ankles and the deeper significance thereof. I must confess here and now that beauty of line and perfection in form were the soul of my desire from youth to age.
Up to forty, my life was one long effort at self-development. Thanks to the competition in English schools, I wanted, as a boy and youth, to be an extraordinary athlete more than anything else and labored to develop my muscles in every possible way. I read everything I could find on athletics, and questioned my elders every chance I got, while developing myself systematically. With my eldest brother, in the Belfast gymnasium, I practiced assiduously. At fifteen I could pull myself up and chin the bar fifty tunes; and I shall never forget my joy when I found I could draw myself up with one hand. After prolonged practice with clubs and dumb-bells I could hold out fifty pounds at arms' length, and put up a hundred pounds above my head: I could also walk under a bar and then with a short run, jump it.
But again and again I met someone stronger than myself, or more agile, and at eighteen I put the gloves on with a second-rate professional and got a bad beating. He taught me the most important truth in boxing, that one can hit down very much harder than one can hit up; and that height and length of reach give an enormous advantage. From that day on I realized that I was too small to be a great athlete. My eyes, too, were astigmatic and I was shortsighted; in every physical respect I seemed 'cribbed and coffined' to mediocrity. Nature had denied me the crown!
Thanks to this continual exercise, even now, though only five feet six in height, I am broad and strong; nearly forty inches round the chest with fourteen-inch biceps and twelve-inch forearms; stripped I look more like a prize fighter than anything else.
As soon as I learned as a boy of twelve wherein beauty really consisted, I saw that I could have no claim to it; my features were irregular, my eyes only ordinary in size and grey-blue in color, and even my father's sailors always called me 'lug-sails' because of my over-large ears. The chief thing about my mug, as Rodin said, was that it had a certain life and energy.
Perhaps the one thing that might be praised in my appearance was my dress: my father, as a naval officer, always advised me to dress as well as possible at all cost. 'It is of supreme importance in life,' he said, 'to be always well dressed; nobody cares where you live or what you eat, but everyone notices your dress.' I took his advice to heart, and the public school life taught me the rest. The English of the best class are the best dressed men in the world-they have a supreme sense of the value of appearance.
Strangely enough, Pierre Loti told me that he had been plagued as a boy with the very same athletic ambition. I met him first in the Palace at Monaco; he was a great friend of the Princess Alice, who often talked of him. One day I was introduced to him there. He was very small and slight and certainly wore stays, if indeed, he didn't rouge as well; so his confession that he had wanted above all things to be big and an athlete astounded me. We went into the garden together; he was tiny and fully forty, yet to my amazement he insisted on throwing a somersault backwards, and he did it quite perfectly, like a clown, and then went on to show me that the muscles of his arms and legs were like bands of steel. He was of astonishing physical vigor.
'I always wished to be very strong,' he said, 'till I found out, at about seventeen, that I was too small. It was my admiration of size and strength in a man that made me take a big sailor about with me, even in Paris society, at first, and so gave occasion for much cheap sneering.'
Disappointed in my ambition to shine physically, I turned with redoubled energy to the things of the mind; my memory I always knew was very good, indeed: I could read a page of a book slowly and then repeat it almost exactly. I had already learned at school the Paradise Lost of Milton in the leisure hours of a school week; later, at about twenty-four, I learned half a dozen Shakespeare plays by heart without any trouble; and mainly to show off, in Athens I learned Demosthenes' oration 'On the Crown' in the original Greek from beginning to end.
I had no idea then that one should select with the greatest care everything that one learns by heart in youth; for whatever one learns then sticks in the memory and prevents one from recalling with ease words or passages learned later. Memory has its limitations. I hate to think now that I was fool enough to waste my time and pack some memory drawers with Demosthenes' rhetoric instead of Russian vocables.
My father did even worse for me. He used to give me chapters of the Bible to learn by heart and was delighted to make me spout them before visitors.
Often, now, trying to think of something more valuable, I recall some page of the Psalms or even of Chronicles that merely annoys me. One blunders in this world for want of knowledge, and often blunders irretrievably.
I soon found too that a good memory was a handicap to the thinker: to know the thoughts of others prevents one from thinking-to think is a special accomplishment, and has to be specially cultivated.
But no one has shown the way, or indicated, even, the first steps. I found out, however, that denying a thesis and trying to elaborate arguments against it was one way of exercising the mind; so at once I began, in Goethe's phrase, to be the spirit that always denied-der Geist der stets verneint.
This practice helped me a good deal, and one trick I discovered which was of even more avail. Before reading a chapter in some book that interested me, I'd write down all my thoughts on the subject, then read the chapter and see how much the author had added to my stock of ideas. This soon taught me many things and above all, made the personalities of the great thinkers plain to me. I found, for instance, that Kant and Schopenhauer were fine minds, as good even as my whilom favorite, Bacon.
Let me give one example of this way of reading. We take up Schopenhauer on The Art of Literature. If an intelligent, well read man reads it through, the odds are that he finds nothing wonderful ha it, nothing with which he does not agree, and that's the end of the business. But there's a better way to read. I take up a sheet of paper and ask myself what I could write on 'Authorship.'
Because I know Schopenhauer is a first-rate man, I take care to put down on the paper all that life and thought have taught me about the author's work. I revise and revise what I have written, all the while letting my thoughts play about this question, just as if Schopenhauer and I were two competitors and this was the theme given to us by the examiners, which was to determine our respective places in the crucial examination. When you have done this once and then read Schopenhauer's essay, you will appreciate his distinction between those who write for money and those who write because they have thought deeply on some subject and have something original to say. You will probably end where he begins, that writing for money is the mortal disease of literature. You may even share the great pessimist's opinion that 'Vermin is the rule everywhere,' which is a funny comment on our American belief in democracy.
This way of testing yourself by comparing your ideas with those of a master will not only make you think; but will impress upon you any new thought the author gives you in an extraordinary way. One hour's work of this sort each week will make an incredible difference in your thinking powers and in your knowledge in one short year.
For years I did everything I could think of to better my mind; but whereas the proper exercises for the body and its muscles are fairly well known and classified, there are no such handbooks dealing with the intellect, I just jot down, therefore, the practices I have found most helpful, and among them, this of setting forth what you know of a subject, and then comparing it with what a master has written on the same theme, is the most educative.
Very early in my development I found that travel and the learning of a new language did more for me than even books: each new language, I soon realized, was like a new window opening new views of the world, while enlarging one's conception of life.
But it is excessively dangerous for a writer to learn another language really well. Carlyle told me that he had always regretted that he did not know German as well as English, and advised me to make myself a master of it. So when I went to Germany I studied it assiduously, and not only learnt to speak it as well as I spoke English, but studied its development, learnt Gothic and Old High German and Middle High German, as well as modern German.
Besides, I really learnt Latin and Greek through German. The consequence was, when I returned to England my friend Verschoyle pointed out to me that my English style was spoilt by German idioms. I used to say afterwards that it took me three years to learn German and six more years to wash my mind free of it. For I was quite six years in England as a journalist, writing a good deal every day, before I got back to my sure boyish feeling of what was the true English idiom, or the best way to express a new thought in English; and all these years I was afraid to read a German book, nor would I speak a word of German if I could help it. For the characteristic of German is abstract thought, while our English speech is fundamentally poetic.
But a little knowledge of languages does one good. It's like travel: it excites the mind and provokes thought by showing you new views and new limitations of men. Even more than travel, I found that meeting and getting to
