SOME PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERARY CRITICISM
I
Psychoanalysis will put in a new light the old literary controversies
between realism and idealism, between classicism and romanticism.
Idealistic writers are those who write of imaginary pleasing scenes
and characters. Their books are founded on the same principles that
are at the basis of dreams; these are the fulfilment of the author's
wishes. We grow weary of a deluge of such literature, because it is
too visionary and not related to reality. We prefer to see life as
it is, even though it is harsh. Hence our reaction to those ancient
types of romances where the heroes are always strong, pursuing false
ideals, obeying silly codes of honour, and are always triumphant; we
weary still more of the heroines who are always without individuality.
The most idealistic books are those dealing with utopias, and though
the new visionary societies are as a rule undesirable and impossible,
they represent the wish of the author fulfilled; such works sometimes,
as in the case of Plato's _Republic_ and More's _Utopia_, are full of
valuable suggestions. Utopias, however, are generally dreary because
they make no allowances for our instincts; the author is insincere to
himself and pretends to be what he is not.
Then there is the idealistic literature which builds a dream palace
beyond this life. The author wants to live forever and to have things
he did not possess here, and he creates imaginary scenes where all that
he suffered here is righted. Of this type of literature is the Paradise
of Dante, and the Celestial City of Bunyan. Literature of this type
pleases many people, as it enables them to get away from reality and to
have a ground for believing in the existence of chimeras they cherish.
Idealism in literature is the selection for description of only those
features of life that please the fancy of the author. People are
described not as they are but as the author would like them to be;
events are narrated not as they occur in life but as the writer would
wish them to happen. The dream of the author is given instead of an
actual picture of reality. When Shakespeare grew weary of London life,
he drew a picture of life in the forest of Arden in his _As You Like
It_ such as he would have liked to have enjoyed. Idealistic literature
hence gives us an insight into the nature of the author's unconscious.
His constructed air castles show us where reality has been harsh with
him. It is true all literature must to some extent be idealistic, as
the author must always do some selecting. Idealism will never die out
in literature. Man is an idealist by nature; every man who has day
dreams is reconstructing life in accordance with his desires.
There is always a large element in the population that hearkens back to
its childhood days. Even our most intellectual people like to divert
themselves with stories of piracy, battles, sunken treasures, tales
of the sea, of adventure and mystery. The people who love romance
go back in their reading to their boyhood days; they have in their
unconscious, primitive emotions that, unable to find an outlet to-day
very well, refuse to remain altogether repressed; they get satisfaction
by seeing pictures of life in which the unconscious thus participates.
The perennial interest of _Robinson Crusoe_ and _Treasure Island_, of
Scott and Dumas, of the sea stories of Cooper and Captain Marryat, of
the detective stories of Gaboriau and Doyle, is due to the fact that
they make us young again. It is true we often outgrow some of these
books and find them dull in later life, but they enchant many of us at
all ages because our inherent instincts from savage and less cultivated
people can only be kept repressed by being given a feigned instead of a
real satisfaction.
Old legends like those about Achilles, the Wandering Jew, the Flying
Dutchman, Charlemagne, and King Arthur and his knights, never weary us;
they continue to furnish artists and writers with artistic material.
Psychoanalysis explains the love we feel for these romances. We have
never quite grown out of either the barbarous or boyish state. We like
the strange, the marvellous, the mysterious, for this was specially
characteristic of man in an early stage and of the boy. We also find
an affinity for the kind of life our ancestors led. We are interested
in tales where men are hunting and fighting. Man's unconscious loves
a fight, for he has always fought in the history of the race. He is
fascinated by danger and the idea of overcoming obstacles. And he wants
such scenes introduced in literature.
Psychoanalysis also explains the affinity that we have for the
supernatural in literature. Freud's disciples, like Rank and Abraham
and Ricklin, have shown in _The Myth of the Birth of the Hero_, in
_Dreams and Myths_, and in _Wishfulment and Fairy Tales_, respectively,
that fairy tales are to be interpreted like dreams and represent
the fulfilled wishes of early humanity. The child who likes fairy
tales finds his own wishes satisfied in these tales dealing with the
supernatural and improbable. Even when great poets make use of the
supernatural in their work, the same principles of wish fulfilment
are there. Faust is saved in Goethe's poem, Prometheus is released in
Shelley's lyric drama and the Knight of the Cross is victorious over
the dragon in Spenser's allegory. The poems give us the fulfilled
wishes of the modern poets. True the modern poet introduces advanced
ideas of his time and gives different interpretations to the old tales.
