I now call this stupid, but I have really no more right to blame the boy who was once I than I have to praise him, and I am certainly not going to do that.  In his day and place he did what he could in his own way; he had no true perspective of life, but I do not know that youth ever has that.  Some strength came to him finally from the mere struggle, undirected and misdirected as it often was, and such mental fibre as he had was toughened by the prolonged stress.  It could be said, of course, that the time apparently wasted in these effectless studies could have been well spent in deepening and widening a knowledge of English literature never yet too great, and I have often said this myself; but then, again, I am not sure that the studies were altogether effectless.  I have sometimes thought that greater skill had come to my hand from them than it would have had without, and I have trusted that in making known to me the sources of so much English, my little Latin and less Greek have enabled me to use my own speech with a subtler sense of it than I should have had otherwise.

But I will by no means insist upon my conjecture.  What is certain is that for the present my studies, without method and without stint, began to tell upon my health, and that my nerves gave way in all manner of hypochondriacal fears.  These finally resolved themselves into one, incessant, inexorable, which I could escape only through bodily fatigue, or through some absorbing interest that took me out of myself altogether and filled my morbid mind with the images of another’s creation.

In this mood I first read Dickens, whom I had known before in the reading I had listened to.  But now I devoured his books one after another as fast as I could read them.  I plunged from the heart of one to another, so as to leave myself no chance for the horrors that beset me.  Some of them remain associated with the gloom and misery of that time, so that when I take them up they bring back its dreadful shadow.  But I have since read them all more than once, and I have had my time of thinking Dickens, talking Dickens, and writing Dickens, as we all had who lived in the days of the mighty magician.  I fancy the readers who have come to him since he ceased to fill the world with his influence can have little notion how great it was.  In that time he colored the parlance of the English-speaking race, and formed upon himself every minor talent attempting fiction.  While his glamour lasted it was no more possible for a young novelist to escape writing Dickens than it was for a young poet to escape writing Tennyson.  I admired other authors more; I loved them more, but when it came to a question of trying to do something in fiction I was compelled, as by a law of nature, to do it at least partially in his way.