The Other Fellow

Authors, artists, the whole tribe of those engaged in creative work, are often accused of excessive vanity. Superficially, it must be admitted, the imputation is, on the whole, justified. However discreetly veiled, a sort of exultant wonder at their own achievement now and again betrays itself. Out of the innumerable instances which might be cited, one may, at random, recall Stevenson’s unabashed ecstasies over his own happy efforts, Thackeray’s almost awe-stricken rapture over the just-completed great scene in Vanity Fair, of Rawdon Crawley confronting his guilty wife and the Marquis of Steyne, Tennyson’s intense unfailing delight in reading his own poems — to say nothing of Shakespeare’s boundless exaltation of his own ‘ verse ’ even amid the almost painful humilities and selfabasements of the Sonnets.

‘A poor thing — but mine own’ does not in fact sum up the attitude of any real artist toward ‘fire-new’ work. It does not seem to him poor — nor quite his own. For the latter half of that proposition one might again multiply attesting instances. The recent life of Joel Chandler Harris furnishes a striking one, in the strong sense he confesses of an inner ‘other fellow’ who ‘came forward and took charge’ whenever he did his best writing.

It is not mere persiflage, however playfully expressed; but manifestly represents something of real psychical experience, not by any means limited to him.

‘She told me,’ Mr. Cross says in his life of George Eliot, ‘that in all she considered her best writing there was a “not herself ” which took possession of her, and that she felt her own personality to be merely the instrument through which the spirit, as it were, was acting.’

‘Fiona Macleod’ was not to William Sharpe a mere figment, but a psychical fact. Nor need we shrug our shoulders at the alleged dictations of Elizabethan ghosts, even though these products may not be convincingly Elizabethan or ghostly. Some ‘other fellow,’ at any rate, may be in good faith at work; though, for divers reasons, the literature of the ouija board does not promise much.

Sense of ‘the other fellow’ may become pathological. It very often does so become, needless to say, in the madness to genius so near allied. But from genius most sane — and there is no sanity so complete as the sanity of supreme genius — it is, at the same time, inseparable.

From even the slightest touch of genius it is inseparable; and from those exaltations which may come to those most devoid of genius. Witness honest Joe Gargery in Great Expectations, and his single poetic flight in honor of his peccant parent’s memory: —

‘I made it,’ said Joe, ‘by my own self. I made it in a moment. It was like striking out a horseshoe, complete, in a single blow. I never was so much surprised in all my life — could n’t credit my own ’ed — to tell you the truth, hardly believed it were my own ’ed.’

‘Hardly believed it were my own ’ed.’ There it. is, the true mark of top-notch achievement — whether of wise or of simple.

How often Dickens himself must have felt the thrill of that same exquisite surprise at his own creations — his as through sheer gratuity of some beneficent inner power. Almost one can guess which of his scenes and characters were intended, and which ‘just growed’ — sprang from no deliberate planting. Joe himself, I think, ‘just growed ’; as surely as Estella and Miss Haversham were constructed according to strict plans and specifications.

It is among his minor characters, one remembers now, that one finds Dickens’s really delicious figures; among the characters which ‘the other fellow,’ doubtless, in careless bounty contributed — shirking participation, meanwhile, in the evolution of the somewhat wooden dummies appointed to bear the burden of the plot.

‘ The other fellow ’ — what Maeterlinck calls ‘ our mysterious guest ’ — does our best work. Often what seems the vanity of authors and the like is really modesty. It is an ecstasy of astonishment at the extent to which they have surpassed themselves.

It is, one cannot but suspect, ‘the other fellow’ who does most of the great things of life; the self which lurks below the level of consciousness. Many and many a man who has proved himself the bravest of the brave has carried about with him a sickening fear of being a coward. He has been afraid: afraid of wounds and death; afraid, above all, of some shameful paralysis of fear. And then, at the pinch, ‘the other fellow’ comes to the front, gay as a bridegroom, and achieves glory.

‘The other fellow,’ after all, is our ‘realist’ self; although it is not one cabined, cribbed, confined within the bounds of our self-definition, nor one which will come at our bidding. It is good to remember that reserve self — and not too easily be discouraged. ‘The other fellow’ has been to the fore in the recent past as never previously, it is safe to say, in the history of the world — ‘ the other fellow ’ who can do, and endure, great things. We never should have known or suspected what our boys were, if the stress and strain of war had not summoned forth those high heroic selves of theirs, of which they themselves probably had never dreamed.

‘The other fellow’ has been a very real factor in life during these last few years. Will he now go into hiding again, I wonder? The problem of keeping him in the open is the master-problem of human society.