they are composed spontaneously,
but because they express spontaneities which are essentially external to
themselves. In other words, the achievement of perfection, whether in
prose or poetry, is comparable to the task of a piano tuner, who may
spend a whole morning in tightening or relaxing the strings, but who
knows at once, when he gets them, the minutely precise tones which the
laws of music demand.

Whether every reader will agree with me as to these questions or not,
they are, at all events, examples of questions purely literary, which
are in themselves captivating for large numbers of people, without any
reference to ulterior, or what are called practical, objects. To these
questions I may add a few others, which have been specially captivating
to myself.

One of them is the use of metaphor as an immemorial literary device,
especially in the case of poetry. What is the psychology of metaphor?
Let us take an instance from Tennyson, who in one of his poems speaks,
with very vivid effect, of Mediterranean bays as colored like "the
peacock's neck." The color of the bay is at once made present to the
reader's mind. But why? A discussion of this question occurs in a
dialogue between two of the characters in my novel _The Old Order
Changes_. The poet, urges one of them, might, if describing a peacock,
have said with equal effect that the peacock's neck was colored like a
Mediterranean bay. How is it that we gain anything by comparing one
equally familiar thing to another? The secret of the use of metaphor in
the poet's art is, says the speaker, this. When the mind is at rest its
surface is alive with vivid images which have settled on it like sea
birds on a rock, but the moment any one of these detects an approach on
our part, in order that we may examine it carefully, its wings are
spread, and in a flash it is gone. When, however, we use a simile in
order to describe something which is obviously our main concern (say the
color of a Mediterranean bay), the thing which we are anxious to
describe acts as a kind of stalking-horse, which enables us to approach
and capture the thing which we use as an illustration (say the neck of a
peacock) before the peacock so much as suspects our neighborhood. We
have it alive before us, with all its feathers glittering, and these
throw a new light on objects which our direct touch might have
frightened away beyond the confines of our field of vision. The more
vivid of the two objects