he is not conscious of what inspired it--that he had nothing
definite in mind--that he was not aware of any mental image or
process--that, naturally, the actual work in creating something
gave him a satisfying feeling of pleasure perhaps of elation.
What will you substitute for the mountain lake, for his friend's
character, etc.? Will you substitute anything? If so why? If so
what? Or is it enough to let the matter rest on the pleasure
mainly physical, of the tones, their color, succession, and
relations, formal or informal? Can an inspiration come from a
blank mind? Well--he tries to explain and says that he was
conscious of some emotional excitement and of a sense of
something beautiful, he doesn't know exactly what--a vague
feeling of exaltation or perhaps of profound sadness.

What is the source of these instinctive feelings, these vague
intuitions and introspective sensations? The more we try to
analyze the more vague they become. To pull them apart and
classify them as "subjective" or "objective" or as this or as
that, means, that they may be well classified and that is about
all: it leaves us as far from the origin as ever. What does it
all mean? What is behind it all? The "voice of God," says the
artist, "the voice of the devil," says the man in the front row.
Are we, because we are, human beings, born with the power of
innate perception of the beautiful in the abstract so that an
inspiration can arise through no external stimuli of sensation or
experience,--no association with the outward? Or was there
present in the above instance, some kind of subconscious,
instantaneous, composite image, of all the mountain lakes this
man had ever seen blended as kind of overtones with the various
traits of nobility of many of his friends embodied in one