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To the creative mind the creative activity does not appear so much as a process, a sequence of happenings, a growth culminating in a fruition, as a mere occurrence, a sudden appearance in the form of an illumination, or inspiration. The idea or theme to be given material form seems to spring fully mature, like Minerva from the head of Jove, while the creator is in a state of divine afflatus or fine frenzy. Yet, though this substance of the art work may come as a flash of inspiration, it must come from somewhere and in some manner.
Even divine gifts are not so much donations as acquisitions, and the muses must be courted before they yield their favors. The human mind certainly does not work by leaps and bounds, nor does it evolve anything out of nothing. It works slowly and gradually in a sequence of steps, growing on the nourishment supplied by experience. And if the art work is built out of the stuff of experience, the building process starts somewhere in some way and proceeds systematically, though spontaneously, in a certain manner, until it reaches completion.
"There is a painful pregnancy in genius," writes George Santayana, "a long incubation and waiting for the spirit, a thousand rejections and futile birthpangs, before the wonderful child appears, a gift of the gods, utterly undeserved and inexplicably perfect." In order to be able to appreciate this wondrous perfect child, to realize its true wonder and perfection, we must follow its development from its inception, through its painful pregnancy, to its birth and maturity.
 Paul Gaugin
But is this process subject to analysis or must it be taken for granted as a mysterious gift bestowed on the creative mind? "I have often thought," wrote Poe, "how interesting a magazine paper might be written by any author who would--that is to say, who could--detail, step by step, the processes by which any one of his compositions attained its ultimate point of completion. Why such a paper has never been given to the world, I am much at a loss to say; but, perhaps, the authorial vanity has had more to do with the omissions than any one other cause.
Most writers--poets in especial--prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy--an ecstatic intuition--and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought--at the true purposes seized only at the last moment--at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view-at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable--at the cautious selections and rejections--at the painful erasures and interpolations--in a word, at the wheels and pinions--the tackle for scene-shifting--the step-ladders and demon-traps--the cocks feathers, the red paint and black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrionics."
Poe is not stating the case altogether accurately in this passage. It is not true, in the first place, that the poet "would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes" of his creative activity. The truth is that the creator does not know specifically what is happening in the process of creation, since he does not deliberately set out on the journey, with a consciously worked out plan of operation, although he does deliberately set out to state what he has found at the end of the journey of discovery. Nor is he able to retrace his steps, for they are too winding and complicated. Besides, such retracing would be wasteful, tedious for him--why should he look backward when there are such glorious prospects ahead of him? He is therefore not reluctant to tell; he either does not know or he has no time to waste in merely going over traveled ground.
Even if he did make the attempt deliberately he could only tell us a pack of lies, as Poe himself does in his account of how The Raven was written. But we can retrace his steps for him by playing spy upon him and by taking a clue from a hint he throws out here and there in his work. He does, therefore, tell us what he is about, only indirectly so, and therefore also more truthfully, since he does so spontaneously. Keats' poems, for instance, are a treasure trove on how poems arise slowly and gradually from the pain and anguish of their makers. In the second place, if we search far enough and wide enough in the realm of literature we are invariably rewarded with more or less direct statements from creative minds about the manner in which their ideas came to them and the labor involved in giving them formal expression. From these original sources, fortified with what we know from psychological research on creative thought, we can make a fairly systematic analysis of the steps in the creative process. Here are several such original sources:
In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche gives the following account of the evolution of his main work, Thus Spake Zarathustra:
I would like to tell you the history of my Zarathustra. Its fundamental conception, the idea of Eternal Recurrence, the highest formula of affirmation that can ever be attained, belongs to August, 1881. I made a hasty note of it on a sheet of paper, with the postscript: "Six thousand feet beyond man and time." That day I was walking through the woods beside Lake Silvaplana; I halted not far from Surlei, beside a huge, towering pyramidal rock. It was there that the idea came to me. If I count back two months previous to this day, I can discover a warning sign in the form of an abrupt and profoundly decisive change in my tastes--more especially in music. Perhaps the whole of Zarathustra may be classified as music--I am sure that one of the conditions of its production was a renaissance in me of the art of hearing.
