ADVENTURES WITH INSPIRATION

BY HANNEN SWAFFER

ADVENTURES WITH INSPIRATION

What is inspiration? Biblical scholars are trying to explain the word away. Modern authors, artists, composers, dramatists and pianists tell me stories which would seem to suggest that inspiration is a real thing, that it comes from outside the human instrument which uses it. Do some authors get their ideas from forces outside themselves? Are instrumentalists swayed by influences they do not understand? Is "genius," that mis-used word, explained only by an understanding of psychic things? It would seem so. It was the story of Robins Millar that forced me to make an inquiry. He wrote a play called Thunder in the Air which, badly staged though it was in London, created a tremendous impression, and moved strong men to tears. Before the first night, be was an unknown journalist in Glasgow. Then his play made his name in a night. I met him and talked with him 5

for hours. He did not understand his play, or where it came from, it would seem. Although it was a psychic play, he knew nothing of psychics. He was an agnostic. "Why did you write it?" I asked him.

"I had been dwelling for some time on the deaths of young men in the war and on other topics dealt with in the play, such as the different relations between parents and their children, and so on," he said. "When I thought of writing the play, these were, so to speak, indifferent mental temperaments. But the inspiration of the story welded them into one. This came quite suddenly, and in an unaccountable way. I was sitting by the fireside when, in a flash, the story and the characters jumped into life. In an instant, after having reflected many ways of dealing with the subject, I was aware that this was the Truth and vital. "On different occasions, in Glasgow streets, the inspiration for the successive acts came, and, each time, with the effect of giving a physical thrill which was a form of 'ecstasy.' It made one completely confident and filled with the urge to commit the play to paper-almost an exciting sense of something coming out of the unknown, at any rate making one actually tremble with the knowledge of having something revealed. And, sometimes, I felt compelled to stand still till the impulse was exhausted." 6

Did that mean that he had been inspired by some great dramatist who had passed on to another sphere? He used the words psychical," "inspiration," "physical thrill," "ecstasy," "urge" and "coming out of the unknown," and he spoke of being "made to tremble." Is this what inspiration is? Is the word genius explained that way? In Plato's Apology he makes Socrates say, "Not by wisdom do poets write poetry but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things but do not understand the meaning of them." I turned to the dictionaries recently, and the encyclopaedias, and in each of them I found words that seemed to blunder to this

explanation. "The power, principle, or influence that determines character, conduct or destiny," said one of the standard books. "That which controls, guides or aids." "Inspiration," says the Century Dictionary, is a breathing or infusion into the mind or soul; an awakening or creation of thought, purpose, or any mental condition by some specific external influence; intellectual exaltation. "Inspiration, then, according to its manifestation in Scripture, is Dynamical and not Mechanical, the human powers of the divine messenger get according to their natural laws, even when 7

these powers are supernaturally strengthened Man is not converted into a mere machine even in the need of God. That which is impressed by an inspiring influence, a thought or an emotion borne in upon one by an occult prompting or impulse." Then, a short while ago, a new book on psychology was published, Our Minds and our Motives, by Paul D. Hugen. "Genius may be more than intelligence, qualitatively as well as quantitatively," said the author, "for it includes an unexplainable facility for producing transcendent works without apparent effort. In this respect it clearly resembles the phenomena of automatic writing. The subject is not aware of his own source of inspiration, and is as surprised as others when he, later, realises its extent. Some, therefore, have explained genius as a native gift for tapping one's subconscious . "Of the metaphysical explanations, one which has the merit of being attractive is offered by the reincarnation theory, according to which genius is the survival in the ego of the experience of previous lives, remembered not as concrete details but as principles or rules. Thus an individual who attained mastery in music during one or several previous incarnations might be reborn as a musical genius." Then, one day, C. R. W. Nevinson, the artist, came to me. 8

"I know you are interested in psychical matters," he said, "so I would like to tell you that two of my pictures now being shown in the Leicester Galleries were painted under some influence which was certainty not my own." "Sometimes, when I am working," he wrote down for me, so that the words should not be wrong, "I certainly pass into a condition in which I am hardly aware of what I am doing. My mind is about in the same condition that one associates with that just before sleep. I have then painted a picture entirely different from the one I set out to do. Sometimes it is merely a little different from the original conception. I am personally convinced I am then in a control or force of which I have no knowledge. Whenever I exhibit these results, they immediately attract or violently repel others, often causing attention to my work of which I can never quite see the cause. All I want is peace. I loathe the rows and hatreds that my pictures sometimes cause." Then I met a remarkable artist, known to the world for his mastery of technique, who, openly, confessed for publication that many of his drawings, which were exhibited publicly at the St. George's Hall, were merely automatic, that he was the power or medium through which they were made. Who or what the communicating being or force was he did not know. 9

