ugh one looks upon a scene in which one had lived and moved, with the
friendly yet half-distant feeling that it once was one's own possession
but is so no longer. I should think the feeling to be much like that of
the old man whose sons, gone to distant places, have created their
own plantations of life and have themselves become the masters of
possessions. Also I suppose that when I read the story through again
from the first page to the last, I shall recreate the feeling in which
I lived when I wrote it, and it will become a part of my own identity
again. That distance between himself and his work, however, which
immediately begins to grow as soon as a book leaves the author's hands
for those of the public, is a thing which, I suppose, must come to one
who produces a work of the imagination. It is no doubt due to the fact
that every piece of art which has individuality and real likeness to
the scenes and character it is intended to depict is done in a kind of
trance. The author, in effect, self-hypnotises himself, has created
an atmosphere which is separate and apart from that of his daily
surroundings, and by virtue of his imagination becomes absorbed in
that atmosphere. When the book is finished and it goes forth, when the
imagination is relaxed and the concentration of mind is withdrawn, the
atmosphere disappears, and then. One experiences what I feel when I take
up 'The Weavers' and, in a sense, wonder how it was done, such as it is.

The frontispiece of the English edition represents a scene in the House
of Commons, and this brings to my mind a warning which was given me
similar to that on my entering new fields outside the one in which
I first made a reputation in fiction. When, in a certain year, I
determined that I would enter the House of Commons I had many friends
who, in effect, wailed and gnashed their teeth. They said that it would
be the death of my imaginative faculties; that I should never write
anything any more; that all the qualities which make literature living
and compelling would disappear. I thought this was all wrong then, and
I know it is all wrong now. Political life does certainly interfere
with the amount of work which an author may produce. He certainly cannot
write a book every year and do political work as well, but if he does
not attempt to do the two things on the same days, as it were, but in
blocks of time devoted to each separately and respectively, he will
only find, as I have found