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Title: The Erotic Motive in Literature

Author: Albert Mordell

Release Date: March 18, 2018 [EBook #56779]

Language: English

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THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE




                    THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

                                  BY

                            ALBERT MORDELL

             AUTHOR OF "THE SHIFTING OF LITERARY VALUES,"
                  "DANTE AND OTHER WANING CLASSICS,"
                                 ETC.

                            [Illustration]

                          BONI AND LIVERIGHT
                          NEW YORK      1919


                           COPYRIGHT, 1919,
                       BY BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.

                      _First printing, May, 1919_
                     _Second printing, July, 1919_


                       _Printed in the U. S. A._




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                               PAGE

  I INTRODUCTION                                  1

  II EROTICISM IN LIFE                                    20

  III DREAMS AND LITERATURE                               31

  IV THE ŒDIPUS COMPLEX AND THE BROTHER AND
  SISTER COMPLEX                                          51

  V THE AUTHOR ALWAYS UNCONSCIOUSLY IN HIS
  WORK                                                    63

  VI UNCONSCIOUS CONSOLATORY MECHANISMS IN AUTHORSHIP     83

  VII PROJECTION, VILLAIN PORTRAYALS AND CYNICISM
  AS WORK OF THE UNCONSCIOUS                              97

  VIII GENIUS AS A PRODUCT OF THE UNCONSCIOUS            107

  IX LITERARY EMOTIONS AND THE NEUROSES                  118

  X THE INFANTILE LOVE LIFE OF THE AUTHOR AND
  ITS SUBLIMATIONS                                       132

  XI SEXUAL SYMBOLISM IN LITERATURE                      150

  XII CANNIBALISM: THE ATREUS LEGEND                     172

  XIII PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERARY CRITICISM             179

  XIV KEATS' PERSONAL LOVE POEMS                         199

  XV SHELLEY'S PERSONAL LOVE POEMS                       209

  XVI PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY OF EDGAR ALLAN POE            220

  XVII THE IDEAS OF LAFCADIO HEARN                       237

  XVIII CONCLUSION                                       244




CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION


I

This work is an endeavour to apply some of the methods of
psychoanalysis to literature. It attempts to read closely between the
lines of an author's works. It applies some principles in interpreting
literature with a scrutiny hitherto scarcely deemed permissible. Only
such suggestions have been set down whose application has been rendered
fairly unimpeachable by science and experience.

In studying literature thus, I aim to trace a writer's books back to
the outward and inner events of his life and to reveal his unconscious,
or that part of his psychic life of which he is unaware. I try to show
that unsuspected emotions of the writer have entered into his literary
productions, that events he had apparently forgotten have guided his
pen. In every book there is much of the author's unconscious which can
be discovered by the critic and psychologist who apply a few and well
tested and infallible principles.

This unconscious is largely identical with the mental love fantasies in
our present and past life. Since the terms "unconscious" and "erotic"
are almost synonymous, any serious study of literature which is
concerned with the unconscious must deal impartially with eroticism.

Every author reveals more than he intended. Works of the imagination
open up to the reader hidden vistas in man's inner life just as dreams
do. As the psychoanalyst recognises that dreams are the realised
repressed wishes of the unconscious, so the critic discovers in
literary performances ideal pictures inspired by past repressions in
the authors' lives. And just as anxiety-dreams spring largely from the
anxieties of waking life, so literature describing human sorrows in
general takes its cue from the personal griefs of the author.

A literary work is no longer regarded as a sort of objective product
unrelated to its creator, written only by compliance with certain
rules. It is a personal expression and represents the whole man behind
it. His present and past have gone into the making of it and it
records his secret aspirations and most intimate feelings; it is the
outcropping of his struggles and disappointments. It is the outlet of
his emotions, freely flowing forth even though he has sought to stem
their flux. It dates from his apparently forgotten infantile life.

We know that a man's reading, his early education, his contact with the
world, the fortunes and vicissitudes of his life, have all combined
to influence his artistic work. We have learned that hereditary
influences, the nature of his relations to his parents, his infantile
repressions, his youthful love affairs, his daily occupations, his
physical powers or failings, enter into the colouring and directing of
his ideas and emotions, and will stamp any artistic product that he
may undertake. Thus with a man's literary work before us and with a
few clues, we are able to reconstruct his emotional and intellectual
life, and guess with reasonable certainty at many of the events in his
career. George Brandes has been able to build up a life of Shakespeare
almost from the plays alone. As he said, if we have about forty-five
works by a writer, and we still cannot find out much about his life, it
must be our own fault.

Again we may deduce what kind of literary work would have been the
result if there are given to us not only the hereditary antecedents and
biographical data of an author, but a full account of his day dreams,
ambitions, frailties, disillusionments, of his favourite reading,
intellectual influences, love affairs and relations to his parents,
relatives and friends. I do not think it would be difficult for us to
deduce from the facts we have of Dante's life that he naturally would
have given us a work of the nature of the _Divine Comedy_.

Literature is a personal voice the source of which can be traced to the
unconscious.

But an author draws not only on the past in his own life, but on the
past psychic history of the human family. Unconscious race memories
are revived by him in his writing; his productions are influenced by
most primitive ideas and emotions, though he may not be aware what
they are. Yet they emerge from his pen; for the methods of thought and
ways of feeling of our early ancestors still rule us. Nor is the idea
of unconscious race memories idle speculation or fanciful theorising.
Just as surely as we carry in ourselves the physical marks of our
forefathers of which each individual has millions, so undoubtedly we
must have inherited their mental and emotional characteristics. The
manner and nature of the lives of those who preceded us have never
been entirely eliminated from our unconscious. We have even the most
bestial instincts in a rudimentary stage, and these are revived, to our
surprise, not only in our dreams but in our waking thoughts and also
occasionally in our conduct. We carry the whole world's past under our
skins. And there is a sediment of that primitive life in many of our
books, without the author being aware of the fact.

Thus a deterministic influence prevails in literature. A book is
not an accident. The nature of its contents depends not only on
hereditary influences, nor, as Taine thought, on climate, country and
environment, alone, but on the nature of the repressions the author's
emotions have experienced. The impulses that created it are largely
unconscious, and the only conscious traces in it are those in the art
of composition. Hence the ancient idea of poetic inspiration cannot
be relegated to limbo, for it plays a decided part in determining the
psychical features of the work. Inspiration finds its material in the
unconscious. When the writer is inspired, he is eager to express ideas
and feelings that have been formed by some event, though he cannot
trace their origin, for he speaks out of the soul of a buried humanity.

There is no form or species of literature that may not be interpreted
by psychoanalytic methods. Be the author ever so objective, no matter
how much he has sought to make his personality intangible and elusive,
there are means, with the aid of clues, of opening up the barred
gates of his soul. Men like Flaubert and Merimée, who believed in the
impersonal and objective theory of art and who strove deliberately to
conceal their personalities, failed in doing so. Their presence is
revealed in their stories; they could not hold themselves aloof. It is
true we have been aided by external evidence in learning what methods
they employed to render themselves impersonal; the real Merimée and
Flaubert, however, were made to emerge by the help of their published
personal letters. It matters not whether the author writes realistic or
romantic fiction, autobiographical or historical tales, lyric or epic
poems, dramas or essays, his unconscious is there, in some degree.

But in a field which is largely new, it is best to take those works
or species of writing where the existence of the unconscious does not
elude our efforts to detect it. Therefore, much will be said in this
volume of works where there is no question that the author is talking
from his own experiences, in his own person, or where he is using some
character as a vehicle for his own point of view. Such works include
lyric poetry which is usually the personal expression of the love
emotions of the singer. Burns, Byron, Shelley, Keats and Swinburne have
left us records of their love affairs in their great lyric poems. Most
of these were inspired by frustration of love, and were the results of
actual experiences. And though much is said in them, other facts may be
deduced.

It is also a fact that nearly every great novelist has given us an
intimate though disguised account of himself in at least one novel
(note _David Copperfield_ and _Pendennis_ as examples), while other
writers have drawn themselves in almost every character they portrayed,
Goethe and Byron being two instances. An author gives us the best
insight into himself when he speaks frankly in his own person.
His records are then intensely interesting and informative about
his unconscious. But even if the author identifies himself with a
fictitious character he speaks hardly less firmly.


II

Very important is the consideration of some of the literature where
authentic dreams or dreams having the appearance of authenticity
have been recorded. The connection between poetry and dreams has
often been noted. The poet projects an ideal and imaginary world just
as the dreamer does. He builds utopias and paradises and celestial
cities. He sees visions and constructs allegories. I have interpreted,
according to the methods of Freud, some dream literature like Kipling's
_Brushwood Boy_ and Gautier's _Arria Marcella_. These tales prove most
astoundingly the correctness of Freud's theories about dreams being the
fulfilment in our sleep of unconscious wishes of our daily life.

A literary production, even if no dream is recorded therein, is
still a dream; that of the author. It represents the fulfilment of
his unconscious wishes, or registers a complaint because they are
not fulfilled. Like the dream, it is formed of remnants of the past
psychic life of the author, and is coloured by recent events and
images. Freud in interpreting the dreams of his neurotic patients,
learns the substance, the manifest content of the dream, as he calls
it, and inquires about the events of the preceding days and he evokes
all the associations which occur to the patients. He learns something
of their lives and finally after a course of psychoanalytic treatment
frequently cures them of their neuroses by making them aware of the
unconscious repressions or fixations from which they suffer. These
are removed and the resistances are broken down. As critics, we may
interpret a book in the same way. A literary work stands in the same
relation to the author as the dream to the patient. The writer has,
however, cured himself of his emotional anxiety by giving vent to his
feelings in his book. He has been his own doctor. The critic may see
how this has been accomplished and point out the unconscious elements
that the writer has brought forth in his book out of his own soul.
The critic, not being able, like the physician and his patient, to
question the author in person, must avail himself, in addition to the
internal evidence of the literary product itself, of all the data that
have been collected from the author's confessions and letters, from the
accounts of friends, etc. After having studied these in connection with
the writing in question, he learns the author's unconscious. Shelley's
_Epipsychidion_, for instance, is an autobiographical poem, Shelley's
dream of love, and can be fully followed only when the reader has
acquainted himself with the history of Shelley's marriages and love
affairs.

I have interpreted a dream of Stevenson recorded in his _A Chapter
on Dreams_, and have found in it a full confirmation of the Freudian
theory of dreams. Stevenson, recounting at length a dream of his own,
tells us unwittingly more about the misunderstanding that existed
between him and his father and the difficulties he encountered before
he married (since the object of his affection was separated but not
yet divorced from her first husband) than his biography does. When the
essay and the biography are taken together, we see the testimony before
us as to why Stevenson dreamed this dream.

William Cowper's poem on the receipt of his mother's picture is a
remarkable document in support of one of the tenets that are among
the pillars of Freud's system, the theory of the Œdipus Complex. As
is well known, Freud traced the nucleus of the psychoneuroses to an
over-attachment that the patient had for the parent of the opposite
sex, a fixation which was very strong in infancy but from the influence
of which there had never been a healthy liberation. This fixation which
is often unconscious plants the seeds of future neuroses. The victim's
entire life, even his love affairs, are interfered with by this
attachment. Any one who knows his Freud and has read Cowper's poem can
see in it the cause of most of the latter's unhappiness and most likely
his insanity. His mother died when he was a child, and many years later
he was writing to her, almost with passion.

Both Stevenson's essay and Cowper's poem are self-explanatory to the
disciple of Freud. If we had known nothing about the authors' lives, we
would have seen beyond doubt that in the one case there was in actual
life a hostility to the father, revealed by the dreamer's murdering
him; and in the other case we would have known that a hysterical
overattachment to the mother existed and that the writer's life would
have been neurotic and that he might possibly experience an attachment
to some older woman who replaced the mother.

Further, just as there are typical dreams from which alone the
psychoanalyst can judge the wishes of his subject without asking
him any questions about himself, so there are literary compositions
wherefrom we can learn much of the author's unconscious, without
probing into the facts of his life. Typical dreams in which certain
objects like serpents or boxes appear, or in which the dreamer
is represented as flying, swimming or climbing, have a sexual
significance. Freud has shown this after having investigated thousands
of such dreams and noted the symbolic language and customs of our
ancestors. Literary works also speak _per se_ for the author when they
abound in similar symbolical images.


III

We now come to another species of literature that is important for the
psychoanalytic critic. This is a class of writing which delineates
primæval and immoral emotions. It often shows us the conflicts
between savage emotions still lurking in man, and the demands of
civilisation. Either force may triumph, but the real interest of
these works is that they show the old cave dweller is not yet dead
within us, and that civilisation is achieved gradually by suppressing
these old emotions; sometimes these needs are strong and must not be
extirpated too suddenly; in fact in some specific cases must be granted
satisfaction. Among some of the interesting books in recent years have
been tales where primitive emotions have been depicted as conquering
their victims. Note Conrad's _Heart of Darkness_, where it is shown
how the old barbarian instincts and the cry of the forest are part
of us and may be revived in us. Jack London's _Call of the Wild_ is
an interesting allegory on the subject. It is well known that we are
descended from forbears who were wilder than the most savage tribes of
to-day. Naturally some of the emotions they felt are not altogether
extinct in us. Civilisation is after all but a veneer and slight causes
may stir up brutal sensations in many people. They are still in our
unconscious and form for the literary man very fascinating though often
dangerous material. Shakespeare understood this when he drew Caliban.

Poe once said that no writer would dare to write truly all his inner
thoughts and feelings, for the very paper would burn beneath them.
What he meant was that all writers, even the bravest, suppress those
unconscious elements in their nature that are related to immorality,
indecency, degeneracy, morbidity and cruelty. It may not be advisable
for writers continually to remind the reader of the remnant echoes
and memories of our primitive state, which have fortunately been made
quiescent but not been completely exterminated by culture. In the
confessions of criminals, in the pathological disclosures of sexually
aberrated people given to physicians, in the records of atrocities
committed in time of war, we have illustrations of the atavisms of our
day. Often a diseased literary man ventures far in baring his soul
and we get the morbid and immoral material that provides food for the
unhealthy.

As a rule the author's sense of propriety and prudence act as a censor
for him and hedge in his dormant savage feelings, so as not to allow
them to find a direct voice in his art. Yet we can often pierce through
the veil and observe exactly where the censor has been invoked and
guess fairly accurately what has been suppressed.

Some authors who relax the censorship voluntarily and appear to be
without a sense of shame, give us some of the immoral literature
which the world publicly abhors, but which individuals often delight
in reading in private. I do not refer to the really great literature
which has been stamped "immoral" by prudish people, because its ideas
are too far advanced for them to appreciate, and are different from
the conventional morals of society. I do not refer to the hundreds
of great works which give us true accounts of the natural man, books
whose irresistibility cannot be evaded except by hypocrites. I do not
include novels and plays wherein the authors have realised that we
are exerting too great a sacrifice upon our emotions and that many
souls are starved by lack of normal gratification on account of the
harsh exactions of conventional society. But there is a real immoral
(or rather indecent) literature where the author allows his savage
instincts to come to the surface and trespass on those aspects of his
personality which civilisation should have tamed. He may suffer from
the vice of exhibitionism and think he is frank, when he is merely
showing he has no sense of shame; and he may cater to a market merely
for money, in which case he acts like a mercenary harlot. He may try
to gratify himself by sexual abandon in art because he has never had
the craving for love satisfied in life. He gives vent to instincts that
are still ruling him because of his own atavistic or neurotic state.
Psychoanalytic literature puts in a new light immoral literature, which
hitherto has been dealt with from a moral, and not a psychological,
point of view. This literature should be explained and its sources
traced; these will be found in the infantile love life of the authors.
Such writings should not be condemned offhand just because they stir
our moral indignation. They must be interpreted so that we may learn
the nature of their authors.

I have also made a study of so repulsive a feature in the lives of our
earliest ancestors as cannibalism. It is one of the most primitive
emotions. The discoveries of archæologists show that cannibalism
prevailed in Europe before the dawn of history; Greek plays show its
early existence in Greece; and we know that it still prevails among
savage tribes to-day.

Many of the views here presented will be strange and novel to those
unacquainted with or hostile to Freud's theories, or to those who wish
to ignore the fact of the existence of primitive emotions in man.
The ideas advanced here will displease the puritanical opponents of
scientific research. But it should be borne in mind that a study of the
unconscious must necessarily deal with much that is obnoxious in human
nature.[A] A study of this unpleasant element leads to the attainment
of a more natural and moral life. But we should also remember that the
unconscious, besides containing the seeds of crime and immorality, also
is the soil of all those finer emotions that the church and the state
cherish. Conscience, self-sacrifice, moral sense, love, are unconscious
sentiments.

I should have liked to treat of the literature of metempsychosis.
In this literature where people are depicted as remembering past
existences, as in Kipling's tale, _The Finest Story in the World_,
George Sand's _Consuelo_, and Jack London's _The Star Rover_, there may
be possible avenues to race memories. Needless to say, I do not believe
in the transmigration of the individual soul as some of the Greeks and
early Christians did. But the Buddhistic conception of metempsychosis
with its doctrine of the Karma, the scientific theory of heredity, and
the conception of psychoanalysis are all dominated by a similar idea;
this is, that the manners of feeling and thinking of our progenitors
are exercised by us. We carry their souls, not the individual, but the
collective ones; we are the products of their sins and virtues; we have
all the idiosyncrasies, mental make up, emotional tendencies, that
they had; we have stamped on us our race, our nation, our religion.
We cannot remember isolated events of past ages, but the effects of
happenings then are registered in our nervous system. No one has done
more than Hearn to show this, and he is, both because of his life and
work, one of the fittest subjects for psychoanalytic study. The only
possible rival he has is Edgar Allan Poe.

If any one wishes to see an adroit application of the method of
reading between the lines in a poem, let him read Lafcadio Hearn's
interpretation of Browning's poem _A Light Woman_ in the _Appreciations
of Poetry_. Hearn had probably never heard of Freud, but in his lecture
to his class, he showed that the unconscious of the author and the
character could be discovered by probing carefully into the literary
work. Hearn tells in prose Browning's story of the young man who
claimed that he stole his friend's mistress to save him, and on tiring
of her pretended he had never loved her. Hearn shrewdly observes:

"Does any man in this world ever tell the exact truth about himself?
Probably not. No man understands himself so well as to be able to tell
the exact truth about himself. It is possible that this man believes
himself to be speaking truthfully, but he certainly is telling a lie, a
half truth only. We have his exact words, but the exact language of the
speaker in any one of Browning's monologues does not tell the truth,
it only suggests the truth. We must find out the real character of the
person, and the real facts of the case, from our own experience of
human nature."

Psychoanalysis was applied to literature long before Freud. When
biographers recounted all the influences of an author's life upon his
works, or probed deeply into the real meaning of his views, they gave
us psychoanalytic criticism. Great literary critics like Sainte-Beuve,
Taine and George Brandes traced the tendencies of authors' works to
emotional crises in their lives. Critics who study the various ways
in which authors have come to draw themselves or people they knew in
their books, are psychoanalytic. When biographers and critics dilate
especially on the relations existing between the writer and his
mother, and trace the effects on the work of the author, they employ
the psychoanalytic method. Any profound insight into human nature is
psychoanalytic, and I find such insight in Swift, Johnson, Hazlitt and
Lamb.

It is, however, Freud who first gave complete application of that
method to literature. He first touched on it in his masterpiece _The
Interpretation of Dreams_ in 1900, when he saw the significance of
the marriage of Œdipus to his mother in Sophocles's play _Œdipus_.
He showed that it was a reminiscence of actual incestuous love that
was practised far back in the ages of barbarism, and that the play
shows horror as a reaction to such attachment to the mother. The first
treatment of an æsthetic theme from the new point of psychoanalysis was
made by Freud in his book on _Wit and the Unconscious_ in 1905. The
first sole application of psychoanalysis to a work of literature was
undertaken by him in connection with Jensen's novel _Gradiva_ in 1907,
where he shows the similarity between the emotions of the hero and the
psychoneuroses. (The novel and Freud's essay have been both translated
into English.)[B] Freud also studied Leonardo da Vinci and showed the
influences of the artist's infantile love life upon his later career
and work. Psychoanalytic methods have been applied to music, mythology,
religion, philosophy, philology and morals, and indeed to almost every
sphere of mental activity. Many monographs have been published by
Freud's disciples, taking up the relations between an author and his
work. Sadger studied the poets Lenau, Kleist, and F. K. Meyer and
showed the power of infantile influence. On this side of the ocean
little work has been done in this direction, but that little has been
excellent. Professor Ernest Jones's study of the Œdipus Complex in
_Hamlet_ (_American Journal of Psychology_, January, 1910), Dr. Isidor
Coriat's account of the hysteria of Lady Macbeth and Professor F. C.
Prescott's scholarly essay on the relation between poetry and dreams
(_Journal of Abnormal Psychology_, April, June, 1912), are excellent
pioneer works in psychoanalytical literary criticism.[C]


IV

Freud is a genius whose performances astonish one as do those of a
wizard. His revolutions in psychology are no less important than those
of Darwin in biology. After his discoveries, literary interpretation
cannot remain the same. The points of difference between him and his
disciples Jung and Adler need not be touched on here. My own sympathies
are with Freud.

The new method will help to explain the nature and origin of literary
genius, though it is not pretended it will create it. Psychoanalysis
will show us the direction that literary genius takes and will explain
why it proceeds in a particular path. It will give the reasons why
one author writes books of a particular colour or tendency, why
he entertains certain ideas. It explains why certain plots and
characters are indulged in by particular authors. It claims to tell
why Schopenhauer became a pessimist, why Wagner dealt with themes like
the woman between two men. In fact studies of these artists, employing
Freud's methods, have already been published. Graf and Rank each wrote
about Wagner, and Hitschman has given us a monograph on Schopenhauer.
Similarly the critic of the future will explain the fundamental tone
of the works of writers who differ vastly from each other. We will see
more clearly why Byron gave vent to his note of melancholy, Keats to
his passion for beauty, Browning to his spirit of optimism, Strindberg
to his misogyny, Swift to his misanthropy, Ibsen to his moral revolt,
Tolstoi to his religious reaction, Thackeray to his cynicism, and
Wordsworth to his love for nature.

The author is more in his work than he suspects. To illustrate: There
is a theory of projection, in psychoanalysis, which explains to us
that hysterical people lean with great eagerness for moral support or
consolation on some actual person they love or admire. Often he is the
clergyman or physician, at other times he is a friend or relative.
The same thing occurs in literature. The writer who has certain
theories clings for support to some characters in history or fiction.
He projects his personality on theirs. If he writes a biography
he chooses a type most like himself and is really writing his own
life. Renan's _Life of Jesus_ is really a life of Renan and he makes
Jesus have many qualities he himself had. I have compared Renan's
autobiography to his _Life of Jesus_ and shown the resemblance between
Renan and the Jesus of his creation.

An author also identifies himself with his characters and draws
unconsciously on himself when he creates them. I have discovered
a personal note in an epic like the _Iliad_, usually considered
impersonal. I have deduced that the master passion of the author of the
Achilles-Patroclus story was friendship, and that he sang a private
sorrow in Achilles' grief for Patroclus. I have been aided in this by a
dream of Achilles.

Authors also often draw their villains from their unconscious. They
indulge in exaggeration, disguise and various other devices. Balzac's
worst villain, the intellectual, unmoral Vautrin, is the Dr. Hyde of
Balzac himself let loose in a fictitious character. And we know Byron
was even accused of having committed the crimes of his villains. This,
however, does not mean that the creator of vicious types himself may
not be the purest person in his personal life. We must not conclude
that actual events of a fictitious work have happened to the author
himself. And this brings me to the real danger of a critical study of
this kind.

I have maintained a double guard over myself so as not to transcend
the danger line. I have sought not to interpret as a portrait of the
author's own life, his delineation of a character, when no reason
warrants such a conclusion. It is absurd to conclude that isolated
incidents in a novel happened in the writer's own life. It is only when
a writer harps on one plot--one motive--continually--and in several
works, that one's suspicions are aroused that he is really writing
about himself. It is only when there is a genuine ring to the cry of
distress, that the reader suspects that the work is more than a mere
literary exercise. The early readers of Heine, De Musset and Leopardi,
saw that the poets were singing about real sorrows. No one ever doubted
that Goethe, Ibsen and Tolstoi used fictitious characters as vehicles
for their own ideas, and that Wilhelm Meister, Brand and Levine were
really the authors themselves.

No doubt, many literary men will be among the first to object to a
theory of literary criticism which tends to reveal their personalities
more closely to the public. They may claim that they are painfully
careful to keep their own views and personalities from the public
eyes. I do not think that anything derogatory to authors as a whole
will result from psychoanalytic criticism. They should be the first
to welcome this method. In fact the older writers gain by the process
of psychoanalytic study. We become more liberal and admire them
all the more. I can only speak from my own studies and say that my
admiration for the personal character of men like Byron and Poe, the
moral standing of whom has never been very high with the public, has
increased since my studies of psychoanalysis, and my appreciation of
their work has deepened.

The reader's indulgent attention is invited to the pages where the
effect upon literature of the sexual infantile life of the author is
treated. This involves a résumé of one of Freud's most important and
most abused discoveries, that the child has a love life of its own,
the development of which has most significant bearing upon his entire
life. More particular indulgence is pleaded for the pages dealing with
sex symbolism in literature. The critic who will find the author of
this volume obsessed with sex will be more charitably inclined if
he first masters Freud's works or a good study and summary of them
like Dr. Hitschman's _Freud's Theories of the Neuroses_, Dr. Brill's
_Psychanalysis_, Pfister's _The Psychoanalytic Method_ or Jones'
_Papers on Psychoanalysis_.

In conclusion, I quote a passage from William James to show the
significance of the unconscious in modern psychology.

"I cannot but think," says William James in his _Varieties of Religious
Experience_ (1902), (P. 233), "that the most important step forward
that has occurred in psychology since I have been a student of that
science is the discovery, first made in 1886, that in certain objects
at least, there is not only the consciousness of the ordinary field,
with its usual centre and margin, but an addition thereto in the shape
of a set of memories, thoughts and feelings which are extra-marginal
and outside of the primary consciousness altogether, but yet must
be classed as conscious facts of some sort, able to reveal their
presence by unmistakable signs. I call this the most important step
forward because, unlike the advances which psychology has made, this
discovery has revealed to us an entirely unsuspected peculiarity in the
constitution of human nature."

FOOTNOTES:

[A] The reader should also remember that such fearsome words as (1)
"sex," (2) "incest," (3) "homosexualism," (4) "sadism," etc., include
in psychoanalysis (1) love, (2) great affection between mother and son,
father and daughter, brother and sister, (3) intense friendship, (4)
cruelty, etc., respectively.

[B] _Delusion and Dream_, Moffat, Yard & Co.

[C] There are in English but few articles applying psychoanalytic
methods to writers and thinkers. Some of them are: Alfred Kuttner's
"The Artist" in _Seven Arts_, Feb., 1917; Wilfrid Lay's "'John
Barleycorn' Under Psychoanalysis," "H. G. Wells and His Mental
Hinterland" and "The Marriage Ideas of H. G. Wells" in _The Bookman_
(N. Y.), March, July and August, 1917, respectively; A. R. Chandler's
"Tragic Effects in Sophocles" in "The Monist" (1913); W. J. Karpas's
"Socrates in the Light of Modern Psychology" in _The Journal of
Abnormal Psychology_, vol. 10, p. 185; and Phyllis Blanchard's
"Psychoanalytic Study of Comte" in the _American Journal of
Psychology_, April, 1918.

Two indispensable articles are the summaries by Rudolph Acher and by
Lucille Dooley of "Psychoanalytic Studies of Geniuses," published in
German. The reader should study these articles in the _American Journal
of Psychology_ for July, 1911, and July, 1916, respectively.




CHAPTER II

EROTICISM IN LIFE


I

Psychology has in recent years investigated the unconscious day dreams
which are now recognised as part of our imaginative life. No matter
how religious or moral we may be, erotic fancies are always with us.
This mental life has often been described in mediæval literature in
the accounts of sensuous visions which tempted saints. The authors who
aimed at inculcating moral and religious lessons thus gave vent to
their own erotic fancies in the alluring and enticing verbal pictures
they drew. Many instances thus appear in puritanical and ascetic
literature, of immorality and exhibitionism.

We are learning to deal directly with a phase of our lives, whose
influence upon our happiness can scarcely be overestimated. We must
first admit the reality of the fantasies that occupy so much of our
existence. Out of them bloom as a flower the emotions which are
associated with the noblest sentiments in human nature--love. How these
fancies may be sublimated into higher purposes, like beautiful deeds
and works of art, how they may be directed into the channels of love,
how they may be partly gratified without impairing the finer instincts
of man, are problems which are being made the subject of serious study.
It is also being realised that these fancies increase in vividness,
number and variety where, for economic and conventional reasons, means
of normal love life are cut off. It is also being admitted that much
of the mental misery and physical debility of many people is due to
the absurd asceticism forced upon us in sex matters by our modern
civilisation.

We must learn to discuss, in a sincere manner, the nature and
tendencies of the erotic in our lives. Scientists have the privilege of
speaking openly on the subject; many literary men who have claimed the
same freedom have used it, however, to evolve pornographic works for
commercial purposes. Yet no literary man to-day would be permitted to
discuss sexual questions with the frankness of Montaigne in his essay
"Upon Some Verses of Virgil."

Let us examine the word "erotic" itself. Unfortunately it has
assumed an unsavoury meaning, although it means "related to love"
and is derived from the Greek word "eros"--love. It has been used to
designate the perverse and the immoral in sex matters; it has been made
synonymous with lust, abnormality, excess and every unpleasant feature
in regard to sex matters. Pater once complained that he did not like
the use of the word "hedonism" because of the misapprehension created
in the minds of people who did not understand Greek. The same objection
may be brought against the use of the word "eroticism." Properly
speaking all love poetry is erotic poetry; in fact the greatness of
poetry and literature is its eroticism, for they are most true then to
life, which is largely erotic. To call a great poet like Paul Verlaine
erotic is a compliment, not a disparagement. Nor is he nearly as erotic
as the author of _The Song of Songs_. Since there is no word in English
to specify love interest in its widest sense, we must cling to the use
of the words "erotic" and "eroticism." We should restore to the word
"eroticism" its original and nobler meaning.

Any literary work that lays an emphasis on the part played by love in
our lives is erotic. Literature could not exist without dwelling on the
love interest. The stories of Jacob and Rachel, of Ruth, and of David
and Uriah's wife, are all beautiful examples of eroticism in the Bible.

Man is averse to admitting certain facts about his mental love life.
People are often shocked by the immorality of the dreams which reveal
their unconscious lives. A man, however, will often confess in intimate
circles the existence of sensuous fancies within himself. People show
indications in many ways of the parts played by the love and sex
interests in their mental lives. Some witness suggestive plays; others
indulge in telling and hearing lewd jests, indecent witticisms and
improper stories. Any one who has listened to the conversation of men
in the club or smoker, in the factory or office, in the bar-room or
sitting room, cannot be blind to the fact that the erotic interests
rule us far more than we wish to admit. He who thinks that the wealthy
are too much absorbed in accumulating more riches and the poor too much
worn out by the struggle for existence, to be occupied with erotic
fancies, is mistaken. A day spent in a factory or an evening at a club
will show one that the millionaire and the pauper are brothers under
their skins.

Man's nature is erotic to its very foundations; he was erotic, in
infancy, in his own way; he carries within him all the erotic instincts
of millions of ancestors for thousands of years back. His eroticism
extends to many sensitive areas of his body like his lips, the palms
of his hands, his chest and back. Eroticism often is hidden in an
interest in many subjects which are apparently unrelated to it, an
interest which is a compensation to one for his lack of love. Man's
first real combined physical and spiritual suffering commences at
puberty when he hears new and strange voices in his soul calling for
a reply to which there is no answer. He discovers that society is so
constituted that he must spend his youth, when the passions are at
their height, in unnaturally curbing or misdirecting them. He often
discovers later that even marriage is not a full satisfaction for his
love instincts.

Though man has refused to concede the importance that the erotic has
played in his life, his fellow men who were poets spoke for him. They
did not conceal the truth, for the words in which their emotions were
couched betrayed them. Often the people persecuted their spokesman for
uttering the truth, though they delighted in secretly reading his books.

The "purist" to-day is often the one who revels (in private) most in
obscene literature; while many people find in such literature the
only means they have of indulging their ungratified love life. Many
book-sellers make a specialty of furnishing pornographic books and
pictures to many roués and celibates.

The mere interest, however, in a virile and unhypocritical literary
work like a novel by Fielding or Smollett, does not indicate abnormal
eroticism in the reader. In fact, it is often a sign of some unhealthy
tendency or starvation in human nature when a person shrinks from
honest and frank literature. The school-boy or college student who
reads in stealth De Foe's novel _Roxana_, instead of _Robinson Crusoe_,
who turns from his Greek version of Aristophanes to the translation of
_Lysistrata_, or who wearies of Chaucer's Prologue to the _Canterbury
Tales_ and tries to read in spite of the old English "The Miller's
Tale" or "The Reeve's Tale," is not an immoral youngster. The reader
who not having read these works may look them up (now that they have
been mentioned) is not therefore an indecent or abnormal person. The
school-boy's as well as the reader's interest is each additional proof
of the erotic in us.

The real lover of literature who has read most of the Latin poets,
English dramatists and French novels is soon in the position where the
"erotic" portions do not assume for him the vast importance they have
for the reader who merely hunts them out and takes no interest in any
other passages but these.

Bayle, whose _Dictionary_ abounds in many risqué stories, defended
himself in an excellent essay called "Explanation Concerning
Obscenities." He said there very aptly:

"If any one was so great a lover of purity, as to wish not only that no
immodest desire should arise in his mind, but also that his imagination
should be constantly free from every obscene idea, he could not attain
his end without losing his eyes and his ears, and the remembrance
of many things which he could not choose but see and hear. Such a
perfection could not be hoped for, whilst we see men and beasts, and
know the significance of certain words that make a necessary part of
our language. It is not in our power to have, or not to have, certain
ideas, when certain objects strike our senses; they are imprinted in
our imagination whether we will or not. Chastity is not endangered by
them, provided we don't grow fond of them."


II

Men may be engaged in philanthropic or political movements; they may
love their work intensely; they may be consummating an ambition; they
may make sacrifices in performing their duties; but withal their minds
are pondering on some particular woman, or on women in general. We
hold imaginary conversations with women we have known, whom we know,
or whom we would like to know. We think about the feminine faces we
meet in the streets, and experience a passing melancholy because we
are unacquainted with some of the girls we see. Undue interest in the
opposite sex is of course also characteristic of women. They adorn
their persons and choose their styles in dress with the object of
physically attracting the male.

Those who are unhappy in love or marriage do not find themselves
compensated for their misfortune by the fact that they may possess
great wealth, or have a name that is respected or crowned with glory.
The careers of Lord Nelson and Parnell show that national saviours and
leaders may be engulfed in a grand passion whose fortunate outcome may
be to them possibly as momentous as the welfare of their country. The
fact that Anthony was a general on whose move the saving of his country
depended, did not make him the less interested in Cleopatra. The fact
that Abelard was a philosopher did not make him hold his studies higher
than he did Heloise. There was really nothing abnormal about these men.
Modern writers have been attracted to them. Shakespeare chose Anthony
as the hero of his play, and Pope's famous _Epistle_ shows his interest
in Abelard. The amorous adventures of great military leaders like
Cæsar and Napoleon are well known.

The love affairs of many literary men make us almost conclude that they
were more concerned about their loves than their art. Recall Stendhal's
famous cry about his perishing for want of love or Balzac's eternal
ambition to be famous and to be loved. Goethe once exclaimed that the
only person who was happy was he who was fortunate in his domestic
affairs. He made every one of his love affairs the basis of some poem,
novel or play; and not to know anything about his love for Charlotte
Buff, or Frederica or Lili, or Frau von Stein, is to limit oneself in
being able to appreciate Goethe, in being able to understand _Werther_,
_Faust_, _Wilhelm Meister_ and other works by him.

And we love these poets and writers who naïvely confessed that they did
not care for aught in life but love, and who sang of their troubles
frankly. Who does not find Catullus and Tibullus sweet? Who that has
read them does not cherish the lyrical cries of the Troubadours or
the poems of the Chinese poets of the T'ang period? Can any one help
thinking of Burns or De Musset without affection and sympathy? And
there are many who would not surrender the great body of sonnets and
lyrics of England's poets for her colonies. And why is this? Because
these poets are ourselves speaking for us and saying what we feel but
are unable to express. The cry of the mediæval Persian or Japanese poet
is our own cry. His joy is ours and he is we and we are he. Once a poem
has left its author's pen it is no longer a mere personal record, but
becomes an enduring monument of art in which millions of men discern a
grief or gladness that they too have known. In a measure, literature
is more real and eternal than life itself. It makes the past live and
it holds a soul that can sway millions of people for ever and ever. As
Cicero said in his speech for Archias the poet: "If the _Iliad_ had not
existed, the same tomb which covered Achilles' body would also have
buried his renown."


III

A comprehension of the erotic in ourselves will help us discern many
false ideals connected with the treatment of love in literature. I
refer especially to the ideal of a first and only love (regarded by the
lover usually as Platonic) which has been spread by deceptive authors
and which has produced much affectation and insincerity in literature.

In real life people do not generally marry their first loves; they
often cherish contempt for persons once loved; they do not as a rule go
through life always claiming that they loved once and that they would
never love again. On the contrary, they usually marry and settle down
and forget about their early affairs, although in most cases these have
lasting influence.

If poets, however, were to speak in a prosaic manner of their early
loves, their works would be less admired. The public loves loyalty and
hence it encourages love literature that is over-sentimental and false.
No doubt when a man contracts an unhappy marriage or does not succeed
in winning love later in life he looks back upon an early love affair
with tenderness. And while it is true that the past always rules us we
are often satisfied as to the manner in which it shaped our futures.
Robert Browning had an early sad love affair which influenced his
_Pauline_ and indeed many of his later lyrics, but he was happy in the
love of the poetess Elizabeth Barrett. Mark Twain's married life was
ideal and happy, in spite of an early love affair of his which ended
because of the accidental non-delivery of a letter. On the other hand
Byron, who was unhappily married, cherished the love of his early
sweetheart Mary Chaworth for over twenty years. Strangely and unjustly
enough he has been accused of insincerity and posing, and most critics
refuse to admit that many of his later love poems were written to her.

There are two conspicuous instances in literature where a poet's love
was thought by himself to have lasted for life, the cases of Dante
and Petrarch. If the loves of these Italians for their mistresses are
strictly investigated, I think it will be discovered that they have
hoodwinked the world about their loves. They wrote their best poems
about their beloved ones, after these had died, and death often makes
a man unwittingly write falsely about the past. Pfister tells us in
his _Psychoanalytic Method_ of a diseased man of fifty who lived apart
from his wife in the same house, and who treated her brutally. After
her death he always insisted that they were an ideal couple. Pfister
relates another story of a widower who recalled only the happy part of
his unhappy married life, and thought he never could marry again.

There has always been a suspicion among some people about the
durability of the love felt by Dante and Petrarch, for Beatrice and
Laura respectively. Symonds says of Laura: "Though we believe in the
reality of Laura, we derive no clear conception either of her person or
her character. She is not so much a woman as woman in the abstract....
The _Canzoniere_ is therefore one long melodious monotony poured from
the poet's soul, with the indefinite form of a beautiful woman seated
in a lovely landscape." (Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. XXI, P. 314.)

Petrarch was twenty-three years old in 1327 when he met Laura. She
died twenty-one years later. Petrarch survived her twenty-six years,
dying in 1374. Petrarch, it should be mentioned, had two illegitimate
children born by a mistress before Laura's death; they were later
legitimised. The poet probably at times felt the pangs of disprised
love to the extent that he claims he did in his sonnets; he may have
experienced the grief he describes he suffered in his sonnets. But
that he was in the constant throes of love for her for forty-seven
years is doubtful. He probably was projecting that ideal of faithful
love to please the public; he offered himself as the type of hero the
public likes; a faithful, steadfast lover. It was this kind of ideal
that made so great a genius like Thomas Hardy gratify the public taste
by portraying so unswerving a lover as Gabriel Oak in _Far From the
Madding Crowd_.

The case of Dante is an even more noteworthy example of literary
affectation and self-delusion. His love is the most astonishing in
history. He and Beatrice were each only nine years old when he saw
her. He probably saw her once after that. She died in 1290, when the
poet was twenty-five years old. Great as Dante's sorrow was, it did
not prevent him from marrying two years later. Dante makes Beatrice
the heroine of his _Divine Comedy_, or at least of the Paradiso. His
platonic affection for her is so unnatural that one feels he was doing
what Petrarch did, unconsciously creating an ideal and depicting as
permanent an emotion, that had really brief sway.

Although it is true that their past love affairs may have ruled them
for life, neither Dante nor Petrarch were the faithful lovers they
would have us believe they were.




CHAPTER III

DREAMS AND LITERATURE


I

Freud discovered that dreams were the royal road to the unconscious,
in that they portrayed our most daring and immoral wishes as actually
fulfilled. It is not necessary that we actually have those wishes in
our waking life; it is sufficient if they merely intruded themselves
upon us against our wills sometime in the past. The dream will express
our inmost thoughts. It will use symbolical language to let us still
remain in the dark about our painful desires; but the psychoanalyst can
learn what these are. As a result, when we have revealed to us what
unconscious emotions are at the bottom of our nervous disturbances, we
may be eased of them.

Many writers on dreams, in the past, understood that they referred
to events of our daily life, but the exact relation was not seen.
The ancients were especially interested in the phenomena of dreams.
Many ancient histories and fairy tales abound in narrations and
interpretations of dreams.

Modern literary men also have paid a great deal of attention to them.
There are essays on dreams by Locke, Hobbes, Thomas Browne, Addison,
Leigh Hunt, Dickens, Emerson and Lafcadio Hearn.