In Recoaro, a little mountain watering-place near Vicenza, where I spent the spring of 1881, I, together with my friend and maestro Peter Gast (another who had been reborn), discovered that the phœnix bird of music hovered over us, decked in more beautiful and brilliant plumage than it had ever before exhibited. If, therefore, I reckon from that day to the sudden birth of the book, amid the most unlikely circumstances, in February, 1883,--its last part, . . . --it would appear that the period of gestation was eighteen months. The period of eighteen months might suggest, at least to Buddhists, that I am in reality a female elephant. The interval was devoted to the Gaya Scienza, which has a hundred indications of the approach of something unparalleled; its conclusion shows the beginning of Zarathustra, since it presents Zarathustra's fundamental thought in the last aphorism but one of the fourth book. To this interval also belongs that Hymn to Life (for a mixed choir and orchestra), the score of which was published in Leipzig two years ago by E. W. Fritsch.
The German dramatist Grillparzer reports this incident of his creative life:
At this time I planned to take advantage of a vacation to finish my play, The Golden Fleece, work on which was interrupted by my Italian journey. But a tragic event intervened. My mother's death, the overwhelming impressions of the Italian journey, my sickness in Italy, the distractions of the return home, had effaced all preparation for the work I planned. I had forgotten everything. Above all, the point of view, but also the details, were cast into darkness, so that I could never decide to put anything on paper. While I was attempting vainly to delve into my memory, something wonderful occurred. I used to play with my mother the compositions of great masters arranged for the piano for four hands. While playing the symphonies of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, I thought continually about my GoldenFleece
Fleece, and the embryonic ideas fused with the tones into a unified whole. This fact I had also forgotten or never thought of seeking help thereby. I had made the acquaintance of Karoline Pickler, an authoress. Her daughter was a pianist and at times we would play the piano after dinner. Then it happened that when we came to the symphonies that I had played with mother all my former ideas came back to me. I knew once more what I needed,--and although the same standpoint could not be regained, my purpose and the tendency of the entire play became clarified. I set to work, finished the Argonauts and began Medea.
From poets we have numerous accounts of how poems are born. Thus John Gould Fletcher tells us that his own method of writing poetry is as follows:
Something which I have seen, heard, or experienced in life affects me very strongly. I brood upon it, largely unconsciously, until suddenly, for no apparent reason, a line or a group of lines form themselves in my brain, in some way connected with the subject on which I have been thinking. These lines are not necessarily the opening lines of the poem; they may be its refrain, or leading idea, but when they have established themselves in memory for the time being, other lines are added to them. In this way I have often composed as many as a dozen lines of poetry before putting pen to paper. When I finally sit down to the actual task of composition, I generally (except in the case of a very long poem, of which the process of incubation has gone on for a considerable time) write out the whole poem in a single draft and at a single sitting, my aim being to preserve my original subconscious impulse as long as possible.
This original draft may later be amplified or corrected, but never entirely rewritten. During the first heat of composition, I find that I am usually so entirely absorbed in the subject as to be oblivious of the flight of time, and sometimes I am so completely unaware of what it is that I am putting on paper, that it is only at a later reading that I recognize its value. This seems to be a fairly common experience with most poets; and I should say that the great point about the first draft of any poem is to be able to stop before exhaustion has set in, and also to be able to look upon it later with a detached and refreshed mind. Sometimes the subconscious discovery I have made in writing a poem urges me to compose a number of others on similar or related lines. In this way I wrote my color-symphonies, and a great many poems contained in The Tree of Life.