This was Austin O. Spare, who sprang into fame as a boy of sixteen, and who, for some years, an exile from the comfortable life that he formerly enjoyed, had been existing in a slum, cultivating the occult, "developing the subconscious," perfecting a new technique. I sat with him in his poverty-stricken room in a tenement house in a South London slum. There was just a rough bed, wireless apparatus scattered around on the floor, a book or two and his drawings. Before the war he lived in Mayfair; now his home is in a slum, among London's roughest characters. "I have been almost starving for six months," he told me, "and then I was taken ill. I would not use a charm to cure myself. If you remove one evil you induce another." He talks of the occult as frankly as that, saying, for instance, how, trying to master unseen forces, he has sought to produce rain. Spare's father was a City policeman. He was born in in Kennington, spending his evenings at the Lambeth Soon after, his father found one of his pen-and-ink with the result that the young artist was hailed as 10 Smithfield in 1888, and, at the age of fourteen, entered a stained-glass factory School of Art. When sixteen he won a scholarship at the Royal College of Arts. drawings, which, unknown to the boy, he sent to the Royal Academy. It was hung, a genius.

Some of Spare's "automatic drawings," done in pencil, remind me of the work of Dore; others are rather like the later work of Aubrey Beardsley. The draughtsmanship, however, is, to my mind, more brilliant than any of which Beardsley or Dore was capable. Spare's subjects are widely divergent. They pass from the noblest inspiration to the most evil. Some transport to a high spiritual ecstasy, inducing belief in a high human destiny. Others are despairing in their revelation of human nature wedlocked to the animal world. In some, spirituality breathes among the forms of satyrs. All these drawings, says Mr. Spare, are supernormal. He does not dogmatise about the method. He is experimenting. . . . "In some cases the ideas are the result of my inward psychical. experiences," Mr. Spare told me, "things I have not necessarily seen, or outwardly experienced. In others, the drawings are automatic, started with no idea as to what form they shall take, and completed without conscious direction.

"Indeed, sometimes, when I have been drawing while in a sort of dream, I have awakened to find that it has been dark for a long time. I have been drawing perhaps for hours, in the darkness, the most delicate work that I could not see. "On other occasions I have gone to bed and fallen asleep, lost in the mesh of some vivid dream. 11

Suddenly I have awakened to find myself, riot in bed but in a chair, rapidly drawing away in the darkness something of which I have never been conscious." On some occasions, in order to do automatic drawings, Mr. Spare stares into a mirror and induces self-hypnotism. In a hypnotic state, he sometimes goes on working for hours, awakening to find that he has covered pages and pages full of the most beautiful work. He cannot always control it. There are periods, sometimes for months at a time, he says, when, receiving no promptings from outside, he cannot work at all. At others he is unable to stop working. "Although it was my strong wish to do some more drawings for next week's exhibition," he told me, when I saw him, "my pencil did not move for three months. On another occasion I worked on in a dream-state for twenty-four hours, finishing a book of fifty pages. "Unknown to themselves, I believe many artists are inspired by outside forces, or that they work through their subconscious mind. The development of these powers will open up a new world. I believe that Hamlet was the result of a psychical experience of Shakespeare's, which found expression in the act form he had adopted; otherwise you cannot explain him. All significant art, I believe, comes from that 12

source. It is inspiration, revelation, spiritual truth, which men express in the different ways they have developed. "I am now trying to perfect a technique of automatic drawing, so that the best can be brought out in me. If we study the subconscious, we have much to learn. "Prophecy and revelation are as possible today as they ever were. They can operate, if only you induce the conditions. What the conditions are we must discover. "The prophets and the seers were hermits. Because of circumstances I have lived for months a hermit's life. Poverty has made me live alone. It has been partly choice, partly compulsion. The result has been psychic development." How do you explain William Blake, the son of a hosier? "Some called him mad. Some merely used the word genius. It is clear that no madness imputed to Blake could equal that which would be involved in the rejection of his work on this ground. The greatness of Blake's mind is even better established than its frailty." These are the words of the Encyclopaedia. Blake's pictures remain; so do his poems. He said he saw "angels" and merely painted them. George Eliot wrote Silas Marner when she was in the midst of writing a longer novel. When 13

