I laughed.

"What I mean is, that a man, as a man, endowed with will, control,
wishes, and so on, ceases to exist, you may say, while he is
writing. He becomes then the tool of that peculiar, mysterious power
that is moving in his brain. He writes as a clerk writes from
dictation. He is the clerk pro tem of the impulse stirring his
being, which dictates to him what it pleases. There is no
consideration in his mind--'I will write this or that' or 'I won't
write the other.' He simply feels he must write a particular thing;
it crowds off his pen before he can stop it. He does not know where,
whence, how, or why the idea came to him. But it is there,
clamouring to be written, and he writes it because he must. The
expression, very often, of a thought is as uncontrollable as a
physical spasm, and the man who writes it cannot always be held
responsible for it."

"My dear Victor!"

"No, really," I said, laughing, "I am simply stating ordinary facts.
I believe any writer, any acknowledged writer of talent, will bear
me out, more or less. It is the old idea of inspiration--one cannot
express it better--a breathing into. It is exactly that. The man of
genius, in any form, feels at times-that is to say, when his fit is
on, that there is a breathing into his brain. It becomes full of
images he is unfamiliar with, crowded with thoughts that are quite
foreign perhaps to the man himself, to his life, to his habits, and
invested with a peculiar knowledge of things he has had no personal
experience of. Then as suddenly as it came the fit goes; it is over,