well be called Romance, and that even in a more technical sense,
since it corresponds to the rise of the Romance languages as distinct
from the Roman language. It might more truly be called Religion, for
historically it was the gradual re-emergence of Europe through the
Dark Ages, because it still had one religion, though no longer one
rule. It was, in short, the creation of Christendom. It may be called
Legend, for it is true that the most overpowering presence in it is
that of omnipresent and powerful popular legend; so that things that
may never have happened, or, as some say, could never have happened,
are nevertheless rooted in our racial memory like things that have
happened to ourselves. The whole Arthurian Cycle, for instance, seems
something more real than reality. If the faces in that darkness of the
Dark Ages, Lancelot and Arthur and Merlin and Modred, are indeed faces
in a dream, they are like faces in a real dream: a dream in a bed and
not a dream in a book. Subconsciously at least, I should be much less
surprised if Arthur were to come again than I should be if the Superman
were to come at all. Again, the thing might be called Gossip: a noble
name, having in it the name of God and one of the most generous and
genial of the relations of men. For I suppose there has seldom been a
time when such a mass of culture and good traditions of craft and song
have been handed down orally, by one universal buzz of conversation,
through centuries of ignorance down to centuries of greater knowledge.
Education must have been an eternal _viva voce_ examination; but the
men passed their examination. At least they went out in such rude
sense masters of art as to create the Song of Roland and the round
Roman arches that carry the weight of so many Gothic towers. Finally,
of course, it can be called ignorance, barbarism, black superstition,
a reaction towards obscurantism and old night; and such a view is
eminently complete and satisfactory, only that it leaves behind it a
sort of weak wonder as to why the very youngest poets do still go on
writing poems about the sword of Arthur and the horn of Roland.
All this was but the beginning of a process which has two great points
of interest. The first is the way in which the mediæval movement did
rebuild the old Roman civilisation; the other was the way in which it
did not. A strange interest attaches to the things which had never
existed in the pagan culture and did appear in the Christian culture. I
think it is true of most of them that they had a quality that can very
approximately be described as popular, or perhaps as vulgar, as indeed
we still talk of the languages which at that time liberated themselves
from Latin as the vulgar tongues. And to many Classicists these things
would appear to be vulgar in a more vulgar sense. They were vulgar in
the sense of being vivid almost to excess, of making a very direct and
unsophisticated appeal to the emotions. The first law of heraldry was
to wear the heart upon the sleeve. Such mediævalism was the reverse of
mere mysticism, in the sense of mere mystery; it might more truly be
described as sensationalism. One of these things, for instance, was a
hot and even an impatient love of colour. It learned to paint before
it could draw, and could afford the twopence coloured long before it
could manage the penny plain. It culminated at last, of course, in the
energy and gaiety of the Gothic; but even the richness of Gothic rested
on a certain psychological simplicity. We can contrast it with the
classic by noting its popular passion for telling a story in stone. We
may admit that a Doric portico is a poem, but no one would describe it
as an anecdote. The time was to come when much of the imagery of the
cathedrals was to be lost; but it would have mattered the less that
it was defaced by its enemies if it had not been already neglected by
its friends. It would have mattered less if the whole tide of taste
among the rich had not turned against the old popular masterpieces. The
Puritans defaced them, but the Cavaliers did not truly defend them.
The Cavaliers also were aristocrats of the new classical culture, and
used the word Gothic in the sense of barbaric. For the benefit of the
Teutonists we may note in parenthesis that, if this phrase meant that
Gothic was despised, it also meant that Goths were despised. But when
the Cavaliers came back, after the Puritan interregnum, they restored
not in the style of Pugin but in the style of Wren. The very thing
we call the Restoration, which was the restoration of King Charles,
was also the restoration of St. Paul's. And it was a very modern
restoration.
So far we might say that simple people do not like simple things. This
is certainly true if we compare the classic with these highly-coloured
things of mediævalism, or all the vivid visions which first began to
glow in the night of the Dark Ages. Now, one of these things was the
romantic expedient called rhyme. And even in this, if we compare the
two, we shall see something of the same paradox by which the simple
like complexities and the complex like simplicities. The ignorant liked
rich carvings and melodious and often ingenious rhymes. The learned
liked bare walls and blank verse. But in the case of rhyme it is
peculiarly difficult to define the double and yet very definite truth.