writing certain dramatic scenes in Middlemarch, she was, in her own words, "seized by a not-self." Hugh Walpole says when he read the proofs of one of his novels, "I seemed to have had nothing to do with it." "Some years ago," Mr. Walpole recently told the Kilmarnock Rotary Club, "I was staying at a Swiss hotel with my father and sister. I was in the middle of a very long novel, and had not another idea in my head but this work. On several occasions I noticed in the dining-room an ugly, morose woman who was always alone. One evening I saw her rise from her seat and cross to another table, where sat a very pretty girl. The girl was wearing round her neck a beautiful string of beads, and the woman fingered these and spoke of them. And suddenly, as I sat there, I was obsessed with an idea -something which I could not resist, which was stronger than myself. I saw this woman in a certain situation, longing desperately to possess some beautiful thing which someone else had got, and straightway I went to my study and began a story about this woman. Writing from morning to night without cessation, I finished the story in a month, and it was published as The Old Ladies. "Then I went back to my long book and completely forgot the characters in the other. When I re-read The Old Ladies in proof, I seemed to 14

have had nothing to do with it. I did not know at all where these old women came from, or how I knew anything about them, or why I had been driven to write about them. The whole thing was very mysterious." Nevinson is the last kind of artist you would consider a psychic. He is one of those solid sort of men, very sane, very self-willed, the last man you would think to be influenced by something else. So is Edgar Wallace. Yet, recently, when I was discussing the psychic interpretation of inspiration with him, Wallace told me, quite seriously, that he never thought of his plots, but they came into his head ready-made. The same phrase was used by Henry Arthur Jones, who, a year or so before he died, said to me, "God seems to give me plots ready-made." "I start dictating my novels right away," said Wallace, "and never think of the end. When I've been stuck for an idea and I've suddenly started again, my wife has said, 'Why did you say "Thank you"?' I have replied that I supposed I was thanking something and that I did not understand it."

"Perhaps," he said to me, "yours is the clue." Rosina. Filippi, the actress, who has published novels, recently said that sometimes when she has been writing and has been held up for a chapter 15

she has felt something compel her to go to her desk and write. She has been compelled by some force, which she could not understand, to take up her pen and start writing and then, in an hour or two, she has finished the chapter. Sometimes she has even left a party to do it because of the urgency of the call. "If I were a Spiritualist," she said, "I should say I had written under control." Sir Hall Caine told me, too, that he dreamed the plot of The Woman of Knockaloe three times in one night, and that the third time he knew he had to write it. He did. Under the name of Barbed Wire it sold by the hundred-thousand. Coleridge said he dreamed parts of Kubla Khan. Robert Louis Stevenson, who was the secretary of the first Psychical Research Society formed in Edinburgh, dreamed the plot of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. John Aulay Steele, writing recently on The Author as Amanuensis, mentions that Robert Louis Stevenson confessed to having had the kindly collaboration of nocturnal "Brownies," who provided him with plots quite apart from his own conscious seeking. George Sand said that on completing a novel all its characters would vanish, leaving no trace; so apart from her ordinary self were they that she could read her own novels as if they were the work of others. Sir Walter Scott 16

said that a demon seated himself on the feather of his pen whenever he began a novel and led it astray from his original plan. I began to collect cuttings about this sort of thing-a letter, for instance, which, signed by jean Forbes of Callendern, appeared in the Spectator soon after the death of Flora Annie Steel, the novelist. She was recording what Mrs. Steel herself told her about her masterpiece, On the Face of the Waters. "At luncheon, Mrs. Steel sat next my father, the late Sir Charles Hotham," she, wrote, "and I heard him say to her: 'I would like to tell you that my great friend, Sir Donald Stewart, has always said that your novel is the most perfect and accurate account of the Siege of Delhi that has ever been written, and, of course, he was all through it.' "Some time after, I went to see Mrs. Steel and said to her: 'How was it possible for you to write so wonderfully about the Siege of Delhi? It was in 1857, and you were only ten years old then, and never in India until you were eighteen. Who told you all about it?' I remember her answer distinctly: 'My dear, no one told me about it, nor did I write it; it was written through me.' "I recollect also that I once asked her, 'Was Craddock, the engine-driver, a real person?' And 17

