several tentative versions, were, paragraph by paragraph, written again five or six times more, the corrections each time growing more and more minute, and finally the clauses and wording of each individual sentence were transposed, or rebalanced or reworded, whenever such processes should be necessary, in order to capture some nuance of meaning which had previously eluded me as a bird eludes a fowler. As an example of this process I may mention a single sentence which occurs in my little book on Cyprus. It is a sentence belonging to a description of certain morning scenes--of dewy plains, with peasants moving across them, and here and there a smoke wreath arising from burning weeds. The effect of these scenes in some poignant way was primitive, and I was able at once to reproduce it by saying that the peasants were moving like figures out of the Book of Genesis. I felt, however, that this effect was not produced by the groups of peasants only. I felt that somehow--I could not at first tell how--some part in producing it was played by the smoke wreaths also. At last I managed to capture the suggestion, at first subconscious only, which had so far been eluding me. I finished my original description by adding the following words, "The smoke-wreaths were going up like the smoke of the first sacrifice." It may be objected that prose built up in this elaborate way loses as much as it gains, because it is bound to lose the charm and the convincing force of spontaneity. This may be so in some cases, but it is not so in all. I have found myself that, so far as my own works are concerned, the passages which are easiest to read are precisely those which it has been most laborious to write. And for this, it seems to me, there is a very intelligible reason. Half of the interests and emotions which make up the substance of life are more or less subconscious, and are, for most men, difficult to identify. One of the functions of pure literature is to make the subconscious reveal itself. It is to make men know what they _are_, in addition to what spontaneously they _feel_ themselves to be, but feel only, without clear comprehension of it. As soon as a writer, at the cost of whatever labor, manages to make these spontaneities, otherwise subconscious, intelligible, the spontaneity of the processes described by him adds itself at last to his description.