One English writer who gave almost complete expression to the views
of Freud was William Hazlitt. In his essay "On Dreams" in _The
Plain Speaker_, he stated the theory. It may come as a surprise to
Freud--probably as a greater surprise than when he learned that
Schopenhauer had written about repression--to read the following
passage:

"There is a sort of profundity in sleep; it may be usefully consulted
as an oracle in this way. It may be said that the voluntary power is
suspended, and things come upon us as unexpected revelations, which we
keep out of our thoughts at other times. We may be aware of a danger
that we do not choose, while we have the full command of our faculties,
to acknowledge to ourselves; the impending event will then appear to
us as a dream and we shall most likely find it verified afterwards.
Another thing of no small consequence is, that we may sometimes
discover our tacit and almost _unconscious_ sentiments, with respect to
persons or things in the same way. We are not hypocrites in our sleep.
The curb is taken off from our passions and our imagination wanders at
will. When awake, we check these rising thoughts, and fancy we have
them not. In dreams when we are off our guard, they return securely
and unbidden. We make this use of the infirmity of our sleeping
metamorphoses, that we may _repress_ any feelings of this sort that we
disapprove in their incipient state, and detect, ere it be too late,
an unwarrantable antipathy or fatal passions. Infants cannot disguise
their thoughts from others; and in sleep we reveal the secret to
ourselves." [The italics are mine.]

Freud's work may almost be called a commentary on this extraordinary
passage of one of England's greatest critics.

Let us examine a few dreams, actual and artificial, in literature, and
we will note that they show method in their madness, that they are ways
of expressing the person's unconscious desires.

In his astonishing essay, "A Chapter on Dreams," Stevenson has shown
us how dreams influence authorship. He tells us how the "Brownies,"
as he calls the powers that make the dreams, constructed his tales;
however he often had to reject some of these stories because of their
lack of morals. As we remarked above, wicked dreams are dreamt even by
virtuous people, since the material is drawn from the psychic life of
our infancy and primitive ancestors. Stevenson relates how his famous
tale Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was suggested by a dream.

Stevenson, in his essay, relates a dream wherein unwittingly he lays
bare much about some past experience in his life. He found it too
immoral he says to make a tale of it. But he did immoral things in his
dream; these were related to certain wishes in his waking hours. Those
who are familiar with an episode in Stevenson's life, that relating
to his marriage, and with Freud's theories, will find no difficulty
in interpreting the dream and seeing how the dream and the events
in his life which gave rise to it, tally with one another, when the
Freudian method is applied. In fact the truth of Freud's views could be
established alone by the interpretation applied to this dream.

Stevenson dreamed that he was the son of a rich wicked man with a most
damnable temper. He (the son) lived abroad to avoid his parent, but
returned to England to find his father married again. They met and
later in a quarrel the son, being insulted, struck the father dead.
The step-mother lived in the same house with the son, who was afraid
she detected his guilt. Later he discovered her near the scene of the
murder with some evidence of his guilt. Yet they returned arm in arm
home and she did not accuse him. Once he searched all her possessions
for that evidence she had found of his guilt. She returned and he met
her and asked her why she tortured him; "she knew he was no enemy to
her." She fell upon her knees and cried that she loved him. Stevenson
comments that it was not his tale but that of the little peoples, the
brownies. Stevenson was mistaken; it was his tale. Everything that
happened in that dream had a _raison d'être_. Let us see why he dreamt
this immoral dream and interpret it in the light of its own facts and
those his biographer relates.

In early youth Stevenson was a free-thinker and had difficulties with
his father. In 1876, at the age of twenty-six, he met his future
wife, Mrs. Osbourne, who was not yet divorced from her husband. The
elder Stevenson was opposed to the match. Robert Louis had travelled
extensively; he went to France before he took his memorable trip to
California to be near the object of his love. Mrs. Osbourne obtained
a divorce and married Stevenson in 1880. Thus after four years of
suffering and the removal of three great obstacles, the married state
of his beloved, the objection of his father and financial troubles,
the novelist was happily united to the woman he loved. Mrs. Osbourne's
first husband re-married and Stevenson's father died in 1887. Stevenson
and his father became reconciled, and on the latter's death, Stevenson
was so shocked that he had many nightmares of which in all likelihood
this dream was one. The essay containing the account of this dream
was published in January, 1888, in _Scribner's Magazine_, and is
included in the volume _Across the Plains_ issued in 1892. When the
dream occurred I cannot say; it may have been between the date of his
father's death on May 8, 1887, and the end of the year, by which time
the essay had been written. It may have been dreamed even before the
marriage in 1880, or thereafter while the elder Stevenson was alive.
The interpretation is not affected. The state of mind, however, which
gave birth to the dream is that in which he was before his wife was
divorced and while his father was opposed to him.

Two men were in the way of Stevenson's marriage--his father and his
loved one's husband, Mr. Osbourne. Stevenson wanted these men out of
the way; they were the obstacles to his happiness. He wished that
Mr. Osbourne were divorced and he entertained bitterness towards
his father for showing such animosity to the match. Now we are not
accusing Stevenson of a crime when we say that unconsciously the
thought may have come to him if one or both of these men were dead
his road to marriage would be easy. The dream of the murder of the
father by the son is understood by all Freudians. It is not an uncommon
one, especially where there is ill feeling between son and father,
or where an over-attachment exists for the mother. It has its origin
psychically in infancy when the father was looked upon as a rival of
the infant in the affections of the mother, and the dream is given
additional grounds for its entry when the relations between father and
son continue or grow strained. It represents just what it portrays,
the wish of the child for the father to be out of the way, or dead.
When the child wishes some one dead he means he wants him absent; he
has no conception of death. The dream of murdering one's own father
then is evidence of hostile feeling entertained by the dreamer to his
father either in infancy, where it is always entertained, or later in
life. It represents a wish of the unconscious fulfilled, the removal
of an obstacle to happiness. Needless to say it does not represent a
conscious desire on the part of the dreamer in his waking hours to kill
his father.

We know how strained Stevenson's relations with his father were. The
elder Stevenson was not sympathetic to his son's liberal ideas and
later he opposed him in his lovemaking. Two more serious oppositions
to a young man, one to the inclinations of his intellect and the other
to his love, can not be imagined. The novelist never realised what
the feature of the murder of his father in his dream meant, and how
it arose. If in his dream his father appeared as rich and wicked with
a damnable temper, that is what Stevenson really thought his father
was. In the dream the son lived abroad to avoid the father, and this
Stevenson also actually did in life, and as a result, by the way, we
have some of his early books of travel, and I dare say if these were
closely examined evidence of his strained relations with his father
would appear.

As we know, in dreams there is considerable distortion, and the person
of our dream in an instant becomes another individual. This occurs in
Stevenson's dream. No doubt the dreamer's father was actually made up
of a combination of the elder Stevenson and Mr. Osbourne, both of whom
Stevenson wished were out of the way. But a more important distortion
takes place, the merging of the second wife of the dreamer's murdered
father with the married woman in real life whom Stevenson loved. We
recall that in the dream the dreamer lives with his father's second
wife in the house after the murder, but there is a barrier between
them, for the dreamer is haunted by the woman's possible knowledge
of his guilt. He loves her really and they return arm in arm from the
scene of the murder. He did not want her to know that he had committed
the murder because he wanted to marry her. He searched her possessions
for the evidence of the guilt she found and then bursts out asking why
she tortures him, he is not an enemy of hers; that he really loves her,
is implied. She also, it appears, had loved him and makes confession of
the fact. No doubt this scene must be largely a picture of the proposal
of Stevenson to his future wife. The situation depicted showing the
feeling of guilt the dreamer has for his murder may be traced to his
own guilty thoughts in actual life on account of his unconscious wishes
for both husband and father to be out of the way. These feelings appear
in the remorse of the murderer and in his suspicion of discovery by the
woman he loves. We might trace the dream to much earlier material in
Stevenson's life if we knew all the facts. We do know that he had an
earlier love affair in youth in which he was disappointed and that he
has left us poems celebrating that episode.

The dream concludes with the implication that the dreamer and the
step-mother marry as they had confessed their love to one another;
there are no longer any remorses or fears on one side or suspicions
on the other, and the obstacles to the marriage, the objections of
the dreamer's father, the legal ties of the husband to the beloved
woman, have been removed. Stevenson wanted all this to happen in real
life and later it incidentally did turn out that way. Both his father
and the husband of Mrs. Osbourne were removed as barriers, the former
by acquiescence and forgiving, the latter by divorce. The dreamer
represents as fulfilled his wish to marry Mrs. Osbourne, with all
opposition removed. The dreamer's father is both the elder Stevenson
and Mr. Osbourne, the father and the husband respectively, made one in
the dream; the second wife of the father, step-mother of the dreamer,
becomes Mrs. Osbourne, Stevenson's love who became a wife a second
time. Thus we have had what Freud calls condensation and displacement
in the dream.

The dream sheds much light on the most important period of his life;
it fits in with the facts left us by the biographer. We see what his
repressed wishes were in those days and how they appeared realised in
his dream.


II

Freud first applied his theory of dream interpretation to fiction in
1907 in his study of Jensen's _Gradiva_ (1903).

Freud might have analysed Gautier's story _Arria Marcella_ instead
of Jensen's _Gradiva_, which was obviously suggested by the plot of
Gautier's tale. _Arria Marcella_ appeared in 1852, over fifty years
before Jensen's story. It gives one a good opportunity for studying
Gautier himself and is an effective corroboration of Freud's theories
on dreams.

Octavius sees in a museum a piece of lava that had cooled over a
woman's breast and preserved its form. He falls in love with the
original woman, though he knows she is dead. He is a fetich worshipper
and is enamoured of ancient types of women preserved in art; he has
even been cast into ecstasy by the sight of hair from a Roman woman's
tomb. He dreams of the "glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was
Rome." He is a pagan and loves form and beauty. In his dream that night
he is transported to the year of the eruption of Vesuvius and witnesses
a performance of a play by Plautus in a Roman theatre. Here he sees
the real woman whose shapely breast had preserved its form in the lava
that killed her. She also sees him and loves him. Her slave leads him
to her home. She is a Roman courtesan and her name is Arria Marcella.
She tells him that she has come to life because of his desire at the
museum to meet her in life. His wish in waking life is fulfilled in
his dream. As a matter of fact, as the poet comments, art preserves as
alive all the beauty of antiquity.

Octavius realises his wish and, soon, kisses and sighs are heard.
But the charm is soon dispelled, for a Christian man comes in who
reproaches her, even though she did not belong to his religion. She
refuses to abandon Octavius, but the Christian, by an exorcism, makes
Arria release Octavius, who awakens and swoons. He loved her for the
rest of his life and when he married later, in memory he was unfaithful
to his wife, for he always thought of Arria.

The meaning of all this is obvious. It is an expression of Gautier's
favourite theory that Christianity is hostile to love and beauty, and
has deprived the world of much of the greatness of paganism. But there
is more here than Gautier himself imagined. First, the story like all
dreams is a wish-fulfilment of the unconscious. Not only the girl but
the world of her time becomes a reality and Octavius lives in his
dream in the pagan world. There are the moments of anxiety where the
Christian interferes and hinders the satisfaction of Octavius's love.
Freud's theory is that an anxiety dream is formed when a repressed
emotion encounters a strong resistance.

Now Octavius is Gautier, who makes a work of art cut of the dream,
preserves it for humanity and gives us a valuable thing of beauty.
Gautier makes up for the ugliness of to-day by preserving the beauty
of the past. Gautier satisfies his longing for the old pagan world now
vanished by making his hero live in it and realise the love of one of
its courtesans.

This story reveals the author as much as his _Madamoiselle de Maupin_
does. We have the same Gautier for whom only the material world
existed, the Gautier who was obsessed by sex, hated Christianity and
worshipped art alone. The trained psychoanalyst who wishes to go deep
into the unconscious of Gautier will, I think, find some perverse
qualities like fetichism, revealed not only in this tale but in others.

Gautier pursues the motive of this story in several other tales. He
lives constantly in his fantasies amidst the beauties of the ancient
world. It is hard to believe that many of his tales of phantom love
scenes laid in ancient times were not actually dreamed by him.

His novel, _The Mummy's Foot_, his stories, _The Golden Chain_, _One
of Cleopatra's Nights_, _King Candaules_, and two that are considered
his best, _The Dead Leman_ and _The Fleece of Gold_, show the
unconscious worshipper of physical beauty in Gautier. All these stories
may be analysed like dreams, for they are creatures of the author's
imagination whereby he consoled himself for the loss of the pagan
world. He was really a pagan transported into our time and he lived
those times over in his stories.


III

Kipling's dream story _The Brushwood Boy_ is a very good confirmation
of Freud's theories. We will analyse it psychoanalytically; it will be
seen that the artificial dream in it is inspired by the same causes
as real dreams are. The story was published in the _Century Magazine_,
December, 1895, and appeared in book form in 1901, a year after
Freud's great work on Dreams had been issued. Kipling had no knowledge
of Freud's theories, but he shows his hero suffering an unconscious
repression; Georgie saw for many years visions of a girl he had met in
childhood and apparently forgotten. He dreamed of her often and these
dreams give us an insight into the hero's anxieties and longings.

Georgie, the Brushwood Boy, dreamed at the age of three of a policeman.
At the age of six he had both day and night dreams which always began
with a pile of brushwood near the beach. There was a girl he saw at the
pile of brushwood who merged with a princess he saw in an illustration
of Grimm's _Fairy Tales_. He called her Annie-an-louise. At the age of
seven he saw at Oxford, on a visit, a girl who looked like the child in
the illustrations of _Alice in Wonderland_, and he flirted with her. He
went to India as a young man. In his dreams he saw the old policeman
of his infant dreams, who was saying, "I am Policeman Day coming back
from the city of Sleep." One day in a dream he stepped into a steamer,
and saw a stone lily floating on the water. He met the same girl of
his early dreams at the Lily Lock and they took a pony on the Thirty
Mile Road. He often dreamed of her and in his dreams was happy when
with her and unhappy when away from her. When he got back to England he
heard a girl guest at his house sing a song of Policeman Day and the
City of Sleep, and he guessed that it was she who wrote the music and
composed the song. Her name was Miss Lacy; she was the girl he met as a
child at Oxford. He took a ride with her and each found that the other
had dreamed the same dreams. She knew all about the Thirty Mile Road
and she had once kissed him in his sleep. At that very moment he had
dreamed that she had bestowed the kiss. Each had cherished the other as
an ideal, now to be realised, in marriage.

What is the meaning of this story? How did Georgie come to love a girl
he had known apparently only in his dreams? Where does the Policeman
come in and what is the secret of the dream journeys on the Thirty Mile
Road? Georgie's dreams were the fulfilment of his unconscious desires
in waking life. He had actually seen his love in his childhood, was
attracted towards her but apparently forgot about her. But the love was
there nevertheless; it was repressed. He neither knew why he dreamed of
her nor did he believe she actually existed. He conjured her up in the
books he read and identified her with the princess of the fairy tales.
Like the neurotic patient he did not know the cause of his anxieties;
he could not fit altogether in the scheme of life; he was dreaming
inexplicable dreams which were having an effect upon him in his waking
hours. In a case like this we know that the dreams have a reality that
makes them almost equivalent to events of the day. When he took those
trips with her in his sleep he was fulfilling the unconscious wishes
of his waking life. He suffered nightmares when anything interfered to
take him away from her. The anxiety dream as Freud has explained shows
that there has been an interference with the satisfying of the love
desire.

Policeman Day is the cause of terror because he represents the time
when the dreams do not occur, day time, when he becomes the symbol of
love unrealised, for in the day Georgie is no longer with his love.
Policeman Day is consciousness opposed to unconsciousness, reality
opposed to illusion. Miss Lacy also felt this when she sang the song
with the refrain,

    Oh pity us! Ah, pity us!
    We wakeful! Oh, pity us!
    We that go back with Policeman Day
    Back from the City of Sleep.

She also was with Georgie in her dreams and dreaded waking. He also
was present in her unconscious and she never really forgot the boy
she had met as a child, although she had no conscious memory of him.
Their infantile impressions were powerful and ruled them all the time
till they met again. They dreamed they were with each other because
they wanted to be with each other. He guessed she wrote the poem
because she had felt as he did. The poem was an anxiety poem, voicing
the unconscious desire to be with the loved one. It represents the
state of mind of both lovers; he had also felt the sentiments of the
poem, but she put them in words. When he came back to England he was
unconsciously going to find the ideal of his dreams, the original
Annie-an-louise. When he found her he was cured of his dreams and
anxieties. Their meeting acted like a cure for their mysterious
longings. All their dreams were made up of infantile fantasies and
represented repressions. The marriage satisfies these repressions.

I dare say Kipling was his own model for the Brushwood Boy.

This disposes of any interpretations based on mere mental telepathy
between George and Miss Lacy. They had the same feelings because they
suffered the same repression and had met and loved each other in
infancy.

Among other dream stories by Kipling, two of the best are _They_ and
_The Dream of Duncan Parrenness_.


IV

Brandes said in his book on Shakespeare:

"As, knowing the life and experiences of the great modern poet, we are
generally able to trace how these are worked upon and transformed in
his works, it is reasonable to suppose that in olden times poets were
moved by the same causes, acted in the same way, at least those of them
who have been efficient. When we know of the adventures and emotions
of the modern poet, and are able to trace them in the productions of
his free fancy; when it is possible, where they are unknown to us,
to evolve the hidden personality of the poet and--as every capable
critic has experienced--to have our conjectures finally borne out by
facts revealed by the contemporary author, then we cannot feel it to
be impossible, that in the case of an older poet, we might also be
successful in determining when he speaks earnestly from his heart, and
in tracing his feelings and experiences through his work, especially
when they are lyrical, and their mode of expression passionate and
emotional."

Just as we can build up a picture of a modern author from dreams he
reports, we can do the same with ancient authors.

I have tried to build up a portrait of the author of the
Achilles-Patroclus episodes in the _Iliad_, from a dream repeated
there--that of Achilles in the twenty-third book. It is remarkable
that no portrait of Homer, or whoever was the author of the books
dealing with Achilles, has thus far been constructed. Whether we
assume that one man or more wrote the _Iliad_, we may draw one
inevitable conclusion: That the parts of the poem in which Achilles
figures contain the clue to the author of those sections. It is
assumed generally that Homer wrote those sections. Homer sang his own
troubles through his hero as a medium. Unconsciously his own traits
and personality crept in. The great tragedy of Achilles's life was the
death of his friend Patroclus; his master passion was friendship. It
does not require psychoanalysis to detect beneath the great grief of
the warrior, Homer's own despair. The poet sings of the bereavement
of his hero in too poignant a strain for any one to doubt that in
Patroclus he was not bewailing some loss of his own. We need not
hesitate in saying, to judge by the manner in which the poet treats
of friendship, and writes of it with his heart's blood as it were,
that some friendship was the crown of Homer's existence. He no doubt
also suffered a terrible crisis when he lost his friend, as is only
too apparent, through parting or by death. When the blow befell him,
he was drawn to the one incident of the many in connection with the
Trojan war, the legend centring around Achilles and Patroclus. Why did
he not choose some other feature of which there were so many and with
which other poets dealt? The very choice of the subject apart from the
internal treatment furnishes the proof he could not help but choose
that which interested him most because of some experience in his own
life. He had now an opportunity of registering his sorrows and adding
personal matters while singing his tale. Life had become empty to him
and his only consolation was to put his pangs into song. He even wished
to die.

The key to these deductions is furnished by a section of the
twenty-third book, of about fifty lines, of which John Addington
Symonds says, "There is surely nothing more thrilling in its pathos
throughout the whole range of poetry." Achilles sees Patroclus in his
dreams, who recalls to him their youthful days and asks to be buried
with him and foretells Achilles's own death. The warrior promises
to grant his friend's requests and pleads: "But stand nearer to me,
that embracing each other for a little while, we may indulge in sad
lamentation." Achilles tried in vain to touch him, and told his
comrades afterwards: "All night the spirit of poor Patroclus stood by
me, groaning and lamenting, and enjoined to me each particular and
was wonderfully like unto himself." All this has too authentic and
personal a touch for any one not to feel that Homer was reporting a
dream of his own and was attributing it to Achilles. The poet had also
spent restless nights and saw his dead friend before him "wonderfully
like unto himself"; the dream was very vivid to him, and more so if as
tradition reports he was blind.

No indeed, Homer was no mere spectator reciting Achilles's troubles in
an objective manner. He had a great sorrow of his own and he did not
go out of the way to counterfeit one. He sang his own loss; he told
his own dream; Achilles was the medium through which he told the world
of his own troubles. Patroclus's prophecy that Achilles would die soon
shows that Homer after his loss had wished he too would die, and Homer
must have dreamt that his own end would come soon, in accordance with
the principle that we often dream as happening or about to happen what
we wish to take place. He saw his friend in his dream just as we all do
because we wish our friends to be still with us. This dream then is the
clue to the tragedy of Homer's life.

So Homer had loved a friend and suffered. Like Patroclus, he hoped his
friend wanted to be buried with him; at least Homer wanted to have
his own bones repose near those of his friend. What the nature of
the friendship was we cannot say; it may have been homosexual, a love
which was common among the later Greeks. But it did have the element of
passion. We know now the chief event of Homer's life. What the details
were we cannot say. It is rather unsafe to guess. But there are a few
facts that appear, whose import is significant. Achilles, we recall,
resolved to fight the Trojans again only because they killed Patroclus.
He was now ready to forget Agamemnon's wrong to him in depriving him
of his captive woman. He knew that by his new resolve he would lose
his life. He was willing to die for his friend. Homer's love for his
friend was also so great that he too would no doubt have given up his
life for him. This I believe establishes the passionate element in the
friendship of both warrior and poet.

Again, Achilles blames himself for Patroclus's death. Had he not
withdrawn from the fight, the Trojans would not have gained any
victories and not have killed his friend. In short, he had been too
sensitive, proud and sulky; he had been too easy a prey to anger and
revenge. Now he was suffering remorse. This indicates that Homer had
quarrels with his friend. We know by psychoanalysis that people who
lose by death a loved one feel guilt stricken if in life they had
hostile wishes against the person; in fact they attribute the death to
these secret emotions. The remorse is a reaction to the hostile wishes,
and it is possible, but I do not wish to press this point, that Homer's
friend was either ostracised or shunned by many for some idiosyncrasy
or event in his past life for which he was not to blame and hence the
poet loved him the more. Patroclus reminds Achilles in the dream that
as a child, he, Patroclus, had killed a playmate. This detail would
not have been invented by a poet writing impersonally. Homer thought of
some event in the life of his own friend.

But the real deduction nevertheless remains I believe unassailable,
that the master passion of Homer's life was friendship, that Achilles
contains much of the poet unconsciously and that many of the moods
and passions given to him were Homer's own. Homer also suffered a
terrible loss and sang of it by emphasising the despair of Achilles
at Patroclus's death which made him forget Agamemnon's wrong. The
great warrior's calamity was to him a sadder blow than the loss of
his captive woman, with whom he had fallen in love, proving that with
Homer, as with Achilles, friendship was stronger than the love passion.
The fact that so little of love appears in the _Iliad_ has often
excited comment. It is true the war was fought on account of a woman,
but there is almost nothing of romantic love in the poem. This is
because Homer had probably never felt love as he had known friendship.
That love as a tender emotion existed, we know from the lyric poems
written not very long after Homer. If a man writes works in which he
says so little about love for women, it may be because he has never had
such love. That Homer was altogether indifferent about women, however,
is not likely. Some critic will some day study the women in Homer from
a psychoanalytic viewpoint. Women figure more in the Odyssey; it is
unlikely that the same man wrote both poems; and Samuel Butler has
tried to prove that the Odyssey was written by a woman. This is not so
absurd as it seems; at any rate some woman's influence made itself felt
in the writing of that poem.

It is only right to conclude that the same motives and principles of
singing which actuated later poets prompted the earlier ones. If Milton
appears in Lucifer, Goethe in Faust and Mephistopheles, Shakespeare in
Hamlet, there can be no question Homer has drawn himself in Achilles
and an intimate friend of his in Patroclus.

After having formed this theory, I discovered the following significant
passage in Plato's Republic, Book X, "For we are told that even
Creophylus neglected Homer singularly in his lifetime."


V

There are thousands of dreams, actual and artificial, reported in
literature and history. Many of these may be analysed, but in most of
them sufficient data are lacking to help us with the analysis. There
are entire books cast in the form of dreams. There are Flaubert's
_Temptation of St. Anthony_, Hauptmann's _Hannele_, Strindberg's _Dream
Play_, Maeterlinck's _The Blue Bird_, and its sequel _The Betrothal_,
Newman's _Dream of Gerontius_, William Morris's _Dream of John Ball_.
There are the artificial visions of Dante, Bunyan and Langland. There
are dreams recorded in Apuleius, Rabelais, Chaucer, the Mort D'Arthur,
Swedenborg; in the Bible and the Talmud; in the histories of Herodotus,
Xenophon, Suetonius, Dio Cassius; in _Richard III_ and _Cymbeline_, in
_Paradise Lost_ and _Robinson Crusoe_ and Hawthorne.

The dreams recorded in ancient and mediæval literature are in many
cases actual ones. Dreams were formerly regarded as being prophetic of
the future, but they only rarely have such value. For this reason most
of the interpretations put on them by ancient sages are worthless for
our purposes. Cicero in his _On Divination_ has reported many dreams
and given us arguments pro and con regarding their prophetic value.
It is to be hoped that the scientific investigation of Freud into the
interpretation of dreams will not give superstition a new weapon.




CHAPTER IV

THE ŒDIPUS COMPLEX AND THE BROTHER AND SISTER COMPLEX


I

Freud opened up a new field of dream interpretation by his discovery of
the significance of the remark of the chorus in Sophocles's _Œdipus_
about men dreaming of incestuous relations with their own mothers. He
saw this dream referred to the barbarous times in which such incest
actually occurred, and to the infantile affection of the child for the
mother. He saw that the counterpart of this dream was in the mythical
material dramatised by Sophocles of a man murdering his father and
marrying his mother. The dream means that one wants his mother's love.
Herodotus reports a dream of Hippias who dreamt of incest with his
mother. Plato's _Republic_, Bk. IX, says that in our dream our animal
nature practises incest with the mother. Dio Cassius reports Cæsar had
such a dream.

The influence of the writer's attitude towards his father or mother
appears in his literary work. Stendhal has left us a record of the
intense child love he had for his mother; he hated his father. One can
see the results of these conditions in his life, work and beliefs. He
became an atheist, since people who throw off the influence of their
fathers often cast aside also their belief in a universal father. This
also explains largely the atheism of Shelley, whose relations with his
father were not cordial. The essay on the necessity of atheism was the
cause of Shelley's expulsion from Oxford University.

An extreme attachment to the mother is the nucleus of future neurosis.
If the mother is intensely loved by her infant son or boy, and then she
dies, he will still be looking for a mother substitute, as it were.
Freud's deduction about the mysterious smile of the Mona da Lisa is
very plausible; it was in all likelihood the unconscious reproduction
by the artist of his mother's smile which he rediscovered in another
woman.

The best example of the Œdipus Complex in English literature is to be
found, I think, in the poem by Cowper, _On the Receipt of My Mother's
Picture_. Very few more touching tributes to a mother have been
written. Cowper's mother died when he was six years old. The poem was
written in 1790, when he was past 58 years. The poet never married and
found a mother substitute in Mary Unwin, who ministered to his comfort;
to her he wrote a famous sonnet and also the well known lyric.

Cowper wrote the poem celebrating his love for his mother "not without
tears." On actually receiving the picture he kissed it and hung it
where it was the last object he saw at night and the first that met
his eyes in the morning. In the poem he becomes a child again. The
intervening fifty-two years drop out of his life; he is back with his
mother and he narrates his infantile impressions. The psychoanalyst who
is aware that this child's affection for his mother is its first love
affair, will observe that Cowper in his poem is giving us reminiscences
of a childish fantasy that shaped the course of his whole life.
His insanity and fits of depression, his sentimental and platonic
attachments to old ladies, his religious mania, are apparent, in the
germ, in this poem.

The poet recalls the affection and tenderness lavished upon him by
his mother; he relates how he felt at her death, and was deceived by
the maids who told him that she would return. He again sees her in
her nightly visits to him in his chamber to see him laid away safe to
sleep. He mentions the biscuits she gave him, dwells on her constant
flow of love and on the way she stroked his head and smiled. He thus
re-lives those days. One should remember these are the reflections of a
man fifty-eight years old. In his troubles he still looks back to her
for support. He contrasts his position then with his situation now. He
is suffering from depression and the memory of many griefs. His dead
mother is like a bark safe in port.

    "But me scarce hoping to attain that rest,
    Always from port withheld, always distressed,
    Me howling blasts drive devious, tempests tossed,
    Sails ripping, seams opening wide, and compass lost.
    And day by day some current's thwarting force
    Sets me more distant from a prosperous course."

It of course displeases people to have any association made between the
noblest sentiment, mother love, and so repulsive a feature as incest.
When Freud interpreted the marriage of Œdipus to his mother both from
a historical and psychological point of view, and called attention to
the dream in the play where the Chorus mentions the most obnoxious
dream that sometimes visits us mortals, that of incestuous relationship
with the mother, he opened up a new field not only in psychology but
in medicine. Psychoanalytic treatment has cured many people whose
neurosis arose from the early attachment to the mother from which they
were finally freed. Cowper was a victim of the Œdipus Complex; it was
buried in his unconscious and in this poem of his he shows that the
seeds that were sown fifty-two years ago were still bearing fruit.
Literature can hardly furnish so good an example of the influence of
the Œdipus Complex through so great a distance of time.

In this poem Cowper put his hand unknowingly on the cause of all his
troubles, but he never realised it. Had the poem been written in his
twenties instead of his late fifties, the subliminal process of freeing
himself by art from his Œdipus Complex might have made his life more
pleasant. The fact that the poem was written so late shows that the
unhealthy attachment clung to him all his life; it ruined him mentally
and gave us his strange personality.

Freud has shown us that psychoneuroses, like hysteria and obsessions,
have their origin in an infantile overattachment to the parent of the
opposite sex, which remains unconscious but nevertheless is an active
and disturbing element. It is perfectly natural that this condition
should exist in infancy, but it disappears in the normal person. If
it does not, one's entire life will be influenced by his inability
to overcome the too intense love for mother or infantile hatred for
the father. If a man has had an unfortunate repression in childhood
such as the early death of a mother he loved intensely, his destiny
in life will be affected. This fact has been understood by people
from time immemorial. If an abnormal situation develops like a hatred
in childhood for the mother, the child's life will be in the future
shaped differently from that of most people. People especially are
influenced in the way they react to the world and to love affairs by
the frustration or repression of their earliest love. If they become
writers their literary work is charged with a certain tone, depending
on the nature of the author's relation with his parents.

By this discovery of Freud's literary criticism receives a new impetus.
Most literary biographers unconsciously worked in accordance with this
theory, for they always stated, where possible, the relations of the
writer to his parents. Freud merely formulated and proved the truth of
the theory.

Why were Schopenhauer and Byron such pessimists? Among the many causes
that later in life contributed to impart the note of woe and despair
to their work, was the fact that both men were in unusually unhappy
relations with their mothers and their quarrels with them are matters
of literary history. Why are men like Lafcadio Hearn and Edgar Allan
Poe the unhappy Ishmaelites in literature, with their morbid and weird
ideas? They both lost in infancy or early childhood mothers to whom
they were greatly attached.

Facts like these have great significance. It is not claimed that other
factors do not go into the making of the man, but his relations with
his parents is the earliest cause in determining his mental, moral
and emotional make up. A man who hates his father sees in many of his
future enemies the image of his father. One who is overattached to
his mother looks unconsciously for her counterpart, among women, in
seeking his mate. He sees a reminder of his father in those people who
interfere with his plans, ambitions and conduct. He sees the father in
the rivals he has in love affairs, just as in infancy he found in his
father his rival in the affections of his mother. This seemingly absurd
and repellent view has been scientifically demonstrated by Freud and
his disciples so that I refer objectors to it to their works.

The influence of step-mothers has always been noted in ancient times
and the amount of material in folk lore dealing with the effects of
step-mothers on the lives of children is large. We are all familiar
with the Cinderella story. Literature is rich in examples of writers
whose step-mothers coloured their lives for them. Strindberg's misogyny
no doubt dates back to his early dislike for his step-mother.

All literary works show between the lines a writer's early attitude
towards his parents. An interesting volume might be written on the
relations of literary men to their mothers. We would find the mother
unconsciously influencing literary masterpieces. We might find the
misanthropy of Molière's _Le Misanthrope_ and the cynicism of Thackeray
in _Vanity Fair_ each due to the fact that both these men while boys
lost their mothers, though later personal tragedies influenced them.
Thackeray loved Mrs. Brookfield, a married woman, and Molière was
married to a coquette.

The fact that the mothers of Coleridge and Dickens had almost no
influence upon them is seen in their work.

The relation of the only child to its parents must be mentioned here.
The studies of both Freud and Brill in regard to the later neurotic
condition of the only child applies to literary men who were only
children. John Ruskin, although subjected to a strict education, was
petted and spoiled nevertheless like the average only child. His
precociousness made his parents admire and worship him. He was attached
to his "papa" and "mamma" for the rest of their lives. He was not young
when they died and he preserved the attitude of the child towards them.
His mother lived to a great age. When he was separated from his wife
he returned to his parents to live. His later tragedy, the unmanly
love for Rose Le Touche, which forms a most humiliating affair in his
life, shows he was a neurotic from childhood. He was in the later part
of his life subject to periods of psychosis. In his actions he was
eccentric; he would be invited to lecture on art and would give a talk
on economics.

His passions were love of beauty in the early part of his life, and
interest in economic reform in his middle and old age.

We must always remember he was an only child. In his autobiography
_Praeterita_, he refers often to his "papa" and "mamma."

Alexander Pope, the poet, was also a spoiled child, though he had a
half sister.

The seeds of Browning's optimistic philosophy were sown in the normal
and quiet affection that existed between him and his mother. There was
no mad attachment, no repression, no ill feeling, and hence he never
became an abnormal or morbid poet. He had less neuroticism than any of
the great English poets of the nineteenth century. His optimism was
also fostered by his happy marriage to Elizabeth Barrett.

Freud's theories about the relations of the child to the parents are
borne out whenever we consider the life of a poet.


II

The birth of a new child also has an influence on the psychic life
of the child. There is also always something in the relation between
brothers and sisters that affects their lives. Hence the subject of
incest in literature is of paramount import, repulsive as the theme
may be.[D] It has been most exhaustively studied in unconscious
manifestations in fictitious characters by Otto Rank in his _Incest
Motiv_ (1912), which should be translated into English.

The only phase of the subject I wish to touch on here is the close
relationship that prevails in some cases between brother and sister
among authors. The brother and sister complex, as it may be called,
shows its effects upon the literary work of the writer.

The extreme attachment of Renan to his sister Henrietta and of
Wordsworth to his sister Dorothy had much to do with the nature of the
literary work of these men. The attachment explained from the point
of view of psychoanalysis amounts to this. The affection which each
man has for his mother is transferred to the sister who is the nearest
resemblance to the mother. This new fixation may remain too long and
the man hence loves no other woman. The affection is usually at its
height in youth before the man marries another, in case he does marry.
Both Renan and Wordsworth married after they were thirty. The incest
idea was unconsciously present but repressed by the natural disgust the
men felt as a result of education and training. In all likelihood had
each of these authors been separated from his sister in infancy and met
her years later in youth, he might have fallen in love with her.

The effects of this extreme brotherly and sisterly love have been
studied but not yet exhaustively. No doubt much of the effeminacy of
Renan, the gentleness, the moral tone, the kindliness, we find in his
writings was due to this attachment to his sister. He dedicated his
_Life of Jesus_ to her. As I show elsewhere he drew himself in this
book, and his love for his sister was a great factor in his making
Jesus somewhat effeminate. He has also left a tribute to her in his _My
Sister Henrietta_.

The influence of Wordsworth's sister upon him manifested itself in
several ways, one of which is the utter respectability of his poetry,
and another the almost total absence of any reference to love or sex.
His sister was largely responsible for the trend of her brother's mind.
She gave him eyes and ears, as he put it, helped him to observe nature
and was herself a great force in the evolution of the new poetry. Her
influence has been under- rather than over-estimated. Another reason
for the absence of love poetry in Wordsworth may have been due to a
guilty conscience, as he left an illegitimate daughter in France, he
not being able to marry the mother for justifiable reasons. Professor
Harper first published the story.

As one might have expected, neither Henrietta Renan nor Dorothy
Wordsworth ever married, though the latter is said to have been in love
with Coleridge.

Charles Lamb, the Gentle Elia, owes probably much of his quality
of gentleness to his sister Mary, "Bridget Elia." She appears in
his famous essays and they collaborated together in writing poems
and tales. His kindness was no doubt enhanced by his pity for her
unfortunate fits of insanity and by the fact that in one of these fits
she had killed her mother.

The love felt for their sisters by Byron and Shelley made the subject
of incest a common topic of discussion between them. They went so far
as to question whether the law or feeling against marriage between
brother and sister was not a convention based on ungrounded prejudice.
Byron's love for his sister, Mrs. Augusta Leigh, did not create
feminine qualities in him. She was to him a sort of refuge from the
disappointment of other love affairs, a shelter when public opinion
was against him. His poems to her rank among his best. He may have
had unconscious incest thoughts in regard to her, and he may have
drawn himself as married to her in _Cain_, where she may be Cain's
sister Adah. But the accusation that Byron ever indulged in unlawful
relationship with his sister is a groundless libel. We have no evidence
for it and we have no right to make any assumptions because of
misinterpretations put on his work. Between the thought and the deed
there is a wide gap. Carlyle once said, the hand is on the trigger, but
the man is not a murderer before the trigger is pulled. The story of
the reputed incest with his sister was first published by Mrs. Harriet
Beecher Stowe. The myth was revived again by "documentary" evidence
furnished by Lord Lovelace, a descendant of Byron, and published in
_Astarte_. A later woman biographer, Ethel C. Mayne, accepts the story.
The entire tale is ably demolished by Richard Edggumbe in his _Byron,
the Last Phase_, where he applies, without a knowledge of Freud's
views, psychoanalytic methods to Byron. Brandes also defended Byron
years ago.

Lord Lovelace published a love letter alleged to have been written to
Augusta Leigh, Byron's sister, dated May 17, 1819, but this letter
was really meant for Mary Chaworth, to whom he wrote: "I not long ago
attached myself to a Venetian for no earthly reason (although a pretty
woman) but because she was called ... and she often remarked (without
knowing the reason) how fond I was of the name." The name which is
crossed out is Mary. The mistress was the Venetian Mariana (the Italian
for Mary Anne) Segati, the poet's mistress from November, 1816, to
February, 1818. He was thus showing Mary Chaworth he still loved her.
It is not likely he would try to impress Augusta with his love for a
woman named Mary and again not probable that he would tell his sister
of his liaison when he and his sister were supposed to love each other.
The tone of this letter differs from that of others to his sister.

In 1820 Byron was writing in his _Don Juan_ that he has a passion for
the name Mary, that it still calls up the realm of fancy where he
beholds what never was to be, and that he is not yet quite free from
the spell. He loved Mary Chaworth all his life.

Byron's alleged criminal attachment to his sister was supposed to be
the mystery in Manfred's life, revealed by these words in the second
act, when wine is offered to him:

    "'tis blood--my blood! the pure warm stream
    Which ran in the veins of my fathers and ours,
    When we were in our youth and had one heart,
    And loved each other as we should not love,
    And this was shed."

In a poem published a year later, _The Duel_, there is also a reference
to blood--"And then there was the curse of blood." This line and the
passage in _Manfred_ merely refer to the fact that an ancestor of
Byron, the fifth Lord, not a direct ancestor, killed Mr. Chaworth
whose blood flowed in Mary's veins. Astarte then in _Manfred_ is Mary
Chaworth and not Augusta.

Shelley had a great affection for his sister Elizabeth and wanted his
friend Hogg to marry her. She returned to her father and Shelley was
broken hearted that she drifted away from his own influence. He thought
she was not lost to him and wanted to take her with him to the west of
Ireland in 1814. He continued to love her, and this influenced his
work. In the first edition of the _Revolt of Islam_ he made Laon and
Cynthia, who were brother and sister, lovers. The publisher made the
poet regretfully change certain passages, mostly single lines. In the
early preface the poet concluded he could not see why an innocent act
like love of brother and sister for each other should arouse the hatred
of the multitude.

In _Rosalind and Helen_ he describes Helen visiting a spot where a
sister and brother had given themselves up to one another, and had a
child, who was torn by people limb from limb. The mother was stabbed
while the youth was saved by a priest, to be burned for God's grace.
Their ghosts visited the spot.

FOOTNOTE:

[D] Edgar Saltus has touched on the theme in a few of his novels,
notably _The Monster_.




CHAPTER V

THE AUTHOR ALWAYS UNCONSCIOUSLY IN HIS WORK


I

"No man," says Dr. Johnson in his _Life of Cowley_, "needs to be so
burdened with life as to squander it in voluntary dreams of fictitious
occurrences. The man that sits down to suppose himself charged with
treason or peculation, and heats his mind to an elaborate purgation of
his character from crimes which he was never within the possibility
of committing differs only by the infrequency of his folly from him
who praises beauty which he never saw; complains of jealousy which he
never felt; supposes himself sometimes invited and sometimes forsaken;
fatigues his fancy and ransacks his memory for images which may exhibit
the gaiety of hope, or the gloominess of despair; and dresses his
imaginary Chloris or Phyllis sometimes in flowers fading as her beauty,
and sometimes in gems as lasting as her virtues."