her answer was: 'More real than perhaps anyone I have met in this life.' "She told me another time that she often described to her family the plot of a short story she was going upstairs to write, and then came down with quite a different story, which she declared was strange to herself." I read, too, how Dr. George Matheson, the Presbyterian. minister who lost his sight as a youth and yet passed a brilliant University course, spoke in a very similar way of the writing of the famous hymn, O Love, that wilt not let me go. According to Dr. Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology, the standard work on the subject, the hymn was written in the manse of Matheson's former parish, Inellan, Argyleshire, on a summer evening in 1862, and the manner of its composition seems to provide a case of sudden access of inspiration. Dr. Matheson said that "it was composed with extreme rapidity; it seems to me that its construction occupied only a few minutes, and I felt myself rather in the position of one who was being dictated to than of an original artist. I was suffering from extreme mental distress, and the hymn was the fruit of pain." Then Cernicoff, the Russian pianist, told me how, when asked to play a certain piece by Liszt-he could not remember a note of it, until suddenly 18

it poured from him and he felt that the Abbe Liszt was close beside him. I heard, too, the story of John Foulds, who said that when he was composing his World Requiem he heard the sound of heavenly music in the room and merely wrote it down. Arthur Poyser, one of the earliest leaders or the Boy Scouts' Association, whose songs he has written, and a City organist, told me, too, how, while asleep, he dreamed that he heard a voice singing an old-fashioned song and that, when he woke up suddenly half-way through the song, he heard the same voice finishing the words. He has written down this song for me. It is quaintly old-fashioned. I soon wanted to know how many authors understood what inspiration meant. I sent to them Robins Millar's statement and asked for their opinion. Arnold Bennett was not nearly so brutally rejectful of the idea as I expected. He is a Rationalist, you know. He would call himself

a materialist in all things. Yet, after reading all about Millar's "ecstasy" and "physical thrill," he wrote: Millar seems to have had experiences usual with authors who have anything to say. I have often had ideas come to me almost complete in a few minutes, especially when walking in the 19

streets. I get nearly all my ideas out in the streets and parks of this city. 'Inspiration' is a phenomenon which nobody, so far as I am aware, has yet satisfactorily explained. One becomes accustomed to it, and expects it in the ordinary course of one's working life. Personally, I do not attribute it to anything outside myself." G. K. Chesterton, who is a Roman Catholic, stayed on the fence. "I am a little shy of all ideas of inspiration coming from external powers," he wrote, "possibly because I am not an agnostic. I do not dismiss the idea, for I respect human tradition, which certainly has had the notion of a Muse, but personally I would rather take the dreadful responsibility of my own deplorable works. I also think there is another mystical idea quite as important, that man is the image of God and is therefore, in some secondary sense, a creator." Alfred Noyes, that brilliant English poet, discussed the matter with me in his house in Regent's Park, not long ago. "I do not reject the idea," he said. "Sometimes I sit in this room almost for weeks without being able to write. Then the idea comes." He told me that he had tried to explain his views in his poem, The Sign of the Golden Shoe, in which, after Christopher Marlowe's death, Nash talks with Chapman in the Mermaid Inn. 20

"I describe in this poem how the stiffness of Chapman's 'wonted speech 'becomes' charged with living undertones,'" said Noyes. "I am sure that this does happen. On the greatest scale, it happened, of course, in the Hebrew prophets and the full meaning of what is said was perhaps obscure to the sages and certainly misinterpreted by too liberal readers. It happens in all true poetry. The passage about Musaeus in the same poem contains all that I can venture to say about it." After quoting in his poem the phrase "By spirits taught to write above a mortal pitch," Noyes describes how Nash and Chapman talk. "Of Marlowe's poem that was left half sung, His Hero and Leander. ' Kit desired, If he died first, that you should finish it,' Said Nash. A loaded silence filled the room As with the imminent spirit of the dead Listening." Then Noyes makes Chapman say: Before you spoke, before I knew his wish, I had begun to write I For I have thought, sometimes, when I have tried To work his will, the hand that moved my pen 21

Was mine, and yet-not mine. The bodily mask Is mine, and sometimes, dull as clay, it sleeps With old Musaeus. Then strange flashes come, Oracular glories, visionary gleams, And the mask moves, not of itself, and sings.' When the poet reaches his highest urge of ecstasy, is this the secret? "My pen . . . and yet -not mine." Noyes, you see, goes a long way. Then there is another poet I know, one I will now quote because he is the reverse of the successful Noyes-just a struggling reporter whose daily business it is to go round to registry offices, looking out for interesting weddings, but, who in his spare time, has written such brilliant epic poetry that T. W. H. Crosland, usually a brutal critic, called him "the modern Milton." On the morning I saw in print this phrase of Crosland's I sent to find out what Frederic Irving Taylor-that is the poet's name-was doing that day. He was reporting an inquest at King's Cross! The next day I reprinted from an evening paper his latest contribution to art and letters. It was a plain shorthand report of a sordid suicide. Yet, Taylor, under inspiration no doubt, is now engaged on the third volume of an epic trilogy on the history of the world. The other day, when I met him, he had just reached the stage where America came into the war. 22

