Montaigne, who understood human nature as well, perhaps, as anyone who ever lived, remarks: “There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.”[[16]] And it was doubtless because he had many such thoughts which no one was at hand to appreciate, that he took to writing essays. The uncomprehended of all times and peoples have kept diaries for the same reason. So, in general, a true creative impulse in literature or art is, in one aspect, an expression of this simple, childlike need to think aloud or to somebody; to define and vivify thought by imparting it to an imaginary companion; by developing that communicative element which belongs to its very nature, and without which it cannot live and grow. Many authors have confessed that they always think of some person when they write, and I am inclined to believe that this is always more or less definitely the case, though the writer himself may not be aware of it. Emerson somewhere says that “the man is but half himself; the other half is his expression,” and this is literally true. The man comes to be through some sort of expression, and has no higher existence apart from it; overt or imaginary it takes place all the time.
Men apparently solitary, like Thoreau, are often the best illustrations of the inseparability of thought and life from communication. No sympathetic reader of his works, I should say, can fail to see that he took to the woods and fields not because he lacked sociability, but precisely because his sensibilities were so keen that he needed to rest and protect them by a peculiar mode of life, and to express them by the indirect and considerate method of literature. No man ever labored more passionately to communicate, to give and receive adequate expression, than he did. This may be read between the lines in all his works, and is recorded in his diary. “I would fain communicate the wealth of my life to men, would really give them what is most precious in my gift. I would secrete pearls with the shell-fish and lay up honey with the bees for them. I will sift the sunbeams for the public good. I know no riches I would keep back. I have no private good unless it be my peculiar ability to serve the public. This is the only individual property. Each one may thus be innocently rich. I enclose and foster the pearl till it is grown. I wish to communicate those parts of my life which I would gladly live again.”[[17]] This shows, I think, a just notion of the relation between the individual and society, privacy and publicity. There is, in fact, a great deal of sound sociology in Thoreau.
Since, therefore, the need to impart is of this primary and essential character, we ought not to look upon it as something separable from and additional to the need to think or to be; it is only by imparting that one is enabled to think or to be. Everyone, in proportion to his natural vigor, necessarily strives to communicate to others that part of his life which he is trying to unfold in himself. It is a matter of self-preservation, because without expression thought cannot live. Imaginary conversation—that is, conversation carried on without the stimulus of a visible and audible response—may satisfy the needs of the mind for a long time. There is, indeed, an advantage to a vigorously constructive and yet impressible imagination in restricting communication; because in this way ideas are enabled to have a clearer and more independent development than they could have if continually disturbed by criticism or opposition. Thus artists, men of letters, and productive minds of all sorts often find it better to keep their productions to themselves until they are fully matured. But, after all, the response must come sooner or later or thought itself will perish. The imagination, in time, loses the power to create an interlocutor who is not corroborated by any fresh experience. If the artist finds no appreciator for his book or picture he will scarcely be able to produce another.
People differ much in the vividness of their imaginative sociability. The more simple, concrete, dramatic, their habit of mind is, the more their thinking is carried on in terms of actual conversation with a visible and audible interlocutor. Women, as a rule, probably do this more vividly than men, the unlettered more vividly than those trained to abstract thought, and the sort of people we call emotional more vividly than the impassive. Moreover, the interlocutor is a very mutable person, and is likely to resemble the last strong character we have been in contact with. I have noticed, for instance, that when I take up a book after a person of decided and interesting character has been talking with me I am likely to hear the words of the book in his voice. The same is true of opinions, moral standards, and the like, as well as of physical traits. In short, the interlocutor, who is half of all thought and life, is drawn from the accessible environment.
It is worth noting here that there is no separation between real and imaginary persons; indeed, to be imagined is to become real, in a social sense, as I shall presently point out. An invisible person may easily be more real to an imaginative mind than a visible one; sensible presence is not necessarily a matter of the first importance. A person can be real to us only in the degree in which we imagine an inner life which exists in us, for the time being, and which we refer to him. The sensible presence is important chiefly in stimulating us to do this. All real persons are imaginary in this sense. If, however, we use imaginary in the sense of illusory, an imagination not corresponding to fact, it is easy to see that visible presence is no bar to illusion. Thus I meet a stranger on the steamboat who corners me and tells me his private history. I care nothing for it, and he half knows that I do not; he uses me only as a lay figure to sustain the agreeable illusion of sympathy, and is talking to an imaginary companion quite as he might if I were elsewhere. So likewise good manners are largely a tribute to imaginary companionship, a make believe of sympathy which it is agreeable to accept as real, though we may know, when we think, that it is not. To conceive a kindly and approving companion is something that one involuntarily tries to do, in accordance with that instinctive hedonizing inseparable from all wholesome mental processes, and to assist in this by at least a seeming of friendly appreciation is properly regarded as a part of good breeding. To be always sincere would be brutally to destroy this pleasant and mostly harmless figment of the imagination.
Thus the imaginary companionship which a child of three or four years so naïvely creates and expresses, is something elementary and almost omnipresent in the thought of a normal person. In fact, thought and personal intercourse may be regarded as merely aspects of the same thing: we call it personal intercourse when the suggestions that keep it going are received through faces or other symbols present to the senses; reflection when the personal suggestions come through memory and are more elaborately worked over in thought. But both are mental, both are personal. Personal images, as they are connected with nearly all our higher thought in its inception, remain inseparable from it in memory. The mind is not a hermit’s cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse. We have no higher life that is really apart from other people. It is by imagining them that our personality is built up; to be without the power of imagining them is to be a low-grade idiot; and in the measure that a mind is lacking in this power it is degenerate. Apart from this mental society there is no wisdom, no power, justice, or right, no higher existence at all. The life of the mind is essentially a life of intercourse.
Let us now consider somewhat more carefully the way in which ideas of people grow up in the mind, and try to make out, as nearly as we can, their real nature and significance.
The studies through which the child learns, in time, to interpret personal expression are very early begun. On her twelfth day M. was observed to get her eyes upon her mother’s face; and after gazing for some time at it she seemed attracted to the eyes, into which she looked quite steadily. From the end of the first month this face study was very frequent and long-continued. Doubtless anyone who notices infants could multiply indefinitely observations like the following:
“M., in her eighth week, lies in her mother’s lap gazing up at her face with a frown of fixed and anxious attention. Evidently the play of the eyes and lips, the flashing of the teeth, and the wrinkles of expression are the object of her earnest study. So also the coaxing noises which are made to please her.”
“She now [four months and twenty-one days old] seems to fix her attention almost entirely upon the eyes, and will stare at them for a minute or more with the most intent expression.”