But we still love the supernatural because we have our limitations with
reality.
In an essay on Hans Christian Andersen published in 1867 George Brandes
showed the connection between the unconscious and the nursery tale.
Thus he anticipated the discoveries of Abraham, Ricklin and Rank, who
noted that folk-lore and fairy tales are, like dreams, realised wishes
of the unconscious of early humanity, formulated into endurable form.
Brandes objected to the occasional moral tag in Andersen's stories
"because the nursery story is the realm of the unconscious. Not only
are unconscious beings and objects the leaders of speech in it, but
what triumphs and is glorified in the nursery story is this very
element of unconsciousness. And the nursery story is right, for the
unconscious element is our capital and the source of our strength."
Brandes shows how child psychology interests us all because of its
unconscious. He distinguished the changes brought in by the nineteenth
century where the unconscious is worshipped, while in the critical
eighteenth century consciousness alone had been valued.
Nietzsche understood that the romantic life of our ancestors and their
ways of thinking were repeated by us in our dreams. He wrote in his
_Human All Too Human_, Vol. 1, pp. 23-26: "The perfect distinctions of
all dreams--representations, which pre-suppose absolute faith in their
reality, recall the conditions that appertain to primitive man, in whom
hallucination was extraordinarily frequent, and sometime simultaneously
seized entire communities, entire nations. Therefore, in sleep and in
dreams we once more carry out the task of early humanity.... I hold,
that as man now still reasons in dreams, so men reasoned also _when
awake_ through thousands of years; the first _cause_ which occurred
to the mind to explain anything that required an explanation, was
sufficient and stood for truth ... this ancient element in human nature
still manifests itself in our dreams, for it is the foundation upon
which the higher reason has developed and still develops in every
individual; the dream carries us back into the remote conditions
of human culture, and provides a ready means of understanding them
better. Dream-thinking is now so easy to us because during immense
periods of human development we have been so well drilled in this form
of fantastic and cheap explanation, by means of the first agreeable
notions. In so far, dreaming is a recreation of the brain, which by day
has to satisfy the stern demands of thought, as they are laid down by
the higher culture."
Supernatural phenomena, however, in our contemporary literature savour
of imitation and the artificial. Writers do not as a rule believe in
the supernatural while the creators of the old fairy tales did. From
so fine a poet as Yeats, who is said to believe in fairies, we get
literature that is both sincere and artistic. We have a beautiful ideal
reconstruction of the world in such a play as _The Land of Heart's
Desire_. Here the dream principle is still at work.
Among the fairy tales of our day are those centring around psychic
phenomena and reporting the conversations of the dead. They are written
because they represent the writer's wishes to communicate with the
dead and to prove that we do not die. They are needed by some in an
era of exact science and a great war as old folk lore was needed in
its time. Needless to say this does not speak well for the intellects
of the writers of these spiritualistic works. We make something occur
because we want it to transpire. Lodge's _Raymond_ is one of the fairy
tales of recent times and it has a genuineness because the author, to
the amazement of many of us, believes those talks with his son actually
took place. The book is really a commentary on his pathetic state of
mind after the death of his son, and is his dream of hope.
But realistic literature is after all in the ascendant, for it tells us
of what we experience in our own life. Don Quixote showed us that love
for books dealing with dreams and impossibilities may help to make one
mad. Men are interested in their inner struggles and in the problems
of the day. Books treating of these have replaced considerably the old
romances as serious literature.
Romantic and idealistic works are like dreams, fragments of the psychic
life of the race when it was young.
II
The literary works that we like best are those which tell of the
frustration of wishes like our own. We prefer to read about troubles
like those we have suffered, to lose ourselves in the dreams and
fantasies built up by authors, akin to those we have conjured up in
our own imagination.