"Write down for me how you do it," I asked. "Inspiration is an indispensable factor in poetic work," he remarked, "but as that magical quality which differentiates pure poetry from mere metrical excellence it is too subtle to come precisely within the scope of scientific definition. Like electricity, we know something of what it does, and how it acts, but little or nothing of what it really is. "In relation to Art of whatever kind, I should say, at the outset, that inspiration helps but does not wholly constitute the artist. He must not only have learnt his craft-no matter when or how-but he must exercise it consciously (not in a condition of trance mediumship) in order to achieve that quality of work recognizable as true Art.

But the degree of consciousness may vary enormously in individuals. Judging by my own experiences, some of one's finest lines seem to lilt themselves while the poet is in a sort of rapture or reverie, as if such lines, at any rate, were projected into consciousness by some unseen personality comparable with the Muse of the Ancients. "The greatest emotional moment of a poem is during its initial conception. The theme seems to flash upon the brain with a tremendous impulse. One realises, with an excitable feeling of triumphant energy, and an immense sense of power, reminiscent of the Eureka of Archimedes, that the poem is now already written. 23

"That this is actually so seems indicated by the fact that, upon surveying the vista of inspiration thus mysteriously poured into the brain like a sunburst, and thereupon deciding to carry out the work in a certain manner, the theme stubbornly insists upon developing itself in its own way, and any attempt by the poet to wrest it from this peculiar or even erratic course proves either abortive or disastrous to the poem as an inspired work of Art. "As regards methods of work, the poet may compose rapidly and revise laboriously, as Burns did, but even the work of revision, to be performed felicitously, must also, to some degree, be inspired. One has often had the experience, while revising a word or phrase, that the right word or phrase is just throbbing upon the borderland of consciousness. You know and feel that such a word or phrase is about to be presented to you by the Unseen Hand, and at last it is magically flicked into your brain, as the inevitable, yet allneedful, trifle that makes Perfection." You all know Pachmann, the old man of over eighty, who sits at the piano enthralling for hours thousands of people who crowd the largest halls in the country and who talks away all the time, as though he is communing with entities around him, entities that you cannot see. Sometimes, as I play, my piano is surrounded 24

by the ghosts of the departed and the memories of the past," he said not long ago. How do you explain John Bunyan? "As a boy he was disturbed by dreams of fiends trying to fly away with him," solemnly records the Encyclopeadia Britannica. "In the middle of a game of tip-cat, he paused and stood staring wildly upwards with his stick in his hand. He had heard a voice asking him whether he would leave his sins and go to heaven or keep his sins and go to hell. He struck at the hobgoblins, he pushed them from him, but still they were at his side. He was illiterate. . . . His vigorous genius enabled him not only to exercise a great influence over the vulgar but even to extort the half-contemptuous admiration of scholars." St. John Ervine, too, provided his contribution. I sat by him on the first night of Alibi, and discussed an article he had printed the day before in the Observer, describing a dream he had recently had which might form the first act of a play. In the dream he saw himself standing in a dock about to be sentenced to death, and he heard himself addressing the jury, protesting against their finding him guilty of a crime he had not committed, telling them that the evidence against him was entirely circumstantial, and that he urged them, when his innocence was established, as it would 25

be one day, to see that never again would any man or woman be hanged on circumstantial evidence alone. He went on with his dream, stage by stage, until he reached the other world when suddenly he woke up. "You were given that dream so that you should write it into a play," I said, for I have noticed that most of these inspirations, whether they come in dream form or are the apparent workings of the subconscious mind, have some elevating idea. They oppose capital punishment, vivisection, or hunting, or, as in the case of The Woman of Knockaloe, preach a lesson of peace. I thought Ervine looked very sceptical. Anyway, the curtain went up just then. "Authors are striving generally, without much success, to dramatise emotions and experiences which are not physically apparent," said Ervine, describing his dream, "and it may be that we are on the verge of a revelation which will enable men and women to discover their souls as surely as they have already discovered their bodies. "I have known a man to sit down to write a book on one theme and be obliged to write a book upon an entirely different theme. He may seize his subject or be seized by it. Mr. Shaw asserts sometimes that St. Joan was written by Joan herself, and one gathers that his part in the piece was practically that of a superior stenographer with access to the stars and permitted, as a reward 26