It is difficult to define the sense in which rhyme is artificial and
the sense in which it is simple. In truth it is simple because it is
artificial. It is an artifice of the kind enjoyed by children and other
poetic people; it is a toy. As a technical accomplishment it stands
at the same distance from the popular experience as the old popular
sports. Like swimming, like dancing, like drawing the bow, anybody
can do it, but nobody can do it without taking the trouble to do it;
and only a few can do it very well. In a hundred ways it was akin to
that simple and even humble energy that made all the lost glory of
the guilds. Thus their rhyme was useful as well as ornamental. It was
not merely a melody but also a mnemonic; just as their towers were
not merely trophies but beacons and belfries. In another aspect rhyme
is akin to rhetoric, but of a very positive and emphatic sort: the
coincidence of sound giving the effect of saying, "It is certainly so."
Shakespeare realised this when he rounded off a fierce or romantic
scene with a rhymed couplet. I know that some critics do not like
this, but I think there is a moment when a drama ought to become a
melodrama. Then there is a much older effect of rhyme that can only be
called mystical, which may seem the very opposite of the utilitarian,
and almost equally remote from the rhetorical. Yet it shares with the
former the tough texture of something not easily forgotten, and with
the latter the touch of authority which is the aim of all oratory.
The thing I mean may be found in the fact that so many of the old
proverbial prophecies, from Merlin to Mother Shipton, were handed down
in rhyme. It can be found in the very name of Thomas the Rhymer.
But the simplest way of putting this popular quality is in a single
word: it is a song. Rhyme corresponds to a melody so simple that it
goes straight like an arrow to the heart. It corresponds to a chorus so
familiar and obvious that all men can join in it. I am not disturbed
by the suggestion that such an arrow of song, when it hits the heart,
may entirely miss the head. I am not concerned to deny that the chorus
may sometimes be a drunken chorus, in which men have lost their heads
to find their tongues. I am not defending but defining; I am trying to
find words for a large but elusive distinction between certain things
that are certainly poetry and certain other things which are also song.
Of course it is only an accident that Horace opens his greatest series
of odes by saying that he detests the profane populace and wishes to
drive them from his temple of poetry. But it is the sort of accident
that is almost an allegory. There is even a sense in which it has a
practical side. When all is said, _could_ a whole crowd of men sing
the "Descende Cœlo," that noble ode, as a crowd can certainly sing the
"Dies Irae," or for that matter "Down among the Dead Men"? Did Horace
himself sing the Horatian odes in the sense in which Shakespeare could
sing, or could hardly help singing, the Shakespearean songs. I do not
know, having no kind of scholarship on these points. But I do not feel
that it could have been at all the same thing; and my only purpose is
to attempt a rude description of that thing. Rhyme is consonant to the
particular kind of song that can be a popular song, whether pathetic or
passionate or comic; and Milton is entitled to his true distinction;
nobody is likely to sing _Paradise Lost_ as if it were a song of that
kind. I have tried to suggest my sympathy with rhyme, in terms true
enough to be accepted by the other side as expressing their antipathy
for it. I have admitted that rhyme is a toy and even a trick, of the
sort that delights children. I have admitted that every rhyme is a
nursery rhyme. What I will never admit is that anyone who is too big
for the nursery is big enough for the Kingdom of God, though the God
were only Apollo.
A good critic should be like God in the great saying of a Scottish
mystic. George Macdonald said that God was easy to please and hard to
satisfy. That paradox is the poise of all good artistic appreciation.
