Many a poet of the first order, puzzling over the state of his mind during his creative moments, has declared that his works were composed as in a dream, the main ideas, sometimes even the phrases used, shaping themselves of their own accord in his consciousness. “Often it happened to me,” says Goethe, “that I would repeat a song to myself and then be unable to recollect it; that sometimes I would run to my desk, and, without taking time to lay my paper straight, would, without stirring from my place, write out the poem from beginning to end, slopingly. For the same reason I always preferred to write with a pencil, on account of its marking so readily. On several occasions, indeed, the scratching and spluttering of my pen awoke me from my somnambulistic poetising and distracted me so that it suffocated a little product in its birth.” (Hirsch’s “Genius and Degeneration,” p. 33.) Elsewhere Goethe specifically states that his “Werther” was written “somewhat unconsciously, like a sleepwalker.” And, according to Vischer, the poet Schiller, Goethe’s almost equally great contemporary, complained that whenever he was consciously at work creating and constructing, his imagination was hampered and did not perform “with the same freedom as it had done when nobody was looking over its shoulder.” “It is not I who think,” confesses Lamartine, “but my ideas which think for me.” Dante had much the same feeling, as recorded in his famous lines, “I am so constituted that when love inspires me, I attend; and according as it speaks in me, I express myself.” Voltaire, who wrote to Diderot that “in the works of genius instinct is everything,” on seeing one of his own tragedies performed, exclaimed, “Was it really I who wrote that?” “My conceptions,” says Rémy de Gourmont, “rise into the field of consciousness like a flash of lightning or the flight of a bird.” “One does not work, one listens; it is as though another were speaking into one’s ear,” writes De Musset. Exactly similar is the statement of the composer, Hoffman: “When I compose, I sit down to the piano, shut my eyes, and play what I hear.” From other great musicians comes equally emphatic testimony to the part played by the subconscious in the creation of their works. Mozart frankly avowed that his compositions came “involuntarily, like dreams.” Among eminent composers of to-day Saint-Saens has only to listen, like Socrates, to his Dæmon; and Vincent d’Indy, writing to Dr. Paul Chabaneix (to whose “Le Subconsciente chez les Artistes, les Savants, et les Ecrivains” I am indebted for most of these French instances) relates that he “often has, on waking, a fugitive glimpse of a musical effect which—like the memory of a dream—needs a strong immediate concentration of mind to keep it from vanishing.”