One of the things to remember here (too often it is forgotten, and
Dr. Prescott deserves favorable mention for stressing it) is that a
man’s conscious desires are not always identical with his subconscious
longings; in fact, the two are often directly antithetical. No doubt
the real man lies in the depths of the subconscious, like a carp
lurking in mud. His conscious personality is largely a product of his
environment—the reaction of his subconscious to the prevailing notions
of what is meet and seemly. Here, of course, I wander into platitude,
for the news that all men are frauds was already stale in the days
of Hammurabi. The ingenious Freud simply translated the fact into
pathological terms, added a bed-room scene, and so laid the foundations
for his psychoanalysis. Incidentally, it has always seemed to me that
Freud made a curious mistake when he brought sex into the foreground
of his new magic. He was, of course, quite right when he set up the
doctrine that, in civilized societies, sex impulses were more apt to be
suppressed than any other natural impulses, and that the subconscious
thus tended to be crowded with their ghosts. But in considering
sex impulses, he forgot sex imaginings. Digging out, by painful
cross-examination in a darkened room, some startling tale of carnality
in his patient’s past, he committed the incredible folly of assuming
it to be literally true. More often than not, I believe, it was a mere
piece of boasting, a materialization of desire—in brief, a poem. It
is astonishing that this possibility never occurred to the venerable
professor; it is more astonishing that it has never occurred to any of
his disciples. He should have psychoanalyzed a few poets instead of
wasting all his time upon psychopathic women with sclerotic husbands.
He would have dredged amazing things out of their subconsciouses,
heroic as well as amorous. Imagine the billions of Boers, Germans,
Irishmen and Hindus that Kipling would have confessed to killing!
But here I get into morbid anatomy, and had better haul up. What I
started out to say was that a man’s preferences in poetry constitute an
excellent means of estimating his inner cravings and credulities. The
music disarms his critical sense, and he confesses to cherishing ideas
that he would repudiate with indignation if they were put into plain
words. I say he cherishes those ideas. Maybe he simply tolerates them
unwillingly; maybe they are no more than inescapable heritages from his
barbarous ancestors, like his vermiform appendix. Think of the poems
you like, and you will come upon many such intellectual fossils—ideas
that you by no means subscribe to openly, but that nevertheless give
you a strange joy. I put myself on the block as Exhibit A. There is my
delight in Lizette Woodworth Reese’s sonnet, “Tears.” Nothing could do
more violence to my conscious beliefs. Put into prose, the doctrine
in the poem would exasperate and even enrage me. There is no man in
Christendom who is less a Christian than I am. But here the dead hand
grabs me by the ear. My ancestors were converted to Christianity in
the year 1535, and remained of that faith until near the middle of
the eighteenth century. Observe, now, the load I carry; more than
two hundred years of Christianity, and perhaps a thousand years
(maybe even two, or three thousand years) of worship of heathen gods
before that—at least twelve hundred years of uninterrupted belief
in the immortality of the soul. Is it any wonder that, betrayed by
the incomparable music of Miss Reese’s Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, my
conscious faith is lulled to sleep, thus giving my subconscious a
chance to wallow in its immemorial superstition?
Even so, my vulnerability to such superstitions is very low, and it
tends to grow less as I increase in years and sorrows. As I have
said, I once throbbed to the drum-beat of Kipling; later on, I was
responsive to the mellow romanticism of Tennyson; now it takes one of
the genuinely fundamental delusions of the human race to move me. But
progress is not continuous; it has interludes. There are days when
every one of us experiences a sort of ontogenetic back-firing, and
returns to an earlier stage of development. It is on such days that
grown men break down and cry like children; it is then that they play
games, or cheer the flag, or fall in love. And it is then that they
are in the mood for poetry, and get comfort out of its asseverations
of the obviously not true. A truly civilized man, when he is wholly
himself, derives no pleasure from hearing a poet state, as Browning
stated, that this world is perfect. Such tosh not only does not please
him; it definitely offends him, as he is offended by an idiotic
article in a newspaper; it roils him to encounter so much stupidity in
Christendom. But he may like it when he is drunk, or suffering from
some low toxemia, or staggering beneath some great disaster. Then, as I
say, the ontogenetic process reverses itself, and he slides back into
infancy. Then he goes to poets, just as he goes to women, “glad” books,
and dogmatic theology. The very highest orders of men, perhaps, never
suffer from such malaises of the spirit, or, if they suffer from them,
never succumb to them. These are men who are so thoroughly civilized
that even the most severe attack upon the emotions is not sufficient
to dethrone their reason. Charles Darwin was such a man. There was
never a moment in his life when he sought religious consolation,
and there was never a moment when he turned to poetry; in fact, he
regarded all poetry as silly. Other first-rate men, more sensitive to
the possible music in it, regard it with less positive aversion, but
I have never heard of a truly first-rate man who got any permanent
satisfaction out of its content. The Browning Societies of the latter
part of the nineteenth century (and I choose the Browning Societies
because Browning’s poetry was often more or less logical in content,
and thus above the ordinary intellectually) were not composed of such
men as Huxley, Spencer, Lecky, Buckle and Travelyn, but of third-rate
schoolmasters, moony old maids, candidates for theosophy, literary
vicars, collectors of Rogers groups, and other such Philistines. The
chief propagandist for Browning in the United States was not Henry
Adams, or William Summer, or Daniel C. Gilman, but an obscure professor
of English who was also an ardent spook-chaser. And what is thus true
ontogenetically is also true phylogenetically. That is to say, poetry
is chiefly produced and esteemed by peoples that have not yet come to
maturity. The Romans had a dozen poets of the first talent before they
had a single prose writer of any skill whatsoever. So did the English.
So did the Germans. In our own day we see the negroes of the South
producing religious and secular verse of such quality that it is taken
over by the whites, and yet the number of negroes who show a decent
prose style is still very small, and there is no sign of it increasing.
Similarly, the white authors of America, during the past ten or fifteen
years, have produced a great mass of very creditable poetry, and yet
the quality of our prose remains very low, and the Americans with prose
styles of any distinction could be counted on the fingers of two hands.