Without the first part of the paradox appreciation perishes, because
it loses the power to appreciate. Good criticism, I repeat, combines
the subtle pleasure in a thing being done well with the simple pleasure
in it being done at all. It combines the pleasure of the scientific
engineer in seeing how the wheels work together to a logical end with
the pleasure of the baby in seeing the wheels go round. It combines
the pleasure of the artistic draughtsman in the fact that his lines
of charcoal, light and apparently loose, fall exactly right and in
a perfect relation with the pleasure of the child in the fact that
the charcoal makes marks of any kind on the paper. And in the same
fashion it combines the critic's pleasure in a poem with the child's
pleasure in a rhyme. The historical point about this kind of poetry,
the rhymed romantic kind, is that it rose out of the Dark Ages with
the whole of this huge popular power behind it, the human love of a
song, a riddle, a proverb, a pun or a nursery rhyme; the sing-song of
innumerable children's games, the chorus of a thousand camp-fires and a
thousand taverns. When poetry loses its link with all these people who
are easily pleased it loses all its power of giving pleasure. When a
poet looks down on a rhyme it is, I will not say as if he looked down
on a daisy (which might seem possible to the more literal-minded),
but rather as if he looked down on a lark because he had been up in a
balloon. It is cutting away the very roots of poetry; it is revolting
against nature because it is natural, against sunshine because it is
bright, or mountains because they are high, or moonrise because it is
mysterious. The freezing process began after the Reformation with a
fastidious search for finer yet freer forms; to-day it has ended in
formlessness.
But the joke of it is that even when it is formless it is still
fastidious. The new anarchic artists are not ready to accept
everything. They are not ready to accept anything except anarchy.
Unless it observes the very latest conventions of unconventionality,
they would rule out anything classic as coldly as any classic ever
ruled out anything romantic. But the classic was a form; and there was
even a time when it was a new form. The men who invented Sapphics did
invent a new metre; the introduction of Elizabethan blank verse was
a real revolution in literary form. But _vers libre_, or nine-tenths
of it, is not a new metre any more than sleeping in a ditch is a new
school of architecture. It is no more a revolution in literary form
than eating meat raw is an innovation in cookery. It is not even
original, because it is not creative; the artist does not invent
anything, but only abolishes something. But the only point about it
that is to my present purpose is expressed in the word "pride." It is
not merely proud in the sense of being exultant, but proud in the sense
of being disdainful. Such outlaws are more exclusive than aristocrats;
and their anarchical arrogance goes far beyond the pride of Milton and
the aristocrats of the New Learning. And this final refinement has
completed the work which the saner aristocrats began, the work now
most evident in the world: the separation of art from the people. I
need not insist on the sensational and self-evident character of that
separation. I need not recommend the modern poet to attempt to sing his
_vers libres_ in a public house. I need not even urge the young Imagist
to read out a number of his disconnected Images to a public meeting.
The thing is not only admitted but admired. The old artist remained
proud in spite of his unpopularity; the new artist is proud because of
his unpopularity; perhaps it is his chief ground for pride.
Dwelling as I do in the Dark Ages, or at latest among the mediæval
fairy-tales, I am yet moved to remember something I once read in a
modern fairy-tale. As it happens, I have already used the name of
George Macdonald; and in the best of his books there is a description
of how a young miner in the mountains could always drive away the
subterranean goblins if he could remember and repeat any kind of
rhyme. The impromptu rhymes were often doggerel, as was the dog-Latin
of many monkish hexameters or the burden of many rude Border ballads.
But I have a notion that they drove away the devils, blue devils of
pessimism and black devils of pride. Anyhow Madame Montessori, who has
apparently been deploring the educational effects of fairy-tales, would
probably see in me a pitiable example of such early perversion, for
that image which was one of my first impressions seems likely enough to
be one of my last; and when the noise of many new and original musical
instruments, with strange shapes and still stranger noises, has passed
away like a procession, I shall hear in the succeeding silence only a
rustle and scramble among the rocks and a boy singing on the mountain.
PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND THE NOVEL
By J. D. BERESFORD
I
If the opinion of the reviewer represents in any degree the opinion of
the public, psycho-analysis is becoming at once the craze and the curse
of the modern novelist. The chief persons of the story, we gather,
are no longer units, recognisable illustrations of acceptable and
well-defined types of character, but tend to split horribly into their
component parts, revealing the workings of their unconscious minds
with a spiritual immodesty worthy of the immortal Sally Beauchamp. Our
heroes suffer from "Œdipus complexes" with a unanimity that must appear
altogether perverse to a generation reared on the works of Charles
Dickens, who consistently regarded all mothers as criminal, negligible,
or insane. Our heroines are become either displayed specimens of morbid
pathology or increasingly middle-aged. Finally, and as a culminating
horror, we occasionally come across a novel written with such a single
regard for the subjective emotions that the objective personality
appears only now and then as an uncompleted cast momentarily lifted,
for examination, from the matrix.