Frequently I have noticed that it is not a single impulse that has produced in me a poem, but the fusion of several. Thus, for example, my poem on Lincoln came into being, first, because I had been strongly moved by reading Herndon Life; second, because I had but recently spent a summer in the pine woods of Michigan, and had been powerfully affected by the backwoods atmosphere in which Lincoln had grown to manhood; third, because of the troubled political situation in America, in the spring of 1916, when the poem was actually composed. Incidentally, I may also remark that this poem was written in a single afternoon, but that my mind had in some way been preparing for it for nearly a year before. And in much the same way I might analyze many of my longer and better-known poems. 1
In A Midsummer-Night's Dream Shakespeare gives us a most striking comment on the workings of the imagination:
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
One of the most striking of all indirect lights on the creative process is given in verse form by Amy Lowell. Dr. W. V. Bingham gives the following account of the occasion of this poem:
One day in July, 1924, we had been dining with Amy Lowell at her home in Brookline. After an evening of brilliant talk about the mental processes of poetic invention and particularly about the way in which some of her own poems had come to birth, we tried to persuade her to save the first drafts of her manuscripts with all the changes and interlinings. This, we argued, would be a good way to study records of the creative process at work. She protested that they would be useless, because the really creative act occurs before putting pen to paper.
At the time she was working at high tension on her monumental life of Keats, and had written no poetry for almost two years. But that memorable night she began again. Several new poems came rapidly, first among them the one which follows. When she read it to us a week or so later, it was entitled, To the Impudent Psychologist.
But hardly a scrap of her first drafts has ever been found.
TO A GENTLEMAN
Who wanted to see the first drafts of my poems in the interests of psychological research into the workings of the creative mind
So you want to see my papers, look what I have written down
'Twixt an ecstasy and heartbreak, con them over with a frown.
You would watch my thought's green sprouting ere a single blossom's blown.
Would you, friend? And what should I be doing, have you thought of that?
Is it pleasant, think you, being gazed upon from feet to hat,
Microscopically viewed by eyes commissioned just for that?
Don't assure me that your interest does not lie with me at all.
I'm a poet to be dissected for the good of science. Call
It by any name, I feel like some old root where fungi sprawl.
Think you, I could make you see it, all the little diverse strands
Locked in one short poem? By no means do I find your prying hands
Pleasure bearing and delightful straying round my lotus lands.
Not a word but joins itself with some adventure I alone
Could attach consideration to. You'd wrench me flesh from bone,
Find the heart and count its tappings. At your touch, 'twould turn to stone.
What is I, and what that other? That's your quest. I'll have you know
Telling it would break it from me, it would melt like travelled snow.
I will be no weary pathway for another's feet to go.
Seize the butterfly and wing it, thus you learn of butterflies.
But you do not ask permission of the creature, which is wise.
If I did consent, to please you, I should tell you packs of lies.
To one only will I tell it, do I tell it all day long.
Only one can see the patches I work into quilts of song.
Crazy quilts, I'm sure you'd deem them, quite unworthy of your prong.
One must go half-way with poets, feel the thing you're out to find,
Wonder even while you name it, keep it somehow still enshrined,
Still encased within its leafage like an arbor honey-vined.
Lacking just this touch and tremor, how can I but shrink and clutch
What I have to closer keeping. Little limping phantoms, such
Are my poems before I've taught them how to walk without a crutch.
You mean well, I do not doubt it, but you're blind as any mule.
Would you question a mad lover, set his love-making to rule?
With your pulse upon his finger, watch him play the sighing fool?
Would he win the lady, tell me, with you by? Your calculations
Might frustrate a future teeming with immeasurable equations.
Which will prove the most important, your research or his relations?
Take my answer then, for, flatly, I will not be vivisected.
Life is more to me than learning. If you clumsily deflected
My contact with what I know not, could it surely be connected?
Scarcely could you, knowing nothing, swear to me it would be so.
Therefore unequivocally, brazenly, I tell you "No!"
To the fame of an avowal, I prefer my domino.
Still I have a word, one moment, stop, before you leave this room.
Though I shudder thinking of you wandering through my beds of bloom,
You may come with spade and shovel when I'm safely in the tomb.
What can we deduce from these pronouncements regarding the art work in the making?
They tell us rather clearly that the art work is not the product of an inspiration, but of a slow growth. They tell us, furthermore, that in this growth two related processes are clearly discernible, namely, one process in the course of which
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; during which the prospective art work consists of no more than thought's green sprouting and little limping phantoms, but this process leads up to a stage when the sprouts are blown into blossoms, when the imagination bodies forth the forms of things up to then unknown. In the second process the little phantoms are taught to walk without a crutch, when the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
But these utterances tell us nothing definite as to what actually happens in the course of these processes. Here we must resort to spade and shovel, and we shall borrow those of J. Middleton Murry who reverentially dug up the ground that Keats covered on the way to one of his most famous poems, the sonnet On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer.
