It is a difficult conundrum, but I should answer somehow like this:—The poet is consciously or unconsciously always either taking in or giving out; he hears, observes, weighs, guesses, condenses, idealizes, and the new ideas troop quietly into his mind until suddenly every now and again two of them violently quarrel and drag into the fight a group of other ideas that have been loitering about at the back of his mind for years; there is great excitement, noise and bloodshed, with finally a reconciliation and drinks all round. The poet writes a tactful police report on the affair and there is the poem.
Or, to put it in a more sober form:—
When conflicting issues disturb his mind, which in its conscious state is unable to reconcile them logically, the poet acquires the habit of self-hypnotism, as practised by the witch doctors, his ancestors in poetry.
He learns in self-protection to take pen and paper and let the pen solve the hitherto insoluble problem which has caused the disturbance.
I speak of this process of composition as self-hypnotism because on being interrupted the poet experiences the disagreeable sensations of a sleep-walker disturbed, and later finds it impossible to remember how the early drafts of a poem ran, though he may recall every word of a version which finally satisfied his conscious scrutiny. Confronted afterwards with the very first draft of the series he cannot in many cases decipher his own writing, far less recollect the process of thought which made him erase this word and substitute that. Many poets of my acquaintance have corroborated what I have just said and also observed that on laying down their pens after the first excitement of composition they feel the same sort of surprise that a man finds on waking from a “fugue,” they discover that they have done a piece of work of which they never suspected they were capable; but at the same moment they discover a number of trifling surface defects which were invisible before.
VII
THE PARABLE OF MR. POETA AND MR. LECTOR
MR. POETA was a child of impulse, and though not really a very careful student of Chaucer himself, was incensed one day at reading a literary article by an old schoolfellow called Lector, patronizing the poet in an impudent way and showing at the same time a great ignorance of his best work. But instead of taking the more direct and prosaic course of writing a letter of protest to the review which printed the article, or of directly giving the author a piece of his mind, he improvised a complicated plot for the young man’s correction.
On the following day he invited Mr. Lector to supper at his home and spent a busy morning making preparations. He draped the dining-room walls with crape, took up the carpet, and removed all the furniture except the table and two massive chairs which were finally drawn up to a meal of bread, cheese and water. When supper-time arrived and with it Mr. Lector, Mr. Poeta was discovered sitting in deep dejection in a window seat with his face buried in his hands; he would not notice his guest’s arrival for a full minute. Mr. Lector, embarrassed by the strangeness of his reception (for getting no answer to his knock at the door he had forced his way in), was now definitely alarmed by Mr. Poeta’s nervous gestures, desultory conversation and his staring eyes perpetually turning to a great rusty scimitar hanging on a nail above the mantelpiece. There was no attendance, nor any knife or plate on the board. The bread was stale, the cheese hard, and no sooner had Mr. Lector raised a glass of water to his lips than his host dashed it from his hands and with a bellow of rage sprang across the table. Mr. Lector, saw him seize the scimitar and flourish it around his head, so for want of any weapon of defence, the unfortunate young man reacted to terror-stricken flight. He darted from the room and heard the blade whistle through the air behind him.
Out of an open window he jumped and into a small enclosed yard; with the help of a handy rainwater tub he climbed the opposite wall, then dashed down a pathway through a shrubbery and finding the front door of a deserted cottage standing open, rushed in and upstairs, then breathlessly flinging into an empty room at the stairhead, slammed the door.
By so slamming the door he had locked it and on recovering his presence of mind found himself a close prisoner, for the only window was stoutly barred and the door lock was too massive to break. Here then, he stayed in confinement for three days, suffering severely until released by an accomplice of Mr. Poeta, who affected to be much surprised at finding him there and even threatened an action for trespass. But cold, hungry and thirsty, Mr. Lector had still had for companion in his misery a coverless copy of Chaucer which he found lying in the grate and which he read through from beginning to end with great enjoyment, thereupon reconsidering his previous estimate of the poet’s greatness.