We prefer a book that apologises for us, that tells of strivings and
repressions such as we have experienced. We get a sort of pleasure
then out of painful works, in which our sorrows and wants are put into
artistic form, so as to evoke them again in us. It depends often on
the character of our repression as to the nature of the books we like.
If we have overthrown the authority of our fathers or experienced a
painful love repression because we were hampered by social laws, if we
have broken with our religious friends or been crushed by some moneyed
powers, we may become of a revolutionary trend of mind and hence prefer
writers with radical opinions. In our time there have arisen a number
of geniuses who voiced such opinions; having experienced repressions
on account of the customs of society, they sang and wrote of those
repressions and attacked those customs. The great love felt by the
young man who does not fit into the social order, for writers like
Whitman, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Shaw, and others, is because these writers
approve an individualism that he seeks to cultivate. He who is grieved
by the tyranny of the philistine and the bourgeois, the hypocrite and
the puritan, finds himself consoled by writers who were also victims of
such tyranny.
If we are somewhat more neurotic than the average person, or even
abnormal, we go to the writers who are neurotic and abnormal. Why did
Baudelaire love Poe so much? Because he saw in him another Baudelaire,
a dreamer out of accord with reality, a victim of drink and drugs, a
sufferer at the hands of women, an artist loving beauty and refusing
to be a reformer. Hence he translated Poe's works, swore to read him
daily, and imitated him. Baudelaire's unconscious recognised a brother
sufferer in Poe; he wanted to have the same ideal conditions Poe
imagined in his dreams; he suffered from the same neuroses that Poe
suffered. These two writers became the idols of the French decadent
writers, and Huysmans, Mallarmé and others loved them. The French
decadents found affinities with ancient authors, especially the Roman
poets of the Silver Age, Petronius and Apuleius. Oscar Wilde, Dowson
and Arthur Symons in our literature belong to the group who found
themselves in harmony with the French decadents.
Literary influences are due to definite reasons and follow regular
laws. Though sometimes authors appeal to us who are just the opposite
of ourselves, we, as a rule, love those writers who write of our own
unconscious wishes.
What is the secret of the universal appeal of Hamlet? Is it not because
many of us, like him, have been in conflict wherein we could not
act because there was an external obstacle? Dr. Ernest Jones found
a reason for Hamlet's inability to act in an unconscious feeling of
guilty love for his mother. He was jealous of his uncle, the murderer
of his father, and also the successful rival to Hamlet in his mother's
affections. This psychoanalytic interpretation made by Dr. Ernest
Jones adds a new element to the old theory of Hamlet's struggle with
fate. Hamlet has given rise to a series of characters in literature
characterised by inaction, by thinking and not doing. Russian
literature, with its Rudins and Oblomovs, has recognised in this
portrayal by Shakespeare a common Russian type. Hamlet, nevertheless,
had good reason for not being able to act, and finally did act, though
he made a bungle of it all.
Byron and Shelley have had more imitators and lovers than any of the
poets of England of their time. We know the influence of each of them
on Tennyson and Browning respectively, though the Victorians later
departed from the footsteps of their masters and became conservative.
But the causes that made Heine, Leonardi, De Musset and Pushkin love
Byron were the same as those which drew to Shelley, the republican
melodist Swinburne, James Thomson, the atheist author of the _City of
Dreadful Night_, Francis Thompson, the Catholic maker of beautiful
forms out of his own sufferings, and the unhappy lyricist Beddoes, who
committed suicide. The later poets found Byron and Shelley singers of
unconscious wishes of their own, portrayers of moods and sorrows like
those they felt and constructors of means of ridding the world of such
griefs by plans they largely approved.
The reason for the universal appeal of the Bible is because of the
variety in this library of books; there is always some chapter that
expresses our unconscious wishes.
The _Old Testament_, especially, satisfies our unconscious. This is
due to the psalms voicing human sorrow, and the prophecies of Isaiah
ringing with a passionate love for justice, to the pleasant tales that
appeal to our youthful fancy like those of Joseph and his brethren, and
Ruth, and the philosophical drama of Job, in whose sufferings we see
our own, to the epicureanism and melancholy in Ecclesiasticus, and the
military exploits of Joshua and David. The Bible appeals as literature
to many who do not believe in dogma or miracles, to many who find parts
of it cruel and unjust because it is a varied collection of books, and,
as a result, the unconscious wishes and means of gratification of some
of the writers must meet our own, separated as we are from them by
thousands of years.