Much have I traveled in the realms of gold
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen,
Round many a Western island have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold;
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
Which deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne
Yet never could I judge what men could mean
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with wond'ring eyes
He stared at the Pacific,--and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent upon a peak in Darien.
The poem was written by Keats within a few hours after he and his friend Cowden Clarke had delved for the first time into Chapman's translation of Homer Odyssey. Keats left Clarke at daybreak, and at ten o'clock in the morning the finished poem was on Clarke's breakfast table. On the surface, then, the poem was written between daybreak and breakfast time one day in October, 1816, when Keats became twentyone years of age. As Mr. Murry states, "It is one of the great sonnets in the English language, and it was the first great poem Keats wrote. If the word 'inspiration' is ever to be used in literary criticism it might be used with some propriety here."
But the "inspiration" was the flower of a long period of search and preparation, and Mr. Murry traces it through the labyrinth of Keats' rich mind and long labors. He shows the complexity of the structure of the poem, and yet, "the more the intricacy of the structure is realized the more impossible it becomes to conceive that the poem was constructed deliberately as a watchmaker constructs a chronometer." Its genesis is rather like that of the new-born animal, "before whose birth there is indeed a long period of elaboration, but the elaboration is unconscious, and occurs in the darkness of the womb." Mr. Murry then proceeds to trace this period of unconscious elaboration. Chapman's Homer was not the direct cause of the poem, but "has served the office of a spark to ignite a highly combustible gas in the poet's mind into a flash of perfect incandescence." And the gas had been gathering gradually in the mind of the poet.
Mr. Murry finds a clue to the making of the poem "in its native setting among Keats' poetry of this period," namely, Keats' first volume of poetry. In that volume the sonnet, "besides being the one perfect poem in that uneven and exciting book, is a perfect crystallization of a mood of thought and feeling which exists in solution throughout the volume. In the sonnet Keats succeeded in expressing, with a strange completeness and concision, a complex condition of thought and feeling which finds imperfect and partial utterance in nearly all his serious poems of the same period."
What is this condition that is crystallized in the poem? Mr. Murry calls it, "the ardor of exploration and the excitement of discovery." At first the ardor of exploration is in the realm of poetry and nature. The poet finds the two realms to be one; "and he is a chained prisoner from both." 6 He is studying medicine, and the Borough where the medical students had their lodgings is a dirty place. He cries:
Far different cares
Beckon me sternly from soft "Lydian airs"
And hold my faculties so long in thrall,
That I am oft in doubt whether at all
I shall again see Phoebus in the morning . . .
But might I now each passing moment give
To the coy muse, with me she would not live
In this dark city.
This is November, 1815. In the early summer of 1816 Keats climbed out of the dingy Borough to visit Cowden Clarke, a poet, at Hampstead Heath, thus finding his way to nature and poetry. Clarke "had shown some of Keats' verses to Leigh Hunt. Hunt had been, as he himself tells us, 'fairly surprised with the truth of their ambition and the ardent grappling with nature' and had invited Keats to his cottage in the Vale of Health on the Heath." As a result of these visits and contacts with nature Keats cries:
Give me a golden pen, and let me lean
On heap'd up flowers, in regions clear, and far;
Bring me a table whiter than a star . . .
The while let music wander round my ears,
And as it reaches each delicious ending,
Let me write down a line of glorious tone,
And full of many wonders of the spheres;
For what a height my spirit is contending!
'Tis not content so soon to be alone.
But his visits to the Heath were not enough. "He must go away. And away he went, to Margate--to something he had not seen before, the sea." His epistles to his brother George, to Mathew, to Clarke, during this period, "are concerned with a single theme, his consuming ambition to write poetry and his conviction that poetry is somehow directly created in the poet's soul by Nature." 3 Keats is discovering nature and therefore also poetry:
Open afresh your round of starry folds,
Ye ardent marigolds!
