Thus we should utterly
refuse to say that this momentum was capable of being extended
indefinitely or was simplicity itself. It may be a good piece of
literary psychology to say that simplicity precedes complexity, for it
precedes complexity in consciousness. Consciousness dwindles and
flares up most irresponsibly, so long as its own flow alone is
regarded, and it continually arises out of nothing, which indeed is
simplicity itself. But it does not arise without real conditions
outside, which cannot be discovered by introspection, nor divined by
that literary psychology which proceeds by imagining what
introspection might yield in others.
There is a deeper mystification still in this passage, where a writer
is said to "plant himself in the very heart of the subject." The
general tenor of M. Bergson's philosophy warrants us in taking this
quite literally to mean that the field from which inspiration draws
its materials is not the man's present memory nor even his past
experience, but the subject itself which that experience and this
memory regard: in other words, what we write about and our latent
knowledge are the same thing. When Shakespeare was composing his
_Antony and Cleopatra,_ for instance, he planted himself in the very
heart of Rome and of Egypt, and in the very heart of the Queen of
Egypt herself; what he had gathered from Plutarch and from elsewhere
was, according to M.
Pages:
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115