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.

A signal example of this fact may be found, not in prose, but in love
poems. Most people can fall in love. It takes no trouble to do so,
whatever trouble it may bring them. If any human processes are
spontaneous, falling in love is one of them. Most lovers feel more than
they know until great love poetry explains it to them what they are; but
great love poems are great, not because