a school of posturing and melancholy self-deception. And yet this
was not the most efficient part of my training. Good though it
was, it only taught me (so far as I have learned them at all) the
lower and less intellectual elements of the art, the choice of the
essential note and the right word: things that to a happier
constitution had perhaps come by nature. And regarded as training,
it had one grave defect; for it set me no standard of achievement.
So that there was perhaps more profit, as there was certainly more
effort, in my secret labours at home. Whenever I read a book or a
passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or
an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some
conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must
sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was
unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again
unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain
bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction
and the co-ordination of parts. I have thus played the sedulous
ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to
Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann.
I remember one of these monkey tricks, which was called THE VANITY
OF MORALS: it was to have had a second part, THE VANITY OF
KNOWLEDGE; and as I had neither morality nor scholarship, the names
were apt; but the second part was never attempted, and the first
part was written (which is my reason for recalling it, ghost-like,
from its ashes) no less than three times: first in the manner of
Hazlitt, second in the manner of Ruskin, who had cast on me a
passing spell, and third, in a laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas
Browne. So with my other works: CAIN, an epic, was (save the
mark!) an imitation of SORDELLO: ROBIN HOOD, a tale in verse, took
an eclectic middle course among the fields of Keats, Chaucer and