Dry up the moisture from your golden lids,
For great Apollo bids
That in these days your praises should be sung
On many harps, which he has lately strung.
He identifies his power of response to nature with his power of poetry. The poet is ever startled by the leap
Of buds into ripe flowers; or by the flitting
Of diverse moths, that aye their rest are quitting;
Or by the moon lifting her silver rim
Above a cloud, and with a gradual swim
Coming into the blue with all her light.
He has thus discovered the beauty of nature, the beauty of poetry, and his power to express the beauty of nature in poetry. He is gaining confidence in himself, becoming ready for the supreme moment. Mr. Murry continues
Now let us take stock of our materials--what we have gathered towards the making of the Chapman sonnet. The moment is apt, for that spirit "standing apart upon the forehead of the age to come" is curiously reminiscent of Cortez on his peak in Darien. We have the ardor of exploration, the excitement of discovery: of Nature, of Poetry, and of Keats' own powers of poetry. We have an ocean, that speaks to him unutterable things, upon which he looks down from a lofty cliff. We have, if not a planet, a moon, to whom he cries:
O maker of sweet poets, dear delight
Of this fair world, and all its gentle lovers;
whom he had described first in Calidore,
Lovely the moon in ether, all alone,
and later as "with a gradual swim, coming into the blue with all her light."
The discovery of poetry--the thing in itself and his own powers of it--the discovery of the moon, the discovery of the ocean. Since Nature and Poetry are one to him, why should not all these be the same? But how to express these as discoveries? The ocean had been discovered--why not the ocean when it was unknown?
Keats is ready for the great leap, for the sonnet. The raw material is prepared. What is to bring it to the point of fusion?
Mr. Murry finds this catalytic agent in a poem of Keats', entitled Sleep and Poetry, composed in 1816, after a "white night spent on the sofa at Hunt's cottage where he lay thinking of poetry, with a picture of Petrarch and Laura before
his eyes." "From the first," says Mr. Murry of this poem, "we are conscious that the poet is straining to utter a conception of poetry too great for his words. He has had an intuition into a mystery, which he seeks again and again to declare. Poetry, he seems to be saying, is the instinctive response of the purified soul to the wonder and majesty of the Universe: through the poet the All finds voice."
Mr. Murry summarizes his study as follows:
But what can we claim to have accomplished by this inquiry? To have explained a great poem? Assuredly not. The act of composing the sonnet on Chapman Homer remains unique and beyond analysis. But we can, I think, fairly claim to have substantiated the theory that the composition of a great poem is but a final conscious act supervening upon a long process of unconscious elaboration.
Can we, with the help of our evidence, more clearly define the nature of this process? What elements can we distinguish in it?
First and foremost, a predominant, constantly recurring complex of thought and emotion. Throughout the period of unconscious elaboration Keats had been continually discovering more and more of what was to him the highest reality: Nature, Poetry, the Nature of Poetry; and the continual discovery was accompanied by an incessant emotional excitement. Whether his successive acts of discovery can properly be called "thoughts" will depend upon the philosophy of the man describing them; but "thoughts" they shall be for us, as they were for Keats:
There came
Thought after thought to nourish up the flame
Within my breast . . .
These successive thoughts (which some would call intuitions), accompanied by an incessant emotional excitement, form what Coleridge calls "a predominant passion," more exactly a persistent process of thought-emotion.
Second, in the service of this persistent thought-emotion the specific poetic-creative faculty has been continually at work to find means of expression for it. These means of expression are chiefly images derived from a series of particular sense-perceptions. Thus, the poet's first perception of the Moon:
Lovely the moon in ether, all alone
is refined to a subtler perception of her
Lifting her silver rim
Above a cloud, and with a gradual swim
Coming into the blue with all her light.
And this sense-perception is used to enable the poet to grasp his own thought of the nature of poetry. The smooth and lovely motion of the moon is a quality of the poetry he conceives:
More strange, more beautiful, more smooth, more regal
Than wings of swans, than doves, than dim-seen eagle.
