16 AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER 



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 subconscious 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's 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 writers : 

 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 sympathies, nor 

 are they prisoners of their own personalities, like 

 writers who depend upon this pack of unconscious 

 impressions at their back. An experience must 

 lie in my mind a certain time before I can put it 

 on paper, — say from three to six months. If 