The shrewd doctor displayed great insight into the psychology of
authorship in these remarks. They form a good argument against those
who deny the importance of the personal note in literature.

One objection that these critics make is that an author may
deliberately conceal himself and that in fact writers have often done
so. Thus a man who is happily married may write a novel or play,
seething with attacks upon the marriage institution, full of cynical
and bitter statements about women and love. The author may say that
book does not represent his own life. It does, however, in that it
shows his reaction to seeing life of this kind lived by others; it
means that he has been struck by the cruelty or injustice of it, and
that unconsciously he reflected that he too might but for a chance
throw of the dice of fate be in the same position. His attitude towards
the lives of others is part of his own life. The fact that he has
suffered pain by witnessing other people's lives, shows that his own
psyche is affected. The life described has been lived by some of his
friends or relatives, and some of his ancestors. The griefs of others
often affect us, if not like our own, at least strongly enough to make
us devote ourselves to mitigating them.

Investigation however will show that the great works voicing sorrows
were experienced by those who wrote about them. It is an unhappily
married writer like George Sand, who has given us the novels that deal
with the marriage problem. It is a disappointed lover like Heine or De
Musset who writes the saddest love poems. Life is made up of so many
sorrows that writers do not have to go out of their way to invent them.
The rich man does not imagine himself starving and write books where
the pangs of hunger are described. Such literature is written usually
by a man who has starved, a man like George Gissing. The financier who
has never had any business troubles as a rule will not waste energy
nor court pain by trying to figure how a bankrupt feels and put those
feelings in art. Such feelings are usually delineated by a man who has
himself been bankrupt like Balzac in his _Cæsar Birroteau_. Of course,
no writer could have felt all the emotions he describes. Balzac, for
example, never had the troubles of Goriot, for he never had children to
be ungrateful to him. But even here there must have been some personal
affair, for the author had suffered from ingratitude of some other kind
and all ingratitude hurts.

The author again may write merely for amusement or commercial purposes.
In these cases it is true the author's personality may not be in his
work any more than an editorial writer's real opinions are in the
editorial which he writes in accordance with the policy of his paper. A
writer may study the demands of the public and try to comply with them.
In cases like these the reader may detect the insincerity or learn of
it by clues. Here the works are not representative of the author and
he can no more be judged by them, than a person who would invent or
falsify his dreams in reporting them to a psychoanalyst. Certainly
these would not reveal the unconscious. And I realise much "literature"
is of this nature.

An author again may purposely conceal himself, but the key once
discovered reveals him. Deliberate and continuous concealment by the
author of his personality can often be detected. We know Mérimée and
Nietzsche were personally entirely different from what some of their
books would lead us to suspect. Mérimée was not cold nor Nietzsche
cruel; one was too emotional and the other too genteel.


II

A good example of the follies that may follow by the refusal to adopt
psychoanalytic methods in literature is seen in the case of Charlotte
Brontë.

It had always been noticed that several similar motives appeared in
her novels; the love of a girl for her school master, a married man;
an intense craving for affection; and pictures of sad partings. It was
known that Charlotte had attended the school of M. Heger, a married
man in Brussels, that she had left it and then returned, and later
departed finally. There were critics who suspected that Charlotte was
really in love with her teacher and that various scenes in her novels
had their counterpart in reality. Among these were Sir Wemyss Reid,
Augustine Birrel and Angus Mackay. But other critics scoffed at the
idea. So great a Brontë student as Clement Shorter said it would be
the act of treachery to pry into the writer's heart. May Sinclair,
especially, repudiated with indignation the possibility that Brontë
drew on actual facts for her novels; and her purposes in writing her
_The Three Brontës_, was to demolish the theory that Charlotte Brontë
was in love with M. Heger. But shortly after this work appeared there
were published in 1913 in the London _Times_ one of the "scoops" of the
age, four pathetic heart burning love letters by Charlotte Brontë to
M. Heger, written without pride, pleading for a little affection. The
secret was out; there could be no doubt that the scenes of unrequited
love in her novels were due to her own unreciprocated love for M. Heger
and that Charlotte was Lucy Snowe and Jane Eyre in _Villette_ and _Jane
Eyre_, respectively. Miss Sinclair wrote an article attacking the
publishing of the letters which had disproved her theory.

An excellent study of the influences of Charlotte's sad love affair on
her work was made by Mrs. Ellis H. Chadwick in her _In the Footsteps of
the Brontës_. It is really a psychoanalytical study, for it traces the
novelist's work to her repressions. Another study has been promised by
Lucille Dooley, who made several abstracts of psychoanalytical studies
of genius from essays by Freud's disciples, in the _American Journal of
Psychology_.

I just wish to point out a few of the influences of Brontë's love
affair upon her work. Charlotte Brontë published _Jane Eyre_ in
October, 1847, and wrote in 1848: "Details, situations which I do not
understand and cannot personally inspect, I would not for the world
meddle with.... Besides not one feeling on any subject, public or
private, will I ever affect that I do not really experience."

After she left Brussels on December 29, 1843, she wrote that she
suffered much and that she would never forget what the parting cost
her. This departure inspired the description of the flight from
Thornfield (which is Brussels in _Jane Eyre_), the part of the novel
which she told her biographer appealed to her most.

In her letters to Heger which were published she begs for sympathy
as a beggar for crumbs from the table of the rich man. In the second
letter written in 1844 she tells how she waited six months for a
letter and she sent this one through friends. In _Villette_, in the
twenty-fourth chapter, she wrote how Lucy Snowe studied to quench her
madness because she received no letters. "My hour of torment was the
post hour." She wrote that in all the land of Israel there was but one
Saul, certainly but one David to soothe him. Heger was the David, she
says symbolically, to soothe her. (In the novel Heger is called Paul
Carl David Emanuel).

_Villette_ is the most autobiographical of her novels. It appeared in
the beginning of 1853 and had occupied the author the previous two
years. It cost her great effort and she recalled in it the sleepless
nights in Brussels about which she told Mrs. Gaskell; her anxieties
were caused by her hopeless love for M. Heger. She knew that the novel
would be recognised by the Hegers, and she printed in it a statement
that the author reserved the rights of translation, as she feared M.
Heger would read it if it were translated into French. She first had
wanted to publish it anonymously. She also refused to make a happy
ending which was wanted by the publishers; she would not have Paul
and Lucy marry, for such was not the case in real life. (Jane Eyre,
however, married Rochester.) The book is full of the Hegers, even their
children being in it. Madame Heger does not figure in a favourable
light, and one could hardly expect a girl to admire the wife of the man
she loved herself.

The interval between the first and last of the letters published in
the _Times_ is about two years, which covers the saddest period of her
life, the time she left Brussels finally on December 29th, 1843, and
end of 1845. She had gone to Belgium originally in February, 1842; she
was then twenty-six and Heger was seven years her senior. She left in
November, 1842, when her aunt died, and returned in January, 1843.
Heger wanted her to return and Charlotte was only too eager, though she
could have received a better position. She describes this second trip
in _Villette_. She left finally because Mme. Heger really did not want
her services.

Charlotte's brother Branwell also fell in love with a married person,
the wife of his employer.

Charlotte Brontë drew herself as a man in her first novel, _The
Professor_. She calls herself William Crimsworth, who loves his
teacher, Mlle. Reuter. The account she gives of the parting of the
student with his teacher is again reminiscent of her memories of
parting from M. Heger. She drew herself then just once in this rôle of
the male lover.

"The principal male characters," says Mrs. Chadwick, "to be found in
Charlotte Brontë's great novels were those drawn from M. Heger, M.
Pelet, Rochester, Robert Moore, Louis Moore and Paul Emanuel."

Hence we may conclude as a rule that when a motive appears often, or
a note persists continuously, in a writer's work, there were reasons
therefor in his personal life. Charlotte Brontë was no exception to the
rule.

She married in 1854 but did not really love her husband. Poor Charlotte
Brontë! She married late and not for love, and all her youth she craved
love and wanted to marry and be a mother. She betrays herself in a
dream reported in the twenty-first chapter of _Jane Eyre_. Had she
known that dreams are realised unconscious wishes she might never have
recounted this dream, a frequent one among women, both married and
unmarried, who have no children.

"During the past week scarcely a night had gone over my couch that had
not brought with it a dream of an infant, which I sometimes hushed in
my arms, sometimes dandled on my knee, sometimes watched playing with
daisies on a lawn, or, again, dabbling its hands in running water. It
was wailing this night and laughing the next; now it nestled close to
me, and now it ran from me; but whatever mood the apparition evinced,
whatever aspect it wore, it failed not for seven successive nights to
meet me the moment I entered the land of slumber."

Literature can scarcely present a more personal confession in disguised
form. That dream of Jane Eyre's was Charlotte Brontë's, who wanted to
have children by M. Heger.


III

The value of the study of an author's works in connection with his life
is also seen in the case of Dickens. An excellent book by Edwin Pugh,
_Charles Dickens Originals_, really applies the psychoanalytic method,
to a large extent, to Dickens's work.

Some of the main influences in Dickens's life and work were due to
two girls, Maria Beadnell, his boyhood sweetheart, who rejected him,
and Mary Hogarth, his wife's sister, who died young. These women were
respectively the models of Dora in _David Copperfield_, and Little Nell.

The story of Dickens's early love became known a half dozen years ago
when his letters to Miss Beadnell were published. He was eighteen
when he loved her, and when she finally rejected him he wrote to her
saying he could never love another. Not long afterwards he married.
In 1855, when he was nearly forty-four years old, he said in a letter
to his future biographer, Forster, that he could never open _David
Copperfield_ "without going wandering away over the ashes of all that
youth and hope, in the wildest manner." He was thinking of his love for
Maria, for the reference in the letter is to Dora, of whom Maria was
the prototype. She also appears as Dolly Varden in _Barnaby Rudge_. He
again draws her in Estella in _Great Expectations_, and describes the
sufferings that Pip, who is himself, had undergone on account of her.

In 1855 Maria Beadnell, who had become Mrs. Henry Winter, wrote to
the author, and he agreed to meet her clandestinely. He was unhappily
married but not yet separated from his wife. The separation came a few
years later. Dickens was disillusioned when he met Mrs. Winter; she was
homely and stout. He describes his disillusionment in _Little Dorrit_,
where Mrs. Winter is Flora Finching. "Flora whom he had left a lily,
had become a peony." And then he gives way to a personal pathetic cry.
He could no longer love his first love, he was not in love with his
wife; with all his fame and wealth he had missed the greatest pleasure
in life. "That he should have missed so much, and at his time of life
should look so far about him for any staff to bear him company upon his
downward journey and cheer it--was a just regret." He looked into the
dying fire by which he sat and reflected that he too would pass through
such changes and be gone. Thus we can trace the childwife Dora and the
sufferings of Pip to Dickens's first love.

Mary Hogarth, who helped to shape Dickens's ideals of women, was
a younger sister of his wife, and she died as a girl. Dickens was
so shocked by this that he could not go on for a while with his
_Pickwick Papers_ and _Oliver Twist_. This was about 1837, when he was
twenty-five. He has left a number of records of the great and lasting
effect upon him of the grief he felt. He describes a dream where he
sees her; he thinks of her when in America. She was his model for
Little Nell and he wrote that old wounds bled afresh when he wrote this
story. But she was responsible for all those pure, bloodless girls,
lacking in individuality, which fill his pages. She died when she was
innocent of worldly guile, and unconsciously was the type before him
when he drew women. He could not understand the modern intellectual
woman and he owes this literary deficiency to his misfortune. "And
so he presents to us," says Mr. Pugh, "that galaxy of amazing dolls
variously christened Rose Maylie, Kate Nickleby, Madeline Bray, Little
Nell, Emma Haredale, Mary Graham, Florence Dombey, Agnes Wickfield, Ada
Clare and Lucy Manette.... Modern criticism has exhausted itself in
scathing denunciation of these poor puppets. And yet there is perhaps
something to be said in defence of the convention that created them.
Dickens was never a self-conscious artist. He had indeed no use for
the word Art." His female types were the result of his faith in the
perfection of woman as he saw it in Mary Hogarth.

Two women who did not influence his work are his mother and his wife.
He entertained no affection for either. He had no pleasant memories
of his mother because she was indifferent to his sufferings when he
worked as a boy in the blacking factory. She is drawn in Mrs. Nickleby.
David Copperfield's mother may also have been an idealised portrait of
Dickens's own mother, but Mrs. Copperfield resembles more the Little
Nells and other characters based on Mary Hogarth in her colourlessness,
and her goodness. Dickens's own wife scarcely, if ever, served as a
model for any of his female characters. They lived apart for the last
twelve years of the author's life.

Dickens's greatness lies in his portrayals of male characters. He was
poor in his female characterisation because Mary Hogarth unconsciously
influenced him into drawing spineless women and he kept the painful
memories of his love affair with Maria Beadnell suppressed except to
caricature her in Dora and Estella and Flora. When we think of Dickens
we have memories of men like Sam Weller, Micawber (Dickens's father),
Uriah Heep, Pecksniff, and others. Why he especially excelled in
characterisation of these types familiarly known all over the world,
and how he was led to that peculiar "exaggerative" portrayal of
eccentric creatures is a theme which can be explained by psychoanalytic
theories and the application of Freud's theories of the comic, and a
study of the originals and the types Dickens met in his life. It should
also be remembered that this style of character portrayal was common in
Dickens's youth, and he also imitated other writers.


IV

Swinburne has been usually regarded as an impersonal poet, though some
of his critics have tried to see in the accounts of derelictions from
the path of virtue in the poems, records of actual experiences. The
poet has himself written something on the subject. In the Dedicatory
Epistle of 1904 to the collected edition of his works he wrote: "There
are photographs from life in the book (_Poems and Ballads_, 1865);
there are sketches from imagination. Some which keen-sighted criticism
has dismissed with a smile as ideal or imaginary were as real and
actual as they well could be; others which have been taken for obvious
transcripts from memory were utterly fantastic or dramatic.... Friendly
and kindly critics, English and foreign, have detected ignorance of
the subject in poems taken straight from the life, and have protested
that they could not believe me were I to swear that poems entirely or
mainly fanciful were not faithful expressions or transcriptions of the
writer's actual experience and personal emotion."

The poet does not tell us which poems were fanciful and which were not.
He does let us know that some of the poems were the record of his own
experience. I propose to show that many of the poet's best known poems
had a personal background and thus to differ with the theory usually
prevalent that Swinburne, instead of having sung his own soul, was but
a clever manipulator of rhyme and metre. The clue to the investigation
is furnished by our knowledge that one of his greatest poems in the
_Poems and Ballads_, "The Triumph of Time," was inspired by the one
love disappointment of his life. It was written in 1862 when he was
twenty-five years old and "represented with the exactest fidelity,"
says Gosse, his biographer, "his emotions which passed through his
mind when his anger had died down, and when nothing remained but the
infinite pity and the pain." Swinburne met the young lady at the home
of the friends of Ruskin and Burne-Jones, Dr. John Simon and his wife.
She was a kinswoman of theirs. She gave the poet roses and sang for
him. She laughed in his face when he proposed. He was hurt grievously
and went up to the sea in Northumberland and composed the poem. The
poet told Gosse the story in 1876.

The poem is a cry of a wounded heart; one of the most powerful in
all literature. The poet recounts all his emotions and foresees that
this affair will influence his life. Many lines in it are familiar to
Swinburne lovers, such as "I shall never be friend again with roses,"
"I shall hate sweet music my whole life long." It is one of Swinburne's
masterpieces and Rupert Brooke considered it the masterpiece of the
poet.

One may now see that the terrible declamation against love, one of
the lengthiest and best choruses in his play _Atlanta in Calydon_,
rings with a personal note. The lines beginning "For an evil blossom
was born" constitute one of the most bitter outcries against love in
literature. Unconsciously, memories of his lost love were at work and
the chorus must have been written about the same time as "The Triumph
of Time." The play itself was published in 1864. Swinburne is the
Chorus and thus chants his own feelings in the Greek legend he tells.

Swinburne may have had other love affairs though Gosse tells us this
was his only one. I find memories of the unfortunate episode throughout
the entire first volume of _Poems and Ballads_, and note recurrences
to the theme in later volumes. In one of his best known poems, "The
Forsaken Garden," written in 1876, he dwells on the death of love. The
idea of love having an end is repeated with much persistency throughout
many of his poems; he so harps on the same note, that the suspicions of
critics should have been roused before we learned about the romance of
his life. No doubt the reason he was attracted to the love tragedy of
Tristram of Lyonesse, published in 1882, was because of his own tragic
experience; and in the splendid prelude (written, Gosse tells us, in
1871) we see the effects of his love affair.

We have evidence of Swinburne's grief in two of the greatest poems of
the _Poems and Ballads_, where it was least suspected, in "Anactoria"
and "Dolores," poems whose morality he had to defend. He pours some
light on the subject in his _Notes on Poems and Reviews_, published as
a reply to his critics after the issue of his _Poems and Ballads_ in
1865. Of "Anactoria" he said: "In this poem I have simply expressed, or
tried to express, that violence of affection between one and another
which hardens into rage and deepens into despair.... I have tried
to cast my spirit into the mould of hers (Sappho), to express and
represent not the poem but the poet.... As to the 'blasphemies' against
God or gods of which here and elsewhere I stand accused--they are
to be taken as the first outcome or outburst of foiled and fruitless
passion recoiling on itself."

In other words he was singing his own grief through Sappho. The rage
and despair were Swinburne's own and the "blasphemies" were his own
reaction to frustrated love.

On "Dolores," the poet says: "I have striven here to express that
transient state of spirit through which a man may be supposed to pass,
foiled in love and weary of loving, but not yet in sight of rest;
seeking rest in those violent delights which have violent ends in free
and frank sensualities which at last profess to be no more than they
are."

No doubt the poet gave himself up to light loves as a result of his
disappointment. But the point here to be remembered is that the poem
is by his own confession a result of a state of spirit through which a
"man foiled in love" (the poet himself) may be said to pass and through
which Swinburne did pass.

Let us examine some of his lyrics, chiefly those in his first volume
where we can see the result of the love affair.

In "Laus Veneris" he breaks off from his story to say:

    "Ah love, there is no better life than this,
    To have known love how bitter a thing it is,
    And afterwards be cast out of God's sight."

He spoke here from personal memories.

After he tells the story of "Les Noyades," of the youth who was bound
to a woman who did not love him and thrown into the river Loire, the
poet ends abruptly, and addresses his own love, regretting that this
could not have happened to him. He re-echoes the sentiment in "The
Triumph of Time" where he wishes he were dead with his love. Yet no
critic has ventured to see how Swinburne was drawn to this tale by
his unconscious, by the fact that he had lost his love; and no critic
dreamed of claiming that the following concluding lines were personal
and addressed to the kinswoman of the Simons:

    "O sweet one love, O my life's delight,
    Dear, though the days have divided us,
    Lost beyond hope, taken far out of sight,
    Not twice in the world shall the Gods do this."

His address to the spirit of Paganism, the "Hymn of Proserpine,"
which should not necessarily bring up thoughts of his love tragedy,
nevertheless begins, "I have lived long enough, have seen one thing,
that love hath an end," and later on he complains that laurel is green
for a season, and love is sweet for a day, but love grows bitter with
treason and laurel outlives not May. I fear that the poet deserves more
sympathy than he has hitherto been accorded. He had accused his love of
having encouraged him, hence he knew what he meant when he sang those
sad words "love grows bitter with treason."

Two other pathetic poems are "A Leave Taking" where he constantly
reiterates "she would not love" and he turns for consolation to his
songs; and "Satia de Sanguine" where he says, "in the heart is the prey
for gods, who crucify hearts, not hands."

In "Rondel" he begins:

    "These many years since we began to be
    What have the gods done with us? what with me,
    What with my love? They have shown me fates and fears,
    Harsh springs and fountains bitterer than the sea."

In the "Garden of Proserpine," he sings,

    "And love grown faint and fretful,
    Sighs and with eyes forgetful
    Weeps that no loves endure."

This poem shows his longing for rest after his sad experience; he is
tired of everything but sleep.

In "Hesperia" he again refers to his troubles:

    "As the cross that a wild nun clasps till the edge of it bruises
her bosom,
    So love wounds as we grasp it and blackens and burns as a flame;
    I have loved much in my life; when the live bud bursts with the
blossom
    Bitter as ashes or tears is the fruit, and the wine thereof shame."

Even in "The Leper" he gives us an inkling of his great love by
describing the devotion of the lover for the smitten lady. "She might
have loved me a little too, had I been humbler for her sake."

All these poems appeared in his first volume and were written within at
least two years after his sorrow. He can scarcely write a poem or chant
about a woman or retell an old myth or legend, or venture a bit of
philosophy but he unconsciously introduces his aching heart. The burden
is always that love has an end or lives but a day.

There are other poems in the first volume where the personal note is
present and yet very little attention has been called to this.

The poem "Felise," with its quotation from Villon, "Where are the
Snows of Yesterday," is I believe a personal poem, based on an actual
or desired change between him and his lost sweetheart, that is, if
this poem refers to her. Some day new data may appear to tell us
whether the facts of the poem had any basis in reality. It seems that
a year after the poet's love was rejected by the girl, she wished to
win his love back and that he now scorned her. The poem was written,
Gosse conjectures, in 1864, but 1863 is most likely the date from the
internal evidence, as she rejected him in 1862. Swinburne refers to the
change a year had brought:

    "I had died for this last year, to know
    You loved me. Who shall turn on fate?
    I care not if love come or go
    Now, though your love seek mine for mate.
    It is too late."

He exults cruelly; in the new situation he is revenged.

    "Love wears thin,
    And they laugh well who laugh the last."

He concludes:

    "But sweet, for me no more with you!
    Not while I live, not though I die.
    Good night, good bye."

If she ever sought a return to the poet's affections, he refused to
receive her. He had hoped she might seek to return; read the following
lines from "The Triumph of Time," where he takes the same stand that he
does in this poem.

    "Will it not one day in heaven repent you?
    Will they solace you wholly the days that were?
    Will you lift up your eyes between sadness and bliss,
    Meet me and see where the great lane is,
    And tremble and turn and be changed? Content you.
    The gait is strait. I shall not be there."

No, never would he take her back. Whether the incident of her asking
to be restored to his affections happened or not is unimportant,
relatively. Sappho prayed to Aphrodite to reverse the situation of her
love and make the rejecting lover come to her suppliant; a situation
that every suffering lover wants, and as we know, very often happens.

One of the finest poems inspired by his love, "his sleek black
pantheress," is the poem called "At a Month's End," published in 1878
in the second series of _Poems and Ballads_. He recalls the old days
and his grief is not now so maddening. He sighs:

    "Should Love disown or disesteem you
    For loving one man more or less?
    You could not tame your light white sea-mew,
    Nor I my sleek black pantheress.

    "For a new soul let whoso please pray,
    We are what life made us and shall be.
    For you the jungle and me the sea-spray
    And south for you and north for me."

The late Edward Thomas, killed in the war, was certainly in error when
he concluded that Swinburne did not directly express personal emotion
and that few of the pieces could have been addressed to one woman
and that he never expressed a single hearted devotion to one woman
except in "A Leave Taking." We need not insist that one woman was
always in his mind, but one woman inspired most of his love passages.
New information may show that other women inspired some of his love
verse.[E]

Another phase in studying the poet that has interested readers is
whether he actually figured in the light and lewd loves he sang. This
is rather dangerous ground, and one cannot delve with certainty here.
Nor is this matter so important as the question of the connection
between a grand passion and the poems. The poet says in his notes in
reply to critics that "Dolores" and "Faustine" are merely fanciful.
Gosse has been censured for not having written an honest biography and
for having passed over certain episodes in the poet's life. It had
often been rumoured that the poet did lead, occasionally, a dissipated
life. In the late seventies he was rescued by his friend Watts-Dunton
from the effects of presumable long dissipation. After that time the
poet's life was normal and the publication of the early poems of
passion became a source of regret to him. He never again returned to
that strain and incidentally rarely wrote work that was equal to his
first period. It may then be true that some light loves and immoral
women inspired poems like "Anima Anceps," "A Match," "Before Parting,"
"Rococo," "Stage Love," "Interlude," "Before Dawn," "Faustine,"
"Dolores," "Fragoleeta," "Aholibah," etc.

Swinburne then, who of all lyric poets was the one deemed least to have
drawn on his personal life for material, has done so in great measure.

His "Thalassius" gives us his spiritual autobiography. At the age of
fifty-five he recurred to his childhood scenes and gave us memories
of them in his drama _The Sister_ (1892) where he drew himself in
Clavering. His _The Tale of Balen_, published a few years later, is
also personal.

In spite of the fact that the poet elaborated and gave us such rich
verse, he wrote from the unconscious. The first stanzas of "A Vision of
Spring in Winter" were composed in sleep. He awoke at night and penned
the verses he had composed. His "A Ballade of Dreamland" was written
in the morning without a halt. Swinburne worked from impulse.

Swinburne's affinity to Shelley calls for special comment. He was
attracted to him, because Shelley too, like Swinburne, hated monarchy
and the church, because he had a mastery over melody in verse, because
he was persecuted. He wrote to his youngest sister (Leith: Swinburne,
Page 221): "I must say it is too funny--not to say uncanny--how much
there is in common between us two; born in exactly the same class, cast
out of Oxford--the only difference being that I was not formally but
informally expelled--and holding and preaching the same general views
in the poems which made us famous." This is a good illustration of the
process of projection in literature. Swinburne was attracted to Shelley
because he was most like him.

The influence of his mother, Jane Swinburne, was a determining factor
in his life. She guided his reading and took care of him and he was
mentally a good deal like her. He was very much attached to her and no
doubt she unconsciously is present in much of his work. She died in
1896 when eighty-seven years old and her death left him a changed man
and was the tragedy of his later life. When she came to live with him
before her death he wrote a poem of welcome to her, "The High Oaks,"
and when she died he wrote "Barking Hall."

FOOTNOTE:

[E] Among recently published posthumous poems of Swinburne is one
called "Southward," written no doubt with his love still fresh in mind.




CHAPTER VI

UNCONSCIOUS CONSOLATORY MECHANISMS IN AUTHORSHIP


I

There is a large body of popular literature that may be called the
literature of self-deception. The author makes statements that are
false, but which he wants to be true. He is aware, too, that most
people like these sentiments, and he gives a forceful expression to
them so that they have a semblance of truth. Dr. Johnson once said that
all the arguments set forth to prove the advantages of poverty are good
proof that this is not so; you find no one trying to prove to you the
benefits of riches.

The literature of self-deception, which is nearly always optimistic
and consolatory, derives its value as a defence mechanism. It is based
on a lie but is efficacious nevertheless. Of this species Henley's
famous poem ending with lines "I am Master of my fate, I am Captain of
my soul" is a good example. Of course no one is master of his fate. To
this class belongs much of the consolatory advice found in the stoical
precepts of Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. Most religious poems
and works like _The Imitation of Christ_ may be included here.

Many writers whose lives have been sad, have written works that buoyed
them up. They have affected to learn much from their calamities,
although they unquestionably would have preferred not to have been
victims of these misfortunes. They have pretended to exult over the
failures of their ambitions when at heart they would have wished a
more successful termination to them. Naturally literature of this
kind is popular, although any vigorous intellect can see through the
fallaciousness of the reasoning in a poem like "The Psalm of Life" or
in the writings of the syndicate authors in our newspapers.

All the literary works wherein the precious and valued things in life
are decried, wherein asceticism, death and celibacy are vaunted, are
usually unconsciously insincere. The writer cannot have certain things
and he bolsters himself up by pretending he is better off without them.

In examining a literary work we should always find out what the
author's real thoughts must be, and not assume that they are what he
claims them to be.

Eulogies of pain and the praise of the advantages of misfortune are
forced, and though the literature abounding in such sentiments may aid
some, it will only irritate those who think.

It would be interesting to collect passages from the works of writers
who give us such ideas and inquire what motive prompted them. It is not
very difficult to unravel the unconscious in these cases, especially if
we know something of the writer's life.

Take the following lines from "Rabbi Ben Ezra" by Browning:

    "What I aspired to be,
    And was not, comforts me."

No doubt these lines, put in the mouth of the Rabbi, were a consolation
that Browning administered to himself in his days of obscurity. It
could not be possible that he really meant it. He wanted his work to
be read and he wanted to have the name of poet. While it is not to the
credit of a poet to seek popular applause by trying to do commonplace
work, still a poet of value is anxious to be recognised as such by some
people. He is not comforted that he does not attain this end; on the
contrary, he is disappointed. And while it is always best to do one's
utmost and to be resigned if one fails, it does not follow that the
man should be satisfied with his mishap. The lines of Browning are a
confession of regret for failure.

Then the various passages in the same poem seeking to show the
advantages of age over youth merely tell us that after all the poet was
really bemoaning his lost youth. Love and recognition came to him late
in life, and as his youth was embroiled with some unsatisfactory love
affairs and as he was not recognised as a great poet, we cannot say
that Browning had an altogether happy youth. He would have preferred
to become young again but to spend his youth more happily than he had
done. He also no doubt had unconsciously before him the praises sung
by poets of youth, and recalled Coleridge's beautiful plaint for his
own departed youth, in the poem "Youth and Age." Browning really agreed
with the sentiments of that poem, but after all what was the use of
regrets? One might as well pretend that age was the better period of
life, and one would then possibly be able to enjoy it. He wrote then,
when past fifty, to counteract his real feelings, the lines:

    "Grow old along with me!
    The best is yet to be,
    The last of life for which the first was made."

Much of Browning's optimism was forced.

The most famous example of consolation for the miseries of old age
is Cicero's discourse _On Old Age_ addressed to Atticus when they
were both about sixty-three years old. Cicero puts his own arguments
about the advantages of old age into the mouth of Cato who is
eighty-four years old. Cato tries to prove beneficial the four assumed
disadvantages of old age; these are that it takes us away from the
transactions of affairs, enfeebles our body, deprives us of most
pleasures and is not very far from death.

Cicero really tried to console himself for the loss of his youth. Most
assuredly he would rather have been young. The objections that he finds
against old age are not satisfactorily removed by him and he does not
state them all. Even though he does show old age has its pleasures, we
read between the lines that he is aware that his body is subject to
ailments, that he is shut off from certain pleasures, that he has not
the energy or health or zest of life he had in youth and that he dreads
death; we perceive all his arguments are got up to rid himself of these
painful thoughts. People as a rule do not write on the disadvantages
of youth; these are taken for granted. Rich and successful men who are
old would generally be young again and give up some of the advantages
of old age. Not that many people have not been happier in age than in
youth, not that age is not free from those violent passions to which
youth is subject, but youth still is preferable to old age and all the
arguments in favour of it will not make a man want it to be reached
more quickly.

Carlyle was the author of many statements meant to salve his own
wounds. One of his famous hobbies was to attack people who seek
happiness, no doubt because that is the very thing he himself sought
his whole life long. He told them to seek blessedness. Let us examine
the following passage from one of the most famous chapters of _Sartor
Resartus_, entitled "The Everlasting Yea."

"I asked myself: What is this that, ever since earliest years, thou
hast been fretting and fuming, and lamenting and self-torturing, on
account of? Say it in a word; is it not because thou art not happy?....
Foolish soul! What act of legislature was there that _thou_ shouldst
be happy?... Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe ... there is in man a
Higher than love of Happiness: he can do without happiness, and instead
thereof find Blessedness."

We can discern under all this Carlyle's despair because he is not
happy. Teufelsdröck, who is Carlyle's picture of himself, had
a sweetheart who was stolen by a friend. One may be sure that
Teufelsdröck would have given up his ideal of blessedness if this
misfortune could have been prevented. No doubt, like Carlyle, he had
dyspepsia, was poverty-stricken and had a hard path to travel to
success. Of course he would have wished to have had a good stomach, to
be free from money troubles, and to be recognised. All these fortunate
circumstances were not his. He had to say to himself, "Away with
them. I am better off without them." But it is certain he never could
have really felt this way. We learn from Carlyle's recently published
letters, written to his future wife in his courting days, that he was
unhappy for personal reasons; because she coquetted with him or jilted
him, because he was unsuccessful, because he was poor, etc. He whined
only too much though no doubt he had reason therefor. He is full of the
Byronism which he affected to despise.

It is likely that Browning and Carlyle, who remain, nevertheless, among
the greatest English writers, may have thought at the time of writing
that they believed what they said. But psychoanalysis teaches us that
we do not really know our own minds. We may think we are honest when we
really are deceiving ourselves.

A writer may seek an effect which is attained by lauding a moral
sentiment. Did not Shelley profess to believe in immortality of the
soul, in his elegy on Keats, _Adonais_, while we know from a prose
essay of his that he did not believe in immortality?

We should try to learn the whole truth from the fractional part of
it or unconscious lie that authors give us. We will find a personal
background for all their theories, a past humiliation or a present
need, which will explain the origin of the ideas professed.

When we read in his _Autobiography_ that Spencer ascribes his nervous
breakdown to hard work, if we are Freudians we figure that Spencer
has not told us the truth. We know that most cases of breakdown have
had a previous history, usually in some love or sex repression. We
are aware that Spencer was a bachelor who never had his craving for
love satisfied, and probably led a celibate life. This led to his
nervous troubles. This is merely one instance where by the aid of
psychoanalysis we can read more than the author reveals.

There are many instances where critics who had never heard of
psychoanalysis still applied its principles. In his essay on Thoreau,
Stevenson dilates on Thoreau's cynical views on friendship. When
Stevenson inserted the essay in his _Familiar Portraits_ he wrote a
little introductory note, in which he shows he penetrated the secret
of Thoreau's views. Thoreau was simply seeking to find a salve for his
own lack of social graces. His strange views and personality made him
almost an impossible friend.


II

Even a great writer like Goethe deceived himself, as one can see by a
famous passage in his autobiography as to why Spinoza appealed to him.
In the fourteenth book he says that his whole mind was filled with the
statement from the _Ethics_, that he who loves God does not desire God
to love him in return. Goethe desired to be disinterested in love and
friendship, and he says that his subsequent daring question, "If I love
thee, what is that to thee?" was spoken straight from his heart.

Great as Goethe's intellect was, he could not perceive that his
partiality for this passage from Spinoza was due to the consolation
he found in it for unreciprocated love. This particular sentiment
from the profound work of that philosopher is really one of the least
valuable parts of the work. It was probably inspired unconsciously by
the philosopher's rejection at the hands of Miss Van den Ende, whom he
meant to marry. The _Ethics_ was finished when the author was about
thirty-three. Spinoza, who led the life of a celibate, sublimated his
repressed love into philosophic speculation. When he wrote the passage
in question he was consoling himself for loving a girl who did not care
for him. The mechanism was: "I am not such a fool after all, because
I love a girl who does not love me; why should I even want her to do
so; don't we love God, and yet don't want Him to love us in return?"
Goethe, having gone through the harassing experience that led to the
writing of _Werther_, repeated the mental processes that Spinoza must
have gone through in creating the sentiment about our not desiring God
to love us in return.

Goethe imagined that love could be disinterested, and this is really
not so. The lover seeks a return of his love, for that is just what
love means. Those novels where sacrificing lovers turn over the women
they love to rivals, as in George Sand's _Jacques_ and Dostoievsky's
_Injured and Insulted_, do not show disinterested love, but merely
obedience to an abstract idea with which the whole individual's psychic
and physical constitution is not in harmony at all. Goethe tried to
be different from what he really was. The question, "What is that to
thee if I love thee?" with its corollary that the love need not be
returned, did not come, as Goethe thought, straight from his heart.
His interest in Spinoza's sentiment, just as the creation of it by
Spinoza, was a self curative process for grief because of disprised
love. All psychoneuroses are unsuccessful efforts to purge one's self
of repressed feelings.

Now let us investigate the sentiment itself, and we will see under
analysis it has no value intellectually.

As a matter of fact, there is no warrant for Spinoza's assumption that
man does not desire that God love him in return. All religion is based
on the principle that God loves us and cares for us more than he does
for other animals, or more than he does for other tribes or religious
sects. Prayers are made to God to make us happy and prosper and satisfy
our wants. This is tantamount to saying we want His love. If God, or
Nature, as Spinoza understood Him, was only a malevolent force and
gave us undiluted pain, we would not love Him or her. Again, man does
not love God or Nature in the sense that he loves a woman, so even
if Spinoza were right that man does not desire to be loved by God or
Nature in turn, it is because that love does not promise the pleasure
derived from the returned love of the woman.

The truth is that both Spinoza and Goethe would have preferred to have
had their love returned, and had such been the case, they would not
have occupied themselves with this fatuous idea.


III

Then there is the reaction-impulse and the infantile regression
in writers. Many books are written by their authors to counteract
certain impulses. They feel that their course of conduct or thought
was reprehensible, and they try to make amends for this. They become
fanatical converts; they show a regression to a fixed period in their
own lives, and return to the religion of their parents. Writers who
in spite of being unable to believe in religious dogmas, miracles,
ascetic notions of morality, nevertheless return in later life to the
religions advocating these, belong to this class. The leading of a
wicked life, but more often the influence of childish memories of a
religious household, are responsible for such conversions. The converts
feel young again; pleasant recollections of the mother or father and
delicious memories of school days play a part in the process. Many free
thinkers who have had a theological training never really outgrow this.

Tolstoi's conversion was due to the wild days he spent as a young man.
He was a proud aristocrat, and gave play to all his instincts; he was
an atheist and pessimist, he was a gambler and a rake. He shows us his
evolution in his various novels and autobiographical works. He finally
came to deify ignorant peasants and advocated extreme non-resistance.
He worshipped poverty, practised self-abnegation, and derogated sex.
But, after all, his latter views are but the reactions to the life he
led in youth, and a regression with some changes to views he was taught
in childhood.

The same is true of Strindberg, who as a young man was an atheist, and
a believer in free love; through the sufferings brought about by his
three marriages and his attacks of insanity, he "turned." He looked
with disapproval upon his early ideas, attributed much of his misery
to his entertaining them; hence he discarded them, and returned to the
religious views he held as a child. But his greatest work belonged to
the period when he held liberal ideas.

Dostoievsky was really always a devout orthodox Christian, even in his
early revolutionary days. His great suffering in Siberia chastened him,
and made him find a welcome religion in the religion of suffering,
a guide in Christ who suffered. He is always at pains in his later
novels to prove the existence of a personal God--a fact which makes one
suspect that he had his own doubts, and that he tried to rid himself of
them by his writing. Being also an epileptic, he would, particularly in
these attacks, digress to infantile fixations and they would lead him
to worship his sublimated "Father in Heaven."

There are many who naïvely insist that these men, when they went back
to the belief of childhood days, had at last come to see the truth. The
point of view taken is dependent on whether a man considers belief in
the dogma of a religion a fetter or an asset.

In English literature we have as examples of reactions, both in
religion and politics, the Lake School poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge
and Southey. All of them later turned away from the republican and
pantheistic ideas of their youth. The reason Southey fought so bitterly
against free thinkers like Byron and Shelley, is that in youth he,
like them, also was attached to the ideas of the French Revolution. He
became a Tory of Tories, showed disapproval of all the leading thinkers
of the time, of men like Hazlitt, Lamb and Hunt. Liberal ideas, it is
well known, have no greater enemy than a renegade liberal. Southey
was sufficiently pilloried by Byron in the _Vision of Last Judgment_,
and the psychology of his reaction has been drawn in the portrait of
him by Hazlitt in _The Spirit of the Age_, while the gentle Lamb has
administered to him a rebuke in the immortal _Letter of Elia to Robert
Southey_.

When one reads the theological works of the gifted Coleridge, such as
_The Aids to Reflection_ and some of the _Table Talk_, and ponders
on the spectacle of this former Spinozist and Unitarian, speaking in
defence of dogmas that have not one logical argument in their favour,
one is amazed. Poor Coleridge! What a wreckage of the human intellect
is often made by private misfortunes. Here was the greatest literary
critic and one of the subtlest poets England ever had, talking about
supernatural miracles as though they were not even to be questioned.
"The image of my father, my reverend, kind, learned, simple-hearted
father, is a religion to me," he once said, thus giving us the key to
his reaction. The elder Coleridge was a vicar, and died when the poet
was nine years old. The poet became religious because of his repressed
childish affection for a religious father who influenced him.

As for Wordsworth, he was sufficiently punished for his reaction,
in that in later life he was never able to do creditable literary
work. And Shelley's poem, "To Wordsworth," and the lines of Browning
beginning, "Just for a handful of silver he left us," generally thought
to refer to Wordsworth, were deserved rebukes.

The reaction impulse plays a great rôle in shaping the destinies of
literary men. It sometimes sweeps an entire age and gathers all before
it. This happened in France in that period of French Literature which
Brandes called the Catholic Reaction, when Chateaubriand, De Maistre,
Bonald, and others were influential. It again occurred in the same
country in the early nineties when leading free thinkers like Bourget
and Huysmans went from the extreme radical position to Catholicism.
Only great writers like Zola and Anatole France were able to keep their
heads clear. Now most of these converts really were always at heart
religious. They never emerged from the associations of their religion
even though their intellects would not enable them to believe some of
its dogmas. Unconsciously Bourget and Huysman were always Catholics in
feeling.

Hawthorne wrote a story in which he imagines some of the dead English
poets of the early decades of the nineteenth century continuing to
live, and living a life in complete reaction to their youthful lives.
He pictures the atheist Shelley as becoming a Christian, a prediction
that might have come true; for had Shelley died at seventy instead of
thirty, he might have changed, as there was some similarity between his
ideas of "perfectibility" and those of Christianity. This is, however,
a mere surmise, as one of the last letters he wrote contains an attack
on Christianity.