for his virtue and industry, to kick up his heels in an epilogue. William Archer, the most determined Rationalist, acknowledged that his only successful play, The Green Goddess, was proposed to him he knew not by whom, in a dream." Well, now, what is the case of William Archer? I know something about that myself. William Archer, as you know, was a Rationalist, a Scotsman without humour, a man, who, nearly all his life, fought against the melodrama, derided it, made fun. Then, right at the end of his life, he wrote The Green Goddess, out of which he made his first big money. It was a melodrama, perfectly constructed, and full of a humour certainly foreign to Archer's nature. He said he got it in a dream. That is all he ever acknowledged in print. I happen to know that at a seance, held when George Valiantine, the direct voice medium, came to London, he spoke with what purported to be the voice of his dead son and thanked him for giving him the plot of The Green Goddess, and asked for another. Although the seance was one of a series held so the reports of all of them could be printed, this remark of Archer's was suppressed at his own request. It was the only record omitted from the published volume. Since then, at a similar seance, the purported voice of William Archer himself

27

has been heard by me and this voice said, "I got the plot from my son. You know I did." As for Bernard Shaw, and Ervine's remark about how he wrote St. Joan, I sent him Robins Millar's statement. "You must regard me as a hardened old professional who is inspired all the time during working hours," wrote Shaw. "My subjects come to me anyhow, and when I have chosen my subject, the play writes itself. I can even begin without a subject with the same result. The characters come and talk and define themselves and explain their business, and there is your play for you. Thus my plays must be classed as inspirations, not as constructions. Hence their charm." Sir J. M. Barrie, whom I should regard as an obvious psychic, whether he knows it or not, did not reply to my letter. is obviously inspired when he writes a poem like Recessional -surely the same man who wrote "Pay, Pay, Pay" must have nature somewhere-begged to be excused. Pinero was sorry, but he was too busy. Sir Philip Gibbs, whose idealistic work believe is helped by something outside himself, although he has recently attacked the psychic case in a novel, wrote, honestly confess that I have never been aware of any direct inspiration in my work as an author. 28 Kipling, who a duality of I certainly "I must

Generally, I have to struggle painfully to develop an idea." He added a postscript, however. "I believe my brother Cosmo has had experiences of the kind you mention," he said. It was to answer his brother's views that Gibbs, a Roman Catholic convert, recently wrote his anti-Spiritualist novel, Darkened Windows. As a matter of fact, Gibbs's brother, Cosmo Hamilton, came to me, not long ago, with his remarkable story of how he wrote Scandal. I asked him to write the story down in his own words. "I had been working very hard on it," he said. I knew that the last ten minutes of the play, to which I had been leading up from the beginning of it, were the ones which would make the play a success if I were a good enough playwright to write them. I was late when I arrived at this point. I was perfectly aware of the fact that these last ten minutes were to be faced then, just as a man who has built a house puts in the final chimney. But I couldn't go on. The scene was too big for me. I spent hours niggling with words, and all of them were wrong. I was angry, humiliated, and, finally, filled with fear. I said to myself, 'Good God, what will become of me as a workman if I let myself down at the crucial point to which every word and thought has focused and ought to be easy to write? ' 29

"I got up and walked about, egoism rampant, trying to make excuses by saying that I was tired. I wasn't tired. I had never felt so fit. "Finally, achieving what I think now is the height of human emotion-humility-I gave it up, owned to absolute defeat and implored some far more able spirit to come and help me in my trouble. "In other words, I prayed, hoping to reach any one of the great dramatists who might be earth-bound and interested, therefore, naturally enough, in the struggles of a poor devil still on earth whose work was like his own down here. "Very soon I found myself cooler and probably saner than I had been and perfectly happy, writing easily and without any corrections, until, after ten pages or so had been covered with dialogue, the word 'Curtain' wound them up. Then I went to bed, and when, with the most intense eagerness I read, early the following morning, what I had written, I knew that there was not a single word that came out of my brain. My pen had been used. "I had been heard and helped, and what had been written for me during that hour was so far above anything I had ever written as to be unrecognisable to me. It was due entirely to these last ten pages that the play, first performed in 1918, has never ceased to run." I prayed, hoping to reach any one of the great 30