Moreover, these symptoms and their like--I still adapt and condense
the current opinions of the outraged reviewer--exhibit an inclination
to multiply. We picture the admirer of the world's most successful
novelist (Harold Bell Wright) as arching his back and spitting
furiously at the first indication of a Freudian thesis. And, to
conclude the indictment, it is plain that unless the novel-writing
disciples of the Vienna and Zurich schools of psychology can
promptly be bled to death--they have, thank God, quite miserable
circulations!--their influence may permeate and vitiate that sane
and admirable method which has given us an Ethel M. Dell, a Temple
Thurston, or a Zane Grey.
This indictment represents, no doubt, an extremist attitude, the
opinion of that multitude which must have its heroines pure and its
morality undiluted; but it cannot be neglected solely on that account.
And when we recognise, as we must, that authentic critics have also
shown a bias in the same direction, we have established a case that
demands both a literary and a scientific consideration.
Our analysis, however, must begin with certain exclusions. If we are
to test the influence of psycho-analysis on the novel as an art-form
we must take into account not only the effect, but also the manner
of the incidence. For it is manifest that of all theories of the
nature of man ever put forward by a reputable scientist, that of
Sigmund Freud is the most attractive and adaptable for the purposes
of fiction. It was a theory of sex, the all but universal theme of
the novel; it emphasised various peculiarities of thought, feeling,
and action that no observant, and, _a fortiori_, no introspective
novelist could thereafter overlook; it gave a new mystery to the human
mind; adumbrated the suggestion of a freer morality by dwelling upon
the physical and spiritual necessity for the liberation of impulse;
and, last temptation of the enervated seeker for new themes, provided
material for comparatively unworked complications of motive.
Now, these appeals have inevitably influenced the writing of just those
experimenters and opportunists whose novels I wish to exclude from
our analysis. Their productions can only be indicative of a passing
fashion; their value, at best, such as the future historian may find
in the record of the epidemic symptoms they have documented. But since
novels of this type have a particular significance, both in relation
to our present purpose and to all literary criticism of this form of
expression, we must in the first place arrive at a clear understanding
of the quality that differentiates them from those other works which,
whatever their failings, have another representative value.
Taking, then, an extreme and therefore ideal example, I submit that
the essential difference is that between pure observation and pure
feeling, or variously between an intellectual as opposed to an
emotional response to experience. In the case of the experimenters
we are considering, such a subject as psycho-analysis is studied
from the surface, the facts and general teachings are memorised and
then applied, more or less arbitrarily, to the invented or observed
characters who figure in the story. Such a method when brilliantly used
may produce an impression of truth, may even in rare cases lead to
discovery, but in its essence it is mechanical, a mere collection and
presentation of material that has not been assimilated, and hence very
slightly transmuted by the writer.
The opposed example is that in which the study of, say, psycho-analysis
comes to the understanding of the writer as a formula that interprets
for him a mode of experience. He has, let us assume, been aware of
and puzzled by a habit of thought or feeling which is suddenly and
beautifully illuminated for him by the application of this new formula.
Nor, in the truly representative instance, does the process halt at the
first discovery, but continues to open resolutions of old difficulties
hardly recognised as such until they fall within the scope of the new
criterion. The danger that besets the young disciple in the first
ecstasies of such an adventure is that he will inevitably be tempted to
apply his touchstone too generally, to imagine that his formula will
explain all life.
In such a case as this the manner of incidence, to which I referred,
differs markedly from the first example. Here we get a sense of
interpenetration and subsequent assimilation, in the former case rather
of obliquity and reflection; the true difference being that one writer
finds in psycho-analysis an aid to the understanding of human thought
and action, the other merely a useful piece to add to his repertoire.
And, finally in this connection, one has true value as evidence of the
validity of the theory; the other has not.