There are numerous instances of the reactionary impulse in literature.
Shakespeare, who was of plebeian origin, often attacked the common
people in his plays. He wrote favourably of nobility, and had little
sympathy with democracy. Nietzsche, who was gentle personally and
suffered much pain in his life, wrote in defence of cruelty, wished
to do away with pity, sought to kill the finer emotions, and thought
invalids should be left to die instead of being allowed to be cured. He
was creating a system in philosophy whose ruling ideas were the very
opposite to those which governed his private life. He could not even
witness another's pain. Professor Eucken tells a story illustrating
Nietzsche's gentleness. When that philosopher of the superman orally
examined a student who did not answer correctly, Nietzsche would prompt
him and answer the question for him, as he was unable to witness the
student's discomfiture. Burns gave us some poetic outbursts against
the crime of seduction, probably because he himself was guilty of
it. Thackeray, who was hopelessly in love with a married woman, Mrs.
Brookfield, and was rejected by her, affected to be very cynical at
disappointed lovers and ridiculed them in his _Pendennis_. Cicero, who
loved glory, wrote against it.

So men are often the very opposite of what they appear in their books,
but this is done also unconsciously, although sometimes the effort may
be deliberate. Converts are fanatics. Reformed drunkards are the most
convinced prohibitionists. The severest moralists and Puritans are
often former rakes. The man who rails most bitterly against a vice may
often be suspected of struggling against temptation with it.

Similarly, the fact that professors in exact sciences and devotees to
a philosophy of materialism, often become the most ardent exponents of
spiritualism, may be due to an unconscious reaction on their part. No
doubt the desire to believe that the dead can still communicate with
us is the real basis of this belief. It seems that scientists like
Lodge, Crookes, Barrett, Wallace and Lombroso, who have done so much
to spread spiritualism, should be the last persons to embrace absurd
beliefs so at variance with the principles which these men profess in
their scientific work.




CHAPTER VII

PROJECTION, VILLAIN PORTRAYALS AND CYNICISM AS WORK OF THE UNCONSCIOUS


I

Renan drew himself in his _Life of Jesus_, as one may see by comparing
it with his _Memoirs of My Youth_. He projected himself upon Jesus
and wrote a life of Renan instead. He portrayed in the volume his
individual traits and gave his own characteristics to Jesus. His
picture of Jesus is not a true one. Unconsciously he read into Jesus's
life predominating features of his own personality, and also of his
sister Henrietta's. He emphasised Christ's love of flowers, his
indifference to the external world, his obsession with a utopian ideal
and a mission in life. He found in Jesus a love for the simple and
common folk, and a partiality towards women and children. He admired
Jesus's exaltation of beggars and sympathised with his making poverty
an object of love and desire. He saw no external affectation in Christ,
who was bound only to his mission, and who was a revolutionist besides.
Jesus had only some of the qualities Renan attributed to him.

"Never did any one more loftily avow that disdain of the 'world' which
is the essential thing of great things and great originality," said
Renan of his Master. Thus was he describing himself unconsciously and
presenting the plan of life which he, Renan, had followed.

If we read the analysis of Jesus's character and teachings in the last
three chapters of the _Life of Jesus_ and then turn to Renan's analysis
of his own character in his autobiography, we shall see that the author
had projected himself upon Jesus, as it were, and identified himself
with the Master he worshipped. He finds in himself, he tells us in his
autobiography, love of poverty, indifference to the world, devotion to
his mission, affection for the common people, esteem for simplicity,
contempt for success and luxury, fondness for poverty, dislike for the
world of action, such as mercantile life--in short, he dwells on all
the meek and lowly traits that he has, and arrogates to himself Jesus's
practices, and attributes to his master idiosyncrasies of his own. In
an unguarded moment he forgets his customary modesty and gives us the
clue to himself in these words: "I am the only man of my time who has
understood the character of Jesus and of Francis of Assissi." In this
bit of self-portraiture is the whole secret of his _Life of Jesus_.
Critics were attacking him for drawing a false picture of the founder
of Christianity, but it did not dawn on them why the portrait was
distorted. "Jesus has in reality ever been my master," says Renan.

How strongly Renan identified himself with and projected himself upon
Jesus may be seen from the fact that the memoirs written at the age of
sixty are in the same tone as the _Life of Jesus_, published twenty
years earlier. He also tells us in the memoirs how the _Life of Jesus_
originated. From the moment he abandoned the church, he says, with the
resolution that he should still remain faithful to Jesus, the _Life of
Jesus_ was mentally written.

A few more traits that may be mentioned, which he felt he had in common
with Jesus, were his aversion to incurring intimate friendships. There
is reason to believe that Jesus did have friends, but Renan, who did
not cultivate friendship (though he had a good friend in Berthelot),
tried to persuade himself that Jesus was also like him in this regard.
Again Renan deemed himself a dreamer, like Jesus, who was, however,
also a man of action. Renan also saw his own effeminacy and kindliness
in Jesus, who, however, vented himself of vigorous utterances.

Renan also fancied he found in Jesus his own inherent hostility to
Jewish culture; his own anti-Semitism. As a matter of fact, Jesus owed
much to Jewish culture, though he wanted the Jews to abandon some of
their customs and to revise the Mosaic laws; the feeling among Jews was
that Jesus, instead of being anti-Semitic, wished to be their leader
and Messiah and King. Renan reads into Jesus his own anti-Semitism.
Those who are familiar with Renan's writings are aware of the many
slurring and contemptuous references he makes to the Jews. In fact,
one of the paradoxes of his life is that with his liberality and
gentleness, with his abandoning of all Christian dogma, he entertains
a bitter feeling towards the people who gave him his ideal man, the
people who originated, even by his own admission, many of Jesus's
maxims. Renan states that Jesus profited immensely by the teachings
of Jesus, son of Sirach, of Rabbi Hillel and of the synagogue. Renan
unjustly made Jesus have his own failing, anti-Semitism.

Strangely enough, Renan's treatment of the story of Jesus (outside of
his giving Jesus traits of his own) has been very largely a Jewish one.
It is for this reason that all devout Christians were offended. Renan
treated Jesus as a man and refused to credit all the legends connected
with him. Renan did not believe that Jesus was born without a human
father; that he was a member of a Trinity; that he could perform
supernatural miracles. In short, Renan did not accept Jesus as a son
of God, though giving him traits almost divine and free from human
frailties. The picture of Jesus in the life is an idealised Jewish
portrayal.

Renan serves as one of the best examples of a free thinker remaining
a devotee of his faith, though discarding all the tenets on which it
rests. His early religious training had a permanent influence on him,
and he was a Christian all his life, even though he differed with the
church. In one of his last and most profound essays, the "Examination
of the Human Conscience," he gives us a confession of his faith. Here
he appears as a pantheist, but ventures incredible guesses that there
may be a supernatural. His church mind plays havoc with his Spinozism,
and we see his early infantile influences. Intellectually at times
he stands high, higher it may be said without irreverence than his
master Jesus, since he had at his command a knowledge of science and
philosophy with which Jesus was unfamiliar. The greatness of Renan
appears in his _Philosophical Dialogues_, in his _Philosophical
Dramas_, in his _Future of Science_, in the _Anti-Christ_ and other
essays and books. When he moralises he is a monk; when he speculates on
philosophic and scientific subjects, he is a thinker. George Brandes's
Renan as a dramatist is an excellent study.[F]

Yet literature scarcely offers such an instance of a man projecting
himself upon a historical character. Such a projection is similar
to the seeking, in an unusual degree, by nervous people of moral
shelter and consolation in some other person. The reposing of Renan
on Jesus gives us an insight into the birth of worship of religious
founders. Pfister, a disciple of Freud, and himself a Christian
pastor, says: "In the divine father-love, he, whose longing for help,
for ethical salvation, is not satisfied by the surrounding reality,
finds an asylum. In the love for the Saviour, the love-thirsting soul
which finds no comprehension and no return love in his fellowmen is
refreshed."

A complete psychoanalytic study of Renan, which this essay does not
pretend to be, would make a fuller inquiry into his relations with
his mother, his affection for his sister and her influence on him
and his never-swerving admiration for the priests who were his early
teachers. He has left tributes to all of them. They ruled his life.
In his unconscious a fixation upon them was buried. His love for them
kept him a Christian, when intellectually he was a free thinker. They
are present in his _Life of Christ_, and the psychoanalyst can see them
guiding the pen of Renan. They are always with him. Had they not loved
him and he them so intensely, had he not inherited so strongly those
meek, effeminate and kindly traits, his temperament might have been as
unchristian as his intellect.

We see why the extreme liberal and the orthodox Christian were
offended by his _Life of Christ_, and why hundreds of pamphlets and
articles were written against it. It was really a portrait of the
author, and the unconscious Christian in him puzzled the radicals,
while his conscious intellect seemed like blasphemy to the devout
followers of dogmas. He gave his own idealised traits to his hero,
and the freethinkers complained Renan made Jesus a god anyhow, while
it seemed an insult to the Christians that mere moral virtues instead
of divinity should be thrust upon Jesus, who they felt did not need
Renan's compliments.


II

Authors also draw on the unconscious for their immoral characters.
In _Pere Goriot_ Balzac drew himself in Eugene Rastignac, but the
author is also present in the villain of the novel, Vautrin or Jacques
Collins, who appears likewise in _Lost Illusions_ and _The Splendors
and Miseries of Courtesans_. Vautrin, it will be recalled, tries to
persuade Eugene to marry a girl whose father will leave her a million
francs, if Eugene consents to have her brother, the more likely heir,
despatched by a crony of Vautrin's. Thus Eugene would be enabled to
become rich immediately instead of being compelled to struggle for
years. Vautrin wants a reward for his services. Vautrin's words are
really the voice of Balzac's unconscious; Eugene's inner struggles are
Balzac's own; and though the young student rejects the proposition he
takes up Vautrin's line of reasoning unconsciously, even though to
drop it. Vautrin's Machiavellian viewpoint was at times unconsciously
entertained by Balzac himself, though never practised. We know Balzac
always sought for schemes of getting rich to pay his debts, and was
always occupied with thoughts of his aggrandisement and ambition. He no
doubt unconsciously entertained notions that riches, love, fame might
be attained by violating the moral edicts of society; these ideas may
have obtruded but a few seconds to be immediately dismissed. But once
they made their appearance they were repressed in Balzac's unconscious,
and emerged in the characters of Vautrin and other villains who are the
author's unconscious.

Balzac understood that vice often triumphed and that the way of virtue
was often hard. "Do you believe that there is any absolute standard in
this world? Despise mankind and find out the meshes that you can slip
through in the net of the code." Vautrin here gives Balzac's inner
unconscious secret away. The author was not aware that he drew upon
himself unconsciously in depicting Vautrin. This, of course, does not
mean that Balzac agreed with Vautrin. We remember Eugene shouted out
to Vautrin, "Silence, sir! I will not hear any more; you make me doubt
myself." The author merely got his unconscious into one of his leading
villains, just as Milton did in Satan, as Goethe did in Mephistopheles.

Vautrin is Lucien de Rubempré's evil influence also, and Balzac saw how
disastrously he himself might have ended his life had he heeded his
unconscious, his Jacques Collin.

Since literature is often depicting struggles and conflicts with our
evil instincts, it deals directly with the material of the unconscious;
for the unconscious that psychoanalysis is concerned with is that
which springs from repressions forced upon us by society as well as by
fate. In literature the unconscious appears under various symbols and
disguises, just as it does in dreams. The devil, for example, is but
our unconscious, symbolised. He represents our hidden primitive desires
struggling to emerge; he is the eruption of our forbidden desires.
His deeds are the accomplished wishes of our own unconscious. We are
interested in the devil because he is ourselves in our dreams and
unguarded moments.

The fascination that the villain has for us is because our unconscious
recognises in him a long-forgotten brother. True, our moral sense soon
prevails, and we rejoice when the rascal is worsted, but he represents
the author's unconscious as well as our own. Any one who has read of
the thoughts and conduct of Raskolnikoff in _Crime and Punishment_,
or of Julian Sorel in _Red and Black_, or of George Aurispa in _The
Triumph of Death_, will see that much of the authors themselves,
or rather their unconscious selves, is drawn in these criminals.
Dostoievsky, Stendhal and D'Annunzio all said to themselves in writing:
"I too might have ended like these characters. I did think their
thoughts and a slight circumstance could have led me to the crimes they
committed."

The man who hates a vice most intensely is often just the man who
has something of it in his own nature, against which he is fighting.
The author sometimes punishes himself in his novel by making the
character suffer for engaging in the course of life that the author
himself followed. There is always a suspicion, when a writer raves most
furiously against a crime or act, that he has committed that deed in
his unconscious.


III

The reason La Rochefoucauld, author of the _Maxims_, is called a cynic
is because he reveals the unconscious, at the bottom of which is
self-love. He knows that there is great egotism, nay something akin to
depravity, at the root of our emotions. He shows us much in our psychic
life that many of us never suspected was there. When he brings it forth
we grow indignant and yet say to ourselves, "How true!"

Let us examine a few of these maxims at random and note the insight
into the unconscious that the author displays. He understood that
repression was at the basis of our unconscious. Take the following
sentence: "Wit sometimes enables us to act rudely with impunity."
This saying anticipates Freud's analysis of wit in his _Wit and the
Unconscious_. The Frenchman digs up in a sentence the hidden strata
of the unconscious. La Rochefoucauld recognised that we must curb
our primitive instincts, repress our private wishes, and leave our
innermost thoughts unexpressed in order to adapt ourselves to people.
The world moves by concealing for charity's, and often decency's,
sake its unconscious. "Men would not live long in society," says the
_Maxims_, "were they not the dupes of each other."

He knew that our primitive instincts could be subdued only when they
were not too strong, and that virtue was practised when it was not
difficult to do so. "When our vices leave us we flatter ourselves with
the idea we have left them." "If we conquer our passions it is more
from their weakness than from our strength." "Perseverance is not
deserving of blame or praise, as it is merely the continuance of tastes
and feelings which we can neither create nor destroy."

He understood the great part played by vanity in the unconscious. The
most modest of us are, in our unconscious, vain. "When not prompted by
praise we say little." "Usually we are more satirical from vanity than
malice." "The refusal of praise is only the wish to be praised twice."

La Rochefoucauld was aware of the unconscious "immoral" instincts in
virtuous women. Though we may dislike him for some of his remarks, he,
however, gave utterance to a truth when he asserted that women do not
want their love or sex feelings repressed any more than men do. "There
are few virtuous women who are not tired of their part." "Virtue
in woman is often love of reputation and repose." Freud went a step
further and showed that women usually have neurosis from repressed sex.

The Frenchman also understood the rôle played by the unconscious in
friendship, and that is the reason he made his well-known statement,
"In the adversity of our best friends we always find something which is
not wholly displeasing to us." He might have been less brutal had he
stated his meaning directly in words to the following effect: When we
strive for the same goal as our friend and he reaches it and we do not,
his success hurts our vanity and we would almost prefer that he too had
failed. We are pleased by his success only if we would profit thereby.

La Rochefoucauld's statement, "It is well that we know not all our
wishes," will be appreciated by students of psychoanalysis.

To conclude, La Rochefoucauld always read between the lines in deeds
he saw. He fathomed the hidden motives of our conduct. Note the great
powers of observation he displayed in the following: "Too great a hurry
to discharge an obligation is an ingratitude." "The gratitude of most
men is but a secret desire of receiving greater benefits."

He recognised that life is often possible only by a process of
self-deception, but that too much of such deception is responsible for
individual and social evils. There are times when the truth about our
unconscious must be told, no matter how painful.

FOOTNOTE:

[F] International Quarterly.




CHAPTER VIII

GENIUS AS A PRODUCT OF THE UNCONSCIOUS


I

In studying the psychology of authorship by means of psychoanalysis
we learn something about the unconscious growth of an author's book;
this phase of its process has not been universally admitted. We are
often told certain incidents gave rise to the writing of a volume, but
they were only the precipitating factors. The book had shaped itself
unconsciously in the author's mind long before; it only gets itself
projected in an endurable form. So though Stevenson tells us that the
shape of a map of an island took his fancy and gave birth to _Treasure
Island_, we know as a matter of fact that he had, as a boy, for many
years been leading mentally the life of the treasure hunters. Stevenson
himself relates how the brown faces of his characters peeped out upon
him from unexpected quarters. The map just set him in action.

Let me sum up briefly the growth of a literary performance from a
psychoanalytical standpoint. Let us assume that the author at some
time of his life was placed amidst circumstances the reality of which
jarred on him, offended his sense of beauty, wrecked his happiness
and frustrated his most cherished desires. Deprived of a world that
he wished to inhabit, he built one in his fantasies and day dreams,
one that was the very opposite of that in which he was constrained
to dwell. If he was toiling in barren labour he pictured himself at
congenial work, or leisure; if he dwelt in squalor and was deprived
of necessities, he mentally placed himself in beautiful surroundings,
rolling in luxury, and in possession of property he prized most. If he
had no one to love he formed an ideal for himself, with whom he lived.
If the loved one did not return his love he depicted himself as wed to
her.

That literature is influenced and created by the wishes of the
character or author may be seen readily. A tale of Ernest Renan sheds
light on this theory, and also serves as a valuable illustration how
neurotics and insane people derive their illnesses from unfulfilled
love desires, and how they build phantasies where those wants are
satisfied. Pleasant pictures appear in day dreams, but these often
assume such reality that the victim cannot tell the fanciful from
the actual. In the first sketch in his autobiography, called _The
Flax Crusher_, Renan relates a pathetic story of a daughter of a flax
crusher who lost her mind because her love for a priest was unreturned.
She unconsciously carried out her wishes in her actions and thoughts.
She would take a log of wood and dress it up in rags and rock and kiss
the artificial infant and put it in the cradle at night. She imagined
that this was her child by the priest. Thus she stilled the maternal
urge. She fancied that she was keeping house for him. She would hem and
mark linen, often interlacing his and her own initials. She finally was
led to commit theft from his home. This story was taken from real life.
The artist who is frustrated in love acts as this girl; he imagines
that his love is being fulfilled and that he is living with the loved
one.

A classic example of fantasy building is Charles Lamb's _Dream
Children_. Rejected by the sweetheart of his youth, Ann Simmons, he
pictured himself married to her and surrounded by their children and
talking to them and entertaining them. He projected a world as it might
have been, and as he desired it for himself; he wakes up from his day
dream--the children were merely those of his imagination.

Day dreams then are the beginning of literary creation. In them we
create a world for ourselves, and we make actual people fit into that
world. After such continual living in a fictitious realm a writer seeks
to express himself, and if he is an artist, to give it endurable form.
If the dreamer dwells too long in one imaginative abode he may lose
the faculty of distinguishing the real from the ideal. He may become
subject to hallucinations and become utterly unbalanced as did Renan's
flax crusher's daughter.

The literary man generally saves himself from neurosis by putting his
dream into artistic shape; though writing of their dreams and troubles
has not prevented artists from going mad, nor continuing to brood over
the troubles that had already inspired their works. But the point of
difference is clearly established between the neurotic and the artist.
One dreams on till he is rescued from going mad by a physician's help,
if possible; the other partly cures himself by self-expression, and
at the same time gives the world a piece of art or literature, which
consoles many, because they too have either had or witnessed similar
troubles, or consider themselves possible victims to such sorrows.

Very few English writers understood the mechanism of day dreams better
than Dr. Johnson, as the chapter in _Rasselas_ on "The Dangerous
Prevalence of Imagination" shows.

One of the best illustrations of the psychoanalytic theory of
authorship detailed by the writer himself occurs in a once-famous
English novel, Kingsley's _Alton Locke_, published in 1850. Alton Locke
tells us how he came to write poetry. The chapter entitled "First
Love" recounts the process, and we learn how because he led a life of
drudgery, he created a far more pleasant one in his imagination and
then unconsciously sought to make a record of this life.


II

Psychoanalysis is always interested in learning exactly how literary
masterpieces are born. Just as it seeks to know through dreams what are
some of the hidden secrets in the unconscious, so it tries to discover
what unconscious life made the writer project his vision.

Two of the most famous love stories of the eighteenth century which
had a personal background, and whose evolution have been told by the
authors, themselves, were Rousseau's _Nouvelle Heloise_ (1760), and
Goethe's _Sorrows of Werther_ (1774). They were the predecessors of the
entire field of autobiographical love-lorn lugubrious literature that
pervaded Europe in the early decades of the nineteenth century. George
Brandes has shown how Chateaubriand, Madame de Stael, Senancour, Byron,
George Sand and others owed much of their methods of recording their
love troubles to these two novels. We to-day scarcely realise the great
vogue that these tales at one time had.

The authors have given us accounts of the birth of these novels. Both
of these geniuses had been frustrated in their loves; as a result
they created mental fantasies and lived in a more pleasant world of
their own creation, and finally, bursting with desire for expression,
produced their novels. The unconscious life buried in them came forth
and was crystallised in art. Rousseau's _Confessions_ and Goethe's
autobiography, _Poetry and Truth_, tell us how the novels came to light.

In the ninth book of the _Confessions_, Rousseau informs us that when
he reached the age of forty-five, he realised that he had really never
enjoyed true love. As a result he began living in a fantastic world
where his craving was satisfied. He realised his wishes in his day
dreams. "The impossibility of attaining real beings," he says, "threw
me into the regions of chimera, and seeing nothing in existence worthy
of my delirium, I sought food for it in the ideal world, which my
imagination quickly peopled with beings after my own heart." He tells
us how he valued love and friendship, and that he created two female
friends according to his taste, that he gave one of them a lover, who
was also the platonic friend of the other lady; that in this friend and
lover he drew his own portrait. He imagined that there were to be no
rivalries or pain. These fictions, he continues, gained in consistence.
He then had an inclination to put on paper this situation of fancy.
"Recollecting everything I had felt during my youth, this, in some
measure, gave me an object to that desire of loving which I had never
been able to satisfy, and by which I felt myself consumed." Here we
have the secret. He sought in art what he had not in reality. At first
he wrote incoherent letters, just as his feelings prompted him, and he
thus completed the two first parts of the novel (which is in the form
of letters) without a conscious effort to make a connected work.

At this time Rousseau, who was a married man, fell in love with the
wife of D'Holbach, Sophia D'Houdetot. He loved her madly. He says, "It
was not until after her departure that, wishing to think of Julia
(his heroine), I was struck with surprise at being unable to think of
anything but Madame D'Holbach." He now identified the real with the
ideal; he found the woman of his dreams. But now his troubles began.
Union with his beloved Countess was impossible. New emotions rose
within him, as material for his novel. The work really wrote itself.
He originally formed an ideal because he was not loved by any one who
fulfilled that conception. When he discovered such a person and she was
beyond his attainment, he imagined himself as her lover. All the misery
he recorded had its counterpart in his personal experience. Without the
unconscious reveries which he indulged in as a result of his needs and
tribulations, the novel would not have been written.

After the story was published, women worshipped the author. It was
recognised that he was the hero of the book, and it was generally
believed that the characters were not fictitious. The novel gives us
an account of the real Rousseau at least as fully as the _Confessions_
themselves, where facts are not always truthfully reported.

Goethe has recorded just as minutely the origin of his _Sorrows of
Werther_. He traces the book back to his love for Charlotte Buff, the
betrothed of a friend of his. He resolved to give free play to the
idiosyncrasies of his inner nature. He describes how he had day dreams
and how he held mental dialogues with different people. He then was led
to record these fancies on paper. The substances of his novel "were
first talked over with several individuals in such imaginary dialogues,
and only later in the process of composition itself were made to appear
as if directed to one single friend and sympathiser." He became weary
of life, and had suicidal thoughts. He then heard of the suicide
of his friend Jerusalem, who had been in love with a married woman.
Goethe saw that he was really in the same position as his friend; his
loved one belonged to another. "On the instant," Goethe goes on, "the
plan of Werther was formed, and the whole drew together, and became
a solid mass. I was naturally led to breathe into the work I had in
hand all the warmth which makes no distinction between the imaginary
and the actual." He wrote the book in four weeks. "I had written the
little volume, almost unconsciously like a somnambulist." As a result
he freed himself from his suffering. The artist stepped in and cured
the man. Goethe illustrates the theory that artistic creation acts as
a self-cure of a developing neurosis. "By this composition," Goethe
wrote, "more than by any other, I had freed myself from that stormy
element in which ... I had been so violently tossed to and fro. I felt
as if I had made a general confession and was once more free and happy,
and justified in beginning a new life."

The public thought that the book was solely the history of young
Jerusalem's tragic love affair, and did not altogether understand
that the cry was Goethe's own. His mental dialogues and the longings
of his inner spirit found expression in this novel. His sufferings
were undecipherable by the public, he tells us, because he worked in
obscurity. He also gave the attributes of several women to Lotte, and
hence several ladies claimed to have been the original models.

Thus we see how two great love stories were created almost
unconsciously by the authors. Day dreams and actual love; the longing
for reality, for lack of which imaginary situations were created; and
the putting down in the form of letters and dialogues the ideas and
emotions that burst forth, all led to the shaping of the literary
product.


III

Psychoanalysis sheds some light on the nature of genius, and especially
literary genius. But it does not define it within hard and fast lines.

Literary works are largely the result of repressions that the author
has suffered; he has been led as the result of them to cry out his
sorrow or to depict ideal situations where such grief as his does not
exist. He must write so that people who have had similar repressions,
or who can imagine them, will find a personal appeal in the works
they read. But the situations described must also, besides evoking
an emotional appeal, stir the readers intellectually, so that they
sympathise where the writer counted on sympathy. When the author writes
only of his joys, the unconscious is also at work.

The writer also must be a master of his art, so that fundamental rules
of composition and outrages on common sense he does not violate.

Especially when the author has discovered new features of his
unconscious life, or has been led to present original and profound
ideas as a result of such discoveries; particularly when he moves the
reader with intensity and evokes a passionate response, does the writer
begin to merit the name of genius. When we say that a genius is a man
who discovers a new truth or depicts beauty, we really mean that he
is a man who, having experienced a repression, has been led to make
certain conclusions from that event, that society has not wished to
admit; he is a great artist when he gives an effective description of
that repression; he is a great thinker when he sees certain ways by
which that repression may be avoided, and he is a humanitarian when
he informs the world how to attain a form of happiness that had been
denied him.

We thus do away with the very pernicious doctrine that genius is a form
of degeneracy or insanity. Geniuses are often sufferers from neurosis,
or describe characters suffering from them; they are not degenerates,
as Lombroso and Nordau would have us believe. A neurotic person and
a degenerate one are not necessarily the same. The term "degenerate"
is not the proper name for men like Ibsen or Tolstoi, no matter how
repugnant their ideas might be to people. Nor does it follow that
because some poets like Villon, Verlaine and Wilde had spent time in
jail for crimes, their poems are to be stamped as degenerate products.
While it is apparent that some of the author's insanity appears in
works by Swift, Rousseau, Maupassant, Nietzsche and Strindberg, their
masterpieces are noble works of art.

The faculty of literary genius is not possessed by a few; many people
possess some of its qualities. Intelligent or sincere lovers have often
written love letters that never got into print which were stamped
with the qualities of genius. Highly gifted people in private life
often utter thoughts which if collected and published would constitute
works that show genius. There have been many people who have uttered
sentiments as wise as those found in Boswell's _Life of Johnson_, or
Eckermann's _Conversations of Goethe_, but the ideas were not reduced
to writing, either by the speaker or a friend. Goethe once said that
every genius has in his lifetime been acquainted with men who were
obscure and unproductive, but who possessed greater intellects, more
originality than those geniuses themselves.

There is no dividing line between the genius and the talented or even
average person, any more than there is a marked boundary between the
normal and the abnormal.

The genius, however, always has something of the pioneer in him; even
after his work is no longer new, he retains the title of genius, though
there are people who can write better works than he.

The world has agreed on some geniuses. Most people are ready to admit
that a few men of letters like Shakespeare, Molière, Cervantes, Goethe
and Balzac were geniuses of the first order. But when we are concerned
with literary men who have done good work, it is not easy to say
whether they were geniuses, though we are ready enough to admit that
they had the qualities that make up genius.

The genius must be able to do more than write of the repressions which
he has actually experienced; he must be a master of technique and means
of expression. He must be able to describe with force and imagination,
those repressions he has witnessed others suffer. The more use he makes
of his unconscious, the nearer he gets to truth, and it has often been
the lot of genius to depict those very emotions which society wants to
be kept in the unconscious; and the more he draws on his unconscious,
the less use he has for actual experience.

Yet the ability to present works of human interest that appeal to
the public does not alone constitute genius; otherwise many of the
thrillers of the movies would be works of genius. Nor does the writing
of sad tales or giving ideal pictures make genius. There must be an
important idea, or the presentation of the emotion in a particularly
compelling manner. Then there is something cumulative about genius;
we expect from it a repetition of literary feats that is beyond the
power of most writers; we are not contented with an isolated literary
effort. Still, there are poets who are regarded as geniuses though they
have produced but one or a few pieces of importance.

The literary genius then has a keen insight into the psychology of the
repression of the emotions and can beautifully express this repression
and make valuable intellectual deductions therefrom. He can vary this
work for many years, and move people who think.




CHAPTER IX

LITERARY EMOTIONS AND THE NEUROSES


I

The emotions that literature deals with bear a close analogy to
symptoms in the neuroses or nervous diseases. Every emotional conflict,
every repressed love is an incipient neurosis, and often the sufferings
described in books are full-fledged cases of neuroses. The author may
unintentionally draw characters suffering griefs which the physician
can recognise as analogous to the cases he has observed in practice.
The writer may show how the character cures himself of his neuroses by
being made aware of the unconscious forces struggling within him, or
how the sufferer effects a recovery by sublimation, or how he succumbs
to his disease.

Some authors like Rousseau in his _Confessions_, or Strindberg in his
_Confessions of a Fool_, give us detailed accounts of their neuroses,
though they may not always exactly fathom the causes. Poets have in
their collections of lyrics told us of the sufferings that they have
personally gone through, and the trained scientist can see to what
neuroses the symptoms described are related. Other authors have in the
guise of fictitious characters described the neuroses they have been
suffering. Byron in his _Manfred_, Hauptmann in his Heinrich in the
_Sunken Bell_, Shakespeare in _Hamlet_, Goethe in _Faust_, have told us
of love repressions that were their own, and these characters can be
studied by critics as neurotic patients are analysed by physicians.

The author may draw himself in the guise of a character who is utterly
insane, as Cervantes did in _Don Quixote_. One feels here that the
author was his own knight; in fact, he too had a sneaking fondness for
books of chivalry, and the familiarity that his hero shows with them
is good evidence that Cervantes was a careful student of that kind of
literature. He too had been bruised by windmills; he too found that
the real did not coincide with his ideals. It is most likely that Don
Quixote developed his mental illness by his abstinence from love, by
living in fancy with the high dames he read about, and by cherishing
an affection unreciprocated for the peasant girl he called in his
madness Dulcinea del Toboso. At least these factors cannot be ignored
in the insanity he developed from reading books of chivalry. It is not
improbable that Cervantes drew on a real woman for Dulcinea; he too
had wasted affection on some woman, ignorant and coarse, whom he took
for a lady of high degree. We do know that in the year he married, in
1584, at the age of thirty-seven, he had an illegitimate daughter by
a certain woman. There is also a tradition that he had a few years
previously a daughter by a noble lady in Portugal, and though this
story is discredited, it must have had some basis in reality. However,
Cervantes, though not, like his knight, suffering a mental ailment,
must have had a neurosis on which he drew for the material of this
novel; it was no doubt caused by his worship of a Dulcinea del Toboso.

Writers like D'Annunzio and Dostoievsky have given us complete cases of
neuroticism; they described themselves in their books. Since the line
between the normal and the abnormal psychic condition is hard to draw,
and we all daily or at different crises in our lives overstep the
limits, the works of literary men as a rule deal with those cases where
the morbid and normal merge. Freud said that no author has avoided all
contact with psychiatry. And he is assuredly right. Dickens's eccentric
characters, Balzac's heroes and villains in the grip of great passions,
neurotics like Bunyan, A'Kempis and Pascal, whose repressed love no
doubt made them religious maniacs; Iago, Richard the Third, Macbeth,
Hamlet, Anthony and Timon of Shakespeare, the leading characters of
Ibsen, the unhappy Heine, De Musset, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Leopardi,
Carducci, Burns, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Poe and Hearn can all be
studied like patients suffering from neuroses. In fact all characters
in fiction who suffer are related to neurotics, for sex and love is
usually the cause of their troubles, for as Freud says, "In a normal
sex life no neurosis is possible." The author occasionally deals with
severe cases of neuroses, and the psychiatrists with mild ones, and
their provinces are often the same. The writer details his case with
art, and lays stress on the emotional phase and deduces ideas, while
the psychiatrist gives us bare scientific analyses. "The author," says
Freud, "cannot yield to the psychiatrist nor the psychiatrist to the
author, and the poetic treatment of a theme from psychiatry may result
correctly without damage to beauty." (_Delusion and Dream_.)

Cases of neurosis often especially lend themselves to literary
treatment. Think of the women sufferers in literature like Madame
Bovary, Hester Prynne, Anna Karenina, Hedda Gabler, Magda; you can
always trace their troubles to love repressions. Fictitious characters
who have not had a natural outlet for their love and have been
abstinent, or have had a love disappointment or have suffered from
aberrations of the infantile love life, present phases of neuroses.

Freud has studied Jensen's novel _Gradiva_, and shows how the leading
character has troubles analogous to the psychoneuroses, and cures
himself unconsciously by the methods of psychoanalysis.

Literature records many fully developed cases of neuroses. A story
like the _Fall of the House of Usher_ presents a complete case of a
neurosis. Characters in literature who commit suicide, like Werther and
Hedda Gabler, are victims of neurosis; sex is usually at the bottom of
their difficulties. Every sufferer then in literature is a partly or
fully developed case of neurosis; at least an emotional disturbance due
to sex causes, akin to the neurosis, is always present. This fact is
sufficient for the laymen to know without their making a deep inquiry
into the nature of these neuroses and attempting to classify them. Here
the work of the physician begins and a penetrating insight into the
species of neuroses described in literature can be made only by the
psychoanalyst.

Nevertheless, there are some cases that even the layman may recognise
as soon as he has familiarised himself with the Freudian views of the
neuroses. In English the best technical books on the subject are the
translation of Hitschman's _Freud's Theories of Neuroses_, Brill's
_Psychoanalysis_ and Brink's _Morbid Fears and Compulsions_. Some of
Freud's own essays have been translated by Dr. Brill in _Selected
Papers on Hysteria_.

Freud divides the neuroses into two classes, the true or actual
neuroses, and the psychoneuroses.

The true neuroses are neurasthenia and anxiety neurosis, which formerly
was included under neurasthenia, but which Freud set off as a separate
class. He calls these true neuroses because there are present abnormal
disturbances of the sexual function, not necessarily due to heredity.
Neurasthenia is due to excessive physical abuse, and the anxiety
neurosis results from abstinence or unsatisfactory gratification.
All agencies which prevent the psychic utilisation of the physical
excitement lead to anxiety neurosis. Literature gives us cases of
true neuroses, but they are not as frequent as the other class, the
psychoneuroses.

The psychoneuroses are due to repressions but date back to infancy; the
influence of heredity is important; unconscious factors are at work.
The child's relation to his parents and his infantile sex life have
great influence on his future. The crisis comes when a love repression
in later life breaks out. The psychoneuroses are hysteria, compulsion
neurosis, and mixed cases, especially anxiety hysteria.

In hysteria the patient suffers from reminiscences, and his recent
experiences are unconsciously attached to infantile sexual impressions.
Instead of solving his love difficulties he builds fantasies. Certain
mental impressions remain fixed. The early painful effects struggle to
consciousness, but instead are transformed into uncommon inhibitions,
by a process known as conversion.

In compulsion or obsessional neuroses we also have unconscious
sexual factors at work since infancy, but the effect of the painful
idea affixes itself to other ideas, producing obsessions. These are
transformed reproaches which have escaped the repression. Morbid fears,
doubts and temptations are the result.

The most common form of neuroses in life, and hence most described in
literature, is anxiety hysteria. They partake of the nature of hysteria
and the true neurosis, anxiety. "In these cases," says Dr. Hitschman,
"the anxiety arises not only from somatic (physical) causes, but from
a part of the ungratified libido which embraces unconscious complexes
and through the repression of these gives rise to neurotic anxiety."
The excitation is psychic as well as physical.

Literature abounds then chiefly in the psychoneuroses and especially
anxiety neurosis.

All literature where the author is recalling old griefs on which he
still broods, looking upon them as if they had happened yesterday,
are related to hysteria. Incessant complaints about early love
disappointments, recalling all the incidents, constant memories of
the mother and of childhood days, and obstinate clinging to ideas and
pictures that were uppermost in early life, are related to hysteria.
Byron and Heine, harking back all the time to their early love woes,
were really sufferers from hysteria. Lady Macbeth, as Dr. Coriat has
shown, was a victim of hysteria.

We see obsessions at work in characters like Ibsen's Brand who aims at
all or nothing.

We find most troubles described in literature related to anxiety
hysteria, from the childish griefs of David Copperfield, Maggie
Tulliver and Jane Eyre, to the sad love experiences of the characters
of Thomas Hardy.

Literature is largely a record of the anxieties and hysterias of
humanity.


II

Byron is a good example of hysteria in literature. He loved Mary
Chaworth, and for nineteen years, from 1805, the date of her marriage,
to his death in 1824, she figured in nearly all his shorter love poems.
She was Astarte in _Manfred_. She is Lady Adeline in _Don Juan_, she
is, no doubt, "Thyrza"; she figured as the heroines of his eastern
tales.

In the poem, "The Dream," he refers to the irony of fate that married
each of them unhappily, and he describes his grief because he never wed
her. When the poem was published her husband was annoyed and cut down
some trees to which reference was made in the poem,--"the diadem of
trees" arranged in a circle.

There are nearly fifty lyrics in which she appears beyond doubt, not
mentioning the bigger poems where she often is present.

The last lines that Byron wrote in 1824, "I watched thee when the foe
was at my side," refer to her:

    "To thee--to thee--e'en in the grasp of death
    My spirit turned, oh! oftener than it might.
    Thus much and more; and yet thou lov'st me not
    And never wilt! Love dwells not in our will
    Nor can I blame thee, though it be my lot
    To strongly, wrongly, vainly love thee still."

The word "wrongly" shows that Mary was married.

She is referred to by him in his last letters.

The "Last Words to Greece," published posthumously, refer to Mary, and
contain the same sentiment of his famous poem, "Oh talk to me not of a
name great in story," written in 1821, and also posthumously published.
He cares more about Mary's love than for the honours he would attain as
hero in the Grecian War. He exclaims he is a fool of passion, and that
the maddening fascination of Mary can depress him low if she frowns.

The celebrated poem to the Po River, sent May 8, 1820, to Murray, was
inspired by "private feelings and passions"; he wrote Murray that it
must not be published. The river Po in the poem really refers to the
river Trent, in England, with memories of which Mary was bound to him.

There is no doubt about the fact that most of the early love poems
of Byron relate to Mary. Critics have, however, failed to note her
influence after the "The Dream," written in the summer of 1816, a half
a year after his wife left him. But the reader of the later cantos of
_Childe Harold_ and _Don Juan_ does not have to search too closely
between the lines to detect Mary's presence.

I think we may dispense with the theory that Byron was a poseur and
that his passion was unreal and rhetorical. Those lugubrious moods
were unfortunately sincere. He suffered from hysteria, and this was
connected with the lack of affection in infancy between him and his
mother. He is the hero and Mary is the heroine of all his work. She
made a neurotic out of him, and she is the cause of his moods when
he wrote "I have not loved the world, nor the world me" in _Childe
Harold_, or "From my youth upwards my spirit walked not with the souls
of men," in _Manfred_. This seems strange to us who recognise that
faithful love is often a pose, and that in real life men do not, as a
rule, brood about lost sweethearts when these are married to others,
and that they straightway marry themselves and smile over their past
loves, in whom in many cases they could not again find interest.

Byron's wife inspired only two poems,--the bitter "Lines on Hearing
Lady Byron Was Ill," and "Fare Thee Well"; she was also a model for two
women in _Don Juan_, who are not amiably treated. His mistress, the
Countess Guiccioli, may have been in part a model in _Cain_ for Adah,
along with Mary Chaworth, and she also inspired _Sardanapalus_.

For a long time the Thyrza poems of 1812 puzzled critics. They were
held to be addressed to no one in general; there was a claim by some
that they were addressed to a man, a friend he loved. But there can be
no doubt that Mary furnished the chief inspiration. In _Childe Harold_,
Canto II-9, he refers to Mary in the line "love and life together
fled," and in a Thyrza poem he uses the words, "When love and life
alike were new." Mary Chaworth was really responsible for Byronism.

Whether she ever committed adultery with him and had a child by him, as
is claimed by the author of _Byron, the Last Phase_, one cannot say.

In his four early volumes of poetry, published before he was
twenty-one, there are many poems inspired by Mary, and four poems,
written in 1805, addressed to Caroline, who was undoubtedly Mary, are
of especial excellence. The poems of his youth written to her included
the "Fragment," written after her marriage, in 1805, and "Remembrance,"
written the year after. Both of these poems were published after
Byron's death. A pathetic poem, _In the Hours of Idleness_ (1807), is
"To a Lady"; "Oh, had my fate been linked with thine." "When We Two
Parted" was written the following year, and referred to Mary. In 1808
Byron wrote a series of sad love poems to Mary, and they were published
in the next year, in 1809, in Hobhouse's _Imitations and Translations_.
They include "Remind Me Not, Remind Me Not," "To a Lady," "When Man
Expelled from Eden's Bowers," "Stanzas to a Lady on Leaving England,"
"Well! Thou Art Happy," "And Wilt Thou Weep When I Am Low," and "There
Was a Time I Need Not Name." The six great poems written to Thyrza and
published in 1812, with _Childe Harold_, were "To Thyrza" ("Without a
stone to mark the spot"), "Away, Away, Ye Notes of Woe," "One Struggle
More and I Am Free," "Euthanasia," "And Thou Art Dead and Young and
Fair," and "If Sometimes in the Haunts of Men." Mary was as if dead
to him, and he wrote of her accordingly. About the time of the Thyrza
poems, 1811 and 1812, he wrote other poems to her like the "Epistle
to a Friend" "I have seen my bride another's bride" and "On Parting
New." In 1813 appeared the two sonnets, "To Genevra" and "Remember
Him Whom Passion's Power"; in 1814, "Thou Art Not False, But Thou Art
Fickle," "Farewell! If Ever Fondest Prayer," "I Speak Not, I Trace Not,
I Breathe Not Thy Name." In 1815 appeared "There's Not a Joy the World
Can Give That It Takes Away," and 1816, "There Be None of Beauty's
Daughters."

