He was uneasily
conscious that he ought, in the dread of college anathema, to use the
former, but he loved the many-syllabled crash or modulated music of the
latter. Also, there was the question of getting variety into his
paragraph lengths. It was all excellent practice.
And yet this technique, absorbing as it was, counted as nothing in
comparison with the subject-matter.
The method was talent; the subject-matter was Genius; and Genius had
evolved an Idea which no one had ever thought of before--something
brand new under the sun. It goes without saying that the Idea
symbolized a great Truth. One department, the more impersonal, of
Bennington's critical faculty, assured him that the Idea would take
rank with the Ideas of Plato and Emerson. Emerson, Bennington
worshipped. Plato he also worshipped--because Emerson told him to. He
had never read Plato himself. The other, the more personal and modest,
however, had perforce to doubt this, not because it doubted the Idea,
but because Bennington was not naturally conceited.
To settle the discrepancy he began to write. He laid the scene in
Arabia and decided to call it _Aliris: A Romance of all Time_, because
he liked the smooth, easy flow of the syllables.
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