“As to my ‘first writings,’ I shared one quality with R. L. S. at any rate; I knew they were trash. They were mostly short stories which went and came between me and the magazine-editors with a pendulum-like regularity; I used to work furiously over these things, and always sent them off with the highest hopes, and yet received them back with no deep disappointment. At the bottom of my heart, I say, I knew they were trash. What I did not know was that, in very truth, I should never write anything but trash, no matter how widely it got printed and published; I was forever expecting some day to ‘do it’ and sit down satisfied; I am still expecting that miracle and all the while I know it will not happen. Some of those far-traveled short stories have since been rewritten and published, and some incorporated in novels, and some are still in the back of my mind waiting their hour of usefulness. When I began, the influence of Stevenson was still very strong, and Mr. Weyman and Mr. Hope-Hawkins, to say nothing of Rider Haggard and the incomparable Sherlock Holmes, were in the middle of their popularity. Where are the roses of yester-year? We will always read Stevenson, but we realize now that he was a writer--just that. And he was a great personality--just that. Everybody, including myself, used strenuously to imitate him, and I think it didn’t do us any harm; he preached better than he practiced, and after some toiling after him, we found that out, but our toil was not thrown away. I will say, in self-glorification, that after I got through imitating Stevenson, I did not start in and imitate O. Henry, or Mr. Rudyard Kipling; and few are the writers who can honestly make that boast! About that time, it became manifest to me that the thing to do was not to muddle around with romance, ancient or modern, but to write about people, and to ‘lie like the truth.’ I remember reading Thackeray, and being struck with the profitable use of the conversational style in ‘lying like the truth’; I don’t mean ‘chatty’ and I don’t mean colloquial, and I don’t mean that easy slinging about of words which the new writers affect; I mean _conversational_, as conversation is carried on between persons in what I shall call for want of a better term good society. But what puzzled me about Thackeray was that there were occasional passages, of considerable extent, wherein he was not conversational at all; he was writing like somebody else, but it still had the most amazing verisimilitude; it was so plausible that you believed it just as you believe the morning paper. It was in _Barry Lyndon_ that this first struck me, I believe. Who showed him that trick? He is forever talking about Fielding, but upon re-reading the latter I saw it was not Fielding he was imitating. Thackeray, in breezy parlance, can give Fielding cards and spades. After a while, in a moment of illumination, I found him out. The wily old genius was not bothering his head about Fielding; the man he was