Byronism, then, was due chiefly to the poet's early quarrels with his
mother, the separation from his wife, but above all his rejection by
Mary Chaworth.


III

Freud has told us that the idea of repression is the main pillar on
which the theory of psychoanalysis rests. There has been at some time
in the patient's life a serious inhibition of some desire. There are
different kinds of repression, the most serious of which have a sexual
basis. But the denying oneself of the play of any emotions that seek an
outlet, constitutes a repression.

Sex with Freud means love in its broadest sense. The most common
repression is the inability to satisfy one's love, either because the
person has not met any object upon whom to lavish his affection, or if
such an individual is found there is no reciprocation, or if the love
is given it is later withdrawn. All these factors act in a repressive
manner upon a person. For it must be understood that not only the
stinting of sexual satisfaction, but the interference with all those
finer emotions associated with it, cause a repression in the subject.
When the emotions have been satisfied for a long time, and then there
is a sudden cessation through change of heart or infidelity or death
of the beloved one, the repression is very serious. It is this kind of
repression that has produced most of the literature of the world.

But repression includes the stinting or uprooting of any emotion. Great
grief as the result of the death of any one we love of either sex,
whether friend or relative, is a repression. The death of a loved one
puts the sufferer in a worse position than the man who has been stinted
in a great love passion. And the great elegies in literature have been
cries of poets for the death of fellow writers. _Lycidas_, _Adonais_,
_In Memoriam_ and _Thyrsis_ are examples. The authors here suffered
repressions in the loss of brother poets.

The grief which seems to be the greatest of all, that following on the
death of a beloved child, is an instance of the most intense repression
on the part of a parent. Here there is nothing really sexual, but the
death of a child and the consequent agony to the parents is a far
greater repression than any purely sexual one. Hugo's famous elegies
on the death of his daughter which appear in the _Contemplations_ are
among the greatest poems of this kind. In America we have had a few
poems by Lowell, and a famous elegy by Emerson, _The Threnody_, in
which the loss of children is mourned.

If there were no repression, there would be little literature.

The varieties of repressions are as numerous as the emotions to
which we are subject. For the inability to satisfy any emotion is
a repression; the deprivation of an emotion long gratified, the
conquering of a habit or the struggle for activity of a partially
extinct emotion, are repressions. The feeling of loneliness or
homesickness, which has given rise to much good literature, shows
repressed emotion. The wish to wreak revenge or to punish evil or to
do away with injustice or to devote oneself to the following of an
ambition or the pursuit of a certain kind of labour, are all symptoms
of repressions.


IV

Psychoanalysis starts with the assumption that the entire past in a
man's life, beginning with the first day of his birth, is always with
him and is really never forgotten. That which has seemed to pass out
of the haunts of memory, has become part of our unconscious, and is
often revived in dreams. Nothing is really ever forgotten. De Quincey
understood this and discourses on the subject in his _Confessions of
an Opium Eater_ and thus anticipates an important modern psychological
discovery.

Longfellow said, "Let the dead past bury its dead." Ah, if it only
could! Ghosts of sorrows and griefs that we thought laid away still
revisit us even in our waking hours. They stalk before us and open up
closed wounds and we learn that these are not yet healed. They awaken
memories of agonies that again smite us; they make us hearken back
to unkind words dealt us, to suffering inflicted, to injustice done.
Shocks which time had made obtuse are revived; we reap the harvest of
anxieties garnered in our hearts; and we discover that the old despair
has not altogether vanished but still occasionally gnaws us.

The dead rules the living; forgotten incidents, soul-wrecking mistakes,
chance misfortunes still dominate us. We recall the mortification
of a decade or two ago and as its details are resurrected, we again
live through the madness of past years. Prejudices are thus built up,
unreasonable indeed. We become averse to a face that reminds us of a
countenance belonging to a person who troubled us.

The old poverty still haunts us in our present prosperity; memories of
unpleasant toil in the past may make us shrink in terror in our newly
found leisure or congenial labour. Mark Twain describes how in his
prosperity he would dream that he had to return to the hated lecture
platform or that he was again a pilot on the Mississippi River. Past
solitude may still send its roots down to the present and leave us
lonely in society. He who has known a starved body or many unfulfilled
desires, he who has been the victim of ridicule or persecution or never
before been encouraged or sympathised with, remembers the past only too
well, even when the world honours him with recognition.

Impressions are strongest in youth and hence molest us in old age. The
finer our nerves, the less easy is it to forget. The mother who has
lost a child cannot forget the misfortune even after other children are
born.

It is life's grimmest tragedy that we carry within us ghosts of our old
days--ghosts which take us by surprise with their vigour. They mock us
at their will; we are tormented unawares; we travel about with them
and cannot shake them off. They stand beside us when we love; they
take the savour out of our food; they dangle at our footsteps when we
go to the house of mirth; they trail us in ghastly pursuit long after
we have emerged from the house of mourning. Hence when the poet sings
and the philosopher speculates, when the storyteller gives us a tale,
unconsciously those old ghosts are with him and get between the lines
of his writings. An unseen spirit seems to move his pen and he tells
more than he had desired and he gives voice to emotions that he had
sought to suppress or regarded as long since buried in a sepulchre
that was impenetrable. But the dead passions and tear stained griefs
come gliding forth and pierce all barriers and dictate to him. They
even wish to be remembered, to be made as enduring in art as in life.
They never weary of uttering their sentiments; they pursue the human
race to eternity. And when we read of the troubles of man whether in
the _Bible_ or the _Iliad_, they are familiar often to us because they
are our own. The author cannot escape the past and he always opens up
more channels of his heart than he has suspected. His work shows that
his old sorrows rise up like the phœnix from its own ashes. His ghosts
appear in his art; the fires that were thought smouldering are lighted
and we as readers are caught in the flames and are purged in them.

Psychoanalysis tries to rid us of the evil influences of the past by
making us aware of the unconscious disturbances.




CHAPTER X

THE INFANTILE LOVE LIFE OF THE AUTHOR AND ITS SUBLIMATIONS


I

Those who are familiar with the theories of Freud are aware that one
of his most important discoveries is that the child before the age
of puberty has a sex or love life of its own. As he puts it, it is
absurd to imagine that sex enters suddenly at the age of puberty just
as the devils in the New Testament were supposed to enter the swine.
Freud regards the child's sucking of its thumb as a manifestation of
infantile sexuality. In his _Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex_
he studies the sexual life of the child. This theory which met with
much opposition is beginning to be accepted. The studies of Moll,
Havelock Ellis, and Helgemuth confirm Freud's views.

The value of the theory is in this: It shows that the nature of our
later emotional and especially our love life is far more dependent upon
the nature, aberrations, inhibitions, sublimations, developments and
transformations of our infantile sex life than we ever in our wildest
dreams imagined it to be. Here in childhood are laid the seeds of our
future emotional life. Early repression or seduction or bad training
influences our later lives. These facts are recognised by many trained
parents who refuse to over-fondle their children or to do anything
that may awaken a sexual activity too prematurely.

Freud's idea is of value to the literary critic for it shows that the
characteristics of an author's work may be traced back to his infantile
sex life. As a rule we know little about the lives of literary men
when they were children, but we can often judge what the infantile sex
life must have been from the traits appearing in the writers' literary
performances.

Inversion or homosexuality can be traced to the child's love life. As
infants we are bi-sexual in our pre-dispositions. Children display
sentimental friendships for members of their own sex, as we all know.
Even in later life in each sex there are remnants of the other stunted
sex, breasts on the man and hairy faces on women. Freud has given us
a very interesting but by no means full explanation of the origin of
inversion. The abnormal development is favoured by the disappearance
of a strong father in early childhood, and by the overattachment to
the mother at the same or earlier time. The love for the mother is
soon repressed and the boy identifies himself with her and loves other
boys like himself. He returns to that self-love which is a second
stage after auto-eroticism in the infant, and is known as narcissism.
He wishes to love those boys as his mother has loved him. He may like
women but he transfers the excitation evoked by them to a male object,
for they remind him of his mother and he flees from them in order to
be faithful to her. He repeats through life the mechanism by which he
became an invert.

The fact then is that homosexualism is an abnormal development from the
infant's love life. It is in the germ in all normal people, especially
in those capable of intense friendships. It is naturally abhorrent to
us when it vents itself in any abnormal relations.

The sublimated homosexualism which we find in literature is that which
gives way to outbursts of friendly devotion, and intense and passionate
grief at the loss of a friend; it is at the root of the idea that a
man should lay his life down for his friend. Then there is the real
inversion which the world rightly stamps as immoral.

A few examples of literature where the homosexualism of the author's
unconscious is present are Shakespeare's _Sonnets_, Tennyson's _In
Memoriam_ and Whitman's _Calamus_. These works show what capacities
their authors had for friendship. It is the habit of some intellectual
homosexuals to try to interpret these works as indicative of
homosexual practices, as an excuse and consolation to them in their
own unfortunate condition. Whitman wrote to John Addington Symonds in
response to an enquiry about the _Calamus_ poems that he would prefer
never to have written them if they gave any one the inference that he
either practised or tolerated homosexualism.

Two poets of recent years who, we know, practised homosexualism, each
of whom also served jail terms, were Paul Verlaine and Oscar Wilde.
There were critics who saw that certain passages in Wilde's novel
_The Picture of Dorian Gray_, published about five years before he
went to jail, pointed to the homosexual proclivities of the author.
His curious interpretation of Shakespeare's sonnets also shows these.
It is possible that some of the love poems written by Verlaine and
which are supposed to be addressed to women were really written to
Arthur Rimbaud, the poet he loved. This is a practice indulged in by
homosexual poets to avoid suspicion.

The classic stories of ideal friendship are those of David and
Jonathan, and Damon and Pythias; the most widely known essays in
ancient literature discussing homosexual love as a legitimate pursuit
are in the dialogues on love by Plutarch and by Plato. Theocritus and
the _Greek Anthology_ authors refer to homosexual love.

The only interest the subject has for the psychoanalytic critic of
literature is in tracing the connection between the works of authors
where homosexual remnants in the form of extreme friendships are
present and their infantile sex life.

Freud's monograph on Leonardo da Vinci is the best study we have of a
homosexual artist.

It appears then that the bisexual tendency which is in infancy in all
of us, in later life may lead, where it does not become absolutely
normal, to actual homosexuality, or to a sublimation of this early
inverse tendency; one of the manifestations of this sublimation being
literary products in which friendship is exalted.


II

There are other perverts whose vices in later life can be traced to the
infantile sex life. These are sadists, masochists, exhibitionists and
voyeurs. The child's sex life takes place through the pleasures which
it creates for itself in the erogenous zones, which are sensitive areas
in any part of the body. It gratifies itself mainly on its own body;
it is autoerotic. But the sexual life soon derives pleasure through
other persons as sexual objects. There are also components or partial
impulses, which are: for causing cruelty to others (sadistic), for
deriving pleasure from pain to itself (masochistic), for showing itself
shamelessly (exhibitionistic), and for peeping at others in nude state
(the voyeur's instinct). As a rule these impulses are sublimated very
early, but if they persist the perversions govern the individuals for
the rest of their lives. Where they are sublimated we have as a result
some of the most essential features of our modern cultural institutions.

The child who continued shameless for a few years may become very vain,
and as an author write indecent literature. The child who was cruel
may later in life love contests and competitions, and write books
where cruel scenes or virulent abuse of people abound. The infant
who derived pleasure from pain inflicted on it may be interested in
solving intricate problems that as a man annoy him with a demand for
solution, and he will torture himself in solving them. He also may be a
conformist and find pleasure in crucifying himself upon the rack of the
church and the state and the home; or become a martyr for an idea. As a
writer he would depict martyrs or indulge in self-commiseration.

Literature shows sublimations of these impulses and also gives
evidences of the authors' perverse tendencies where these impulses have
not been sublimated; they may contrive to exist or be buried in the
unconscious.

There are many literary men who have been perverse in their tendencies
in later life without knowing it. Often the man who merely thinks he
is fighting Puritanism in art when he shows a tendency to describe the
nude only, or to describe people in compromising positions, is both an
exhibitionist and voyeur. These impulses have been suppressed in him
by civilisation and he finds an outlet for his unconscious by his art.
Such literature is not so much immoral as indecent. A literary man may
become an exhibitionist in his work so as to give play to an impulse
he cannot otherwise gratify. A writer may write exhibitionistic books
for money or to attract attention or for fun, but his work shows that
psychologically he has never completely suppressed the exhibitionistic
or peeping tendencies of his childhood. Like the child he is without
shame. The feature of the cheap and lascivious literature that is
written merely to pander to certain tastes is just in these traits.

But the traits of the exhibitionist and voyeur are found more or less
in much of the good literature of the world. In the cases of works,
however, like the Arabian Nights, Rabelais, Chaucer, the novels of
Sterne, Fielding and many others where great genius, intellect and
honesty are displayed, the liberal minded critic is willing to smile
and pass over these exhibitionistic blemishes. In the cases of the
older works these are due to the general looseness in speech of the
times.

The application of psychoanalytic methods puts then in a new light much
of the so-called immoral literature. In much of the indecent comic
literature, like the Restoration dramatists, Balzac's _Droll Tales_,
Boccaccio's _Decameron_ and La Fontaine's Tales, the object is to
arouse laughter by making a person accidentally exhibit himself. The
author still finds an outlet for his repressed exhibitionism. There is
a distinction between this literature and the "immoral" literature of
a writer like Ibsen, who merely differs with the current morality and
questions it, and who therefore seems immoral to the conventional man.

Again there is a distinction between exhibitionism in literature and
real immoral literature, where an author tries, for example, to defend
sexual crimes like rape or seduction.

Exhibitionism then as we find it in literary men points to infantile
practices that were never completely suppressed and are finding an
outlet. It is true, other motives may enter into the work. There may be
a disgust on the part of the writer at his fellowmen's hypocritical and
prudish standards of modesty and shame, and he may write to counteract
these. But the exhibitionism of writers like Apuleius, Petronius,
Gautier or Zola does not interfere, nay, sometimes enhances the
artistic value of their works.

Another form of sublimation of exhibitionistic traits leads to works
in which the author is always boasting or showing off, directly or
indirectly. Sometimes the sublimation process is not complete and we
have examples of the exhibitionistic traits alongside of the egotism.
The reader will at once think of Montaigne's _Essays_ and Rousseau's
_Confessions_, two of the greatest works in the world's literature.
Among ancients two of the vainest men were Cicero and Cæsar, whose
writings show that exhibitionistic traits of their infancy were strong.

We here may consider the effects of infantile sexual investigation.
Freud says its activity labours with the desire for looking, though
it cannot be added to the elementary components of the impulses. Many
readers may refuse to follow Freud here, where he concludes that
the great desire for knowledge in later life may be traced to this
infantile sexual curiosity. But that there must be some connection
cannot be doubted. A child who has never displayed any curiosity as to
where it came from must be one in whom the desire for knowledge has
not been and probably never will be strongly developed. The child is
the father of the student man. Freud asserts in his study of Leonardo
da Vinci that there are three sublimations in later life of this
curiosity, the most important and rarest being where a pure scientific
investigation replaces the sexual activity and is not occupied with
sexual themes. Thus he explains the scientific work of Leonardo and his
chaste life.


III

Let us now take up the other two partial impulses, sadism and
masochism, noted by Freud, and see their effect on the literary work of
a man in later life.

"The repression of the sadistic impulse," says Dr. Brink, "produces
not its annihilation but merely its transfer from consciousness to
unconsciousness. And there, withheld from the neutralising influence
of conscious reasoning, the impulse and the phantasies derived from
it are not only preserved without deterioration but may even grow in
vigour and intensity. Thus, despite the fact that in many instances the
individual's conscious life is apparently singularly irreproachable,
nevertheless this life is lived coincidently with an undercurrent of
impulses of anger, hate, hostility and revenge and their corresponding
phantasies" (_Morbid Fears_, page 291).

This would account for the tales of horror we find in Poe, Kipling
and Jack London. To-day we do not always assault or kill our enemies.
Literary men do so by depicting scenes in literature where this is
done. Jack London describes fist fights in which he is always defeating
his enemies. It is said that in real life he boasted of his abilities
as a fighter.

Pfister, in his _Psychoanalytic Method_, formulates a law from an
earlier work of his, as follows: "The repressed hate of certain
individuals forms phantasies out of suitable contents of experiences,
either actual or imaginary, according to the laws of the dream-work,
by which procedure it creates for itself imaginary gratification.
This gratification of complex comes about through the mechanism of a
disguised wish, directed towards the injury of the hated person, being
represented in the content of the waking dream as realised."

This explains the literature of hatred and how authors come to put
their enemies in books and poems. Such works are traceable to the sex
sadistic instincts of childhood. We find sadism in books reeking with
curses. Ovid's _Ibis_, directed against the person who was to blame for
his exile, is a good example; it is one of the most bitter invectives
in literature. We also understand now the significance of the imaginary
punishments inflicted by an author upon his enemies. The severe
chastisement inflicted by Dante in his _Inferno_ upon his enemies
represents the poet's wishes carried out in his imagination to gratify
him for his inability to fulfil his repressed hatred.

Literature abounds in hostile and satirical portrayals of the author's
enemies. In ancient Greece we have many examples, the best known
probably being the caricature of Socrates by Aristophanes, in the
_Clouds_.

Elizabethan literature, especially the drama, gives us portrayals of
fellow authors. Ben Jonson attacked the dramatists Marston and Decker
in _The Poetaster_ (1601), and they retaliated in _Satiromastix_. The
most familiar example in English literature of an abuse of enemies is
Pope's _Dunciad_. Then we have Byron's poem "The Sketch" directed at
the maid he considered responsible for his wife's desertion of him, and
Shelley's bitter diatribe "To the Lord Chancellor" against Lord Eldon,
whose decree deprived the poet of his two children. Richard Savage's
poem "The Bastard" against his alleged mother for neglecting him, her
illegitimate son, is not as well known as it used to be. An author who
was past master at the art of lampooning his enemies was Heine, and
his attacks on Count Platen in the _Pictures of Travel_ are among the
most bitter in literature. All these attacks follow one principle; the
author finds an outlet of his repressed hatred, and the desire for
vengeance not being always possible in a physical sense, in modern
times gives rise to phantasies of vindictiveness. The sadistic impulses
of childhood are the sources of such literary works.

Take the portrayal of Thersites in the second book of the _Iliad_. This
notorious character was surely some real person whom the author knew
and despised and on whom he wreaked vengeance by drawing him. He was
some man of Homer's own time, centuries after the Trojan War, and his
type is as common to-day as it was in the days of Homer. The poet no
doubt felt a grievance against some prattler and nonentity he knew, and
pilloried the man for posterity; the personal note appears throughout
the whole passage. Thersites is described as ill-favoured beyond all
men, bandy-legged, lame, round-shouldered, largely bald. He tries to
rebuke his betters, and Odysseus admonishes him severely, calling him
most base of the Greeks, telling him not to have the names of kings in
his mouth and threatening to strip and beat him. Thersites received a
welt on the back and sat down, crying. Then notice how Homer puts his
personal feelings still more into the mouth of the Greek who laughed
and said that Odysseus had done many great deeds but this is the best
he had done in that he had stayed this prating railer. Homer thus
punished some man he did not like. It is rather odd that those who
maintain the theory of the impersonality of the epic poem do not apply
a little knowledge of human nature in studying literature, as this is
often of more value than scholarship.

Lists may be compiled of nineteenth century novels, where the authors
drew as villains their enemies. Often these are fellow authors.
Dostoievsky put Turgenev into _The Possessed_ in an unamiable light,
under the character Karmazinoff. George Sand introduced lovers of hers
with whom she had parted in her novels, and Chopin and De Musset have
been drawn by her for us. Balzac righted his grievance against his
critic Jules Janin by putting him in the _Young Provincial in Paris_.
The motive of vengeance figures considerably in literature, though
at times a malevolent mischievous instinct drives the author on, as
when Dickens drew Leigh Hunt under the character of Harold Skimpole in
_Bleak House_. Sadistic instincts are of course primitive, and where in
ancient times a man might have put his enemy out of existence, to-day
he can kill him only in imagination. The man does not have to be a
personal enemy, but may be some character in real life who represents
an idea or follows a course of conduct that the author thinks
reprehensible. Demosthenes, Cicero, Milton, Swift and the author of the
Junius letters knew how to castigate their enemies. Hugo's attacks on
Napoleon in his _Chatiments_ and _Napoleon the Little_ are among the
most bitter in literature.

An excellent analysis of hatred is found in Hazlitt's _Pleasure
of Hating_, where he shows hatred is a real instinct and needs
satisfaction--it is a remnant of savage days. Hazlitt's attack on
Gifford presents many opportunities for the study of the psychology of
hatred.

There are other cases of sublimated sadism in practically all
literature where pain is described. The author displays a craving to
see people suffer even where he sympathises with them and he satisfies
that craving by drawing them in their agonies. Take Flaubert's keen
interest in describing the torture and sufferings physically inflicted
on Salammbo's lover Matho. There is hardly anything more sadistic in
literature than the conclusion of _Salammbo_.

Sadism is often sublimated into interest in contests. One of the most
ancient examples we have of such sublimation is in Pindar's _Odes_,
where contests in Greek games are described and the victors praised.
We have sadism, in fact, in all tales of competition where some one is
vanquished.

The sadistic trait is the source of the glee with which people watch
some one in a moving picture being beaten or hurt. It is the cause of
the pleasure and interest we find in reading of executions, battles and
physical suffering. There is nothing strange in tracing all this to
the delight we had as children in torturing animals. This is a partial
sexual impulse and is sublimated in most of us in later life and finds
expression in our literature.

It is held that masochism is usually found side by side with sadism.
Literature is also rich in sublimated masochism. Many authors are
apparently only happy in their woe. They find delight in torturing
themselves and in recounting their sufferings. Many of them were not as
unhappy as they persuaded us to believe. The whole school of woe that
had its origin in Rousseau and that was prominent in the early decades
of the nineteenth century was full of sublimated masochism. Hence it
has been called insincere. Byron and Chateaubriand were regarded,
though not justly, as affecting woes they never really felt. Some of
the sonneteers who imitated the Italians before and even during the
Elizabethan period wrote about woes they never felt. This is, however,
not the usual thing, and the greatest Elizabethan sonneteers like
Shakespeare, Spenser and Sidney described real troubles.

Another phase of sublimated masochism is the attempt to torture one's
self to solve puzzles and problems, and vex one's self more for the
sheer delight in unravelling difficult situations than for the pursuit
of knowledge. Note how children like to solve puzzles in newspapers.
Poe, who had the sadistic instinct in sublimation, also had the
masochistic impulse. We are familiar with his interest in reading
cryptograms and with his paper on the subject. We remember his essays
on studying persons' characters from their autographs. His stories of
ratiocination like the _Gold Bug_, the _Murder in the Rue Morgue_, the
_Purloined Letter_ are examples of sublimated masochism. His Dupin, the
detective, is an example of a man who likes to annoy himself. Sherlock
Holmes is the best known modern example. Indeed the interest in tales
of mystery and detective stories shows the power of the masochistic
instinct in human nature.

Still another example of sublimated masochism is found in stories and
plays where the idea of self sacrifice and penance figures. Dante's
_Purgatorio_ is a good illustration of the author's masochistic
tendencies as the _Inferno_ is of his sadism. He who tortures himself
whether to follow the laws of society or to fight them is masochistic.
Hence the tales of martyrs and heroes and idealists all betray the
sublimated masochistic impulse. Both the rebel and the conformist,
because they embrace torture, one might say almost willingly (though
they really cannot help it), are masochistic. All literature
describing these types show that the author has a keen interest in
this satisfaction in one's suffering, and are the results, if Freud is
right, of the author's infantile delight to suffer, which became later
sublimated.

Rousseau describes the pleasure he received from beatings, and this
masochism is seen in his _Confessions_, where he tells us of his woes
with apparent enjoyment in them.

All this is significant. Freud says: "Children who are distinguished
for evincing special cruelty to animals and playmates may justly be
suspected of intensive and premature sexual activity in the erogenous
zones; and in a simultaneous prematurity of all sexual impulses, the
erogenous sexual activity surely seems to be primary. The absence of
the barrier of sympathy carries with it the danger that the connections
between cruelty and erogenous impulses formed in childhood cannot be
broken in later life." (_Three Contributions_--Page 54.)

There is then a connection between the sadism and masochism of early
infancy which is related to sex, and the sublimations in art of those
impulses. People who can hate fiercely or are vindictive or have a
tendency towards cruelty or who like to torture themselves are as a
rule of strong sex impulses.


IV

There are other phases of infantile sexual life that rule a person
for life. One of these is that stage between the first period of the
child's first sex life known as autoeroticism when it finds pleasure
from its own body, and the period when it selects an object to love
apart from itself. This stage is called narcissism because then the
child loves itself. Many people never grow out of this; we are all
more or less narcisstic. This narcissism is the basis of egoism in
literature and is no doubt related to extreme individualism. Stirner,
Nietzsche, and Stendhal, who rank intellectually among the greatest
writers the world has had, are largely narcisstic.

Walt Whitman would form a good subject for study of the manner in
which infantile narcisstic sex life is sublimated in later life into
individualism.

The following are passages from the _Song of Myself_, showing that the
narcisstic infantile life of Whitman was sublimated into good poetry
and philosophy:

    "While they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself.
    Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty
and clean,
    Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be
less familiar than the rest....
    Having pried through the strata, analysed to a hair, counsel'd with
doctors and calculated close,
    I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones....
    Divine am I, inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am
touch'd from,
    The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,
    The head more than churches, bibles and all creeds.
    If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of
my body, or any part of it,
    Translucent mould of me it shall be you!...
    I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious."

His early narcissism did not lead him into selfishness but taught him
self-respect.

He says in the _Song of Myself_:

    "I am an acme of things accomplished and an encloser of things to
be ...
    I chant the chant of dilation or pride;
    We have had ducking and deprecating about enough...."

In _From Blue Ontario's Shore_, he writes:

    "It is not the earth, it is not America who is so great,
    It is I who am great or to be great, it is you up there or any one....
    Underneath all, individuals,
    I swear nothing is good to me now that ignores individuals,
    The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one
single individual--namely to You....
    I will confront these shows of the day and night,
    I will know if I am to be less than they....
    I will see if I have no meaning, while the houses and ships have
meaning."

The following lines from _I Sing the Body Electric_ is another example:

    "O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and
women, nor the likes of the parts of you;
    I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of
the soul and that they are the soul.
    I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and
that they are my poems...."

Where Whitman shows sublimations of these infantile phases he deduces
important and profound views of life to make us happier. He questions
whether the giving up of some of the heritages we surrendered to
cultural demands has not made us also part with some valuable emotions
and whether we have not denied ourselves rights we ought to resume. He
makes egoism respectable, and deduces individualism from it.


V

I also wish to mention that sexual aberration, in which an object unfit
for the sexual aim is substituted for the normal one, and is known as
fetichism. We need not go into the causes of it, but psychoanalysis
has shown that smell plays a part. We often find poets celebrating
the eyebrows, the gloves, and other objects connected with the women
they love. Though a certain amount of fetichism is normal in love,
literature gives us instances where it amounts to an aberrated passion
in the author. There is much fetichism in Gautier's stories, where he
dwells on the fetichistic characteristics of his heroes in whom he
describes himself. Then those poems where the sparrows and dogs of the
beloved are described as if the author were in love with them because
of their associations, those tales where too much attention is given to
the dress of the heroines, all have fetichistic traces.

A phase of sex life in the child that is significant for the future
is the sublimation that occurs in the sexual latency period between
the third and fifth year, when the sentiments of shame, loathing
and morality appear. These are reaction formations to the perverse
tendencies of infancy. They are brought about at the cost of the
infantile sexuality itself. These sublimations take place in the
beginning in this latency period, and if they do not occur there is
an abnormal development and the result is the latter perversions of
life. When we say a man has no moral sense, we mean not only that he
does not know the difference between right and wrong but that he is not
disgusted or shamed at sexual conduct that is held in abhorrence by
most people. Hence those authors who have this indifference to perverse
moral conduct in their work, never as children in the latency period
developed shame or disgust. All this is again evidence of the influence
of the sublimations in childhood upon later literary work and view
points. Girls as a rule develop this sense of morality earlier than
boys, and this no doubt accounts to some extent for the prudishness of
most women writers. The development is greater and we therefore find no
women Rabelais in literature.

It is no exaggeration then to say that the infantile sex life governs
the psychology of the future writer and the nature and tendency of his
work.




CHAPTER XI

SEXUAL SYMBOLISM IN LITERATURE


I

The repression of the libido includes the damming and clogging up
of all the emotional concomitants that go with sexual attraction
and make up the feeling called love. Whenever then sex or libido is
referred to in psychoanalysis the word has the widest meaning. The man
who loves a woman with the greatest affection and passion, without
gratifying these, suffers a repression of the libido, as well as the
man who satisfies certain proclivities without feeling any tenderness
or love for the woman. In the emotion felt towards the other sex
called love, in which admiration, respect, self-sacrifice, tenderness
and other finer feelings play a great part, there is consciously or
unconsciously, however, the physical attraction. If this is totally
absent the emotion cannot be called "love." What differentiates our
feelings towards one of the opposite sex from those felt for one of the
same sex (assuming there are no homosexual leanings) is the presence of
this sexual interest. Love then must satisfy a man physically as well
as psychically. It is a concentration of the libido upon a person of
the opposite sex, accompanied by tender feelings.

Hence when we read the most chaste love poem, we see what is the
underlying motive in the poet's unconscious. He may write with utter
devotion to the loved one and express a wish to die for her, and
though he says nothing about physical attraction, we all know that it
is there in his unconscious. It is taken for granted that a man who
writes a real love poem to a girl wants to enjoy her love. And when
the poet complains because he is rejected or deceived, or of something
interfering with the course of his love, we are aware also that his
unconscious is grieved because his union is impeded or entirely
precluded. The suffering is greater the more he loves, for his finer
instincts, as well as his passion, are prevented from being fulfilled.

Let us take at random a few innocent poems and test the theory. There
is Ben Jonson's well known toast, "Drink to me only with thine eyes."
He tells how he sent Celia a rose wreath, that she breathed on it and
sent it back to him.

    "Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,
    Not of itself but thee."

Odour is an important feature, it is well known, in sexual attraction.
In this poem the poet, after having received the returned rose breathed
upon by Celia, smells her perfume, which now submerges the natural
fragrance of the rose. In other words the poet's unconscious says that
he wishes to possess Celia physically. He is talking symbolically in
the poem.

There is the song in Tennyson's "The Miller's Daughter," beginning "It
is the miller's daughter." The poet says naïvely enough that he would
like to be the jewel in her ear in order to touch her neck, the girdle
about her waist ("I'd clasp it round so close and tight"), and the
necklace upon her balmy bosom to fall and rise; "I would lie so light,
so light." The unconscious sexual feelings here are only too apparent.
The symbols of the earring, girdle and necklace are unmistakable.
The poet is saying in a symbolical manner that he would possess the
miller's daughter.

Moreover one may see the sex motive in poems where it does not seem to
appear. If certain facts in an author's life are known, we may discern
the unconscious love sentiments in poems where no mention seems to be
made of them. Let me illustrate with a fine poem by Longfellow, the
familiar "The Bridge." Take the lines

    "How often, O how often,
    I had wished that the ebbing tide
    Would bear me away in its bosom
    O'er the ocean wild and wide!

    "For my heart was hot and restless,
    And my life was full of care,
    And the burden laid upon me
    Seemed greater than I could bear.

    "But now it has fallen from me, etc."

To the student of Longfellow, this poem speaks of the time he found it
difficult to win the love of his second wife, Frances Appleton, love
for whom he confessed in his novel _Hyperion_, where he drew her and
himself. This story was published before she had as yet reciprocated
his love. He married her July 13, 1843. He finished the poem October
9, 1845. At the end of this year he wrote in his diary that now he
had love fulfilled and his soul was enriched with affection. He is
therefore thinking of the time when he had no love and longed for it,
and now that he has it, he is thinking of the love troubles of others.
In the olden days he wanted to be carried away by the river Charles,
for his long courtship, seemingly hopeless, made his heart hot and
restless and his life full of care. So we see that in this poem the
poet was thinking of something definite, relating to love (and hence
also sex), though there is no mention of either in the poem.

It is well known that all love complaints are the cries of the Jack who
cannot get his Jill; or who has lost the possibility of love happiness
by desertion, deception or death.

Read that fine and pathetic Scotch ballad, beginning "O waly, waly
up the bank." The girl (or woman) has been forsaken by her lover
and expects to become a mother. She longs for death. She complains
about the cruelty of love grown cold; she recalls the happy days. Her
unconscious sentiment is that her lover will never give her spiritual
happiness or satisfy her craving. Her life is empty. The poem was based
on an actual occurrence. It contains all the despair of love that was
once given and then withdrawn.

    "O wherefore should I busk my head,
    Or wherefore should I kame my hair?

    "When we came in by Glasgow town
    We were a comely sight to see;
    My love was clad in the black velvet
    And I myself in cramasie."

She does not want to dress herself gorgeously now as she has no lover.
Among other great love wails by a woman are the old Saxon elegy "A
Woman's Complaint" and the second Idyl of Theocritus.

All the pain of frustrated love is due to the repressing of the tender
as well as of the physical emotions, to the damming up of the libido,
which is love in its broadest sense.

Sometimes the poets tell us almost plainly their real loss, or suggest
it in such a manner that we feel the thought has become conscious
in the poem. Read in Tennyson's "Locksley Hall" the fifteen lines
beginning, "Is it well to wish thee happy," and one can see that the
victim is suffering because Amy is in another's embrace rather than in
that of the singer's. He thinks with maddening thoughts of the clown
she married.

    "He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel forces,
    Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse."

He calls sarcastically upon Amy to kiss her husband and take his hand.
"He will answer to the purpose." The singer clearly shows his pain
because he has been cheated out of physical pleasure.

When we come to the decadent poets, the loss is sung plainly. One of
the most beautiful poems of this kind is Dowson's _Cynara_. The poem
is frankly sexual. The poet, who was rejected by a restaurant keeper's
daughter, tries to console himself with another woman for his loss. The
words "I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion" mean he
loves her in others. He tries to satisfy himself partly by thinking he
is with her while he is with another. It is a poem showing how a sexual
repression seeks an outlet with some one who did not arouse it and how
the poet forces himself to imagine that he is with the one who created
it. The poem makes this clear, that a love poem is always a complaint
that the libido is being dammed.

It is therefore true to say that even in the tenderest and sweetest
love lyrics, like those of Burns and Shelley for instance, one sees the
play of unconscious sexual forces. This fact does not make the poem any
the less moral or the poet any the less pure.


II

Probably the greatest objection to the application of psychoanalytic
methods to literature will be made to the transference of the sexual
interpretation of symbols from the realm of dreams to that of art. But
if the interpretation is correct in one sphere it is also true in the
other. Civilisation has made it necessary to refer in actual speech to
sexual matters in hidden ways, by symbolic representations; our faculty
of wit, due to the exercise of the censorship, also uses various
devices of symbolisation. Dreams and literature both make use of the
same symbols.

When Freud attributed sexual significance to certain typical dreams
like those of riding, flying, swimming, climbing, and to certain
objects, like rooms, boxes, snakes, trees, burglars, etc., he made
no artificial interpretations. He merely pointed out the natural and
concrete language of the unconscious.

Now the same interpretation must inevitably follow in literature, much
as authors and readers may object. If flying in dreams is symbolic of
sex, then an author who is occupied considerably with wishes to be a
bird and fly or with descriptions of birds flying--I do not mean an
isolated instance--is like the man who is always dreaming he is flying;
he is unconsciously expressing a symbolical wish. Many poems written to
birds in literature show unconscious sexual manifestations. Shelley's
"To A Skylark," Keats's "To A Nightingale" and Poe's "Raven" are poems
where the authors sang of repressed love; there is unconscious sex
symbolism in them.

Wordsworth, one of the poets who rarely mentioned sex, has in his "To
a Skylark" unconsciously given us a poem of sexual significance. The
motive of the poem is the intense longing to fly. But beneath the wish
to fly in the poem, as in the imaginary flying in the dream, a sexual
meaning is concealed. The poet is sad when he writes the poem "I have
walked through wildernesses dreary, and to-day my heart is weary." He
also thinks of the fact that the bird is satisfied in love. "Thou hast
a nest for thy love and thy rest."

Very few of the poems addressed to birds harp on the wish to fly to the
extent that Wordsworth does in this poem. Nearly half of the poem is
taken up with this wish, and for this reason the sexual interpretation
is unmistakable.

The first two stanzas are as follows:

    "Up with me! up with me into the clouds!
    For thy song, Lark, is strong;
    Up with me, up with me into the clouds!
    Singing, singing,
    With clouds and sky about thee ringing,
    Lift me, guide me till I find
    That spot which seems so to thy mind!

    "I have walked through wildernesses dreary
    And to-day my heart is weary;
    Had I now the wings of a Fairy,
    Up to thee would I fly.
    There is madness about thee, and joy divine,
    In that song of thine;
    Lift me, guide me high and high
    To thy banqueting place in the sky."

The wish in literature corresponds to the fulfilment in the dream,
and the psychology of the poet who wishes to fly is like that of the
dreamer who does fly. Unconscious sex symbolism is voiced in poems
where the poet expresses a desire to be a bird, or fly like one, such
as those by Bernard de Ventadorn, the great Troubadour of the twelfth
century, "The Cuckoo," by Michael Bruce, the Scotch poet who died young
from consumption, and others.

I quote from memory the chorus of a poem sung in my school days:

    "Oh, had I wings to fly like you
    Then would I seek my love so true,
    And never more we'd parted be,
    But live and love eternally."

The author here tells us most plainly why he or she wants to fly like a
bird--for the satisfaction of love. He says practically that merely by
flying like the bird, he would have the embrace of the loved one. The
opening lines of the chorus show that it is no far-fetched idea, that
of seeing sex or love symbolism in birds flying or singing.

We recall Burns's famous poem to the bonny bird that sings happily
and reminds him of the time when his love was true. "Thou'll break
my heart, thou bonny bird," he sings in despair. A false lover stole
the rose and left the thorn with him. The entire poem is full of sex
symbolism. That he too would like to have love, is what he says when he
speaks of the bird singing.

"The more one is occupied with the solution of dreams," says Freud,
"the more willingly one must become to acknowledge that the majority
of the dreams of adults treat of sexual material and give expression
to erotic wishes.... No other impulse has had to undergo as much
suppression from the time of childhood as the sex impulses in its
numerous components; from no other impulse has survived so many and
such intense unconscious wishes, which now act in the sleeping state
in such a manner as to produce dreams."

This, to my mind, can not be contested, and these wishes appear
largely in the form of symbols. In early times sex was given great
significance, and we know that in early myths and literature many
events and things were sex symbols. When we dream symbolically, we go
back to a method of picturing events that in early history had value,
but of which the significance has been forgotten. The law of symbol
formation is in dreams not an arbitrary one; it is based on forms of
speech in the past and on witty conceptions of to-day. Folklore and
wit are full of sexual symbols corresponding to those in dreams. All
doubt has been removed of sexual symbolism in dreams by an experiment
made by means of hypnotism, where a patient was told to dream some
sexual situation. Instead of doing so directly she dreamed a situation
in symbolic form corresponding to that in ordinary dream life. Rank
and Sachs in their _The Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Mental
Sciences_ have given us an excellent study of the nature of symbol
formation. Freud has furnished us a list of objects and actions that
are of sexual significance. W. Stekel has made an exhaustive study of
the subject in his _Sprache des Traumes_ (1911). Freud recognises R. A.
Scherner as the true discoverer of symbolism in dreams in his book _Das
Leben des Traumes_ (1896), but he admits that Artemidorus in the second
century A.D. also interpreted dreams symbolically.

Freud ventures the opinion that dreams about complicated machinery
and landscapes and trees have a definite sexual significance. If this
is so, and he gives his reason therefor, it would mean that all those
authors who have a partiality for describing landscapes and machinery
in their works continually, are unconsciously revealing a personal
trait they never intended to convey. Ruskin for example is rich in
landscapes in his works. Is there any connection between his propensity
for such description and his attachment to his mamma, his youthful
love disappointment, his unsuccessful marriage and his sad love for
Rose La Touche? Is it not likely that many of the painters who made a
specialty of landscape painting were driven to this special choice by
an unconscious cause that the world has not fathomed, a sexual one?
No doubt there is a connection between paintings of female nudes and
the sex life of the author in his unconscious; why should not the
same be true of the landscape painters and all the writers who abound
in landscape descriptions? Is it not possible that Turgenev, who has
given us so many landscapes, was unconsciously thinking of his first
love disappointment and also of his love for Madame Viardot? We find
landscapes in every literary work that deals with the country, but
Freud's theory can have applicability only to the author who has a
mania for them.

Why does Kipling have a keen interest in bringing descriptions of
machinery into his works? If dreams of machinery relate to sex, then we
must follow the logical conclusion that an undue interest in machinery
must evince a sexual meaning. We are also aware that a large number of
popular sexual terms are taken from instruments in the machine-shop.

I do not maintain that objects do not have a literal significance, free
from any symbolic intent.

