A curious glimpse into the psychology of the writer of fiction is shown by the fact that he wrote two of his books—­good ones, too—­at a time when his health was such that he could not afterwards remember one word of them, and listened to them when they were read to him as if he were hearing the work of another man.  Apparently the simplest processes of the brain, such as ordinary memory, were in complete abeyance, and yet the very highest and most complex faculty—­imagination in its supreme form—­was absolutely unimpaired.  It is an extraordinary fact, and one to be pondered over.  It gives some support to the feeling which every writer of imaginative work must have, that his supreme work comes to him in some strange way from without, and that he is only the medium for placing it upon the paper.  The creative thought—­the germ thought from which a larger growth is to come, flies through his brain like a bullet.  He is surprised at his own idea, with no conscious sense of having originated it.  And here we have a man, with all other brain functions paralyzed, producing this magnificent work.  Is it possible that we are indeed but conduit pipes from the infinite reservoir of the unknown?  Certainly it is always our best work which leaves the least sense of personal effort.

And to pursue this line of thought, is it possible that frail physical powers and an unstable nervous system, by keeping a man’s materialism at its lowest, render him a more fitting agent for these spiritual uses?  It is an old tag that

   “Great Genius is to madness close allied,
    And thin partitions do those rooms divide.”

But, apart from genius, even a moderate faculty for imaginative work seems to me to weaken seriously the ties between the soul and the body.

Look at the British poets of a century ago:  Chatterton, Burns, Shelley, Keats, Byron.  Burns was the oldest of that brilliant band, yet Burns was only thirty-eight when he passed away, “burned out,” as his brother terribly expressed it.  Shelley, it is true, died by accident, and Chatterton by poison, but suicide is in itself a sign of a morbid state.  It is true that Rogers lived to be almost a centenarian, but he was banker first and poet afterwards.  Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning have all raised the average age of the poets, but for some reason the novelists, especially of late years, have a deplorable record.  They will end by being scheduled with the white-lead workers and other dangerous trades.  Look at the really shocking case of the young Americans, for example.  What a band of promising young writers have in a few years been swept away!  There was the author of that admirable book, “David Harum”; there was Frank Norris, a man who had in him, I think, the seeds of greatness more than almost any living writer.  His “Pit” seemed to me one of the finest American novels.  He also died a premature death.  Then there was Stephen Crane—­a man who had also done most brilliant work, and there was Harold Frederic, another master-craftsman.  Is there any profession in the world which in proportion to its numbers could show such losses as that?  In the meantime, out of our own men Robert Louis Stevenson is gone, and Henry Seton Merriman, and many another.