The
transparent medium of prose shares the beauty of its content, just as
a perfect glass partakes of the color of the light which it transmits.
The psychologic roots of prose literature are the impulses to self-
revelation and to acquaintance with life. Every thing that has once
entered into our lives, no matter how intimate, craves to come out;
the instinct of gregariousness extends, as we have noted, to the whole
of the mind. The completely private and uncommunicated makes us as
uncertain and afraid of ourselves as physical loneliness. But in
addition to the dislike for any form of isolation, even when purely
spiritual, there is another factor which determines
self-revelation,--the desire for praise. We want a larger audience for
our exploits than the people immediately involved in them, so we tell
them to any listening ear. The friend whispering his confession
illustrates the one motive; the hero bragging of his deeds illustrates
the other.
The desire to hear another's story is the obverse of the desire to
tell one about oneself, just as the impulse to welcome a friend is the
complement of his impulse to seek our companionship; we receive from
him exactly what he takes from us,--an enlargement of our social world,
the creation of another social bond. If we cannot hear his story from
his own lips, we want to hear it from some third person, who will
surely be glad to relate it, since he, as bearer of the news, will
bring to himself something of the glory of the hero.
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