AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTEE 257 



For my part, I can never interview Nature in the 

 reporter fashion : I must camp and tramp with her 

 to get any good, and what I get I absorb through 

 my emotions rather than consciously gather through 

 my intellect. Hence the act of composition with 

 me is a kind of self-exploration to see what hidden 

 stores my mind holds. If I write upon a favorite 

 author, for instance, I do not give my reader some- 

 thing which lay clearly defined in my mind when I 

 began to write : I give him what I find, after closest 

 scrutiny, in the sub-conscious regions, — a result as 

 unknown to me as to him when I began to write. 

 The same with outdoor subjects. I come gradually 

 to have a feeling that I want to write upon a given 

 theme, — rain, for instance, or snow, — but what I 

 may have to say upon it is as vague as the back- 

 ground of one of Millet'^ pictures; my hope is 

 entirely in the feeling or attraction which draws 

 my mind that way; the subject is congenial, it 

 sticks to me ; whenever it recurs to me, it awakens 

 as it were a warm personal response. 



Perhaps this is the experience of all other writ- 

 ers: their subjects find them, or bring the key to 

 their hidden stores. Great poets, like Milton, 

 however, cast about them and deliberately choose 

 a theme: they are not hampered by their sympa- 

 thies, nor are they prisoners of their own personali- 

 ties, like writers who depend upon this pack of 

 unconscious impressions at their back. An experi- 

 ence must lie in my mind a certain time before I 

 can put it upon paper, — say from three to six 