There can be no doubt about the significance of the phallic worship of
old times, in which the serpent was symbolic. Dreams where the serpent
figures and folk tales telling of dragons who are symbolic of the
lustful side of man both have a sexually symbolic meaning.

Again, if Freud is right in claiming that the dream of a woman throwing
herself in the water is a parturition dream, then one would have to
conclude that a woman occupied constantly with stories about herself
swimming was probably absorbed with thoughts about child-bearing. That
this significance for such a dream is not absurd may be seen from the
following statement by Freud: "In dreams, as in mythology, the delivery
of a child from the uterine waters is commonly presented by distortion
as the entry of the child into water; among many others, the births of
Adonis, Osiris, Moses and Bacchus are well known illustrations of this."


III

Freud was not the first one to interpret dreams symbolically. There
have been excellent symbolical interpretations in literature. I will
mention one in Chaucer and another in Ovid.

In Chaucer's _Troilus and Criseyde_, one of the greatest love poems
ever written and probably a greater work of art than any of the
_Canterbury Tales_, there is a true symbolic interpretation of an
anxiety dream. Troilus was pining for his love, Criseyde, who had been
led back by Diomede to the Greeks in exchange for Antenor. Troilus
dreamt that he saw a boar asleep in the sun and that Criseyde was
embracing and kissing it. His suspicions as to her faithfulness were
confirmed by the interpretation given by his sister Cassandra, who
told him that Criseyde now loved Diomede; Diomede was descended from
Meleager the slayer of the boar, which, according to the myth, once
ravaged among the Greeks.

Chaucer throughout his works attacks the theory that dreams may be
interpreted, but he gives us a true symbolical interpretation in
this poem. He also here recorded unconsciously some of his own past
griefs in love. Freud taught that anxiety dreams were due to the
repression of the libido being converted into fear. We also know from
anthropology that the boar was a sexual symbol. In the poem Diomede
appears to Troilus as a boar, also, because Troilus had heard the story
of Meleager and the boar and of the ancestry of Diomede. Even though
he had forgotten the tale, if he did, since he was reminded of it by
his sister, it was still present in his unconscious. His anxiety was
due to the fear that Diomede had really won Criseyde. The fear that
he experienced at day, that his sweetheart would be lost to him--the
anxiety that his libido would be repressed, become an anxiety dream in
which the boar is the symbol of his rival.

In the fifth elegy of the third book of Ovid's _Amores_, the author
reports a symbolical dream of the loss of his love. It is correctly
interpreted, in a Freudian manner, by an interpreter of dreams. The
poet dreamed that he took shelter from the heat in a grove under a
tree. He saw a very white cow standing before him, and her mate, a
horned bull, near her chewing his cud. A crow pecked at the breast of
the cow and took away the white hair. The cow left the spot; black
envy was in her breast as she went over to some other bulls. The
interpreter told Ovid that the heat which the poet was seeking to avoid
was love, that the cow was his white-complexioned mistress and that he
was the bull. The crow was a procuress who would tempt his mistress
to desert him. The sexual symbolic interpretation shows that Freud's
most unpopular idea was known among the Romans. It happened that Ovid's
mistress did prove unfaithful to him and he complained of the fact.
His dream arose, however, from his day fears, and he had previously
written a poem in the _Amores_ against a procuress.

Ovid is one of the greatest love poets in all literature, and his
Epistle of Sappho to Phaon in his _Heroides_ translated by Pope records
some of his own love griefs, though these are recorded in his _Amores_
directly.

The symbolism that psychoanalysis deals with is that of the
unconscious. Symbols may have the most significance when the dreamer or
writer least suspects it. And it is only by the study of folk-lore, wit
and the neuroses that one gets to see their meaning.

No doubt the critic who examines literary masterpieces to find sexual
symbols will not be a popular one; but that does not alter the fact
that the sexual meaning is there. The field will no doubt be taken up
in the future by some critic who will not fear to brave public wrath.

It will be seen that many writers who were deemed respectable and
pure because they never dealt with sexual problems are full of sex
symbolism. They consciously strove to conceal their sex interest, but
their unconscious use of sex symbolism shows that they were not as
indifferent to the problems as they would lead us to imagine.

Browning rarely wrote directly of sex. He is admired justly by all
lovers of literature; and women are among his most enthusiastic lovers.
It is true one of his poems, the "Statue and the Bust," has puzzled
his women admirers. Adultery seems to be defended here. Now there are
some innocent poems of the poet rich in sex symbolism. It is well known
that dreams of riding on horse-back, rocking, or any form of rhythmic
motion through which the dreamer goes, are sexually symbolical. In
older literature and in colloquial language the word to ride is
used in a sexual sense. Browning is especially addicted to writing
poems describing the pleasure of riding, or poems in rhythmic verse
which suggest the riding process. It has never dawned on critics to
suggest that there may be a cause for this that is to be found in the
unconscious of the author.

Take his "The Last Ride Together." The speaker who is rejected asks his
love to give him the pleasure of a last ride with her. Not being able
to get the pleasures of love from her, he seeks them in another form, a
symbolic one. He will now imagine that he receives them; he is prompted
to his strange request by unconscious causes. He wants a substitute
for the actuality. "We ride and I see her bosom heave," he says. Every
stanza says something about the riding. "I ride," "We ride," "I and
she ride" are repeated throughout the poem. He addresses the poet, the
sculptor and the musician and tells them that he is riding instead of
creating art; by this he means that they express their longing to love
in art; he does so by riding. "Riding's a joy." He also lies to himself
and pretends he is not angry at his mistress and that perhaps it was
best he didn't win her love; he pretends he has no regrets for the past
and that he is satisfied with the ride instead of her love. The poem is
an excellent example of the unconscious use of symbolism in literature.
The meaning is clear.

Two other poems of Browning where sexual symbolism may be present
though there is nothing of love in the poems are the famous "How They
Brought the Good News from Aix to Ghent" and "Through the Metidja to
Abd-El-Kadr." The sexual significance can be seen in the rhythmic
swing, for both poems suggest the motion of the horse rider. The effect
in the latter poem is produced by the use of the words "I ride" twice
in the first, third and eighth lines of each of the five stanzas,
thirty times, and by having each of the forty lines end with "ride" or
a rhyme to "ride."

    "As I ride, as I ride,
    With a full heart for my guide,
    So its tide rocks my side, as I ride,
    As I ride, as I ride,
    That, as I were double-eyed,
    He, in whom our tribes confide,
    Is descried, ways untried
    As I ride, as I ride."


IV

I do not believe that nature worship idea in literature has been yet
fully analysed. Critics have refused to see the exact meaning of the
expression "love of nature." The poets themselves have told us that
they saw in nature lessons of moral improvement and inspirations for
humanitarianism. Granting that this is so, the fact still remains that
there is much left unsaid by the poets. Some of them recognised the
real significance of their love for nature when they told us how they
were inspired by her to love, or were reminded of their lack of love.

Wordsworth, who is one of the greatest nature poets the world has ever
had, appears singularly free from the voicing of the love passion in
his work. Except for the Lucy poems and a few others, he has given us
little love poetry. Hazlitt complained that he found no marriages or
giving in marriage in Wordsworth's poetry. But nevertheless the sex
element is there though never directly expressed. There is nothing,
it is well known, calculated to make a man long for the love of
woman or to miss her more than when he is in the presence of nature.
Anthropology teaches us the close connection between love and nature.
When Wordsworth sang of the beauties of nature he was voicing a cry
for satisfied love which he did not have up to his thirtieth year, when
he married. He was also pining for love of the girl he met in France
in his twenty-third year, the mother of his illegitimate daughter. The
poet was using symbols, such as trees and daisies, whose glory he sang
when he meant he wished he had love. Some things can be enjoyed alone,
though not altogether, such as food, plays, pictures, reading, music,
lectures, etc. It is the great distinction of nature that she inspires
human love and also provokes sadness.

Most of the old bucolic poets frankly associated their Corydons and
Amaryllises with enjoyment of nature. Wordsworth, who had much of the
English Puritanism, was reserved. Any reader who takes up the nature
poetry of Wordsworth lays it down after a while with the feeling that
the poet is not telling the whole truth. It does not follow that
Wordsworth was deliberately concealing it, for he may have been unaware
of what was in his unconscious. After he married and had love he
continued for a while to give us great nature poetry, for the most part
a reflection of his early mood. For it must not be assumed that because
a man has love he therefore loses his love for nature. Wordsworth's
greatest nature poem, "Lines on Tintern Abbey," was written before his
marriage; the nature poetry of the last thirty or forty years of his
life was rather poor.

The secret of Wordsworth's great nature poetry is this: it was a
sublimation of his unsatisfied love cravings and a symbolic means of
expressing them. Instead of singing directly of his longing for love,
or creating imaginary love scenes for himself, or voicing despair, as
other poets did, he expressed his passion for nature and thus vented
himself unconsciously of his feelings. True, the impulse of the vernal
wood interested him because it taught him much about moral evil and
good; it made him also think of love and he sang of his love indirectly
by praising that impulse.

This theory which seems so inevitable is one to which we are forced
from so many human experiences with nature and yet critics have not
dared to advance it. The psychology of nature worship will no doubt
be more completely studied by psychoanalysts some day, and we will
understand our nature poets better. The interpretation may offend those
who want to persuade themselves that nature has only sermons for us,
but let the reader take up some of the sensuous nature descriptions
in Keats and Spenser and he will realise more clearly the underlying
meaning of nature worship.

It is significant that much sexual symbolism has been found in two
poets who were deemed most reticent on the subject of sex--Wordsworth
and Browning.


V

There is no better proof that common objects, when possible, were
formerly assigned sexual associations, than the obscene riddles of
the Exeter Book. This work is largely attributed to the second great
English poet Cynewulf in the eighth century. Certain riddles are
propounded which reek with lewd suggestions, and the answer is supposed
to be some object innocent in itself; it is apparent, however, from the
questions and descriptions given that the interest in this object is
because it is sexually symbolical. Thus the answers meant for the 26th,
45th, 46th, 55th, 63rd and 64th riddles of the Exeter Book are leek,
key, dough, churn, poker and beaker, respectively. The reader will note
thus how these objects had a sexual symbolic meaning for our ancestors.

Professor Frederic Tupper in his scholarly work _The Riddles of
the Exeter Book_ says: "By far the most numerous of all riddles
of lapsing or varying solutions are those distinctly popular and
unrefined problems whose sole excuse for being (or lack of excuse)
lies in double meaning and coarse suggestion, and the reason for this
uncertainty of answer is at once apparent. The formally stated solution
is so overshadowed by the obscene subject implicitly presented in
each limited motive of the riddle, that little attention is paid to
the aptness of this. It is after all only a pretence, not the chief
concern of the jest." He quotes from another scholar, Wossidlo, a
number of other objects than those suggested in the Exeter Book, which
in other riddle books were invested with sexual symbolism. These are
spinning wheel, kettle and pike, yarn and weaver, frying-pan and hare,
soot-pole, butcher, bosom, fish on the hook, trunk-key, beer-keg,
stocking, mower in grass, butter-cask and bread-scoop.

Freud is apparently correct when he stated that familiar objects of our
day like umbrellas and machinery are given a sexual significance by our
dreams unconsciously.

That man early expressed his interest in love in symbolical terms is
conceded by most anthropologists and philologists. They have traced the
origins of many of our customs and institutions, our words and figures
of rhetoric, to the veiled eroticism of former times. In our speech are
many terms which now have a distinct sexual significance, though they
originally had a symbolic one. The word for seed in Hebrew is zera, the
Latin word is semen (from sero, to sow). Both words are also used for
spermatozoa. Man formerly sought analogies just as he does to-day; he
often feared to violate a taboo, or aimed at a delicacy of expression.
He saw the life producing principle at work everywhere, and he found
symbols for it in the phenomena of nature, in the sun, moon, water,
forest, garden, field, trees, roses; in animals like the serpent, the
horse, the bull, the fish, the goat, the dove; in implements like the
arrow, the sword, the plough. Common objects assumed for him suggestive
meanings. He saw a means of coining new expressions for generative acts
and objects; he found associations when he used the fire-drill drilling
in the hollow of the wood, or when he threw wood upon the fire. In
later time he coined new symbolical terms suggested by such acts of
his as stuffing a cork in a bottle, or putting bread in the oven, or
inserting a key in the lock.

Man speaks in symbolic language especially when it comes to sex
matters. This symbolism appears hence in his dreams and his literature.
The language of the unconscious is symbolic, and literature is often
expressing the author's unconscious in symbolic terms without his being
aware of this.

When poets celebrate the ceremonies about the May pole they may not
know that this celebration is related to early phallic worship. When
Æschylus wrote his play of Prometheus stealing the fire, or Milton
used the Biblical material of Eve tempted by the serpent, they were
probably ignorant of the sexual associations of fire and the serpent
in ancient times. But their own works thus become symbolical. Shelley,
for example, used the metaphor of the snake quite often, and one of the
best known passages in his works is the description of the fight of the
eagle and the serpent in _The Revolt of Islam_. He often referred to
himself also, as the snake. Yet he may not have been aware there was
an unconscious connection between his interest in free love and the
symbol of the serpent.

The part played by symbolism in love poetry is seen especially in _The
Song of Songs_. To us moderns and occidentals many of the comparisons
and symbolical representations seem very strange, but they had their
origin not in the poet's own conceits but in a historic use of the
language. This most celebrated of all love poems fairly swarms with
sensuous symbolic images. It proves that early man saw lascivious
suggestions everywhere in the landscapes, in flowers, rocks, trees,
country, city, animals. The speech of our ancestors was sexualised.

The beloved in the poem, which is a dialogue between her and her lover,
is like a wall with towers (the breasts); she is a vineyard; she is in
the clefts of the rock and the hidden hollow of the cliff. She has eyes
like doves, her hair is like a flock of straying goats, her teeth like
a flock of washed ewes, her lips like a scarlet thread, her temples
like pomegranate, her neck like the tower of David builded with turrets
and hung with shields, her breasts like twin fawns feeding among the
lilies. She is a closed garden, a shut up spring, a sealed fountain.
The roundings of her thighs are like the link of a chain, her navel is
like a round empty goblet, her belly like a heap of wheat set among
lilies, her eyes like the pools of Heshbon, her nose like the tower of
Lebanon.

The lover is like an apple tree among the trees of the wood; he is a
young hart. His head is as fine gold, his eyes are like doves, his
cheeks are a bed of spices, as a bank of sweet herbs; his lips are
lilies dropping myrrh, his hands are as rods of gold set with beryl,
his body is polished ivory overlaid with sapphires, his legs are
pillars of marble set in sockets of gold; his aspect like Lebanon,
chosen like the cedar.

The embrace of the lovers is described symbolically by means of the
tree symbol. It is known that the tree was formerly used to represent
both sexes. "The bisexual symbolic character of the tree," says Jung
in his _Psychology of the Unconscious_ (P. 248), "is intimated by the
fact that in Latin trees have a masculine termination and a feminine
gender." The lover in the _Song of Songs_ calls his beloved a tree and
says he will climb up to the palm tree and take hold of the branches;
his beloved's breasts will be as clusters of the vine and the smell of
her countenance like apples.

Students of anthropology will recognise all the sex symbols in this
poem and will find analogies in other literatures. This great love
poem is regarded by many, curiously enough, as a religious allegory.
The chapter headings in the King James version of the Bible represent
Christ and the Church as symbols of the lovers. Higher criticism has
recognised the fact that the poem is a love poem. This is also proved
by the fact that from time immemorial it has been the practice of
orthodox Hebrews to read it on the Sabbath eve, which is the time for
love embrace among them.


VI

Psychoanalysis has gone far, indeed, in seeing sex symbolism in many
objects and ceremonies and allegories where it was least expected to
exist. Freud and Jung, though they differ in their views here, see in
many symbols concealed incestuous wishes. They have dealt with the
subject in _Totem and Taboo_ and _The Psychology of the Unconscious_,
respectively. I have no intention of going into the differences between
their theories.

Artists in the mediæval ages, who always drew and painted the Virgin
Mary, showed also unconsciously in a symbolic form the infantile
incestuous wishes for their own mothers. By this I simply imply that
having failed to find love in real life, they took shelter in their
love for their mothers. A modern critic has divined the significance
of the worship of the Virgin in so fine a poet as Verlaine, who, while
he embraced Catholicism, was not a churchman in the strict acceptance
of the word. In his _French Literary Studies_, Professor T. B.
Rudmose-Brown says of Verlaine: "It is his intense need of a love that
will not return upon itself that makes Verlaine turn to Christ's Virgin
Mother--the Rosa Mystica in whom he found all the qualities he looked
for in vain in his cruelly divine child-wife and his many '_amies_' of
later life--and crouch like a weary child beneath her wondrous mantle."
Verlaine used the Virgin as a symbolic emblem. He unconsciously craved
for the love of his mother since in later life he was divorced by his
wife.

The symbol then often becomes under our new science the means of
recovering the love one felt as a child for one's own mother. The
author may not be aware that this use of the symbol is being made by
him. He uses the earth to-day, as man from time immemorial has used it,
as a symbol of the mother, when he exclaims he wants to die and go back
to mother earth.

The researches of scholars have established, then, the connection
between love and symbolic expressions thereof, and it will be the task
of future critics to discover the author's unconscious expression of
his love life by symbols. Just as the horse shoe, the mandrake and the
four-leafed clover, which are signs of good luck among superstitious
people, were originally symbols of fruitfulness, so other objects
described in books will be seen to have a sexual origin through a study
of anthropology.




CHAPTER XII

CANNIBALISM: THE ATREUS LEGEND


I

It will be probably a shock to many people to be told that the
cannibalistic instinct still is part of our unconscious. It appears in
that pathological state known as lycanthropy where the patient often
has a craving for human flesh. It is occasionally revived in cases of
starvation and shipwreck, when men are driven to eat human flesh. There
should be nothing strange about this, for we are descended from people
who were cannibals. And we know that men of the old stone age in France
were cannibals and it was practised in Greece in earliest times. It has
not yet been exterminated in parts of Africa and Polynesia.

Cannibalism figured considerably in ancient literature. It is not my
purpose to go into the question of its origin, or the ceremonials
connected with it. There are good articles on the subject in the
_Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics_ by J. A. MacCullouch and in the
_Encyclopædia Britannica_ by Northcote W. Thomas. I shall, however,
touch on instances where men ate human flesh at sacrifices.

Cannibalism to-day has chiefly a historic and a literary interest.
The subject is worth taking up because of the attention paid to it in
literature. We have tales about it to-day. Conrad has given us in his
_Falk_ a story of cannibalism. Falk was the survivor on a wrecked ship
and was driven by hunger to feast on the bodies of sailors, thus saving
his life. The memory of the event is of course horrible to him. The
young lady he loves marries him despite his experience.

One of Jack London's stories of cannibalism is "The Whale Tooth" in his
_South Sea Tales_. It tells how a missionary who went out to convert
some Fiji cannibals was betrayed by Ra Vatu, a heathen about to embrace
Christianity. The savage desired the missionary's boots to present
to a chief. In spite of his acceptance of the religion of Christ he
was willing to have his benefactor made a victim of cannibalism. In
the same story London refers to a chief who ate eight hundred and
seventy-two bodies.

Cannibalism is to us but a curiosity that we once practised. We find
no injunction against cannibalism, or eating one's children, among the
crimes on the statute books. It is no crime under the Common Law. A
man who would commit cannibalism among us would be sent to an insane
institution. There are no laws against a thing when no one has the
least inclination to do it. Society recognises that the instinct for
cannibalism is dead, but it is nevertheless in our unconscious. Our
psyche never forgets the episodes in the lives of our ancestors.

The only places where there are laws against cannibalism are in savage
countries where there is a disposition to practise it; and these laws
are made by colonists.

It is prevalent to-day in Africa. John H. Weeks in _Among Congo
Cannibals_ (1913) tells us he saw savages carrying dismembered parts
of human bodies for a feast and that he was offered some cooked human
food. He also speaks of a white man who was a dealer in human flesh
to a tribe, an example of degradation that finds a parallel in Kurtz's
conduct in Conrad's story _The Heart of Darkness_. Mr. Herbert Ward in
his _A Voice from Congo_ (1910) describes how some human victims were
hacked to pieces, alive, for feasts; he witnessed organised traffic in
human flesh and saw several cannibal feasts.


II

Let us mark the part played by cannibalism in ancient Greek literature.
We will see that the cannibalistic instinct was part of the psychic
life of the earliest Greeks. There was a reaction to it as there
was to incest of the son with the mother as shown in Sophocles's
_Œdipus_. Enforced cannibalism, where a man was made to eat his own
children unknowingly, is the revenge motive of the famous Greek
play--_Agamemnon_; this play depicts the reaction to cannibalism.

In the Atreus legend which Æschylus used in _Agamemnon_, Thyestes eats
the flesh of his children, offered up to him by his brother Atreus,
in revenge for having seduced Atreus's wife. In expiation of Atreus's
crime his future descendants suffer. The unfortunate Thyestes had
a son, Ægisthus, as the offspring of the connection with Atreus's
wife--(Pelopia, Thyestes's own daughter, by the way). Atreus and his
son Agamemnon were later killed by Ægisthus, who had besides seduced
Agamemnon's wife Clytemnestra. Agamemnon's son, Orestes, avenges the
murder by killing his mother and her paramour. Orestes is shown as
expiating his matricide in the _Oresteia_ trilogy of which _Agamemnon_
is the first play.

In Æschylus's _Agamemnon_, we have the expiation of the crime of
Atreus for enforcing cannibalism on his brother. There are several
passages dealing with the crime. Ægisthus describes in detail how his
father Thyestes ate the flesh of his own children and how he vomited
when he was told what he had done. When Cassandra, who returns with
Agamemnon, in her insane ravings is telling of the punishment to befall
Clytemnestra she has a vision of the old feast of the children. The
Chorus also tells about the story.

All this shows the horror which was inspired by a deed, the eating of
one's children, and this must mean that way back in antiquity this
act was practised and that the Greeks were now describing the act as
revolting.

There are several other stories of enforced cannibalism in ancient
literature with revenge as the motive. Herodotus tells us how the King
of the Medes punished Harpagus for not killing Cyrus by making Harpagus
dine on the flesh of his own son. This was in the sixth century B. C.
Tereus, King of the Thracians, was served up his son by the latter's
own mother, because Tereus dishonoured his sister-in-law, Philomela,
and deprived her of her tongue. In one of Grimm's fairy tales, _The
Juniper Tree_, we have the story of a man who is given the flesh of his
own child by his wife, the child's step-mother.

Seneca in the first century A. D. wrote _Thyestes_, dramatising all the
repulsive episodes, describing the preparing of the children for the
feast and the feast itself. The most loathsome theme is made the main
idea of the story. Shakespeare has a scene in _Titus Andronicus_ where
Titus makes the wicked Tamora eat the heads of her two sons baked in a
pie. Crebillon wrote a cannibalistic play in the 18th century, _Atrée
et Thyeste_.

The tale of Saturn, who swallowed his children when they were born
so as not to be dethroned in accordance with the prophecy, with the
result that he was compelled to disgorge them later by Zeus, has its
parallels in folk-lore among the Bushmen, Eskimos and others. It is a
very old story.

Freud saw in the Œdipus legend the horror reaction of the Greeks to
two legendary deeds, the killing of a father and the marrying of the
mother by the son, deeds which had their basis in reality and which
were occasionally repeated in dreams. Similarly we can see in the
Atreus legend a reaction to the idea of eating one's children, an
act that used to accompany the offering of human sacrifices. But we
cannot say that the cannibalistic instinct affects one's future as
the Œdipus complex does. It is, however, part of our unconscious. The
effectiveness of Swift's famous satirical proposition to help the poor
in Ireland by suggesting that they sell the flesh of their own children
for food to the rich, is due to the fact that children's flesh was
actually once eaten. Swift wrote his essay with ironical intent but he
was utilising an ancient historical fact, unknowingly.

We know from the stories of Abraham and Isaac, Jephthah and his
daughter, and Iphigenia, as well as from historical records, that
children were offered as human sacrifices and that the body of the
victim was often eaten; hence there is a connection between human
sacrifice and cannibalism.

J. A. MacCullouch in his scholarly article on cannibalism in the
_Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics_, ventures the opinion that human
sacrifice rose through an earlier cannibalism, on the principle that as
men liked human flesh the Gods would also relish it. The worshippers
later shared in the human feasts, with the Gods. Westermarck says that
the sacrificial form of cannibalism springs from the idea that a victim
offered to a God participates in his sanctity and the worshipper by
eating the human flesh transfers to himself something of the divine
virtue.

There were many cases of orgastic cannibalism in ancient Greece. There
is a vase showing a Thracian tearing a child with his teeth in the
presence of a god. Pausanias relates that a child was torn and eaten in
a sacrifice to the Gods in Bœotia. In Plato's _Republic_, VIII 566, we
have an account of a survival of an earlier cannibal sacrificial feast.
It is related there that a piece of human flesh was placed among the
animals sacrificed to Zeus Lycaeus and that in the feasts that followed
the eater of the fragments became a were-wolf.

Other people like the Fijis who partook in a human feast offered first
part of the slain to the gods.

The custom of human sacrifices and cannibalism died out among the
Greeks, and in Æschylus's trilogy we have the horror reaction of the
educated Greek against these institutions. The playwright shows the
terrible retaliation visited on the man who indulges in cannibalism or
makes another do so. Punishment for Atreus's deed is visited upon his
son, Agamemnon, in many ways, one of which is being forced to sacrifice
his daughter Iphigenia. Agamemnon is also punished by the infidelity of
his wife with Ægisthus, and by being murdered by them.

The tale of Iphigenia thus sheds some light on the subject. She figures
considerably in the _Agamemnon_. Æschylus tells us that Clytemnestra
felt justified for being untrue to her husband Agamemnon because he
sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia. The latter's name is closely
associated with human sacrifice in Greek legend.

In the Saturnalia of Rome a human victim was slain as late as the
fourth century A. D.

The theory then resolves itself to this: In very ancient times before
Greek civilisation made its appearance children were sacrificed to ward
off evil and the flesh of those children was eaten by the parents.
There rose a reaction to this which we see in the Atreus legend.




CHAPTER XIII

SOME PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERARY CRITICISM


I

Psychoanalysis will put in a new light the old literary controversies
between realism and idealism, between classicism and romanticism.
Idealistic writers are those who write of imaginary pleasing scenes
and characters. Their books are founded on the same principles that
are at the basis of dreams; these are the fulfilment of the author's
wishes. We grow weary of a deluge of such literature, because it is
too visionary and not related to reality. We prefer to see life as
it is, even though it is harsh. Hence our reaction to those ancient
types of romances where the heroes are always strong, pursuing false
ideals, obeying silly codes of honour, and are always triumphant; we
weary still more of the heroines who are always without individuality.
The most idealistic books are those dealing with utopias, and though
the new visionary societies are as a rule undesirable and impossible,
they represent the wish of the author fulfilled; such works sometimes,
as in the case of Plato's _Republic_ and More's _Utopia_, are full of
valuable suggestions. Utopias, however, are generally dreary because
they make no allowances for our instincts; the author is insincere to
himself and pretends to be what he is not.

Then there is the idealistic literature which builds a dream palace
beyond this life. The author wants to live forever and to have things
he did not possess here, and he creates imaginary scenes where all that
he suffered here is righted. Of this type of literature is the Paradise
of Dante, and the Celestial City of Bunyan. Literature of this type
pleases many people, as it enables them to get away from reality and to
have a ground for believing in the existence of chimeras they cherish.

Idealism in literature is the selection for description of only those
features of life that please the fancy of the author. People are
described not as they are but as the author would like them to be;
events are narrated not as they occur in life but as the writer would
wish them to happen. The dream of the author is given instead of an
actual picture of reality. When Shakespeare grew weary of London life,
he drew a picture of life in the forest of Arden in his _As You Like
It_ such as he would have liked to have enjoyed. Idealistic literature
hence gives us an insight into the nature of the author's unconscious.
His constructed air castles show us where reality has been harsh with
him. It is true all literature must to some extent be idealistic, as
the author must always do some selecting. Idealism will never die out
in literature. Man is an idealist by nature; every man who has day
dreams is reconstructing life in accordance with his desires.

There is always a large element in the population that hearkens back to
its childhood days. Even our most intellectual people like to divert
themselves with stories of piracy, battles, sunken treasures, tales
of the sea, of adventure and mystery. The people who love romance
go back in their reading to their boyhood days; they have in their
unconscious, primitive emotions that, unable to find an outlet to-day
very well, refuse to remain altogether repressed; they get satisfaction
by seeing pictures of life in which the unconscious thus participates.
The perennial interest of _Robinson Crusoe_ and _Treasure Island_, of
Scott and Dumas, of the sea stories of Cooper and Captain Marryat, of
the detective stories of Gaboriau and Doyle, is due to the fact that
they make us young again. It is true we often outgrow some of these
books and find them dull in later life, but they enchant many of us at
all ages because our inherent instincts from savage and less cultivated
people can only be kept repressed by being given a feigned instead of a
real satisfaction.

Old legends like those about Achilles, the Wandering Jew, the Flying
Dutchman, Charlemagne, and King Arthur and his knights, never weary us;
they continue to furnish artists and writers with artistic material.
Psychoanalysis explains the love we feel for these romances. We have
never quite grown out of either the barbarous or boyish state. We like
the strange, the marvellous, the mysterious, for this was specially
characteristic of man in an early stage and of the boy. We also find
an affinity for the kind of life our ancestors led. We are interested
in tales where men are hunting and fighting. Man's unconscious loves
a fight, for he has always fought in the history of the race. He is
fascinated by danger and the idea of overcoming obstacles. And he wants
such scenes introduced in literature.

Psychoanalysis also explains the affinity that we have for the
supernatural in literature. Freud's disciples, like Rank and Abraham
and Ricklin, have shown in _The Myth of the Birth of the Hero_, in
_Dreams and Myths_, and in _Wishfulment and Fairy Tales_, respectively,
that fairy tales are to be interpreted like dreams and represent
the fulfilled wishes of early humanity. The child who likes fairy
tales finds his own wishes satisfied in these tales dealing with the
supernatural and improbable. Even when great poets make use of the
supernatural in their work, the same principles of wish fulfilment
are there. Faust is saved in Goethe's poem, Prometheus is released in
Shelley's lyric drama and the Knight of the Cross is victorious over
the dragon in Spenser's allegory. The poems give us the fulfilled
wishes of the modern poets. True the modern poet introduces advanced
ideas of his time and gives different interpretations to the old tales.
But we still love the supernatural because we have our limitations with
reality.

In an essay on Hans Christian Andersen published in 1867 George Brandes
showed the connection between the unconscious and the nursery tale.
Thus he anticipated the discoveries of Abraham, Ricklin and Rank, who
noted that folk-lore and fairy tales are, like dreams, realised wishes
of the unconscious of early humanity, formulated into endurable form.
Brandes objected to the occasional moral tag in Andersen's stories
"because the nursery story is the realm of the unconscious. Not only
are unconscious beings and objects the leaders of speech in it, but
what triumphs and is glorified in the nursery story is this very
element of unconsciousness. And the nursery story is right, for the
unconscious element is our capital and the source of our strength."
Brandes shows how child psychology interests us all because of its
unconscious. He distinguished the changes brought in by the nineteenth
century where the unconscious is worshipped, while in the critical
eighteenth century consciousness alone had been valued.

Nietzsche understood that the romantic life of our ancestors and their
ways of thinking were repeated by us in our dreams. He wrote in his
_Human All Too Human_, Vol. 1, pp. 23-26: "The perfect distinctions of
all dreams--representations, which pre-suppose absolute faith in their
reality, recall the conditions that appertain to primitive man, in whom
hallucination was extraordinarily frequent, and sometime simultaneously
seized entire communities, entire nations. Therefore, in sleep and in
dreams we once more carry out the task of early humanity.... I hold,
that as man now still reasons in dreams, so men reasoned also _when
awake_ through thousands of years; the first _cause_ which occurred
to the mind to explain anything that required an explanation, was
sufficient and stood for truth ... this ancient element in human nature
still manifests itself in our dreams, for it is the foundation upon
which the higher reason has developed and still develops in every
individual; the dream carries us back into the remote conditions
of human culture, and provides a ready means of understanding them
better. Dream-thinking is now so easy to us because during immense
periods of human development we have been so well drilled in this form
of fantastic and cheap explanation, by means of the first agreeable
notions. In so far, dreaming is a recreation of the brain, which by day
has to satisfy the stern demands of thought, as they are laid down by
the higher culture."

Supernatural phenomena, however, in our contemporary literature savour
of imitation and the artificial. Writers do not as a rule believe in
the supernatural while the creators of the old fairy tales did. From
so fine a poet as Yeats, who is said to believe in fairies, we get
literature that is both sincere and artistic. We have a beautiful ideal
reconstruction of the world in such a play as _The Land of Heart's
Desire_. Here the dream principle is still at work.

Among the fairy tales of our day are those centring around psychic
phenomena and reporting the conversations of the dead. They are written
because they represent the writer's wishes to communicate with the
dead and to prove that we do not die. They are needed by some in an
era of exact science and a great war as old folk lore was needed in
its time. Needless to say this does not speak well for the intellects
of the writers of these spiritualistic works. We make something occur
because we want it to transpire. Lodge's _Raymond_ is one of the fairy
tales of recent times and it has a genuineness because the author, to
the amazement of many of us, believes those talks with his son actually
took place. The book is really a commentary on his pathetic state of
mind after the death of his son, and is his dream of hope.

But realistic literature is after all in the ascendant, for it tells us
of what we experience in our own life. Don Quixote showed us that love
for books dealing with dreams and impossibilities may help to make one
mad. Men are interested in their inner struggles and in the problems
of the day. Books treating of these have replaced considerably the old
romances as serious literature.

Romantic and idealistic works are like dreams, fragments of the psychic
life of the race when it was young.


II

The literary works that we like best are those which tell of the
frustration of wishes like our own. We prefer to read about troubles
like those we have suffered, to lose ourselves in the dreams and
fantasies built up by authors, akin to those we have conjured up in
our own imagination.

We prefer a book that apologises for us, that tells of strivings and
repressions such as we have experienced. We get a sort of pleasure
then out of painful works, in which our sorrows and wants are put into
artistic form, so as to evoke them again in us. It depends often on
the character of our repression as to the nature of the books we like.
If we have overthrown the authority of our fathers or experienced a
painful love repression because we were hampered by social laws, if we
have broken with our religious friends or been crushed by some moneyed
powers, we may become of a revolutionary trend of mind and hence prefer
writers with radical opinions. In our time there have arisen a number
of geniuses who voiced such opinions; having experienced repressions
on account of the customs of society, they sang and wrote of those
repressions and attacked those customs. The great love felt by the
young man who does not fit into the social order, for writers like
Whitman, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Shaw, and others, is because these writers
approve an individualism that he seeks to cultivate. He who is grieved
by the tyranny of the philistine and the bourgeois, the hypocrite and
the puritan, finds himself consoled by writers who were also victims of
such tyranny.

If we are somewhat more neurotic than the average person, or even
abnormal, we go to the writers who are neurotic and abnormal. Why did
Baudelaire love Poe so much? Because he saw in him another Baudelaire,
a dreamer out of accord with reality, a victim of drink and drugs, a
sufferer at the hands of women, an artist loving beauty and refusing
to be a reformer. Hence he translated Poe's works, swore to read him
daily, and imitated him. Baudelaire's unconscious recognised a brother
sufferer in Poe; he wanted to have the same ideal conditions Poe
imagined in his dreams; he suffered from the same neuroses that Poe
suffered. These two writers became the idols of the French decadent
writers, and Huysmans, Mallarmé and others loved them. The French
decadents found affinities with ancient authors, especially the Roman
poets of the Silver Age, Petronius and Apuleius. Oscar Wilde, Dowson
and Arthur Symons in our literature belong to the group who found
themselves in harmony with the French decadents.

Literary influences are due to definite reasons and follow regular
laws. Though sometimes authors appeal to us who are just the opposite
of ourselves, we, as a rule, love those writers who write of our own
unconscious wishes.

What is the secret of the universal appeal of Hamlet? Is it not because
many of us, like him, have been in conflict wherein we could not
act because there was an external obstacle? Dr. Ernest Jones found
a reason for Hamlet's inability to act in an unconscious feeling of
guilty love for his mother. He was jealous of his uncle, the murderer
of his father, and also the successful rival to Hamlet in his mother's
affections. This psychoanalytic interpretation made by Dr. Ernest
Jones adds a new element to the old theory of Hamlet's struggle with
fate. Hamlet has given rise to a series of characters in literature
characterised by inaction, by thinking and not doing. Russian
literature, with its Rudins and Oblomovs, has recognised in this
portrayal by Shakespeare a common Russian type. Hamlet, nevertheless,
had good reason for not being able to act, and finally did act, though
he made a bungle of it all.

Byron and Shelley have had more imitators and lovers than any of the
poets of England of their time. We know the influence of each of them
on Tennyson and Browning respectively, though the Victorians later
departed from the footsteps of their masters and became conservative.
But the causes that made Heine, Leonardi, De Musset and Pushkin love
Byron were the same as those which drew to Shelley, the republican
melodist Swinburne, James Thomson, the atheist author of the _City of
Dreadful Night_, Francis Thompson, the Catholic maker of beautiful
forms out of his own sufferings, and the unhappy lyricist Beddoes, who
committed suicide. The later poets found Byron and Shelley singers of
unconscious wishes of their own, portrayers of moods and sorrows like
those they felt and constructors of means of ridding the world of such
griefs by plans they largely approved.

The reason for the universal appeal of the Bible is because of the
variety in this library of books; there is always some chapter that
expresses our unconscious wishes.

The _Old Testament_, especially, satisfies our unconscious. This is
due to the psalms voicing human sorrow, and the prophecies of Isaiah
ringing with a passionate love for justice, to the pleasant tales that
appeal to our youthful fancy like those of Joseph and his brethren, and
Ruth, and the philosophical drama of Job, in whose sufferings we see
our own, to the epicureanism and melancholy in Ecclesiasticus, and the
military exploits of Joshua and David. The Bible appeals as literature
to many who do not believe in dogma or miracles, to many who find parts
of it cruel and unjust because it is a varied collection of books, and,
as a result, the unconscious wishes and means of gratification of some
of the writers must meet our own, separated as we are from them by
thousands of years.

When we read that Wordsworth soothed De Quincey and John Stuart Mill,
and had a tonic effect on Arnold, so that he became a leading disciple,
that Shaw based his wit and philosophy on Samuel Butler, an almost
forgotten contemporary, that Brandes found an affinity in writers like
Shakespeare and Ibsen, we are aware that the process is the same:
the later author found some earlier one who especially expressed his
unconscious wishes.

Take the literary influences in literature, that of Smollet on Dickens,
that of Dickens on Daudet and Dostoievsky and Bret Harte, that of
Balzac on Flaubert, of Flaubert on Maupassant and Zola, of Carlyle on
Ruskin and Froude, of Kipling on Jack London. All this means that the
author influenced found in his master a kindred sufferer and a kindred
dreamer.

Literature gives each writer or reader the means of choosing his own
father as it were. When a man says he found his whole life changed by a
certain book, it is equivalent to his saying that the book has merely
made him recognise his unconscious; it did not put anything there
that was not there before. The book had a psychoanalytic effect on
him; it taught him to look at his unconscious objectively; it brought
to consciousness something that was repressed. If the resistance to
perceiving that unconscious had not been overcome the book could have
had no effect. We hate a book often because the censorship in us is too
great. When John A. Symonds describes the effects of Whitman's _Leaves
of Grass_, which he says influenced him more than any other book except
the Bible, he meant Whitman cured him of neurosis, brought out his
repressed feelings and made him aware of his inner wants and told him
how to satisfy them.

The saying, "Tell me what you read and I'll tell you what you are,"
is true. People differ about the qualities of books because their own
unconscious wishes have been met differently in these books.


III

What then is the cause of literary movements and what stamps the
peculiarities of a literary age, if all writers draw on their
unconscious? Why does a Pope appear in the age of Queen Anne and a
Wordsworth at the end of the reign of George IV? Why didn't Shakespeare
write in the Elizabethan age like Charles Dickens in the Victorian
period? How account for the warlike character of the Saxon epic
Beowulf, for the religious tone of her first poet, Cædmon; for the
interest in chivalry and allegory in the _Faërie Queen_? What made
Bunyan so absorbed in salvation, in _Pilgrim's Progress_, at the
time the Restoration dramatists were steeped in exhibitionism and
immorality? What are the causes of the notes of moral revolt in Byron
and Shelley, of the romanticism of Scott, the realism of George Eliot?
If the unconscious is alike in all people, and genius records the ideas
and emotions formed by personal repressions, it would seem the works
of all geniuses who have had similar repressions should be alike,
irrespective of the ages in which they lived.

Literary historians and philosophers have accounted for the various
changes in literary taste fairly satisfactorily, although they have
often omitted from their investigations the factor of the personal
experiences and idiosyncrasies of the author, and have emphasised too
strongly the importance of the predominant ideas of the age. Yet no
author starts out to express the spirit of his age. He gives vent
to his unconscious which he suppresses more or less, and colours,
in accordance with the literary fashion prevailing. His unconscious
appears in a background of the literary machinery and ideas of the
time. Since in our unconscious are present all the emotions man has
had, different events may make any of them burst forth.

On account of the recent war, many dormant emotions were reanimated in
us and appeared in our literature. People found that Homer's _Iliad_
and other ancient warlike epics appealed to them more than these did
in times of peace. Literature in war times becomes more related to
primitive literature where the hero is the successful, brave warrior.
The military and patriotic spirit had not been extinct, but quiescent.

