A tendency to secretiveness very often goes with this self-cherishing. Goethe was as amorous and jealous about his unpublished works, in some cases, as the master of a seraglio; fostering them for years, and sometimes not telling his closest friends of their existence. His Eugenie, “meine Liebling Eugenie,” as he calls it, was vulgarized and ruined for him by his fatal mistake in publishing the first part before the whole was complete. It would not be difficult to show that the same cherishing of favorite and peculiar ideas is found also in painters, sculptors, and effective persons of every sort. As was suggested in an earlier chapter, this secretiveness has a social reference, and few works of art could be carried through if the artist was convinced they would have no value in the eyes of anyone else. He hides his work that he may purify and perfect it, thus making it at once more wholly and delightfully his own and also more valuable to the world in the end. As soon as the painter exhibits his picture he loses it, in a sense; his system of ideas about it becomes more or less confused and disorganized by the inrush of impressions arising from a sense of what other people think of it; it is no longer the perfect and intimate thing which his thought cherished, but has become somewhat crude, vulgar, and disgusting, so that if he is sensitive he may wish never to look upon it again. This, I take it, is why Goethe could not finish Eugenie, and why Guignet, a French painter, of whom Hamerton speaks, used to alter or throw away a painting that anyone by chance saw upon the easel. Likewise it was in order more perfectly to know and express himself—in his book called “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”—that Thoreau retired to Walden Pond, and it was doubtless with the same view that Descartes quitted Paris and dwelt for eight years in Holland, concealing even his place of residence. The Self, like a child, is not likely to hold its own in the world unless it has had a mature prenatal development. It may be said, perhaps, that these views contradict a well-known fact, namely, that we do our best work when we are not self-conscious, not thinking about effect, but filled with disinterested and impersonal passion. Such truth as there is in this idea is, however, in no way inconsistent with what has just been said. It is true that a certain abandonment and self-forgetting is often characteristic of high thought and noble action. But there would be no production, no high thought or noble action, if we relied entirely upon these impassioned moments without preparing ourselves to have them. It is only as we have self-consciousness that we can be aware of those special tendencies which we assert in production, or can learn how to express them, or even have the desire to do so. The moment of insight would be impossible without the persistent self-conscious endeavor that preceded it, nor has enthusiastic action any value without a similar discipline.