Whereupon the dreamer awoke. We know now Sherwood Anderson’s _faculté maitresse_, imagination, and the familiar form which it takes in his books, _i.e._, evocation through dreams. His characters are so deeply absorbed in dreaming that the author himself never quite succeeds in waking them from their hypnotic trance. * * * * * If we are to believe the confessions of his autobiography, Anderson was led to become a writer by a tyrannical impulse. He felt a physical craving for dotting the white surface of a sheet of paper with ink or pencil. Like that friend of his who was so fond of cigars that he took a trunkful of them to Havana, he pleads guilty to not being able to go to a distant city without taking his stationery along with him. The sight of a ream of white paper thrills him to the tips of his fingers. It calls for something to be put on it. The average man crosses the street and sees houses and people, a child at a window, a woman with a babe in her arms, a drowsy workman passing by. He wonders what is the matter with these people. Lo! the white page is there and the writer will photograph the whole thing for him. “You don’t know, but _I_ know!” exclaims the writer. “Just wait a minute and I shall tell you. I have felt it. Now I no longer exist by myself. I only live in these other people.” Then he rushes to his rooms; he lights the lamp and behold! the pageant passes. Words are to the writer what colors are to the artist. They each have a color and a taste. They are tangible.[40] It seems to him that words are something that even his fingers can touch “as one touches the cheeks of a child.” Here are the white sheets of paper taunting the author to write. But like a true lover he wants to postpone his pleasure. He must wait a day or two to take up the challenge daringly, baldly. His worship of the white sheet is such that he excuses the manufacturers of writing paper from his general excommunication of capitalists. Not only does he grant them economic privileges, but he goes as far as to put them among the saints on the calendar: Makers of paper, I exclude you from all the curses I have heaped upon manufacturers when I have walked in the street breathing coal dust and smoke. I have heard your industry kills fish in rivers. Let them be killed. Fishermen are, in any event, noisy, lying brutes. Last night I dreamed I had been made Pope and that I issued a bill, excommunicating all owners of factories, consigning them to burn everlastingly in hell, but ah, I left you out of my curses, you busy makers of paper. Those who made paper at a low price and in vast quantities somewhere up in the forests of Canada, I sainted. There was one man--I invented him--named Saint John P. Belger, who furnished paper to indigent writers of prose free of charge. For virtue I put him, in my dream, almost on a level with Saint Francis of Assisi.