not feel up to it.

I could have avoided the argument, doubtless, by seeming to assent, by
promising to "make up something," and saved myself a number of words.

But there is a strong impulse in me to revolt against allowing myself
to seem to accept a false statement or opinion that I do not really
hold.

And I pulled myself together with an effort.

"I don't think you understand in the least my view of a writer and his
writings," I said. "It is not a voluntary thing, led up to by
pre-determination. There can be no question of making up. I never try
to write nor to think. I do not invoke my own ideas. They spring into
being of themselves, quite unsought. And, in a measure, they are
uncontrollable."

My father was staring at me in silence.

"Eh?" he said merely as I paused.

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, and he can
write no more. Should he be so foolish as to try, his sentences become
mere linked chain