THE QUESTION OF STYLE
Stevenson is a conspicuous example of this practice, and the quality of his prose is admittedly a result of such self-training. In his essay, "A College Magazine," he has himself outlined his method as follows:
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 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.… That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write.
Yet, where this method succeeds with one man out of ten, it is quite likely to do more harm than good to the nine others, making them mere copyists,—like a young painter who spends his days reproducing
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