2. The highest art then is artlessness, unconsciousness. The true artist is not the conceiver, the designer, the executor, but the tool, the recorder, the reporter. He writes because write he must, just as he breathes because breathe he must. And here too, Nature, as elsewhere, hath indicated the true method. The most vital processes of life are not the voluntary, the conscious, but the involuntary, the unconscious. The blood circulates, the heart beats, the lungs fill, the nerves vibrate; we digest, we fall asleep, we are stirred with love, with awe, with reverence, without our will; and our highest aspirations, our sweetest memories, our cheerfullest hopes, and alas! also our bitterest self-reproaches, come ever like friends at the feast,--uninvited. You can be happy, blest at will? Believe it not! Happiness, blessedness _willed_ is not to be had in the market at any quotation. It is not to be got. It comes. And it comes when least willed. He is truly rich who has nought left to be deprived of, nought left to ask for, nought left to will.... 3. Pushkin, therefore, was incapable of giving an account of his own poetry. Pushkin could not have given a theory of a single poem of his, as Poe has given of his "Raven." Poe's account of the birth of "The Raven" is indeed most delightful reading. "I told you so," is not so much the voice of conceit, of "I knew better than thou!" but the voice of the epicurean in us; it is ever a delight to most of us to discover after the event that we knew it all before.... Delightful, then, it is indeed, to read Poe's theory of his own "Raven;" but its most delightful part is that the theory is a greater fiction than the poem itself. It is the poem that has created the theory, not the theory the poem. Neither could Pushkin do what Schiller has done: give a theory of a drama of his own. The theory of Don Karlos as developed in Schiller's letters on that play are writ not by Friedrich Schiller the poet, the darling of the German land, the inspirer of the youth of all lands, but by Herr von Schiller the professor; by Von Schiller the Kantian metaphysician; by Von Schiller the critic; by another Schiller, in short. Pushkin, however, unlike most of us, was not half a dozen ancestors--God, beast, sage, fool--rolled into one, each for a time claiming him as his own. Pushkin was essentially a unit, one voice; he was a lyre, on which a _something, not he_--God!--invisibly played. 4. And this he unconsciously to himself expresses in the piece, "My Muse." "From mom till night in oak's dumb shadow To the strange maid's teaching intent I listened; And with sparing reward me gladdening, Tossing back her curls from her forehead dear, From my hands the flute herself she took. Now filled the wood was with breath divine And the heart with holy enchantment filled."