Having thus cleared the ground by eliminating more particularly those
literary experiments in applied psychology that have had such an
irritant action on the nerves of the reviewer, I propose to test the
applicability of psycho-analysis to fiction by a brief examination of
certain aspects of the work of a writer who had not heard of Freud and
never attempted to anticipate his method. Dostoevsky, in fact, from our
point of view, may be regarded primarily as a patient rather than as a
doctor.
Of his life up to the age of seven years we lack that information
which would provide us with the last triumphant detail of proof. It
is exceedingly improbable that that detail will ever be forthcoming.
But it is a fairly safe inference from the later evidence that at some
time in the course of those earlier years he suffered either some
shock of terror or stress of misery that initiated the trauma which
was later confirmed and emphasised by his experience on the scaffold.
This inference is inherently probable, and since it might conceivably
be confirmed by research and could not conceivably be disproved, we
may assume it as a premise, although it is not absolutely essential
pathologically.
For the remainder of his life we see him beyond all shadow of doubt
suffering from a neurosis that, even if it were not the cause, was
the accompaniment and not the result of his epilepsy. The form taken
by this neurosis has been provisionally termed an "inferiority
complex." In its milder and practically harmless forms it is perhaps
the commonest instance of a morbid inhibition, despite the fact
that--_pace_ Dr. Freud--it depends more on the power principle of
Adler than on the pleasure-pain principle so tediously insisted upon
by the Vienna school. The symptoms in aggravated cases exhibit on the
one side an exaggerated humility, and on the other an intolerant use
of any adventitious opportunity for the use of power. Two instances of
everyday experience taken from a text-book of psycho-analysis are: The
driver of a heavy van brutally threatening the temporarily inferior
pedestrian by the threat of running him down; and the ordinarily
meek woman who takes a delight in exerting temporary superiority of
position, it may be in such a trivial act as keeping anyone waiting by
a pretence of inattention.
Dostoevsky, however, has himself analysed the condition so perfectly
that his study might well find a place in a medical library as the
ideal type of this particular neurosis. The supposed autobiographer
(his name does not appear) in _Notes from Underground_[22] is, perhaps,
too intelligently aware of his own condition, but it is evident
that Dostoevsky's purpose could only be fully served by the form of
a personal confession. It is, indeed, a confession that holds no
reserves. In the earlier part of the story we see the assumed writer of
the notes suffering agonies from the consciousness of his humiliation.
This is followed by two attempts to assert himself, both futile. We
then see him in a contest with his servant, Apollon, whose condition
is a reflex of his own. And, finally, we get the representative
instance of a brutal use of temporary superiority of position in his
dealings with the unfortunate little prostitute, Liza. Moreover, the
title is conclusive. The "underground" is clearly indicated as that of
the mind, and if the story had been written within the last ten years
the author would have been accused by the reviewers of having steeped
himself in the writings of the psycho-analysts. The opening sentences,
indeed, would probably have been a little too much for the sensitive,
since the sketch begins: "I am a sick man ... I am a spiteful man. I am
an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know
nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails
me."
[22] The novels of Feodor Dostoevsky. Vol. X. _White Nights
and Other Stories._ Constance Garnett's translations.
Heinemann.
This one story would be almost sufficient testimony as to Dostoevsky's
own condition, the essential part of it coming, as it does, not from
observation, but from the "underground" of the writer's own mind.
But if we need further evidence it can be found in almost any of
Dostoevsky's novels: the valet in _The Brothers Karamazov_ is a fine
example; Prince Myshkin in _The Idiot_ develops the theme in its
less self-conscious aspect; there is more than one example in _The
Possessed_. But the truth is that, once started on this scent, the
student of Dostoevsky cannot fail to conclude that the type dominates
both the characterisation and the atmosphere of all his works.
Yet if our diagnosis rested solely on this evidence the inference would
be open to attack by the layman on the grounds that Dostoevsky wrote of
the Russian as he knew him; and has not Russia as a country exhibited
precisely the symptoms of the neurosis we have been describing?
Centuries of suppression and humiliation have been at work to foster
and confirm the complex which we now see in its typical expression,
although passing, as did that of the French in the last years of the
eighteenth century, towards its natural sublimation.