CHAPTER XX
It was, perhaps, the undigested horror of those days, as also their unsatisfied yearnings after beauty, that tried to find expression fifteen years later in writing. Once they were over I hid them away, those dreadful weeks, trying to forget them. But nothing is ever forgotten, nor is anything finally suppressed in the sense that it is done with. Expression, sooner or later, in one form or another, inevitably crops up.
"Writing," declared the old doctor, after a talk about De Quincey, "is functional." He had many pet theories or hobbies on which he loved to expatiate. "Writing is as much a function of the system as breathing or excretion. What the body takes in and cannot use, it discards. What the mind takes in and cannot use, it, similarly, excretes. A sensitive, impressionable mind receives an incessant bombardment, often an intense, terrific bombardment of impressions. Two-thirds of such impressions are never digested, much less used. The artist-temperament whose sensitiveness accumulates a vast store, uses them; the real artist, of course, shapes them at the same time. The ordinary man, the Dutzend Mensch, made in bundles by the dozen, gets few impressions, and needs, naturally, no outlet . . . Writing is purely functional. . . . " It was one of his numerous pet theories.
I went to his house now every night; he gave me his professional care, he gave me sympathy, he gave me food. Pathetic, wonderful old German! His tenderness was a woman's, his temper a demon's. I felt a giant in him somewhere. At close daily quarters his alternate moods perplexed me utterly. He had an Irish wife, a kind, motherly, but quite uneducated woman of about forty-five, and a little girl of eight or nine, whose white face
