NOTE
Stevenson, in one of his essays, tells us how he
“played the sedulous
ape” to Hazlitt, Sir Thomas Browne, Montaigne,
and other writers of
the past. And the compositors of all our higher-toned
newspapers keep
the foregoing sentence set up in type always, so constantly
does it
come tripping off the pens of all higher-toned reviewers.
Nor ever do
I read it without a fresh thrill of respect for the
young Stevenson.
I, in my own very inferior boyhood, found it hard
to revel in so much
as a single page of any writer earlier than Thackeray.
This disability
I did not shake off, alas, after I left school.
There seemed to be
so many live authors worth reading. I gave precedence
to them, and,
not being much of a reader, never had time to grapple
with the old
masters. Meanwhile, I was already writing a little
on my own account.
I had had some sort of aptitude for Latin prose and
Latin verse. I
wondered often whether those two things, essential
though they were
(and are) to the making of a decent style in English
prose, sufficed
for the making of a style more than decent. I
felt that I must have
other models. And thus I acquired the habit of
aping, now and again,
quite sedulously, this or that live writer—sometimes,
it must be
admitted, in the hope of learning rather what to avoid.
I acquired,
too, the habit of publishing these patient little
efforts. Some of
them appeared in “The Saturday Review”
many years ago; others appeared
there more recently. I have selected, by kind
permission of the
Editor, one from the earlier lot, and seven from the
later. The other
nine in this book are printed for the first time.
The book itself may
be taken as a sign that I think my own style is, at
length, more or
less formed.
M.B.
Rapallo, 1912.
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