THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE
positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes at the elaborate and vacillating conditions of thought, at the true purposes seized only at the last moment, at the innumerable glimpses of ideas that arrived not at the maturity of full view, at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable, at the cautious selection and rejection, at the painful erasures and interpolations—in a word, at the wheels and pinions, the tackle of scene-shifting, the step-ladders and demon-traps, the cock's feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred constitute the properties of the literary histrio.
For my own part, I have neither sympathy with the repugnance alluded to, nor at any time the least difficulty in recalling to mind the progressive steps of any of my compositions; and since the interest of an analysis or reconstruction, such as I have considered a desideratum, is quite independent of any real or fancied interest in the things analysed, it will not be regarded as a breach of decorum on my part to show the modus operandi by which some one of my own
[99]
