The Brownie in the Brain

CHESS-PLAYERS say that after the first few moves they are not conscious of any further activity of their own minds, but play the game according to the dictates of a subconscious master, a wholly different personality, who comes avidly to the fore and takes command of the intricate tactics.

It is as if a puppet, a small Robot in the brain, were acting for them: while the game is in progress, he works with super-brilliancy and activity; when it is over, he disappears instantly from the conscious mind. Many creative minds admit the same thing — it seems that it is not conscious thought or will-power which produces the poem, novel, or play which delights the world, but the workings of an independent creator, who hides within the brain.

Cordelia, whose delightful essays and stories of modern life are well known to Atlantic readers, once told me as we sat before the blazing logs in her library, that her subconscious mind did all the work for which she receives the glory. ‘I just start the thing,’ she said, reflectively, ‘jot down the main points, perhaps describe the characters, start the story, and then — don’t laugh will you? — then I put the papers away in my Korean chest — you know the one that stands up in the little room off my bedroom? —and put the whole thing out of my mind. Perhaps that night, when I am dropping off to sleep, I think of the thing again, and then I say, firmly, to my subconscious worker, “I want that thought out and ready in the morning. You know as well as I do that it must be ready to go Saturday, or we shall hear from the publishers!" Well! That’s all there is to it! He always does it, or almost always. Once in a while I must confess, he sulks, says he can’t do anything with that old idea, and I need n’t expect him to. But — if I pretend I have forgotten all about it, keep the whole thing right out of my mind, and think hard about other things — why, then, one morning Mr. Subconscious wakes me up with a triumphant, “Here I am! Here’s your plot, everything just as smooth as possible. Don’t you realize how busy I’ve been, and that I can’t always have things ready right on the minute. You might praise me a little; I’m feeling very pleased with myself.” Those are the days when I must write, must, must, must! The words fairly hurl themselves from my lips if I am dictating, or on to the typewriter if I am working by myself. Then I get a day’s work done that is worth while.’

‘Cordelia,’ I said, ‘why the Korean chest? Would n’t your jinni find the notes if they were put anywhere else?’

Cordelia smiled whimsically. ‘Perhaps he would,’ she said, ‘but I have trained him to look there. Do you know, some nights I lie half-awake, and half-asleep, and feel as if I could almost see him. I think he is a comical little sprite, with a puckered, slightly Oriental yellow face. He goes softly to the chest, opens the old brass locks, and takes out my papers; then crouches down and runs away with them. I don’t know where he takes them — I wish I did! Sometimes he jumps out the open window, and looks back at me before he vanishes into the moonlight. He has a tricksy, Puck-like expression. Oh, I am well acquainted with that sprite.’

Before I went home I went to look at the Korean chest. It is old red lacquer, with cumbersome flat brass locks. It had an aura, I had to admit; and when Cordelia opened it, the room was filled with a curious, sweet perfume, a faint breath of ‘cassia, sandal-buds, and aloe-balls.’ In some of the little drawers were small carved ivories, and ricepaper pictures, as well as piles of papers which, Cordelia said, were waiting for the touch of inspiration.

‘But, Cordelia,’ I cried, ‘this is nonsense; suppose you lost the chest, would n’t the subconscious sprite work at all? ‘

‘Oh, I suppose he would get used to another place in time,’ said Cordelia:

‘ the chest is just my whimsey. You remember Dr. Johnson could n’t write unless he had at hand dried lemon peel, decaying apples, and a purring cat. I imagine all writers have their idiosyncrasies. Surely my sprite may have his when he likes, when he works so hard for me. You will say it is all imagination, and so it is; but you must admit the Japanese have caught the essence of it when they say, “Since reality is never real, how do we know when a dream is a dream?”’

Since that talk with Cordelia I have found that other writers admit the jinn, too. A Boston author has recently published an article on ‘The Bewilderment of an Author,’ in which she says: —

‘But though the author must go into the streets and the office, to rub against all sorts and conditions of men on their own ground, not his, he must merely cast these variant types into his own mind, to fuse, to fructify, until, on an unprophesied day, some irresistible human picture will rise before him, not of memory, but of creative vision, and he has his story, and needs only to turn it over to the pen. While his pen lay idle, the good genius imagination had been at work.

‘There is something so obscure as to be almost incredible in this oblique action of the mind. That never-resting Brownie in the brain! He shows you how he has tied a knot in the thread of narrative that failed to hold. Quietly he moves a piece on the puzzle-board of your conception. And if you are an old hand at Brownie-driving, you do not, after his first sign of activity, pay much attention to him. You do not “think it out.” You leave it all to the unresting mind within the mind, and go to sleep; and next morning the job is done and you can deliver it with your pen.’

The same thing that Cordelia said, you see.

You know how Barrie referred to his M’Connachie?

‘M’Connachie? M’Connachie, I should explain, as I have undertaken to open the innermost doors, is the name I give to the unruly half of myself, the writing half. We are complement and supplement. I am the half that is dour and practical and canny; he is the fanciful half; my desire is to be the family solicitor, standing firm on my hearth-rug among the hard realities of the office furniture; while he prefers to fly around on one wing. I should not mind him doing that, but he drags me with him! . . . He has clung to me, less from mischief than for companionship; I half like him and his penny whistle; with all his faults he is as Scotch as peat.’

Sir Walter Scott always looked to the dawn for a solution of his literary difficulties; indeed, he came to rely on his early morning thoughts. ‘I lie simmering over things at night,’ he said, ‘and if they fail to reveal the wanted ideas, I say, “ Never mind. I shall have them at seven o’clock to-morrow morning.’”

Maeterlinck’s wife said: ‘When one is able to follow Maurice’s experience, step by step, one gets a revelation of the formidable role played by the unconscious in our spirits. His work is not the result of mental attention only: it emanates from a force which is in perpetual movement, always awake, which acts unknown to him, and seems to take on a human voice to dictate to him those profound pages which he has written.’

Philosophers probably explain the Brownies by saying that, in men of genius, a fortunate relationship is established between conscious and unconscious mental activity, and that such a relationship is not a matter of education or discipline, but a gift of the High Gods; but I prefer to think of their work as the result of a magic connection, spun of ‘such stuff as dreams are made on,’ between our humdrum world and the Realm of Imagination. From this world the Brownies come, and perhaps it was of one of them that Masefield was thinking when he wrote: —