But with me it is different. To me
the passion is to express it, to embalm it, in phrase or word, not
for my pride in my art, not for any desire to give the treasure to
others, but simply, so it seems, in obedience to a tyrannous
instinct to lend the thought, the sight, another shape. I despair
of defining the feeling. It is partly a desire to arrest the
fleeting moment, to give it permanence in the ruinous lapse of
things, the same feeling that made old Herrick say to the
daffodils, "We weep to see you haste away so soon." Partly the joy
of the craftsman in making something that shall please the eye and
ear. It is not the desire to create, as some say, but to record.
For when one writes an impassioned scene, it seems no more an act
of creation than one feels about one's dreams. The wonder of dreams
is that one does not make them; they come upon one with all the
pleasure of surprise and experience. They are there; and so, when
one indulges imagination, one does not make, one merely tells the
dream. It is this that makes art so strange and sad an occupation,
that one lives in a beautiful world, which does not seem to be of
one's own designing, but from which one is awakened, in terror and
disgust, by bodily pain, discomfort, anxiety, loss.
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