If Milton had lived in the eighteen nineties he would probably have
written problem plays and novels instead of _Paradise Lost_. He was
unhappily married, but the fashion of his age was not to create
imaginative works based on justifiable causes for seeking a divorce. He
did write on the subject of divorce, however, and his views horrified
his contemporaries. He stood alone. Had the tendencies of the time been
to make works of the imagination out of situations in which he was
personally placed, he would have no doubt done so. In his unconscious
he felt about women and divorce much as Strindberg did. He retained
during the Restoration his early Puritanism and religious interests,
and hence published _Paradise Lost_. Even here he found an opportunity
for expressing special views about women and describing his own forlorn
condition.

Again it is likely that Shakespeare in our generation would not have
written much differently from Ibsen or Hauptmann. The marriage problem
interested him also, for he was unhappily married and loved another.
He expressed his bitterness towards woman in his sonnets, in his
characterisations of historical characters like Cleopatra and Cressida.
But he wrote no special work occupied with the theme of the hard
restrictions placed by society upon the lives of some unhappily married
people. A work of this kind would have been almost a monstrosity in
his age. Shakespeare could not have written exactly as Ibsen did,
for though in their unconscious they were alike, each had different
traditions and backgrounds to work on. No writer ignores totally
prevailing literary fashions or tastes.

It is not my purpose to go into the causes of changes in tastes,
traditions, ideas, movements. That subject has been dealt with often.
Economic reasons are great factors in developing new literary periods
and movements, yet also have much to do with this feeling of reaction
against a preceding age. The artificiality of the eighteenth century
gave way to the love of nature of the nineteenth. The demand for
reason, wit and classicism in literature disappeared gradually, to be
replaced by imagination, the utilisation of emotion and romanticism.
Wordsworth is a reaction to Pope (even though Wordsworth's nature
worship concealed his sex interest). His way was prepared by other
writers of nature like Thomson, Collins, Goldsmith, Gray, Cowper,
Crabbe, Blake and Burns. The immortality and exhibitionism of Congreve,
Wycherly, Farquar, Van Brugh and Dryden in the Restoration period were
a reaction to the Puritanism of the age of Cromwell. Bunyan, because of
his early training and physical and mental condition, however, still
clung to his early puritanism.

Yet Pope and Wordsworth were each men of their ages and wrote in
accordance with the rising literary traditions of the time, though
they also altered these. For the imitative instinct is powerful and
present in the most original writers. Shakespeare's plays are much like
those of Marlowe and Fletcher, though greater. His "plagiarisms," like
those of Milton, were extensive. It is true that often one man sets
the standard for a literary age, but he usually has predecessors. His
influence is due to the fact that he strikes responsive chords in the
unconscious of many people of his time, and the circle of his admirers
and imitators increases, so as to make him an authority.

The realistic novels of George Eliot appeared after England wearied of
the fanciful fictions of Walter Scott. A generation passed by before
the reaction set in with full force. Both writers wrote as they did,
largely in obedience to the tendencies of their times, upon which
they reacted and were reacted upon. They wrote because of personal
repressions. Their methods of expression were different, because of a
desire to comply somewhat with literary traditions. Romanticism was
fashionable in 1830, while realism was in the air in 1860.

Those readers who think that these views do not give sufficient credit
to writers for originality in literary expression should remember that
common literary forms are followed by writers who may nevertheless be
original in ideas. Only the student of literary history realises the
power of literary imitation.

Take the thousands of pastorals that flooded European literature from
Theocrities to Pope; most of them, except Spenser's _Astrophel_,
Milton's _Lycidas_, and a few others were flat and unprofitable. Note
the numerous sonnets written since the form was brought over from Italy
by Wyatt and Surrey. The extensive use of the sonnet proves poets are
imitative.

Recall the allegories with which mediæval literature abounded. Even
the great short stories of Hawthorne, who was much influenced by Bunyan
and Spenser, show traces of mediæval forms. Literary tradition is
certainly stronger than originality. And the thousands of authors of
our day who write novels and short stories, would in mediæval times
have written allegories.

The ideas and mode of expression change, and hence makes much of the
old literature obsolete. But many emotions remain eternal. We can still
feel with Sappho and the Troubadours, whereas we find our intellect
insulted by some of the religious ideas versified by Dante and Milton;
although the passages describing secular emotions win our admiration.

When we must look for an author's unconscious buried in the literary
trappings of his day we weary of the task and dismiss his work. Why can
we not read the thousands of pastorals and allegories of the mediæval
writers? Is it not largely because of the feeble intellects, and spirit
of imitation present, because of the absence of the personal note?
The unconscious is buried too deeply in rigmarole. The works have a
psychological and historical but not artistic value. The religious
and romantic instincts in many of us are buried too deeply in our
unconscious, and hence we do not sympathise with those works.

Those poets live who have been most personal. The Roman poets, Horace,
Catullus, Titullus, Propertius, Ovid, Lucretius, were personal. Even
the _Æneid_ reveals the soul of Virgil in the story of Æneas and Dido.

The unconscious is present in all literature, and the literary movement
but colours it and gives occasion for the expression or censorship of
certain phases of it. Puritan writers are not in their unconscious any
different from the "immoral" ones; only the latter relax the censor and
give full play to the unconscious, when a liberal age like that of the
Restoration or the Renaissance, permits it.

Hence, though all writers draw on their unconscious and base their work
on their personal repressions, authors of one age differ in manner
and substance from those of another, not because the unconscious is
different (which it is not), but because it is fashionable to express
only certain features of it in one age; because writers have an
instinctive tendency to comply with the literary fashions of their
age; because the time spirit colours and censors those elements of the
unconscious which appear in the literary product.


IV

Freud has shown in his _Psychopathology of Every-Day Life_ that we tend
to forget the things that are displeasing to us, that unconsciously
we avoid what has once caused us pain. The objection has been raised
to this theory that as a matter of fact it is the painful things that
we never forget, and that these impress themselves most on us. Such
critics might have taken it for granted that the scientist who laid
down the principles that the neuroses date from the earliest painful
love experiences which are never forgotten, but merely repressed and
unconscious, would not have overlooked their objections. Certainly we
do not forget painful things, but nature has so provided that we have a
tendency to repress into our unconscious annoying events and go on our
way as if they had never happened; only in symptomatic acts, mistakes,
slips of the tongue and otherwise do we betray ourselves. The man whose
wife has lied never forgets it if he has loved her. But if he has, let
us say, been slighted by a person who has not been playing a principal
part in his life, he will go on living as if that person had never
existed for him. He may unconsciously avoid the street where that man
lives, and forget about him, until some occasion may arise when he may
betray his dislike of that person in a manner he never intended; the
action is, nevertheless, the voice of his unconscious. Life would be
unbearable if we always had before us pictures of our past sufferings.
In fact, a neurosis is brought about by the fact that we don't forget.
As Freud said, the hysteric suffers from reminiscences or fantasies
based on painful events in the past.

The principle of unconscious avoiding of the painful is at the basis of
the rejection of the world's great books, both old and new. Literary
criticism is influenced by our tendency to ignore what causes us pain.

The world has not always realised the reason for the opposition to
a new great thinker, or an advanced idea or book. We have contented
ourselves by asserting that the world was not yet advanced enough
intellectually to perceive their greatness. We know, however, that
often the most intellectual people of an age are the first to reject a
new idea. Men like Carlyle and Lord Beaconsfield would have nothing to
do with the theory of evolution. Darwin's chief opponents were among
the leading biologists of the time.

The fact of one's being born in an earlier generation from the man
who propounds the new idea, is a large factor in the rejection of it.
Another unconscious reason for the repudiation of the new idea is that
it would cause us pain if it were true. We would also feel that we
had been dupes all our lives. We had been smugly following a pleasant
delusion that brought us some happiness and suddenly we see our bubble
pricked. We had been following a course of thinking and conduct,
that is now impeached by the new discovery. If a man has written
several books on miracles, original sin, and other dogmas, in which he
believes, and has spent all his life studying the subjects, he could
not accept a book which rejects his ideas; it would mean that he had
wasted his life. His aversion to concur with the conclusions of that
new book is nature's means of preventing him from suffering great pain;
it is a defence action. If a preacher has advised thousands of couples
who were unhappy not to divorce and not to remarry some one with
whom they might have been happy, he would be the last man to see the
greatness of a work that shows divorce may be a humane and beneficial
act in some cases, for it would mean that he would have to admit he has
ruined the lives of many people.

The real objection by man to the Copernican theory was that it
reflected on his religion and his vanity; it was annoying to hear that
the earth was not the centre of the universe. The Darwinian theory
was a still more painful discovery because it placed man among the
descendants of animals and taught that he was a by-product like them.
The facts, however, in both cases, were so overwhelming that many
managed to accept them and still keep their religious beliefs intact,
for these still give consolation. In spite of Copernicus and Darwin, we
still live as if the world were the centre of the universe and man its
most divine product.

The most personal and human argument in favour of a belief in personal
immortality of the soul, of communion with the dead or a Providential
Personal God, is that life would be sad if these theories were not
true; they must hence be true. Tennyson, in his _In Memoriam_, has the
popular attitude. If life didn't live for ever more, then "earth is
darkness at the core and dust and ashes all that is." But our wishes
must recede before logic and facts.

A great idea, then, is not accepted if its conclusions are painful to
us when a more pleasant idea has prevailed; every idea is rejected when
its possible truth would mean that we have been living in error and
wasting our lives. New ideas are nearly always made to fit in with the
old views.

The theory of evolution became acceptable only when it was demonstrated
to the satisfaction of the religionists what at first did not seem
apparent to them, that it interfered neither with a belief in a
personal God, Christianity nor the immortality of the soul.

Literary men who are advanced are admired often for qualities that
do not constitute their real greatness. The conservatives praise the
daring poet for his style, after he has made his way; or they select
a few of the minor ideas he champions and ignore the greater ones.
They will not accept the Hardy who wrote _Jude the Obscure_, but the
Hardy of _Far From the Maddening Crowd_; they will admire the early
harmless lyrics of John Davidson instead of the profound testaments
and later plays, whose real greatness was shown by Dr. Hayim Fineman
in his monograph on _John Davidson_.[G] They praise Swinburne for his
melody, Ibsen for his technique and Shaw for his wit, but can see no
intellectual value either in the _Songs Before Sunrise_, or _Peer
Gynt_, or _Man and Superman_. They overlook the value of Byron's _Don
Juan_ or _Cain_, because these works contain ideas that hurt most,
and instead they lavish compliments on harmless descriptions like the
address to the ocean, or the account of the battle of Waterloo. They
like Shelley's lyrics and see nothing in his ideas.

The "conspiracy of silence" that has often greeted many great men was
at times unconscious. People are not prone by nature to investigate
something which might bring painful results. They prefer to let it
alone altogether. The motive of ignoring a great book is founded on
one of displeasure. Hence morbid and pessimistic books, revolutionary
ideas, iconoclastic views on religion, morals or philosophy, new
discoveries in science, encounter opposition. We do not want to be
disturbed in our complacency. For the disturbance is, after all, made
by those who do not fit into the old order; their own discoveries are
defence processes. But gradually it is seen that these writers express
universal wants.

The opposition met by all investigations in the subject of sex, is an
example of man's effort to thrust painful things out of sight. The
barrier raised against Freud himself rises largely from three leading
ideas of his, those on the sexual significance of symbols in dreams and
the attributing of neurosis to sexual causes, and the theory that the
infant has a sexual life of its own. In spite of his broad use of the
term sexual and his many demonstrations of the truth of these ideas,
man does not want to believe them. Jung and Adler, who lay little
stress on the sexual element, have made the theory of psychoanalysis
acceptable to many; but Freud objects to the use of the word
psychoanalysis by disciples who have taken out of his theory something
he considers essential.

FOOTNOTE:

[G] Published by the University of Pennsylvania.




CHAPTER XIV

KEATS'S PERSONAL LOVE POEMS


I

Stress has never been laid on the real unconscious origins of some of
Keats's best poems. We know that his sad love affair with Fanny Brawne,
who coquetted with him, inspired a few poems directly addressed to her;
it is also indisputable that Keats had her in mind when he wrote _La
Belle Dame Sans Merci_, he was telling of his own fate in the account
of the knight's mishap. But it is rarely recognised that emotions
connected with Fanny Brawne inspired his two most famous odes, the one
to the Nightingale and the other to the Grecian urn; that the tale of
_Lamia_, which ranks among his best poems, is a symbolic description
of his attitude towards Miss Brawne, and that her presence is felt in
other poems and sonnets by Keats. He thought of her constantly, and he
could scarcely write a love poem but she somehow or other stepped into
the pages. When we compare these and other poems to the letters that
he had written to her about the same time, we will find that often the
same emotions inspired both.

Keats met Miss Brawne in the fall of 1818, when he was twenty-three
years old. He quarrelled with her in February, 1819, but, nevertheless,
was her declared lover in the spring. His first love letter that we
have to her is dated July 1, 1819, and the last about May, 1820. In
the spring and summer of 1819 he wrote some of his best poems, and
he showed most emphatically the repression of his emotions by the
coquetries of Fanny. He took a walk among the marbles of the British
Museum, in February, 1819, and three months later penned his _Ode to a
Grecian Urn_. In the latter part of April he heard the nightingale in
Brown's garden, and he wrote the famous ode. In the same month he also
wrote _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_. In August and September of 1819 he
worked on _Lamia_. He had his first hemorrhage in February, 1820, left
England in September, and died in Italy February, 1821.

Those who have read the letters to Fanny will remember with what
anxiety the poet wrote, how he showed his jealousy and complained and
pleaded without pride. In one letter dated June 19, 1819, he said he
would resent having his heart made a football, that Brown, with whom
she flirted, was doing him to death by inches, and that the air of a
room from which Fanny was absent was unhealthy to him. "I appeal to
you by the blood of that Christ you believe in.... Do not write to me
if you have done anything this month which it would have pained me to
have seen." In October he writes, "Love is my religion--I could die for
that; I could die for you." The letters are the record of the agony of
a man who is being played with and who cries out in helplessness. He
cannot bear seeing her smiling with others or dancing with them. Miss
Brawne asserted after his death that she did not regard him as a great
poet, and thought it advisable for people to let his reputation die. It
is also said she referred to him as the foolish poet who loved her.

Let us see how this sad affair influenced his work.

The Keats of the first volume, _Poems_, 1817, is a much different
person from the Keats of the _Lamia_ volume, in 1820. The three
intervening years had brought a maddening love affair, a fatal disease
and the famous, though not as once thought fatal review, attacking
_Endymion_. His art principles remained much the same. With growing
sorrow he worshipped beauty more and sought in it a refuge from grief.
His attitude towards women and life was now somewhat different. He paid
woman a tribute in the poem in the first volume, beginning with the
lines, "Woman! I behold thee," etc. But he had not yet suffered from a
Fanny Brawne; here he spoke of woman's being "like a milk-white lamb
that bleats for man's protection." And yet before he was twenty he may
have had a foreboding that his fate in love might not be a happy one.
In the poem, _To Hope_, he wrote:

    "Should e'er unhappy love my bosom pain,
    From cruel parents or relentless fair;
    O let me not think it is quite in vain
    To sigh out sonnets to the midnight air."

Alas for himself, but perhaps (it may be cruel to say) fortunately for
the lovers of literature, those sonnets and other poems were sighed out
later!

Before we can, however, quite understand his sad life and the nature
of his work and philosophy, something must be said about his relations
to his mother. She died from consumption when he was past fourteen.
Keats, who was her favourite child, sat up nights, mourning her, and
was inconsolable; he would hide for days under his master's desk. Once,
at the age of five, he guarded her sick room with a sword. His mother
re-married a year after her husband's death, when the poet was in his
tenth year. She separated from her second husband and went to live with
her mother. Keats then had a guardian. The poet was the oldest of five
children, and was a seven months' child. All this is significant. The
Œdipus Complex was strong in the poet. He was not only deprived of his
mother early, but witnessed her marry a second time. This event revived
the babyish jealousy he felt of his father, and made him unconsciously
hate the new husband. He looked for a substitute for the lost mother
and thought he found her in Fanny Brawne, and then he learned what
grief was. He loved beauty so much because of unrequited love. Some
poets, like Wordsworth, seek consolation in nature for lack of love,
others like Byron simply voice their woe in a personal note, others
like Shelley find it a spur to spread views of reform in connection
with the marriage institution. Keats's love of beauty has a strong
sexual component. His unfulfilled physical desires were sublimated into
poems worshipping beauty. Art was his refuge.

We are now prepared to trace the origins of some of his work. Most
critics saw the unconscious allusions in the _La Belle Dame_ poem.
It is symbolic of himself in the snares of a coquette. There is an
allusion to an old song entitled _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_ in Keats's
_The Eve of St. Agnes_ which Porphyro played to Madeline while she
slept; it was a poem composed in Provence; and we all know that most
of the love poems of the Provençal Troubadours were complaints about
unrequited love. Keats's poem has a simple plot. A knight tells the
poet, in response to a question as to why he was so woe-begone, that
he met a fairy child and set her on his pacing steed. She claimed to
love him, and she lulled him to sleep and he dreamed that pale kings
and princes and warriors told him that he was in the thrall of a girl
without mercy. They were evidently also her victims. He wakes and
loiters on the cold hill side, realising that he was her victim.

This poem was written within a few months before the letter to Fanny
was penned, in which he said he resented having his heart made a
football. The poem corresponds to an anxiety dream. Freud tells us that
the contents of the anxiety dream is of a sexual nature; the libido has
been turned away from its object, and, not having succeeded in being
applied, has been transformed into fear. This poem is a good proof of
this one of the least-understood theories of Freud. Keats then is the
knight and Fanny is the fairy child.

The nature of his day dreams and jealousy appears in the _Ode to
Fanny_, a posthumous poem, probably not meant for publication. It
contains some of the substance of his letters to Fanny. He imagines he
is watching Fanny at a dance, and jealous thoughts come to him. "Who
now with greedy looks eats up my feast?" he asks. His only remedy is to
write poetry to ease his pain. He says to Physician Nature, "O, ease my
heart of verse and let me rest." He loves her so much he cannot bear
that any one profane her with looks. He wants her wholly, her thoughts
and emotions. The poem was probably written about the time of the
quarrel, in February, 1819.

Another posthumous poem addressed to Fanny is the one beginning with
the lines, "What can I do to drive away remembrance from my eyes?"
He is now wishing he were free from love, and that he had his old
liberty. He wants to devote himself to his muse as freely as he once
did. He thinks of wine as he did in the nightingale poem, and asks:
"Shall I gulp wine? No, that is vulgarism." He is in hell, he realises,
but he concludes with a wish to satisfy his physical love for Fanny.
He wants to rest his soul on her dazzling breast, to place his arm
about her waist, and feel her warm breath spread a rapture in his
hair. In a posthumously published sonnet he pleads, "I cry to you for
mercy"; he wants her entirely, including "that warm, white, lucent,
million-pleasured breast." In the sonnet he wrote (not before his
death, as usually thought but as Colvin says, in February, 1819), in
a blank page in a volume of Shakespeare facing "A Lover's Complaint,"
"Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art," he concludes most
sensuously. He longs to be:

    "Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
    To feel forever its soft fall and swell,
    Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
    And so live forever--or else swoon to death."

All this shows that Keats's love was not one where the reason or
moral sense played a great part; it was not tender or kindly, but a
madness, and more than usually physical. There can be no doubt, from
the evidence given by Keats, that he indulged in reveries of physical
satisfaction with Fanny in day dreams.

Keats has himself written that he had sensuous night dreams. He
wrote in April, 1819, apropos the sonnet, _A Dream_, after reading
Dante's Episode of Paolo and Francesca: "The dream was one of the most
delightful enjoyments I had in my life. I floated about the wheeling
atmosphere, as it is described, with a beautiful figure, to whose lips
mine were joined, it seemed for an age; and in the midst of all this
cold and darkness I was warm." A flying dream always has a sexual
significance, even without any female figure to accompany the dreamer.
Of course this figure was Fanny Brawne to whom he had just been or was
about to be betrothed.


II

We now come to his two greatest odes, the one to the Grecian Urn and
the other to the Nightingale. Both were written in the spring of 1819.
In both Fanny Brawne is with the poet though there is no direct mention
of his love for her or his troubles with her. The lines in the _Ode to
a Grecian Urn_ that particularly were written with Fanny in mind are
those addressed to the lover of the Grecian Urn.

    "Bold Lover, never, never, canst thou kiss,
    Though winning near the goal--yet do not grieve;
    She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
    For ever wilt thou love and she be fair."

Keats saw a resemblance between himself and that youth. He, too, was
winning and near the goal, and he no more had her love than did the
youth on the urn. He himself knew the passion

    "That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
    A burning forehead and a parching tongue."

He had to accept his lot and pretend to see some advantage in it as he
did in that of the youth on the urn:

    "More happy love! more happy, happy love!
    For ever warm and still to be enjoyed,
    For ever panting, and for ever young."

The poem is the song of unsatisfied desires. Keats, frustrated in his
love, had one resource, to make poetry and create beauty out of his
sorrow. To the future he too would be like that lover created by an
ancient artist, panting for love ever young. The poem has such great
appeal because it strikes a note in us all.

In the _Ode to the Nightingale_ we also see evidence of his love
sadness because of Fanny. He expresses a wish to go away with the bird
from scenes

    "Where youth grows pale, and spectre thin, and dies;
    Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
    Or new love pine at them beyond to-morrow."

The nightingale has not known like him

    "The weariness, the fever and the fret
    Here where men sit and hear each other groan."

Miss Brawne had embittered his life and hence he must fly at least in
fancy through poetry with the bird. Again he finds consolation for his
unhappy love in poetry.

He has been half in love with death, he has thought of taking to drink;
he expressed both these ideas in previous poems. He is reminded that
the nightingale's song was heard by Ruth, because love is uppermost
in his mind. But he knows his fancied flight with the bird must end
shortly. He will soon come back to his real self with the vexing
thoughts of Fanny.

    "Adieu the fancy cannot cheat so well
    As she is famed to do, deceiving elf."

Then the music ceased, and he is back on earth again.

The unconscious sex symbolism in the wish to fly with the nightingale
is a further proof of his unsatisfied love.

The motive of both these great poems was then supplied by his
unsatisfactory love affair, but critics have not openly asserted the
fact. It wasn't a mere walk in the British Museum or in Brown's garden
that gave birth to the poems. These events merely incited him to put on
paper the poems which had already for some time past fermented in his
unconscious and were really produced by his repressed love for Fanny.
Had he been happy in love, it is very likely we would never have had
these poems. They are as personal as the poems previously mentioned
addressed directly to Fanny, as _La Belle Dame_, and the sonnet written
in the fly leaf of Shakespeare. The same unhappy longings gave rise to
them all, and they were all written within a few months of each other,
though I have no evidence as to the date of the sonnet and the lines to
Fanny.

But it is in a long poem where Fanny is chiefly present unconsciously,
in _Lamia_. We have here the tale of Lamia, a beautiful woman, who is a
metamorphosed serpent ensnaring Lycius of Corinth by her beauty. Fanny
is Lamia the serpent woman, Lycius of Corinth is Keats himself. Lycius
is about to marry Lamia, as Keats was also thinking of marrying Fanny.
It should, by the way, be borne in mind that the period of the writing
of _Lamia_ corresponds with the date of the first published despairing
letters of Keats to Fanny, the summer and fall of 1819. It would be a
rare miracle if during this time he could have kept thoughts of his
sweetheart out of his work. Unconsciously he felt she acted like a
serpent, and hence he drew her as such.

Lycius did not want his teacher Apollonius, the philosopher, at the
feast. But the preceptor did come, an unbidden guest, and told Lycius
who this beautiful woman really was. Lycius died of disappointment.
Keats did not wish to be told the truth about Fanny's lack of
character, and thus be disillusioned. He felt that he too would die,
hence he fears facts and asks: "Do not all charms fly at the touch
of cold philosophy?" In this question we see already he suspects the
nature of Fanny. But he will not believe his uncertain suspicions nor
investigate them. It is the voice of his own unconscious that he hears
in these words of his preceptor:

    "'Fool! Fool!' repeated he, while his eyes still
    Relented not, nor moved; 'from every ill
    In life have I preserved thee to this day,
    And shall I see thee made a serpent's prey?'"

He attacks Fanny in his description of Lamia's pleading, whose beauty
smote while it guaranteed to save. He tells of the meshes in which
he struggled. That he published the poem in his lifetime is evidence
that he himself was not altogether aware he was analysing his own love
affair and was abusing his fiancée. When he resolved to make a poem of
the little tale he read in Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_ it was his
unconscious that chose the theme for him, recognising that he had many
affinities in his life with that of the unfortunate Corinthian youth.
The poem contains more of himself than any of his long poems.

There are many other poems of Keats where the personal element enters
and where he tells us of his unconscious. The affair with Fanny
coloured his entire work after he met her. He also knew and admired
another girl about the time he met Fanny, whom he calls a Charmian; she
was a Miss Cox, but she did not greatly influence him. It is to the
intense affection Keats had for his mother, of whom he was deprived in
boyhood, and the unfortunate affair with Fanny, that we owe some of his
best literary work.




CHAPTER XV

SHELLEY'S PERSONAL LOVE POEMS


I

Shelley's great love poems were inspired by love repressions, and it
will be my province to try to trace some of the finest poems in the
English language to their sources.

His relations with women have been much criticised and also much
misunderstood. The first thing unusual about his life is the slight
influence his mother exerted upon him. Shelley, no doubt, loved
his mother, but he received very little sympathy from her. As a
result he became strongly attached to his sisters; in them he sought
unconsciously for the mother he had all but lost. He was alienated from
his father in boyhood, and there were definite clashes later. The poet
was the oldest of six children.

He loved his cousin, Harriet Grove, and was engaged to her. She broke
the engagement on account of the views he entertained. Her parents
influenced her in this action. It was Shelley's first love affair. The
poet was in his nineteenth year when he was jilted; he slept with a
loaded pistol and poison near him for some time after this. In January,
1811, in a letter to his friend, Hogg, he writes he would have followed
Harriet to the end of the earth. He asks his friend never to mention
her. He tells of a personal interview with Harriet and laments that
she is gone and that he still breathes and lives. On January 11 he
wrote: "She is gone! She is lost to me forever! She married! Married
to a clod of earth; she will become as insensible herself; all those
fine capabilities will moulder." She had, however, not yet married. It
was the recollections of these acute sufferings that he later put into
the mouth of the maniac in _Julian and Maddalo_; those poignant ravings
were for a half century regarded as impersonal, and were never thought
to be directed against a real woman whom he loved.

In the latter part of March, 1811, the poet was expelled from Oxford
for his pamphlet on atheism. In the meantime he had met Harriet
Westbrook and married her, in a spirit of gallantry, in the latter part
of August, 1811; he sympathised with her because of her sufferings at
home. He also liked Elizabeth Hitchener at the time, and later asked
her to come and live with his wife and himself. She did so about July,
1812. Shelley's wife had no liking for her, so Miss Hitchener was
practically bribed by the poet to leave. This she did in November.
Shelley was disillusioned in her, and he really had very little in
common with her, though she was intellectually superior to Harriet,
Shelley's wife.

In July, 1814, Shelley deserted his wife. A few weeks later he left
with Mary Godwin, with whom he had been friendly since the spring of
the year. On December, 1816, Harriet committed suicide by drowning,
while pregnant.

Shelley married his second wife legally December 30, 1816. He probably
was not madly in love with her. Mention should be made of two cases
of unreciprocated affection for him on the part of the poet's two
sisters-in-law, Fanny Godwin, who committed suicide, and Jane
Clairmont, the daughter of Mrs. Godwin by a previous marriage, and also
known as the mistress of Byron.

The two women whom Shelley loved after his marriage and who inspired
some of his best poetry were Emilia Viviani and Mrs. James Williams.
Shelley met Miss Viviani about December, 1820. That winter he wrote
the _Epipsychidion_, which was a love poem to her; here he also told
us the history of his love affairs. In June, 1822, he refers to his
disillusionment with her. About this time his feeling for his friend's
wife, Mrs. Williams, overpowered him, and he wrote a number of lyrics
to her. He was drowned July 8, 1822, with Mr. Williams.

Shelley never had a satisfactory love affair in his life. He was
discarded by his first love, for whom his affection was strong. He
did not love his first wife at all, and his second wife did not give
him that satisfaction in love for which he craved. Hence he yearned
after others. His new affairs brought him no happiness, as he was
disillusioned in his Emilia, while Mrs. Williams was married to his
friend; social intercourse was for a while stopped between Shelley and
the Williamses on account of Shelley's love. Two other women who cared
for him did not attract him. This whole state of affairs led to some
of his best poems, brought out some of his views on free love, and
influenced his lyrics. We will examine how his poetry arose from the
depths of his unconscious.

_Julian and Maddalo_ was first sketched in 1814. The maniac's
soliloquy, which is one of the most forceful outcries of love
disappointment in poetry, inspired by personal experience, and is,
with Swinburne's _The Triumph of Time_, among the greatest of all such
products in literature, is Shelley's own outburst. It is his full
fury cast at Harriet Grove, and was not, as surmised by Arabella
Shore (_Gentleman's Magazine_ [1887], v. 263, p. 329). and H. S. Salt
(_Shelley Society Papers_ [1888], p. 325), directed against his first
wife. He never loved her as that maniac loved; besides, it was not
true of Harriet Westbrook that she ceased to love Shelley. It is said
that the poet believed her guilty of adultery while living with him,
but even if this were so (and we have no evidence to warrant such a
belief), the poet had been casting longing eyes at Mary Godwin, his
future second wife, for some time before he left his first wife; we
have no proof that the poet was heartbroken after he left Harriet
Westbrook, though he sympathised with her.

His affair with Harriet Grove was not the ephemeral thing that William
Sharp deems it, in his biography of the poet. For even when married to
Harriet Westbrook, he was still chagrined about the first Harriet. When
Miss Grove married a cousin in the fall of 1811, a few months after his
own marriage, the poet wrote to her brother, asking how he liked his
brother-in-law, and added sarcastically and bitterly, "A new brother
as well as a new cousin must be an invaluable acquisition." This was
in October 28, 1811. Harriet Grove's conduct had caused him to spend
many sleepless nights, and only a few months before his marriage to
Miss Westbrook he had suicidal thoughts. He wrote sad love verses and
a complaint against love's perfidy. Captain Kennedy describes Shelley,
in June, 1813, as playing on the piano a favourite tune which Harriet
Grove used to play for him. (Dowden's _Life of Shelley_, p. 390.) It
was in the next year that he sketched the poem, _Julian and Maddalo_,
and while it is likely that in the final version, which was written
four years later though published after his death, unconscious emotions
regarding Harriet Westbrook were fused into the poem along with the
indignation at Harriet Grove. The reference to the tomb for which the
lady addressed in the poem deserted the poet, may have been suggested
by the dead Harriet Westbrook; but this fact is not sufficient reason
for regarding her the subject of the poem, as Miss Shore and Mr. Salt
do. We should look for truth beyond such incidental references. The
pain in this poem is the memory of a far greater and earlier agony than
that Shelley experienced by Harriet Westbrook's infidelity; rather of
the grief that Harriet Grove caused him. The passages in the letters to
Hogg prove that the poet's sorrow was too keen for him to forget; he
could not help but put them unconsciously in this poem.

There are references to Harriet Grove in _Epipsychidion_ written in
the early winter of 1821. Mr. Flea, in an article on _The Story of
Shelley's Life in Epipsychidion_, contends correctly that Harriet Grove
is the "one with the voice which was envenomed melody," from whose
cheeks flew a killing air which lay upon the leaves of the poet's heart
and made him feel the ruins of age. The bitterness of this passage is
equal to that in _Julian and Maddalo_, and hence the lines do not refer
to some vulgar affair as some critics think.

Shelley had written some of his earliest sad and lugubrious love poems
to Harriet Grove, and they appeared in 1810, in the volume _Victor and
Cazir_, a copy of which book the poet presented to Harriet Grove. In
the November of the same year, when he was losing her, he published
_Posthumous fragments of Margaret Nicholson_, and the concluding poem,
"Melody to a Scene of Former Times," has all the pain of the Maniac's
soliloquy in _Julian and Maddalo_, and was, no doubt, written to
Harriet Grove. It has passages of reproach like those in that poem.

The best-known lines in the latter poem are:

              "Most wretched men
    Are cradled into poetry by wrong;
    They learn in suffering what they teach in song."

The reader may think that it is utterly insignificant whether the
Julian poem was written about the first Harriet instead of the second,
but this is just as important as to know that, let us say, Arthur
Hallam, and not some one else, is the person mourned by Tennyson in
_In Memoriam_. And we are enabled to learn the influence upon his work
and ideas when we understand the nature of the earliest sex repression
in the poet's life. This affair in Shelley's nineteenth year was of
vast import; it made the Shelley we know, the enemy of society and the
reformer.

He hated intolerance, religion and monarchy because by his heterodoxy
and the offence it gave to Harriet Grove's parents, he lost her; not
to mention that he also lost his mother's love for his radical views.
He saw the world steeped in error, and he believed this condition made
him lose the love of his betrothed and of his mother. He wrote to Hogg
that he would never forgive intolerance. "It is the only point on which
I allow myself to encourage revenge; every moment shall be devoted to
my object which I am able to spare." Here in the words of this youth
we see the main factor which led to writing _Prometheus Unbound_ and
_The Revolt of Islam_. His plans shaped themselves at the time of the
jilting, and he never swerved from them. And in the opening stanzas of
the eleventh canto of the Islam poem he again describes the agonies
of his lost love, with Harriet Grove in mind, no doubt. This poem was
written in the summer of 1817. Shelley then became an uncompromising
reformer because he had suffered in love for his radical ideas; hence
he would make it his aim to spread the views which he held so that in
the future other lovers should not lose their sweethearts because of
liberal notions. And in the _Ode to the West Wind_ Shelley's prayer is
to spread his ideas over the universe.

Though the poet wrote a few good poems to Harriet Westbrook and
dedicated _Queen Mab_ to her, she had little or no influence on his
life except to bring him sorrow because of her suicide. One of the few
references to her in his later work is in the _Epipsychidion_, "And one
was true--oh! why not true to me?" Stopford Brooke thinks this refers
to Harriet Grove, but this is not likely, as Shelley continues, "there
shone again deliverance," and he speaks of one who was to him like
the Moon. The Moon was, of course, his second wife, Mary Godwin, who
immediately succeeded Harriet Westbrook.


II

The _Epipsychidion_ tells us of the poet's love adventures and gives us
his beautiful dream of love. In _Alastor_ he had depicted his longing
for love; the poem was written in 1815 at the time he was living with
Harriet Westbrook; it shows how lonely he felt and how he longed for
love. In _Epipsychidion_, where he speaks of his lying "within a
chaste, cold bed," he says that he had not the full measure of love
from his second wife. Hence he took refuge in building a fanciful isle
where he satisfies his love with Emilia Viviani. In this great poem
Shelley gives us a glimpse into his polygamously inclined unconscious.
He states his philosophy of free love in the poem. As physical desire
was a strong factor in Keats's one solitary love, the trait most
characteristic of Shelley was his polygamous instinct. This is present
in the unconscious of the male, and society has tried to eradicate it
by marriage. We all know that there has never been complete success
in this direction. The instinct which is repressed bursts forth
especially when the marriage has not been successful, or when the man
does not love his wife in full measure, though as the world is aware
it breaks out even in cases where he does love. Neither of Shelley's
two marriages gave him the real love he sought. He wanted other women
to live in his household. He invited Miss Titchener to live with him
and Harriet Westbrook, and he had Jane Clairmont, his wife's half
sister, who fell in love with him, live with them. He thought he would
be happy with Miss Viviani, but was disillusioned with her soon, and
then his polygamous instinct made Mrs. Jane Williams the object of his
affections. Yet Shelley led a chaste, upright life and did not satisfy
his instincts for polygamy; instead, he wrote poetry. He created
fantasies because of his repressions, and gave us the beautiful day
dream closing the _Epipsychidion_.

Mrs. Williams inspired some of the greatest lyrics in the language.
The painful poem to her husband beginning with the words, "The serpent
is shut out from paradise," tells how he flies because Mrs. Williams's
looks stir griefs that should sleep and hopes that cannot die. The
world owes to Shelley's attachment for Mrs. Williams such poems as,
_Rarely, Rarely, Comest Thou, Spirit of Delight_, _One Word Is too
Often Profaned_, _When the Lamp is Shattered_, _Oh, World! Oh, Hope!
Oh, Time!_ _Rough Wind, That Moanest Loud_, _With a Guitar, To Jane_,
_To Jane--the Invitation_, _To Jane--the Recollection_, _Remembrance_,
_Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici_, and _The Magnetic Lady to Her
Patient_. Here are a dozen poems that every lover of Shelley knows,
yet they are the outpourings of the poet's love for another man's
wife, written because he could not attain that love and satisfy his
polygamous instincts. Had these instincts been satisfied, these
beautiful poems would have been lost to the world.

We now come to two of his greatest odes, _To the Wild West Wind_ and
_To the Skylark_. Here, as in the case of Keats's two great odes, the
critics have feared to trace the poems to a love repression on the part
of the poet. In fact, most criticisms of the poems treat them as alien
to the subject of love. And yet unconsciously Shelley is here voicing
his longing for love and giving vent to his unconscious polygamous
instinct. Mr. Gribble, in his _Romantic Life of Shelley_, surmises that
the poet is really unconsciously expressing dissatisfaction with his
married life. When Shelley wrote these poems he was still groping for
love; he lived with his second wife, and as far as we know had no love
affair. He had not yet fallen in love with either Miss Viviani or Mrs.
Williams.

The _Ode to the West Wind_ was written in the fall of 1819. The poet
at the time was unhappy; a child of his had died, and his wife was
suffering great depression. When the poet was complaining that he
was falling on the thorns of life and bleeding, and speaking of the
"autumnal tone" in his life, he was referring to the repression of
his love life. He lived with Mary whom he did not love passionately.
If he concludes his poem with the prayer that the wind drive his dead
thoughts over the universe to quicken a new birth, he wants to profit
by this in love. He unconsciously meant that if his ideas on free love
should prevail, he would be able to take a new love without reproach
and without suffering such misfortunes as he did when he deserted his
first wife. He had been deprived of his children and was driven to
exile from his native land a year and a half previously, March, 1818.
It has been one of the ironies of Shelley's fate that the world has
admired this West Wind ode greatly, and tabooed the most important idea
Shelley wanted spread, that of free love. So if we read between the
lines in this great ode pleading for the dissemination of his idea,
we find the poet's unconscious stating he is unhappy and is longing
for another love than that of his wife. He pleads for a satisfaction
of his polygamous instincts. Should the reader think this conclusion
untenable, I can reply that the facts we have of the poet's life give
it unqualified support. Let us also remember that the fructifying wind
was always a sex symbol.

It is the same with _The Ode to the Skylark_, written nearly a year
later. He envies the bird its happiness. "Shadow of annoyance never
came near thee," he says to it. "Thou lovest--but ne'er knew love's
sad satiety." Here he betrays himself by a few words. He has had his
satiety of love, and sad it was, without satisfying him. He doesn't
love his present wife; he never cared deeply for his first wife; his
first sweetheart rejected him; and he had been loved by girls he did
not love. All these facts justify us in selecting the words, "love's
sad satiety" and assigning them a definite meaning. Had we known
nothing of the poet's biography we could not have spoken with such
conviction. He sings "our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest
thought." His saddest thoughts have been those about the difficulties
of finding love's ideal, and of loving another when pledged to some one
else. Then we have the unconscious sex symbolism in the wish to be
happy like the flying singing bird.

Psychoanalytic methods applied to Shelley reveal him then, in his love
poems and in lyrics which were not supposed to deal with love, as a
chaste man with polygamous inclinations and married to a woman he did
not love passionately. There is a connection between this state of
affairs and his interest in scattering liberal ideas. That he also
mistook real love for platonic love may be seen by _Epipsychidion_ and
the poems to Mrs. Williams. Unconscious love elements were at the basis
of other poems of his, like the _Ode to Dejection_.

_Alastor_, _Julian and Maddalo_ and _Epipsychidion_ of the longer
poems, his dozen lyrics inspired by love for Mrs. Williams, and his two
famous odes represent the personal Shelley from the love side, and are
among the greatest poems in any language.

A few words should be said about _Adonais_, his great elegy on Keats.
It is one of his personal poems, and among the best known lines are
those describing himself, "who in another's fate wept his own." The
critics who attacked the work of Keats, though they did not, as Shelley
erroneously thought, drive Keats to death, were the very reviewers who
attacked Shelley and his ideas. Even in this grand elegy Shelley was
also bemoaning unconsciously his failure, and complaining that his
ideas on free love, liberal religion and republicanism were attacked.




CHAPTER XVI

EDGAR ALLAN POE


I

Edgar Allan Poe proves an interesting study from the point of view of
psychoanalysis. He has been analysed by pathologists and psychologists,
but there remains much to be said about the work of this baffling
genius. I can take up only a few phases of the pathetic life and great
work of Poe.

One question that has interested critics is, what was the source of
those mysterious ladies in his stories, the Ligeias, the Morellas, the
Eleonoras? What made him so preoccupied with the subject of the death
of beautiful women long before his own wife died? All this brings us to
a little emphasised chapter in Poe's life, the history of one of his
love affairs before he married Virginia Clemm. Its influence on his
work has hardly ever been noted by critics, and yet the effect was of
great importance.

Poe lost his parents when he was an infant, and he was adopted by Mr.
Allan. He loved the mother of a friend of his, Mrs. Stannard, and when
she died (he was 15 at the time), he was inconsolable. But the history
of this boyish love is not fully known to us. As a boy of sixteen he
loved Sarah Elmira Royster, whom he again met later in life and to whom
he became engaged shortly before his death. At about the age of twenty
or thereafter he loved his cousin, Miss Elizabeth Herring, and wrote
several poems to her.

