When a man is twenty-one, and has had no experience, and graduates from
a small college where he roomed alone in splendour, and possesses a
gift of words and a certain delight in reading, and is thrown into new
and, to him, romantic surroundings--when all these stars of chance
cross their orbits, he begins to write a novel. The novel never has
anything to do with the aforesaid new and romantic surroundings;
neither has it the faintest connection with anything the author has
ever seen. That would limit his imagination.
Once he was well settled in his new home, and the first excitement of
novel impressions had worn off, Bennington de Laney began to write
regularly three hours a day. He did his scribbling with a fountain pen,
on typewriter paper, and left a broad right-hand margin, just as he had
seen Brooks do. In it he experienced, above all, a delightful feeling
of power. He enjoyed to the full his ability to swing gorgeous involved
sentences, phrase after phrase, down the long arc of rhetoric, without
a pause, without a quiver, until they rushed unhasting up the other
slope to end in beautiful words, polysyllabic, but with just the right
number of syllables. Interspersed were short sentences. He counted the
words in one or the other of these two sorts, carefully noting the
relations they bore to each other. On occasions he despaired because
they did not bear the right relations. And he also dragged out,
squirming, the Anglo-Saxon and Latin derivations, and set them up in a
row that he might observe their respective numbers. He was uneasily
conscious that he ought, in the dread of college anathema, to use the
former, but he loved the many-syllabled crash or modulated music of the
latter. Also, there was the question of getting variety into his
paragraph lengths. It was all excellent practice.
And yet this technique, absorbing as it was, counted as nothing in
comparison with the subject-matter.
The method was talent; the subject-matter was Genius; and Genius had
evolved an Idea which no one had ever thought of before--something
brand new under the sun. It goes without saying that the Idea
symbolized a great Truth. One department, the more impersonal, of
Bennington's critical faculty, assured him that the Idea would take
rank with the Ideas of Plato and Emerson. Emerson, Bennington
worshipped. Plato he also worshipped--because Emerson told him to. He
had never read Plato himself. The other, the more personal and modest,
however, had perforce to doubt this, not because it doubted the Idea,
but because Bennington was not naturally conceited.
To settle the discrepancy he began to write. He laid the scene in
Arabia and decided to call it Aliris: A Romance of all Time, because
he liked the smooth, easy flow of the syllables.
The consciousness that he could do all this sugar-coated his Wild
Western experiences, which otherwise might have been a little
disagreeable. He could comfort himself with the reflection that he was
superior, if ridiculous.