And there were other
careers, too, as statesman, philanthropist, diplomat, that I
considered not beneath my horoscope. I spare myself the careful
delineation of these projects, though they would be amusing enough.
But beneath these preoccupations another influence was working its
inward way. My paramount interest had always been literary, though
regarded as a gentle diversion, not degraded to a bread-and-butter
concern. Ever since I had fallen under the superlative spell of
R.L.S., in whom the cunning enchantment of the written word first
became manifest, I had understood that books did not grow painlessly
for our amusement, but were the issue of dexterous and intentional
skill. I had thus made a stride from Conan Doyle, Cutcliffe Hyne,
Anthony Hope, and other great loves of my earliest teens; those
authors' delicious mysteries and picaresques I took for granted, not
troubling over their method; but in Stevenson, even to a schoolboy
the conscious artifice and nicety of phrase were puzzingly apparent.
A taste for literature, however, is a very different thing from a
determination to undertake the art in person as a means of
livelihood. It takes brisk stimulus and powerful internal fevers to
reduce a healthy youth to such a contemplation. All this is a long
story, and I telescope it rigorously, thus setting the whole matter,
perhaps, in a false proportion.
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