ceive in The Merry-Go-Round and In the Garret (of which he read the proofs just before his death) some signs of growth in this direction.
You are becoming freer, he would say. You are loosening your tongue; your heart is beating faster. In time you may liberate those subconscious ideas which are entangled in your very being. It is only your conscious self that prevents you from becoming a really interesting writer. Let that once be as free as the air and the other will be free too. You must walk boldly and proudly and without fear. You must search the heart; the mind is negligible in literature as in all other forms of art. Try to write just as you feel and you will discover that your feeling is greater than your knowledge of it. The words that appear on the paper will at first seem strange to you, almost like hermetic symbols, 'and it is possible that in the course of time you will be able to say so much that you yourself will not understand what you are writing. Do not be afraid of that. Let the current flow freely when you feel that it is the true current that is flowing.
That is the lesson, he continued, that the creative or critical artist can learn from the interpreter, the lesson of the uses of personality. The great interpreters, Rachel, Ristori, Mrs. Siddons, Duse, Bernhardt, Réjane, Ysaye, Paderewski, and Mary Garden are all big, vibrant personalities, that the deeper thing, call it God, call it IT, flows through and permeates. You may not believe this now, but I