dramatists," said Cosmo Hamilton. A curious confirmation of his words is quoted by Emma Hardinge Britten, who reprints in her Modern Miracles this paragraph, quoted from the Cornhill Magazine: "M. Victorien Sardou is known to many as the drawing medium, through whom were produced, many years back, Le Maison de Mozart, and several other curious drawings. Since that time he has become, perhaps, the most successful and celebrated of modern dramatists in Paris. The court of France is at this moment entertaining a distinguished' company at Compiegne, where a series of theatrical representations are given, and the first play selected entitled La Famille Benoiton, has been written by the hand of Sardou. He has publicly announced that not a line of his comedy is the genuine production of his own brain, but, on the contrary, he asserts that it is entirely the inspiration of the spirits of departed dramatists, with whom he is in constant communication. If this were not true, why should he deprive himself of the honour of being the author of the most successful of modern dramas, as La Famille Benoiton has proved to be?" Although H. G. Wells recently wrote a long article on the psychology of dreams, basing it merely on a dream and its fulfilment, recorded by me in the Daily Express the day after it 31

happened, Mr. Wells was strangely silent on this matter of inspiration. "I am sorry but I can add nothing to your tale of inspiration from without," he wrote. Monckton Hoffe stopped on the fence. "Your question as to whether authors get ideas from something outside themselves is pretty difficult," he began. "It would want someone like John Stuart Mill to deal with the matter intelligently. So far as I am concerned, if I get a particular thought or emotion which seems to me to be entirely original, I promptly acquire a very definite inclination to pass the good news on. In other words I find myself able, and with considerable facility to make that thought or emotion the keystone of a play. "Without some such thing happening, I find myself more or less unable to write anything at all. It is all very peculiar. You know how, when we see a rather effective sunset, we generally desire to draw someone else's attention to it and feel somehow uncomfortable if we can't. Well, I somehow feel that the psychology of this sensation applies to my case with regard to my inclination to do a job of work. I am doubtful about inspiration such as Mr. Robins Millar alludes to, but that, of course, is only a matter of personal opinion." Ashley Dukes, another dramatist, rejected inspiration. 32

"If any writer for the stage gets his play, as it were, from a familiar spirit," he wrote, "I think he is very lucky. "For my part, I do not believe that this is what is meant by inspiration-a word which, to me, means simply the drawing of breath. It is true that the thing is not so easy and natural as the drawing of breath. But there is surely a great difference between the 'brilliant idea' of a plot, which may seem to arrive accidentally, and the long creative process of fashioning the conception into a finished work. No one will deny the inspiration of the Elizabethan playwrights, but it is difficult to imagine one of them claiming inspiration for his plot, which was generally borrowed. On the other hand, all of them claimed inspiration for their dramatic muse, or what the Germans call 'dichtung,' and this seems to me wholly an inward matter. "Every writer, of course, knows the ecstatic thrill of enthusiasm for a new work as yet unwritten. It may happen that complete nonsense, occurring to a writer in the course of a sleepless night, may give this thrill. Poets have sometimes written down such nonsense under the impression that they were writing immortal lines, and may have been astonished next morning to discover their mistake." "Yes, certainly I believe in inspiration," wrote 33

R. Henderson Bland, poet, actor and dramatist. "The great writers of antiquity most certainly believed in something outside the physical envelope. 'Sophocles and Virgil are full of references to such a belief. Milton, our sublimest poet, starts Paradise Lost with an invocation. "I do not mean that I think an anthropomorphic god has any particular interest in a certain poet named Henderson Bland, but I do think that some power, or powers, controlling, or inhabiting, the circumambient air impinge on my mortal frame, or some portion of it, play upon it as on a lyre whereon all winds may play, and that then I am prompted to write. "How do you account for Byron writing forty Spenserian stanzas, a most difficult medium, at one sitting if there were no inspirations? We know that, at times, he could produce nothing when sitting with pen in hand endeavouring to do so. "When I was portraying the Christus in the film From the Manger to the Cross in Palestine I tried to empty myself of memories of all other experiences, and gave myself in all humility, and unreservedly, to the moods that came upon me. if I had not done that how could I, who had never seen a film camera, have hoped to give anything but a theatrical and stilted performance? It was that humility that helped me. Swedenborg writes about the mental interiors 34

being opened up. Yes, he is right. Receptiveness is all, with a frame attuned to beauty." Robert Blatchford, who accepts the case of proved survival, and believes that in certain circumstances departed spirits can communicate with this earth, does not believe, however, that in his own case he is inspired, except by his own subconsciousness. "I think, I say I think," he wrote me, "that in many cases the inspiration is the work of the subconscious mind. The sub-mind seems to work without the knowledge of the conscious mind. I cannot remember a name, I cease to search for it, leaving it to the fellow in the cellarage. After a time, an hour, a day, the name is pushed into my consciousness, the sub-mind has sought and found it. "An author has some loose ideas for a play or story, but he cannot arrange them to his wish. He goes to bed and sleeps and while he sleeps the sub-mind solves the puzzle. In the morning he wakes with an inspiration. He thinks it is a sudden flash of genius, but it is the work of the journeyman in the cellar. "I wanted to write a book on Determinism. I read a lot and had a heap of untidy matter in my mind. I did not worry, I made no notes. I did not think about the book. I got the cards and played Patience. I played for several hours a day, for 35

