cuttlefish squirting ink into sea-water and an agitated poet spreading ink
upon paper, but in both cases, as I have said elsewhere, "it is a question
of an organism, a stimulus and a reaction. The image of the solitary
reaper stirs a Wordsworth, and the result is a poem; a profound sorrow
comes to Alfred Tennyson, and he produces _In Memoriam_."
[Footnote: _Counsel upon the Reading of Books_, p. 219. Houghton Mifflin
Company.]

In the next chapter we must examine this process with more detail. But the
person who asks himself how poetry comes into being will find a
preliminary answer by reflecting upon the relation of "impression" to
"expression" in every nerve-organism, and in all the arts. Everywhere he
must reckon with this ceaseless current of impressions, "the stream of
consciousness," sweeping inward to the brain; everywhere he will detect
modification, selections, alterations in the stream as it passes through
the higher nervous centres; everywhere he will find these transformed
"impressions" expressed in the terms of some specific medium. Thus the
temple of Karnak expresses in huge blocks of stone an imagination which
has brooded over the idea of the divine permanence. The Greek
"discus-thrower" is the idealized embodiment of a typical kind of athlete,
a conception resulting from countless visual and tactile sensations. An
American millionaire buys a "Corot" or a "Monet," that is to say, a piece
of colored canvas upon which a highly individualized artistic temperament
has recorded its vision or impression of some aspect of the world as it
has been interpreted by Corot's or Monet's eye and brain and hand. A
certain stimulus or "impression," an organism which reshapes impressions,
and then an "expression" of these transformed impressions into the terms
permitted by some specific material: that is the threefold process which
seems to be valid in all of the fine arts. It is nowhere more intricately
fascinating than in poetry.