The real clue to Poe's life and work is furnished in an article,
"Poe's Mary," that appeared in _Harper's Magazine_ for March, 1889,
by Augustus Van Cleef. It reports a conversation with a woman who was
Poe's sweetheart and who rejected him. Her name is now known to us as
Mary Devereaux. The main facts of the article have not been questioned
by his biographers. The substance of the interview is this: Mary
Devereaux met Poe through a flirtation. Her memory did not serve her
as to the date, which she put in 1835. But since Poe was betrothed to
Virginia that year, and had been betrothed to her for some time, the
date was probably 1832, as the author of the article surmises, though
Killis Campbell believes the year was 1831. Mary returned the poet's
love, and he called on her almost every evening for a year. She jilted
him, and Poe horsewhipped a relation of hers as being responsible for
his loss. He wrote for a Baltimore paper a poem of six or eight verses
expressing his indignant sentiments. This passion continued with Poe,
buried in his unconscious, even after he married Virginia Clemm. The
day before Virginia died, in 1847, Mary was at the Poe household, and
Virginia said to her: "Be a friend to Eddie, and don't forsake him; he
always loved you--didn't you, Eddie?"

There is an account in the article of a scene that occurred in the
spring of 1842. Poe tried at the time to see Mary, who was then a
married woman, at her home in Jersey City. He reproached her and
shouted that she did not love her husband, and he tried to force her to
corroborate his words. He had been inquiring for her, and made up his
mind he would see her even "if he had to go to hell" to do it. When he
saw her, he was somewhat soothed, and she sang to him his favourite
song, "Come Rest in This Bosom." She had sung this for him in the early
days, and also at a visit she paid him in Philadelphia not long before
his Jersey City visit. After this episode at her home the poet was
found in the woods wandering about like one crazy.

Mary Devereaux scoffed at the idea that the poet's child wife was the
great passion of his life. It was always known, in spite of Poe's
tenderness for Virginia, that he never found intellectual companionship
in her. Poe married Virginia in May, 1836, when he was 27 and she 14
years old. He was living in 1833 with the Clemms in Baltimore, and had
taken out a marriage license on September 22, 1835, but Virginia was
then too young for marriage.

The relation of Mary to his work will soon appear. I wish to show
first that the splendid love poem, _To One in Paradise_, appearing in
the tale _The Assignation_, was, with the story, inspired by Mary.
_Visionary_, the original title of _The Assignation_, appeared with
the poem in January, 1834, in Godey's _Lady's Book_, and hence was
written in 1833, or before. It was among the tales submitted in the
prize contest that year in which Poe was successful with one of his
stories. When Poe later obtained employment on _The Southern Literary
Messenger_, he reprinted here some of his tales; this tale was
reprinted in July, 1835. The clue comes now. In the same number of the
_Messenger_ there is a poem entitled _To Mary_, by Poe, beginning,
"Mary amid the cares--the woes," which in sentiments and ideas is but
another version of _To One in Paradise_ in the _Visionary_. This poem
_To Mary_ appears in Poe's poetical works under the title _To F----_.
He reprinted this poem, which was originally written to his love Mary,
in _Graham's Magazine_ for March, 1842, and changed the first line
and called the poem no longer _To Mary_, but _To One Departed_, very
suggestive of the _To One in Paradise_. Poe, who would make a poem
written to one lady serve, by a few changes in its text, for another
later woman friend, gave this poem its present title, _To F----_, when
he reprinted it in the 1845 _Broadway Journal_ in honour of the poet
Frances S. Osgood, whom he met that year.[H]

If we compare _To One in Paradise_ with _To F----_ there will be no
doubt that they were inspired by the same person and written at the
same time, 1833, when the affair with Mary was over. In both poems
references are made to his sweetheart being an isle in the sea and
covered with flowers over which the sun smiles. In each poem mention is
made of the desolate condition of the poet who derives happiness from
living in dreams connected with her. _To F----_ is not as perfect as
the other, but the idea underlying each poem is the same. The sonnet
_To Zante_ also has the same imagery, and was written, no doubt, at the
same time to Mary.

_To One in Paradise_ is supposed to be written by the lover in the
story _Assignation_, in which it appears. It will be recalled that
the lover of Marchesa Aphrodite in that tale had written the poem
in a volume of Politian's tragedy, a page of which was blotted with
tears. Poe is that lover and Marchesa Aphrodite is Mary. But we know
also that Poe is the author of the poem _Scenes from Politian_, which
was written about the time he loved Mary. It was published in the
_Southern Literary Messenger_ in December, 1835. In these scenes Poe
identified himself with Politian, who loves Lalage and asks her to
fly to America. "Wilt thou fly to that Paradise?" he asks her. The
reference to Politian in _Assignation_ is then significant, and the
tears on the leaf of the play shed by the lover of Marchesa Aphrodite,
the dreamer, were Poe's own for his lost Mary. The poet looked upon her
as dead to him, and hence in a later version of the poem to her, _To
F----_, he changes the title to _To One Departed_; when he wrote _To
One in Paradise_ he looked upon her as dead. Mary was, by the way, a
name that haunted him, and in his _Marginalia_ he advances his belief
in the correct theory that Byron's only real love affair was with Mary
Chaworth.

I am not so dogmatic as to maintain that in writing the _Assignation_
and the three poems I mentioned, and the Politian scenes, his other
earlier loves did not unconsciously make themselves felt. Killis
Campbell thinks _To One in Paradise_ and the sonnet _To Zante_ were
written to Miss Royster. Poe may also have been thinking of the mother
of his friend who died, in the poem _To One in Paradise_. But it is
most likely that his love for Mary chiefly inspired these poems. They
were certainly not written to Virginia, for in 1833 she was only 11
years old.

The poem to Mary Devereaux, supposed to have been written for a
Baltimore paper, may, as Woodberry surmises, be the _To F----_ poem,
although it is not so severe as Mary said the poem he wrote against
her was. Either her memory failed her as to the alleged severity of
the poem, or the poem has not been discovered. A poem by Poe was only
recently unearthed by Prof. J. C. French, of Johns Hopkins University,
and printed in the _Dial_ for January 31, 1918. It was called
_Serenade_, and was published in the _Baltimore Visiter_, April 20,
1833. The girl addressed is given a fictitious name, Adeline. Whether
she is Mary or not I cannot venture to say with certainty, but most
likely she is. It was published when the affair was probably over, and
may have been written at the height of his love a year previously. Here
are some lines from it:

    "And earth, and stars, and sea, and sky
    Are redolent of sleep as I
    Am redolent of thee and thine
    Enthralling love, my Adeline,
    But list, O list,--so soft and low
    Thy lover's voice to-night shall flow
    That scarce awake thy soul shall deem
    My words the music of a dream."

The lover in _Assignation_, in which _To One in Paradise_ appeared then
is Poe, and his dreamy character is in accordance with all the other
self portrayals we have of the poet. The description of the Marchesa,
no doubt, was inspired by Mary.

I think that the tale of _Ligeia_, which Poe considered his best story,
was unconsciously inspired by Mary, and it hence calls for a new
interpretation. It was published in September, 1838, two years after he
married Virginia; but the poet's memories still hearken back to Mary.
She is the dead Ligeia, and his wife, Virginia, is the Lady Rowena,
whom the narrator married after Ligeia died. The story of Ligeia was
suggested by a dream. The poem _The Conqueror Worm_ did not originally
appear in the body of the tale. The narrator's memory, we will recall,
flew back to the dead Ligeia; he called her name in dreams; ever after
Rowena was dead he had a thousand memories of Ligeia. The emphasis
throughout the tale on the love for the departed Ligeia which will
not die shows the real love the poet felt for Mary, about whom he was
thinking. The narrator imagines that the dead Ligeia put a poison into
the cup of his second wife, Lady Rowena, and that thus the latter dies.
He then sinks into visions of Ligeia. He imagines that the corpse of
his wife becomes alive, and as he looks at it, it is transformed into
"my lost love" Ligeia. In other words, the dead love still lives and
will not die; it is not forgotten, and haunts the poet, just as love
for Mary haunted him. The quotation from Glanvil that man does not
yield to death, applies as well to dead love.

In this tale we see then the unconscious influence which an earlier
love held on Poe. It is a tale of dead love as much as of death.

Mary enters into another famous tale where her presence was never
suspected, in _Eleonora_. It has been thought that Eleonora was the
poet's wife, Virginia, but the tale of the "Valley of Many Colored
Grass" refers to the happy days when he courted Mary, and the sad
change when Eleonora died, that took place in the Valley, describes the
poet's grief when Mary jilted him. The story appeared in 1841 in _The
Gift_ for 1842. Whether it was written before Virginia burst a blood
vessel, in 1841, as is likely, or afterwards, matters not. For in the
tale, which was certainly written six years before Virginia died, the
narrator thinks of a second marriage after the death of Eleonora, and
Poe was surely not thinking of a second marriage in 1841. We recall in
the tale that the narrator had vowed never to love or marry again after
he lost Eleonora, but he does--he marries Ermengrade, who is really
Virginia, since Eleonora is Mary. The narrator believes he hears the
voice of Eleonora forgiving him for his marriage. The poet tells us
then in this tale that in spite of his great love for Mary he was able
after her rejecting him, still to care for and marry some one else.

The strongest passion of his youth was Mary and not Miss Royster. When
he became engaged later in life to Miss Royster it was due to worldly
reasons, and he once broke the engagement. I believe that the fact that
Poe and his wife were cousins and that she burst a blood-vessel gave
rise to the theory that Eleonora, who is a cousin of the narrator, was
Virginia.

Another earlier tale of the period of _Assignation_ and submitted
in the prize contest at Baltimore, and hence written by 1833, is
_Morella_. In _Morella_, Mary is still present in the person of the
first Morella, whom the narrator marries and who dies; again we have a
symbol of Mary's dead love. Morella leaves him a daughter also called
Morella, and this may be a description of the paternal feeling Poe
entertained at the time for Virginia, who was then 11 years old. In the
tale the second Morella also dies.

The sadistic story, _Berenice_, of the same period, also has memories
of Mary.

These stories with fanciful names like Ligeia, Eleonora, Morella,
Berenice and the tale _Assignation_ were given us by the poet from the
depths of his unconscious; love repressions starting from the death of
his own mother in infancy, the loss of his foster mother, Mr. Allan's
first wife, the grief at the death of his friend's mother, the quarrel
with Mr. Allan's second wife, the love affairs with Miss Royster, and
Miss Herring, but especially the rejection by Mary entered into the
influences, which made up not only the poems and tales previously
mentioned, but much of his later work. He was neurotic because he lost
his mother in infancy and had many love disappointments. The only tale
where he gives an account of the love emotions is in _The Spectacles_,
written before or about 1844, and here he drew on his experiences,
probably chiefly from memories of Mary.

Now comes a question that has always puzzled his critics: Why was
the poet so occupied with the subject of death of fair ladies or of
depicting a man bereaved by the death of his love. Many replies have
been made, but not altogether satisfactorily. The most common answer
is that he was so occupied with the subject because he lost his own
wife, Virginia. Some uninformed critics are of the belief that poems
like _The Raven_ and _The Sleeper_, tales like _Eleonora_ and _Ligeia_,
were written after his wife died. As a matter of fact these, with the
exception of _The Raven_ and possibly _Eleonora_, were written even
before Virginia burst a blood-vessel. There is evidence to make us
believe that _Ulaume_, which is taken to refer to the death of his
wife, was at least commenced before Mrs. Poe's death, in January,
1847; _Annabel Lee_ was, however, written after that date. Nearly
all of Poe's short stories, too, had been published by that time. He
was occupied with the subject of death long before he married; he
mourns the death of women in _Lenore_, _Tamerlane_, and _The Sleeper_,
all written before he was twenty-two years old. His first tales,
_Assignation_, _Ligeia_, _Morella_, deal with the subject of women's
deaths. So those who believe that he may have imagined Virginia dead
after she burst a blood-vessel, and hence wrote as if she had died,
are not right. For all the stories of this nature with the doubtful
exception of _Eleonora_ were written before she burst a blood-vessel.
_The Raven_ and _The Conqueror Worm_, two poems occupied with death,
were written before her death but after her hemorrhage.

Poe tells us in his _Philosophy of Composition_,--an unconvincing
account of the origin of _The Raven_,--that he regards the death of
a beautiful maiden the most poetical and melancholy topic. But there
were factors that made him think so, and these were the deaths of women
he loved and the rejections by girls with whom he was infatuated. He
lost his mother when he was three years old. Mrs. Lannard, who is said
to have inspired _To Helen_, and who was "the first pure ideal love
of my soul" (Poe) died when he was fifteen. (She is also said to have
inspired _The Sleeper_.) He lost Mrs. Allan, his foster mother, to whom
he was greatly attached, when he was twenty. He had also lost three
sweethearts by the time he was twenty-three. These he looked upon as
departed or gone from him. In the _Bridal Ballad_, written probably
on the occasion of the marriage of Miss Royster, he refers to himself
as a dead lover. The poems _To F----_, _To One in Paradise_, and _To
Zante_, as I showed, were most likely written to Mary, though he may
have had the others in mind, who either died or were gone from him.
All this shows the strong infantile influences on Poe in damming up of
his libido. He was, therefore, occupied with the subject of death not
because of Virginia's illness or death, but because he lost, before he
was twenty-three, six girls or women. His interest in the subject made
him hope death could be conquered or stayed, and hence we have _Ligeia_
and _The Facts in the Case of Valdemar_. There is a philosophic
treatment of death in _The Colloquy of Monos and Una_.


II

Tales of burial alive, such as _The Casque of Amontillado_, _The Black
Cat_, etc., are also characteristic of Poe.

What is the significance of Poe's interest in the subject of burial
alive and in people who are guilty of burying others alive? Very
few people would probably accept Freud's theory, but that master
psychologist as a rule bases his theories on facts, and hence I will
quote his views on the subject. In a footnote of his book on _The
Interpretation of Dreams_, p. 244, he says: "It is only of late that
I have learned to value the significance of fancies and unconscious
thoughts about life in the womb. They contain the explanation of the
curious fear felt by so many people of being buried alive, as well
as the profoundest unconscious reason for the belief in a life after
death, which represents nothing but a projection into the future of
this mysterious life before birth. _The act of birth, moreover_, is the
first _experience_ with _fear_, and _in this the source and model_ of
the emotion of fear."

Would Freud's theory not also account for Poe's great gift of the
analysis and depiction of the emotion of fear?

Morbid fear or anxiety is well depicted by Poe, especially in his _Fall
of the House of Usher_. As we learn from psychoanalysis, morbid fear
is inhibited sexual desire; it is a reaction against the libido. The
individual's sexual impulses incapable of being repressed strive for
forms of wish fulfilment, and these when repugnant are treated like
something hostile, and provoke fear. Morbid fear differs from normal
fear in being continuous and attributed to a source which is not the
real one, the actual source being unconscious. If a woman, for example,
is very much in love with a man who turns out to be a vile criminal,
her love may become incapable of being fulfilled any longer because of
the part played by her moral sense; shrinking from contemplating her
love's fulfilment with the man she really still loves, she may develop
an anxiety. This is only one of the innumerable cases of misdirected
desire that may cause anxiety. Then there are physiological factors
responsible also. Dr. Brink has made a study of the subject.

Poe had himself suffered from a damming of the libido. He is Roger
Usher, and is describing his own morbid fear. One feels that the
narrator of the tale presents a case of psychosis, for he sees
impossible things happen. He imagines the house had a pestilent vapour
about it. He tells us that Roger's condition infected him, and that the
wild influences of Roger's fantastic and impressive superstition crept
over him. He must have been deranged, for he imagines that he sees
Roger's dead sister, whose coffin had been screwed down by them, come
out of the vault and drag Roger to death. He also thinks he sees the
house crumble into fragments and sink into the tarn. Either his whole
narrative is a hallucination or only these few parts of it are.

Roger himself, however, is the real type of sufferer from morbid
fear. He has inherited a peculiar disposition, and no doubt suffered
from repressions, though nothing is said about this. He attributes
his disease largely to anxiety about his sick sister, Lady Madeline.
But the cause is in his unconscious. Those who are acquainted with
the theories of psychoanalysis and the life of Poe will feel that
Roger, like Poe, must have lost a mother early, then the mother of a
friend, then his foster-mother. He also, like Poe, was no doubt thrice
disappointed in love, and probably also drank. His symptoms were such
as afflict neurotics. He was in constant terror and felt that he must
die soon in some struggle with fear; he dreaded the future. He read
strange books and imagined queer things. His sister died, and, with the
aid of the narrator of the story, was buried in a vault in the house.
He soon entertained fancies that he had buried her alive, and he was
in mortal fear that she would wreak vengeance on him. When the teller
of the story read to Roger some pages of a romance, Roger interpreted
various unrelated actions described there as a rending of her coffin
and the grating of iron hinges on her prison. He imagined she stood
outside, and then that he was being crushed to death by her. And he
died in fear. The vision of his sister was imaginary with him and the
narrator as well, for Lady Madeline could not have escaped from the
screwed down coffin and the vault, and having lain many days without
food, would not have had strength to crush her brother to death. Usher
died because of morbid fear.

Poe was a good delineator of the neuroses. Here we have a picture
of his own life and know that he must have experienced some sort of
anxiety, as the tale is so true to life. He was only thirty when the
story was published, and the main character here, as in _Berenice_ and
the _Assignation_, is a neurotic. Behind it all one sees the mourner
for the lost Lenore, the orphan, the victim of love through Stella
Royster, Elizabeth Herring and Mary Devereaux.

Poe had also another trait, and that was a sadistic one. This accounts
for his tales of people torturing and being tortured, as _The Pit, and
the Pendulum_, and the _Cask of Amontillado_. He was sadistic as any
one can see by his delight in writing critical articles calculated to
cause writers intense pain. He punished his enemies by venting his
hatred upon them in his essays. He had an unconscious instinct to
cause pain for the mere sake of pain. He hints at this in his _Imp of
the Perverse_, where he lays down a theory which is undoubtedly true,
but which moralists try to shun. "I am not more certain that I breathe
than that the assurance of the wrong or error of an action is often the
one unconquerable _force_ which impels us and alone impels us to its
prosecution." He was also masochistic, he unconsciously liked to cause
pain to himself. In his _The Black Cat_ he calls perverseness one of
the primitive impulses of the human heart, and he speaks of it as "the
unfathomable longing of the soul _to vex itself_--to offer violence
to its own nature, to do wrong for the wrong's sake only." Poe, as a
child, had the sadistic and masochistic instincts. He is fascinated by
contemplation of suffering, and in his _Premature Burial_ speaks of the
pleasurable pain we get from reading of terrible catastrophes.

His sadism and masochism figure considerably in his art. He could not
carry out his desires to punish in life, and hence found a refuge in
literature. We often carry out in imagination what we cannot actually
do; and we wreak punishment and revenge that way; if we are authors
we make books with such ideas. A very simple illustration will serve
in Poe's case, yet it has never been noted. In Poe's tale _The Cask
of Amontillado_ the motive is revenge. The narrator vowed vengeance
upon Fortunato, who had added insult to injury. He buries him in a
vault. In his fancy Poe was punishing a real enemy, and though he had
several, he hated none more than the author of _Alice Ben Bolt_, Dr.
Thomas Dunn English. It is related he once sought the doctor, saying he
wanted to kill him. The tale was published in _Godey's Lady's Book_ for
November, 1846, and was written probably a few months before. In July
of that year Poe published the savage and violent letter to English
in retaliation for English's reply to a very hostile article about
him by Poe in the _Literati_. Poe's hatred for Dr. English is almost
murderous. It is plausible to assume that a writer would unconsciously
have his most bitter antagonist in mind while writing a bitter tale of
revenge at the time of his most intense hatred for him. Poe was not
satisfied with his own savage reply, and instituted a suit of damages
for defamation of character, which was rewarded with a verdict several
months after the publishing of his tale. In the story Poe wrote: "I
must not only punish, but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed
when retribution overtakes its redresser." He calls Fortunato a quack
in painting and gemmary, as he had called Dr. English a charlatan
in literature, who did not know the rules of grammar. So this is an
illustration of how sadism made him unconsciously write at least one
tale of punishing an enemy by burying him alive.


III

After all, Poe is chiefly the dreamer and author of dream literature.
The narrator of Berenice tells in detail how he was always dreaming.
In _Assignation_ the lover says, "To dream has been the business of
my life. I have, therefore, framed for myself a bower of dreams." In
_Eleonora_ the narrator says those who dream by day obtain glimpses of
eternity. Roger Usher was a dreamer. Poe's _Eureka_ was dedicated to
those who dream instead of those who think. He also wanted to transcend
reality. He builded an ideal landscape in _The Domain of Arnheim_
because he thinks art can surpass nature. He hated the ugliness of
to-day and he tried in _Some Words with a Mummy_ to revive a mummy to
tell him of ancient Egypt and to give him the secret that enables one
to suspend life temporarily and to be revived again centuries hence. He
says in an early poem that all his days have been a dream. (_A Dream
Within a Dream._)

Poe was true to the psychology of the dreamer; he created things out
of his fancies to be as he would like them to be because he did not
have them in reality. He was poor and described mansions with wonderful
furniture. He was sad because of deaths and lost loves and tried in
some tales to conquer death. His _The Raven_ is really an anxiety
dream. Fear prompted it, the fear that he would never be with his
lost Lenore, who probably was Mary. She then inspired this his most
famous poem. His characters cannot help being dreamers, for their
creator was one. He was so absorbed in his dreams that he never tried
to take an interest in reality. Hence we find no moral note in Poe's
work; there is one exception, _William Wilson_. He took no interest in
philanthropy, reforms, transcendentalism or other movements of the day,
and he disliked Emerson. One would never know from his work whether he
lived at the time he did or in the eighteenth or twentieth century. One
does not know from his work that there was a Mexican war or a slavery
problem in his day.

The one moral tale Poe wrote, _William Wilson_, also has great value
to the psychoanalyst. For it is a study of emotional conflicts and
deals with the subject of dual personality and anticipates Stevenson's
famous story, _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_. Poe is William Wilson, and
he even describes his school days in England in the tale. It is the
history of Poe's own struggle with his unconscious, with evil. He too
was a gambler and probably cheated at cards like William Wilson. There
are two William Wilsons, one representative of the unprincipled, the
criminal, the unconscious primitive instincts in ourselves, and the
other William Wilson who is the voice of civilisation, the conscious
moralist seeking to repress the other. Surely this great tale is
symbolic of man's struggle with his own conscious which civilisation
trying to tame.

So we leave Poe. Others may take up the question of his alleged
drunkenness and its overestimated effect on his art. But I have merely
wished to point a few things in his work made clear with the help of
psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis has given the answer to those who object
to Poe because of his lack of moral tone.

It should be added that Poe's great attachment to his mother-in-law,
Mrs. Clemm, was due to the loss of his own mother in infancy.

Poe's devotion and love for women of his later life, Mrs. Osgood, Mrs.
Richmond, Mrs. Lewis, and especially Helen Whitman, did not influence
his work considerably in spite of the sufferings they caused him, but
produced a few good single poems to some of them, notably, _To Annie_,
Mrs. Richmond, and _To Helen_, Mrs. Whitman, and the pathetic, masterly
letters to these women.

FOOTNOTE:

[H] He honoured Mrs. Osgood in the same way by republishing another
poem from the _Southern Literary Messenger_ of September, 1835,
written for some Eliza and opening "Eliza, let thy generous heart."
This poem in the poetical works of Poe bears the title, "Lines Written
in an Album." It originally was written, Woodberry surmises, to his
employer's daughter, Eliza White, though Whitty believes it was
addressed to his future wife, Virginia Eliza Clemm. Yet it is very
likely the poem was written to one of his early sweethearts, Elizabeth
Herring.




CHAPTER XVII

THE IDEAS OF LAFCADIO HEARN


I

Lafcadio Hearn anticipated many of Freud's conclusions. He understood
the unity of life, in the past with that in the present, and his most
persistent thought is the power and influence of the emotional life of
our very distant ancestors upon our own lives.

A word should be said about Hearn's antecedents. He has himself left
a tribute to his mother, who exerted a great influence upon him. She
was a Greek, though one biographer, Nina Kennard, conjectures that
she had oriental blood. Hearn was very much attached to her and lost
her when he was only six years old by his father divorcing her. This
event coloured his entire life. He tells us that there was a miniature
painting in oil of the Virgin and the Child, on the wall of the room in
which he slept as a child. "I fancied," he says, "that the brown Virgin
represented my mother--whom I had almost completely forgotten--and the
large-eyed child myself." In this infantile phantasy we see how the
repressed love for his mother revived in him and how he identified her
with the Virgin.

He wrote to his brother: "My love of right, my hate of wrong;--my
admiration for what is beautiful or true;--my capacity for faith in man
or woman;--my sensitiveness to artistic things which gives me whatever
little success I have;--even that language-power, whose physical sign
is in the large eyes of both of us,--came from her. It is the mother
who makes us,--makes at least all that makes the nobler man; not his
strength or powers of calculation, but his heart and power to love. And
I would rather have her portrait than a fortune."

Hearn knew of the existence of the unconscious in the Freudian sense,
and also of its influence on authorship. When he was twenty-eight, in
1878, in a letter to Mr. Krehbiel he said: "Every one has an inner
life of his own,--which no other eye can see, and the great secrets
of which are never revealed, although occasionally when we create
something beautiful, we betray a faint glimpse of it--sudden and brief,
as of a door opening and shutting in the night." (_Life and Letters_,
Volume 1, p. 196.) "_Unconscious_ brain-work is the best to develop
... latent feeling or thought. By quietly writing the thing over and
over again, I find that the emotion or idea often _develops itself_ in
the process,--unconsciously. When the best result comes, it ought to
surprise you, for our best work is out of the Unconscious." (_Life and
Letters_, Volume 1, p. 140-141.)

Again Hearn realised that fairy tales had their origin in dreams, an
idea that has been developed by Rank, Abraham and Ricklin, disciples
of Freud. Hearn saw that there was an intimate connection between
literature and dreams. He is one of the first men to have seen the
relation between dreams and supernatural literature. The following
passages are from the lecture on "The Supernatural in Literature"
in the second volume of _Interpretation of Literature_. "Whether
you believe in ghosts or not, all the artistic elements of ghostly
literature exist in your dreams, and form a veritable treasury of
literary material for the man that knows how to use them." "Trust to
your own dream life; study it carefully, and draw your inspiration from
that. For dreams are the primary source of almost everything that is
beautiful in the literature which treats of what lies beyond mere daily
experience."

Hearn, with Samuel Butler, is one of the great champions for the
theory about the power of unconscious memory over us. This idea is
one of the axioms of psychoanalysis, or rather one of its pillars. In
his essay, "About Ancestor Worship" in _Kokoro_, Hearn develops his
theories of inherited memory at length, and one might say that there
is scarcely an essay of his that does not touch on the subject. Here
he states one of the leading lessons taught by psychoanalysis. Hearn
realised that we should not starve all our primitive tendencies, as
this would lead to the destruction of some of the highest emotional
faculties with which they are blended. The animal tendencies must be
partly extirpated and partly sublimated. This is practically Freud's
theory that neurosis is produced by trying to stamp out our sexual
impulses (yet Freud does not mean that we should give these full play).
The following passage from Hearn's essay is part of the prophylaxis
of psychoanalysis. "Theological legislation, irrationally directed
against human weaknesses, has only aggravated social disorders; and
laws against pleasure have only provoked debaucheries. The history
of morals teaches very plainly indeed that our bad Kami require some
propitiation. The passions still remain more powerful than the reason
in man because they are incomparably older, because they were once all
essential to self-preservation,--because they made that primal stratum,
of consciousness out of which the nobler sentiments have slowly grown.
Never can they be suffered to rule; but woe to whosoever would deny
their immemorial rights."

He has a similar idea in his essay on "Nirvana." "Mental and moral
advance has thus far been effected only through constant struggles
older than reason or moral feeling,--against the instincts and
appetites of primitive brute life.... Only through millions of births
have we been able to reach this our present imperfect state; and the
dark bequests of our darkest past are still strong enough betimes to
prevail over reason and ethical feeling."

Hearn regarded man as an entity of millions of cells, a composite of
multiples of lives carrying out unconsciously the behests of past ages.
Man's instincts are but unconscious memories of the instincts of old.
Whitman has this idea in his _Song of Myself_, and Buddha taught this
idea which Hearn calls "the highest truth ever taught to man," "the
secret unity of life." Hearn states the view fully in his remarkable
essay on Dust. "All our emotions and thoughts and wishes, however,
changing and growing through the varying seasons of life, are only
compositions and recompositions of the sensations and ideas and desires
of other folk, mostly of dead people.--I an individual,--an individual
soul! Nay, I am a population--a population unthinkable for multitude,
even by groups of a thousand millions! Generations of generations I
am, æons of æons." Or as he states it in another essay, "Ideas of
Pre-existence," in _Kokoro_: "It is incontrovertible that in every
individual brain is locked up the inherited memory of the absolutely
inconceivable multitude of experiences received by all the brains of
which it is the descendant." There are similar ideas in Jack London's
_Star Rover_.

Hearn laid emphasis on the unity of the past and present, a fundamental
principle of psychoanalysis. Hearn saw this idea in Buddhism and hence
became attached to the philosophy of this creed, and his reconciliation
of it with the theory of evolution is no mere idle dream. Leading
Buddhist scholars before Hearn saw the similarity between the theory
of heredity as taught by evolution and the doctrine of Karma or
transmigration of character. This doctrine of Karma explains also that
a man has pernicious unconquered evil instincts because he is allied to
ancestors who possessed them strongly. Buddhism taught the theory found
in evolution and psychoanalysis, that we contain in ourselves every
moral tendency and psychic attribute of millions of people and animals
from whom we have descended. We are full of shreds of our ancestors'
emotions and characteristics which are buried in our unconscious.


II

Why does Hearn harp on this idea of unconscious memory throughout his
work and in his correspondence? Why was he attracted to the question
of the eternal persistence of life even before he accepted the
philosophy of Buddhism. His pet theory was that nothing could be lost
in the universe. In one of his finest essays, "Reverie," in _Kotto_,
he gives us the secret of his life. He tells that the mother's smile
will survive everything, for life can never disappear finally from the
universe. He first states the materialistic position which assumes that
eventually all life will die and naught will be left of our labours
and struggles, and then he gives the Buddhistic idea, which holds that
nothing is lost in the universe. I think in this essay we have the
keynote to Hearn's philosophy. He lost faith in Christianity early and
with it a belief in the immortality of the individual soul. At the age
of six, he lost his mother, whom he loved, and his scepticism on the
subject of immortality made him feel that his mother was gone from him
eternally. This was painful to him and He accepted the philosophy of
Buddhism as a solace, for it taught something that was not repugnant
to his scientific sense; that life can never die out entirely, for the
universe always would exist and even if life died out on our planet,
those conditions that made it prevail here would reign either in some
other part of the universe or at a later time. Hence we all would
contribute to that life as our ancestors contribute to our lives. In
fact, Hearn once wrote he would not object to being transformed into an
insect. So if life went on forever he would still know that mother's
smile he had lost in infancy. The _Reverie_ essay is the result of his
Œdipus Complex.

In fact, Hearn formulated the idea of the Eternal Recurrence in 1880
before Nietzsche did, who wept when he discovered this by no means
new theory in August, 1881, at Silas Maria, 6,500 feet above sea.
Hearn's essay on Metempsychosis appeared in the New Orleans _Item_ and
was included in a collection published called _Fantastics and Other
Fantasies_. But Nietzsche became intensely pessimistic as the result of
his discovery, since it meant all life's tragedies would also recur.
Hearn, no doubt, abandoned the theory as a literal possibility after he
read Spencer, but he retained his belief in some of the main features
of it.

When we recall that Buckle, who was a free thinker in religious
matters, still clung to the idea of immortality of the soul because he
could not tolerate the thought of never meeting his dead mother; when
we remember that scientists like Wallace and Fiske, who were among the
pioneers of the theory of evolution, finally embraced spiritualism as
a compensation for their lost faith in religion, it should not appear
fantastic to trace Hearn's views on unconscious inherited memory and on
the Buddhistic conception of Metempsychosis, to his loss of both his
mother and his religion; for in his new belief he could meet his mother
and still not sacrifice his intellect to his belief.

Psychoanalysis might be applied to other phases of Hearn's
writings,--his interest in the gruesome and exotic. It can explain his
interest in other races like the coloured people and the Japanese; his
passion for physical beauty and his shyness. One thing that impresses
the lover of Hearn is the seeming impersonality of his work. Yet
though he says little of himself directly, you can see the sensitive,
half-blind sufferer throughout the work. For his ideas studied and
traced to their source reveal of themselves the reasons why he embraced
them.

He has described ideal love, such no doubt as he must have felt, in
_Karma_ in _Lippincott's Magazine_, May, 1890. This story has been only
recently published in book form.

His affinity for Poe and his adoption of the name The Raven in his
letters to Mr. Watkins is seen in the projecting of himself upon
that unhappy genius with whom he had so much in common. He, like
Poe, suffered from poverty, from following aristocratic traditions
in intellectual pursuit, in a devotion to physical beauty, in a love
for French literature, in an interest in extreme suffering, in the
divesting of art from morals and in wandering about from city to city.




CHAPTER XVIII

CONCLUSION


I

The question now arises, What effect will a knowledge of the author's
unconscious have in making us appreciate his work as literature? Does
it matter at all if we know whether a particular affair or a certain
woman inspired a poem or not? Many critics protest against the kind
of literary criticism that speculates as to whether the heroines
celebrated in the sonnets of Shakespeare or Sidney were real or
imaginary, whether the emotions felt by the poets were affected or
genuine. These critics are not usually inclined to admit any connection
between an author's life and his work.

One of the great factors in helping us understand literary works
is an acquaintance with some of the episodes of the author's life.
Sainte-Beuve revolutionised literary criticism by his dictum that
the knowledge of an author's life helps us to follow his work the
better. Dr. Johnson once said that he liked the biographical side
of literature. Isaac D'Israeli, before Sainte-Beuve, showed in his
_Literary Character_ that he grasped the nature of the intimate
relationship between an author and his work.

It is our contention that a literary work is better appreciated after
the facts about an author's life are revealed to us, and this does
not usually happen for years after his death. One of the reasons why
masterpieces cannot be fully comprehended in an author's lifetime is
because we do not know altogether how he came to write the works in
question. Shelley and Keats were not fully understood by the critics
of their times not only because of their radical views, but because
the public did not know the details of the poets' relations with their
parents, and the women they loved. How could a cold, stern reviewer
find anything in _Epipsychidion_ or _Lamia_ unless he was aware of some
facts about Emilia Viviani or Fanny Brawne? How was any fair estimate
of either of these poets possible while the information that later
times have furnished was not at hand? Many people objected when the
letters of Keats to Fanny Brawne were published forty years ago, but
these have helped us to understand that the cry that pervades them
is the same embodied in music in the _Ode to Fanny_, the _Ode to the
Nightingale_ and in _Lamia_.

No true estimate of a man is possible till one reads the plaints of
his that were not meant for the public. We should not regret the
publication of the love letters of the Brownings and Carlyles. Those
wonderful letters are almost as good literature as anything the authors
wrote for the public. We are enabled to see the writers in an entirely
different light from that in which their own works put them, and to
understand these better.

It was not possible for the age in which Balzac and Goethe lived, fully
to appreciate them, for it did not have their published correspondence,
and could not estimate the close connection between unknown episodes in
their lives and their works. I do not mean that the contemporaries of
these poets could not recognise the fact that these men were geniuses,
but they could not get a proper understanding of them.

In former times criticism was busy with the questions of technique,
with matters of rhetoric and grammar; a writer's work furnished
opportunities for discussing how near to old ideas of authorship
the author approached. To-day we study an author in connection with
his own life and with ours. The Shakespearean criticism of the last
century is worth more than that of the two centuries following his
death. Coleridge and Hazlitt devoted their discussions to showing how
the great poet discussed problems that touched all of us. A number
of studies and books have been published which seek to educe his
personality from his work. I believe Walter Bagehot was a pioneer
in this kind of work. His essay on _Shakespeare--The Man_ appeared
as early as 1853. The most successful venture of this kind has been
George Brandes's great study. Other works of this nature are Frank
Harris's _The Man Shakespeare_, and _The Women of Shakespeare_, both
usually regarded as fantastic, but nevertheless deserving credit for
their daring, mistaken as they often are. Leslie Stephen's and A. C.
Bradley's essays in the _Studies of a Biographer_ and _Oxford Lectures
on Poetry_, respectively deserve special mention. Then there are books
like David Masson's _Shakespeare Personally_, Robert Waters's _William
Shakespeare, Portrayed by Himself_, and Goldwin Smith's _Shakespeare:
The Man_. Shakespeare's greatness can be recognised though we knew
little about him, yet the keynote of modern Shakespearean criticism is
to endeavour to see the connection between the plays and the man.

Comes the question of the effect of psychoanalytic criticism upon our
judgment of living authors. Writers like George Moore, of the living,
and Strindberg, of the recently dead, have not waited for posterity
to make discoveries about their love affairs. They told us about them
frankly in their autobiographical works. Other writers, great poets
like Yeats and Symons, have sung of their loves more or less openly
in their lyrics. When posterity reads the biographies of these last
two poets, that will no doubt some day be written, it will, I believe,
learn that the emotions these poets expressed in their work had a real
basis. But we have no right to probe into an author's private life
while he is alive; we may make detailed deductions from his work, but
we should not give them publicity. The reader who finds the early
Kipling cynical about women, who notes Hardy constantly reiterating
the tragedies caused by love, may venture to guess there must be some
reason for this, but it would be a vicious criticism that made this
topic the subject of an article while these men are alive. One who
reads Wells' _New Machiavelli_ or Dreiser's _The Genius_ and observes
the author's preoccupation with the marriage problem, may also draw his
own conclusions about how much the fiction is inspired by reality, but
it is a fitter subject for posterity to take up. Occasionally an author
like Robert Herrick or Upton Sinclair has his domestic affairs dragged
into the limelight, on account of the sensational interest of our
newspapers, and the reader learns that novels like _One Woman's Life_
and _Love's Pilgrimage_ were somewhat autobiographical.

There has been a great tendency in our day on the part of authors to
write autobiographical novels. We should not deprecate this tendency.
When I think that Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert and Zola, Tolstoi,
Dostoievsky and Turgenev, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot,
George Meredith and Henry James were often autobiographical, I realise
that all literary men, novelists as well as poets, are compelled
to wear their hearts on their sleeves by virtue of their art. That
criticism which reproached Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Senancour and De
Musset for having been occupied too much with themselves is unfair.
With whom else would the critics have the authors occupied? A man
cannot get out of himself. When he undertakes to write a book, he tells
us practically beforehand that he is going to talk about himself.

Therefore, such excellent novels of our time as Jack London's _Martin
Eden_, Stephen French Whitman's _Predestined_, Maugham's _Of Human
Bondage_ and Beresford's _Invisible Event_ are to be commended. Should
these authors' renown live, posterity will learn that some of the
emotional life lived by the characters had been experienced by the
authors themselves. It is, however, not a matter of importance whether
the mere incidents recorded in these novels actually transpired in the
authors' lives.

Many of us are so constituted that we like to sit down with an author
like Montaigne or Hazlitt, who takes us into his confidence. We dislike
reticent and cold people in literature as much as in life. We do not
ask writers to tell us about their private affairs, but we want them to
talk at least indirectly about things that are close to their heart.
And one may be sure they will interest us. Shakespeare unlocked his
heart to us in his sonnets and in his plays as well.

It is of the world's great books that it can always be said as Whitman
did of his own, "Whoso touches this book touches a man."


II

Art and literature are realities in themselves. The depicting of an
event enshrines it as a thing of beauty; the event itself may be dull.
We meet Falstaffs in real life and waste no time on them; put into
a play by a master, Falstaff gives us an artistic thrill. How many
of the people who enjoy Dickens' novels about humble people would be
interested in them in real life? Dickens's magic pen makes us receive a
sensation reading about them that they cannot give us themselves. It is
the artist's personality and art that count.

Gissing and Flaubert wrote about ordinary people but they themselves
were intellectual aristocrats; they had nothing in common with the
people they wrote about (except with those who were disguised portraits
of themselves). In fact, they despised them; they personally were
recluses and merely sympathised with and were interested in the people
they wrote about as subjects for art. If we had met _Madame Bovary_
personally and heard her tale from her own mouth, the effect upon us
would be small compared to that of the novel.

The domestic troubles of our next door neighbours may be a bore to us.
We may not care to meet the people personally, but a great novel or
play describing the matrimonial difficulties of fictitious characters
gives us a distinct artistic thrill. The sorrows of people who lived
centuries ago move us more than those of people we know, because of the
magic power of art.

Those who from time immemorial called art magical were right. Many
people who disparage art and literature say to the writer and the
reader that they should enter the whirlpool of life, and live
themselves. No advice could be more foolhardy. To read beautiful
books about other people's lives is itself a high form of life, a life
that only art can furnish. It also has its advantages, when we think
of the characters in literature whom we enjoy reading about and yet
would never care to meet. Who would really want to meet Becky Sharp or
Pecksniff?

That artistic pleasure we get, mingled with actual pain on account of
the sorrows of poets, is to us a decided part of our lives. The fact
that we are brought into contact with a beautiful series of lines
voicing human grief in such a manner that both our human and æsthetic
emotions are aroused, is a privileged pleasure that only those who can
enjoy poetry may derive.

It does not follow, however, that a man must confine himself solely to
the artistic or intellectual life. To know of love only through books
and not through experience is not to have lived a full life. To read
the views of Aristotle on friendship and never to have had any real
friendships is also but leading an incomplete life.

Literature is real and to read and write it is to live.


       *       *       *       *       *

Transcriber's Notes:

Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.

Obvious printer's errors corrected.

Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as
possible, including obsolete and variant spellings, non-standard
punctuation, inconsistently hyphenated words, and other inconsistencies.






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