some weeks, until I began to make mistakes in the game. When that happened I knew the sub-mind was signalling me. "I sat down and wrote the book. It was all ready, construction finished, chapters divided. I wrote as if from dictation. I was 'inspired.' Oh yes. The sub-mind inspired me. The work was done without my knowing how. I think the submind wrote Ophelia's speeches and Keats' Ode to a Nightingale. I think so. What is the submind? I have not the least idea. Is it seated in the brain? I think not. I think-I say I think-it is the ego, the soul, the master who uses the brain as a musician uses an instrument. On the other hand, what would seem to be a case of direct inspiration is that of Shaw Desmond, who, since the war, has published no fewer than a dozen books. He wants me to say that he gives his story with all reservation. " We cannot afford to be dogmatic like the Churchman, can we?" he wrote. "Yet at the risk of being accused of self-advertisement, I may say that from early childhood and long before I thought of writing novels I believed I was surrounded by invisible intelligences, who seem to me, often indistinctly, to guide the acts of my life. I very definitely believe this. Later it seemed to me that the chief difference between the artist and the non-artist was the fact that the former 36

was more sensitive to these intelligences than the average man or woman." Then he gave a remarkable instance. "When I wrote Echo, my Roman novel, I was in San Antonio, Texas, where I had gone to rest after a strenuous lecture tour across the American continent. I did not want to write, but to rest, and I chose the famous Argyll House on the Alamo Heights outside San Antonio to do so. I wanted to laze in the sun, instead . . . I was one day 'feeling around,' when, all at once, something said to me (not a voice but something 'inside'): 'Write a novel on your life as gladiator in old Rome under Nero, embodying the "memories" you have had from childhood and do it now.' (Remember, I make no assertion as to whether these were 'memories' or psychic inspiration or both.) "I did not want to do it because I frankly didn't want to be bothered, but the thing becoming insistent, I sat down to my 'portable,' and, day after day, for perhaps ten days or so, the stuff poured from me-certainly in a sense without control from me, I feeling and acting as vehicle. Often I scarcely knew what I was writing, though I did know too. But the curious thing was that when I tried consciously to 'invent,' the whole inspiration stopped dead. (There is no doubt about that last, I think.) This long novel, admitted by authorities to 37

be strangely accurate upon a period and subject unstudied by me, is full of technicalities. I don't claim that it is absolutely accurate in all details for I deliberately changed some. "The first short story I ever wrote that mattered came to me in an equally strange way. "I was at that time in the City as director and secretary of public companies, and one day, in the midst of my financial work, I very definitely got the inspiration (to my exceeding irritation) to sit down at my typewriter and write as fast as the words could come this story, which was written in twenty minutes. I pass no opinion as to its quality beyond saying that two of the best-known writers compared it, and another which came the same way, with Maupassant's work. "The third and last instance is for me interesting, owing to a secret of inspiration which it seemed to me to disclose. "I was strongly moved one day to write a novel which was the psychological analysis of a child's mind. I sat down, and the inspiration being strong, I wrote the first part. This inspiration was cyclic, returning at exactly the same moment each day (something I have often noticed about inspiration, which, in a way, can be evoked at regular intervals). But when I wrongly attempted to 'force' inspiration beyond the very limited field it seemed to have chosen, my prose and I 'fell down.' This forcing of inspiration beyond its limits is well 38

known to every novelist, and I think playwright. It should never be done. Inspiration is 'white heat' or nothing. "I have long since reached the conclusion that all the greater work is probably due to direct inspiration acting upon the artist, who, in turn, reacts and so 'creates.' I do not commit myself only to the psychic inspiration theory, for I know that other things also do their part, but this does not invalidate the central point any more than it weakens or cheapens the work of the artist himself." Well, in a casual sort of way, as the cases came to me, I have written them down, just for record. I could add, after research, scores of other instances. They are in biographies almost by the dozen. By inducing frankness from actors and authors and composers and artists, I could collect hundreds of facts proving, apparently, that some force outside the human brain inspires it in moments of ecstasy. I will not argue the point or I might have to go back to a First Cause. I leave the matter for other brains to worry about. 39