So the image of the moon becomes an image of his thought of poetry.
Again, he sees the sea for the first time, and that perception of the sea, with its attendant emotion, enables him once again to grasp his main thought with its emotion. The image of the vast ocean also becomes an image of his vast "idea" of poetry. Nay more, the very sound of the sea, which whoso hears
Must think on what will be, and what has been, enables him to make audible, as the sight of the sea to make visible his thought. Again, another aspect of his thought is grasped through the vision of himself standing alone on a cliff (at Margate) or on a hill (at Hampstead), staring with wondering eyes at the prospect before him. He is "a spirit standing apart upon the forehead of the age to come."
So the poet's mind has been accumulating through successive acts of sense-perception a series of images which can be assimilated into the main process of his thought and act as surrogates for it. And the condition of this assimilation is an emotional and qualitative correspondence. His perception of the moon is a delighted discovery, so is his perception of the ocean--in both the hidden loveliness of an unknown reality is revealed to him; therefore, both in the qualities discovered and in the emotion awakened in discovering them, these sense-discoveries are analogous to the main thought--discovery of the nature of poetry. With his senses he discovers Nature, with his thoughts he discovers the nature of poetry.
His two crowning sense-discoveries were those of the moon and sea, and those are instantly pressed into the service of his thought: the images of the moon and the ocean can serve at will to embody the objects of his thought. And he is able to think more exactly concerning the nature of poetry because the sensuous images of moon and ocean are become true symbols of the reality about which he is thinking. So that in the process of unconscious elaboration the continually progressing thought is given ever fresh definition and substance by the images it is able to assimilate; and, on the other hand, the images acquire a thought-content. The thought steadily gains focus and intensity; the images significance.
Suddenly this complex of thought and images, which is working itself towards an organic unity, is ejected into poetic form. What occasions this sudden birth? The dominant thought, with its attendant emotion, is given a final focus by a particular event. The discovery of the nature of poetry, which had been going on for months, is consummated by the discovery of Chapman Homer. Utterance becomes urgent, necessary, inevitable. The means are at hand-images long since assimilated to that dominant thought-emotion, of which the discovery of Chapman is the final instance and occasion.
But there is a final creative act. If this unconscious preparation were all, we should imagine Keats in his sestet saying: "Then felt I--as I did when I discovered the moon, as I did when I discovered the ocean." But the moon was discovered long ago, and so was the ocean. It will not do. It must be: "Then felt I--as a man who discovers a new planet, as a man who discovers a new ocean." Then to his need came the memory of Robertson America, which he had read as a schoolboy. An inexact memory--for as Tennyson pointed out, it was Balboa, not Cortez, who stared at the Pacific--but one definite enough to give the final perfection to his imagery.
Of the last act of poetic creation there is nothing to say. We cannot explain it; but it is no longer utterly miraculous. We have seen at least how the main materials lay ready prepared for the final harmonious ordering; part, and not the least part, of the final harmony had already been achieved; we may fairly say that the actual composition of this great poem was but the conscious last of a whole series of unconscious acts of poetic creation. And we may hazard the guess that it is this long period of unconscious preparation which distinguishes the great poem from the merely good one; but this is the reason why, in a great poem, the subject seems to be dissolved away in the incandescence of the emotion it kindles; and, finally, that this is the reason why the depths of significance in a great poem are inexhaustible.
From this study of an art work in the making we see that Shakespeare's poet, whose eye rolls in a frenzy, glancing from earth to heaven and heaven to earth, or Lowell's thought's green sprouting and limping phantoms, is a process of adventure, a search instigated and initiated by a living, vital urge, neither conscious, nor subconscious, nor super-conscious, but all three, like life itself; that the adventure, long, anguishing, heartbreaking, but urgent, results in a discovery, a fruition, when imagination bodies forth into full consciousness the forms of things previously unknown, the discovery in turn serving as a stimulus for another long, but now fully conscious, deliberate, rational activity, a process of execution, in the course of which that which the imagination has bodied forth is given a local habitation and a name, when the little limping phantoms are taught to walk without a crutch.
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