Canto II-9, he refers to Mary in the line "love and life together

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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.