and he can write no more. Should he be so foolish as to try, his
sentences become mere linked chains of nouns and verbs; his
inspiration has gone. He cannot invoke it, cannot restrain it,
cannot retain it, cannot recall it, and only very slightly control
it."

"Ha!" said my father reflectively, going on with his soup, "deuced
inconvenient."

"Inconvenient it may be," I said quietly. "All the same, that which
is written under inspiration is the only stuff worth reading. The
Greeks expressed the peculiar feeling that a man has when his
inspiration comes upon him by the phrase, entheos eimi, and we can
hardly find a better one, only unfortunately we don't believe in
gods. Otherwise, entheos eimi contains everything, for the man who
was only common clay before his inspiration, and will be common clay
when it departs, feels, for the time, as if a god had descended, and
was within him. And when, afterwards, he looks at what he has
written he feels it is something not wholly his own, but that it is
the work of some powerful influence he can hardly comprehend, and
cannot certainly rule."

"But really I don't see that this has much relation to what I said
about your writing something to please the British public!"

"It is the whole gist of the matter," I said. "I am proving to you
that I am, to a certain extent, helpless in what I write; that it is
impossible for me to think of publics, British or otherwise, of
publishers or critics, when I am writing. I have no time to consider
them, no space in my brain for them, no memory that such things, or