LITMIR.BIZ

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myself, I felt excessively “good” with my paper; never since have I been so filled with the sense of perfect righteousness. Here was I, clean, quiet, sedate, studious; and there was my brother, the illiterate young Hooligan, disturbing the sacrosanct shop, and—what was worse—ignorant of his inferiority to me. Disgusted with him, I passed through the kitchen into another shop on the right, still conning the page with soapy, smarting eyes. At this point the light of memory is switched off. The printed matter, which sprang out of nothingness, vanishes back into the same.

I could not read, I could not distinguish one letter from another. I only knew that the signs and wonders constituted print, and I played at reading with intense earnestness. I actually felt learned, serious, wise, and competently superior, something like George Meredith’s “Dr. Middleton.” Would that I could identify this my very first literature! I review three or four hundred books annually now;1 out of crass, saccharine, sentimentality, I would give a year’s harvest for the volume from which that leaf was torn, nay, for the leaf alone, as though it might be a Caxton. I remember that the paper was faintly bluish in tint, veined, and rather brittle. The book was probably printed in the eighteenth century. Perhaps it was Lavater’s Physiognomy or Blair’s Sermons, or Burnet’s Own Time. One of these three, I fancy, it must surely have been.

      After the miraculous appearance and disappearance of that torn leaf, I remember almost nothing of literature for several years. I was six or so when The Ugly Duckling aroused in me the melancholy of life, gave me to see the deep sadness which pervades all romance, beauty, and adventure. I laughed heartily at the old hen-bird’s wise remark that the world extended past the next field and much further; I could perceive the humour of that. But when the ugly duckling at last flew away on his strong pinions, and when he met the swans and was accepted as an equal, then I felt sorrowful, agreeably sorrowful. It seemed to me that nothing could undo, atone for, the grief and humiliations of the false duckling’s early youth. I brooded over the injustice of his misfortunes for days, and the swans who welcomed him struck me as proud, cold, and supercilious in their politeness. I have never read The Ugly Duckling since those days. It survives in my memory as a long and complex narrative, crowded with vague and mysterious allusions, and wet with the tears of things. No novel —it was a prodigious novel for me—has more deliciously disturbed me, not even On the Eve or Lost Illusions. Two years later I read Hiawatha, The picture which I formed of Minnehaha remains vividly and crudely with me; it resembles a simpering waxen doll of austere habit. Nothing else can I recall of Hiawatha, save odd lines, and a few names such as Gitchee-Gumee. I did not much care for the tale. Soon after I read it, I see a vision of a jolly-faced house-painter graining a door. “What do you call that?” I asked him, pointing to some very peculiar piece of graining, and he replied gravely: “That, young sir, is a wigwam to wind the moon up with.” I privately decided that he must have read, not Hiawatha, but something similar and stranger, something even more wigwam my. I dared not question him further, because he was so witty.

      I remember no other literature for years. But at the age of eleven I became an author. I was at school under a master who was entirely at the mercy of the new notions that daily occurred to him. He introduced games quite fresh to us, he taught us to fence and to do the lesser circle on the horizontal bar; he sailed model yachts for us on the foulest canal in Europe; he played us into school to a march of his own composing performed on a harmonium by himself; he started a debating society and an amateur dramatic club. He even talked about our honour, and, having mentioned it, audaciously left many important things to its care—with what frightful results I forget. Once he suffered the spell of literature, read us a poem of his own, and told us that any one who tried could write poetry. As it were to prove his statement, he ordered us all to write a poem on the subject of Courage within a week, and promised to crown the best poet with a rich gift. Having been commanded to produce a poem on the subject of Courage, I produced a poem on the subject of Courage in, what seemed to me, the most natural manner in the world. I thought of lifeboats and fire-engines, and decided on lifeboats for the mere reason that “wave” and “save” would rhyme together. A lifeboat, then, was to save the crew of a wrecked ship. Next, what was poetry? I desired a model structure which I might copy. Turning to a school hymn-book, I found—

      A little ship was on the sea,

       It was a pretty sight;

       It sailed along so pleasantly

       And all was calm and bright.

      That stanza I adopted, and slavishly imitated. In a brief space a poem of four such stanzas was accomplished. I wrote it in cold blood, hammered it out word after word, and was much pleased with the result. On the following day I read the poem aloud to myself, and was thrilled with emotion. The dashing cruel wave that rhymed with save appeared to me intensely realistic. I failed to conceive how any poem could be better than mine. The sequel is that only one other boy besides myself had even attempted verse. One after another, each sullenly said that he had nothing to show. (How clever I felt!) Then I saw my rival's composition; it dealt with a fire in New York and many fire-engines; I did not care for it; I could not make sense of much of it; but I saw with painful clearness that it was as far above mine as the heaven was above the earth. . . .

      “Did you write this yourself?” The master was addressing the creator of New York fire-engines.

      “Yes, sir.”

      “All of it?”

      “Yes, sir.”

      “You lie, sir.”

      It was magnificent for me. The fool, my rival, relying too fondly on the master’s ignorance of modern literature, had simply transcribed entire the work of some great American recitation-monger. I received the laurel, which I fancy amounted to a shilling.

      Nothing dashed by the fiasco of his poetry competition, the schoolmaster immediately instituted a competition in prose. He told us about M. Jourdain, who talked prose without knowing it, and requested us each to write a short story upon any theme we might choose to select. I produced the story with the same ease and certainty as I had produced the verse. I had no difficulty in finding a plot which satisfied me; it was concerned with a drowning accident at the seaside, and it culminated—with a remorseless naturalism that even thus early proclaimed the elective affinity between Flaubert and myself—in an inquest. It described the wonders of the deep, and I have reason to remember that it likened the gap between the fin and the side of a fish to a pocket. In this competition I had no competitor. I, alone, had achieved fiction. I watched the master as he read my work, and I could see from his eyes and gestures that he thought it marvellously good for the boy. He spoke to me about it in a tone which I had never heard from him before and never heard again, and then, putting the manuscript in a drawer, he left us to ourselves for a few minutes.

      “I’ll just read it to you,” said the big boy of the form, a daring but vicious rascal. He usurped the pedagogic arm-chair, found the manuscript, rapped the ruler on the desk, and began to read. I protested in vain. The whole class roared with laughter, and I was overcome with shame. I know that I, eleven, cried. Presently the reader stopped and scratched his head; the form waited.

      “Oh!” he exclaimed. “Fishes have pockets! Fishes have pockets!”

      The phrase was used as a missile against me for months.

      The master returned with his assistant, and the latter also perused the tale.

      “Very remarkable!” he sagely commented—to be sage was his foible, “very remarkable, indeed!”

      Yet I can remember no further impulse to write a story for at least ten years. Despite this astonishing success, martyrdom, and glory, I forthwith abandoned fiction and went mad on water-colours.

1. Written in 1900.

      III

       Table of Contents

      The insanity of water-colours

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