It is
rather difficult for me to say what I think of my own writing.
Arthur Balfour once said that I was the best letter-writer he
knew; Henry tells me I write well; and Symonds said I had
l'oreille juste; but writing of the kind that I like reading I
cannot do: it is a long apprenticeship. Possibly, if I had had
this apprenticeship forced upon me by circumstances, I should have
done it better than anything else. I am a careful critic of all I
read and I do not take my opinions of books from other people; I
have not got 'a lending-library mind' as Henry well described
that of a friend of ours. I do not take my opinions upon anything
from other people; from this point of view--not a very high one--I
might be called original.
"When I read Arthur Balfour's books and essays, I realised before
I had heard them discussed what a beautiful style he wrote.
Raymond, whose intellectual taste is as fine as his father's,
wrote in a paper for his All Souls Fellowship that Arthur had the
finest style of any living writer; and Raymond and Henry often
justify my literary verdicts.
"From my earliest age I have been a collector: not of anything
particularly valuable, but of letters, old photographs of the
family, famous people and odds and ends. I do not lose things. Our
cigarette ash-trays are plates from my dolls' dinner-service; I
have got china, books, whips, knives, match-boxes and clocks given
me since I was a small child. I have kept our early copy-books,
with all the family signatures in them, and many trifling
landmarks of nursery life.
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