At
once we should begin to perceive how casual and superficial are those
data of introspection which M. Bergson's account reproduces. Does that
painful effort, for instance, occur always? Is it the moral source, as
he seems to suggest, of the good and miraculous fruits that follow?
Not at all: such an effort is required only when the writer is
overworked, or driven to express himself under pressure; in the
spontaneous talker or singer, in the orator surpassing himself and
overflowing with eloquence, there is no effort at all; only facility,
and joyous undirected abundance. We should further ask whether _all_
the facts previously gathered are recovered, and all correctly, and
what relation the "thousand other details" have to them; and we should
find that everything was controlled and supplied by the sensuous
endowment of the literary man, his moral complexion, and his general
circumstances. And we should perceive at the same time that the
momentum which to introspection was so mysterious was in fact the
discharge of many automatisms long imprinted on the system, a system
(as growth and disease show) that has its internal vegetation and
crises of maturity, to which facility and error in the recovery of the
past, and creation also, are closely attached.
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