outside, which cannot be discovered by introspection, nor divined by
that literary psychology which proceeds by imagining what
introspection might yield in others.

There is a deeper mystification still in this passage, where a writer
is said to "plant himself in the very heart of the subject." The
general tenor of M. Bergson's philosophy warrants us in taking this
quite literally to mean that the field from which inspiration draws
its materials is not the man's present memory nor even his past
experience, but the subject itself which that experience and this
memory regard: in other words, what we write about and our latent
knowledge are the same thing. When Shakespeare was composing his
_Antony and Cleopatra,_ for instance, he planted himself in the very
heart of Rome and of Egypt, and in the very heart of the Queen of
Egypt herself; what he had gathered from Plutarch and from elsewhere
was, according to M. Bergson's view, a sort of glimpse of the remote
reality itself, as if by telepathy he had been made to witness some
part of it; or rather as if the scope of his consciousness had been
suddenly extended in one direction, so as to embrace and contain
bodily a bit of that outlying experience. Thus when the poet sifts his
facts and sets his imagination to work at unifying and completing
them, what he does is to pierce to Egypt, Rome, and the inner
consciousness of Cleopatra, to fetch _thence_ the profound momentum
which is to guide him in composition; and it is there, not in the
adventitious later parts of his own mind, that he should find the
thousand other details which he may add to the picture.

Here again, in an exaggerated form, we have a transcript of the
immediate, a piece of really wonderful introspection, spoiled by being
projected into a theory of nature, which it spoils in its turn.