When we read that Wordsworth soothed De Quincey and John Stuart Mill,
and had a tonic effect on Arnold, so that he became a leading disciple,
that Shaw based his wit and philosophy on Samuel Butler, an almost
forgotten contemporary, that Brandes found an affinity in writers like
Shakespeare and Ibsen, we are aware that the process is the same:
the later author found some earlier one who especially expressed his
unconscious wishes.
Take the literary influences in literature, that of Smollet on Dickens,
that of Dickens on Daudet and Dostoievsky and Bret Harte, that of
Balzac on Flaubert, of Flaubert on Maupassant and Zola, of Carlyle on
Ruskin and Froude, of Kipling on Jack London. All this means that the
author influenced found in his master a kindred sufferer and a kindred
dreamer.
Literature gives each writer or reader the means of choosing his own
father as it were. When a man says he found his whole life changed by a
certain book, it is equivalent to his saying that the book has merely
made him recognise his unconscious; it did not put anything there
that was not there before. The book had a psychoanalytic effect on
him; it taught him to look at his unconscious objectively; it brought
to consciousness something that was repressed. If the resistance to
perceiving that unconscious had not been overcome the book could have
had no effect. We hate a book often because the censorship in us is too
great. When John A. Symonds describes the effects of Whitman's _Leaves
of Grass_, which he says influenced him more than any other book except
the Bible, he meant Whitman cured him of neurosis, brought out his
repressed feelings and made him aware of his inner wants and told him
how to satisfy them.
The saying, "Tell me what you read and I'll tell you what you are,"
is true. People differ about the qualities of books because their own
unconscious wishes have been met differently in these books.
III
What then is the cause of literary movements and what stamps the
peculiarities of a literary age, if all writers draw on their
unconscious? Why does a Pope appear in the age of Queen Anne and a
Wordsworth at the end of the reign of George IV? Why didn't Shakespeare
write in the Elizabethan age like Charles Dickens in the Victorian
period? How account for the warlike character of the Saxon epic
Beowulf, for the religious tone of her first poet, Cædmon; for the
interest in chivalry and allegory in the _Faërie Queen_? What made
Bunyan so absorbed in salvation, in _Pilgrim's Progress_, at the
time the Restoration dramatists were steeped in exhibitionism and
immorality? What are the causes of the notes of moral revolt in Byron
and Shelley, of the romanticism of Scott, the realism of George Eliot?
If the unconscious is alike in all people, and genius records the ideas
and emotions formed by personal repressions, it would seem the works
of all geniuses who have had similar repressions should be alike,
irrespective of the ages in which they lived.
Literary historians and philosophers have accounted for the various
changes in literary taste fairly satisfactorily, although they have
often omitted from their investigations the factor of the personal
experiences and idiosyncrasies of the author, and have emphasised too
strongly the importance of the predominant ideas of the age. Yet no
author starts out to express the spirit of his age. He gives vent
to his unconscious which he suppresses more or less, and colours,
in accordance with the literary fashion prevailing. His unconscious
appears in a background of the literary machinery and ideas of the
time. Since in our unconscious are present all the emotions man has
had, different events may make any of them burst forth.
On account of the recent war, many dormant emotions were reanimated in
us and appeared in our literature. People found that Homer's _Iliad_
and other ancient warlike epics appealed to them more than these did
in times of peace. Literature in war times becomes more related to
primitive literature where the hero is the successful, brave warrior.
The military and patriotic spirit had not been extinct, but quiescent.
If Milton had lived in the eighteen nineties he would probably have
written problem plays and novels instead of _Paradise Lost_. He was
unhappily married, but the fashion of his age was not to create
imaginative works based on justifiable causes for seeking a divorce. He
did write on the subject of divorce, however, and his views horrified
his contemporaries. He stood alone. Had the tendencies of the time been
to make works of the imagination out of situations in which he was
personally placed, he would have no doubt done so. In his unconscious
he felt about women and divorce much as Strindberg did. He retained
during the Restoration his early Puritanism and religious interests,
and hence published _Paradise Lost_. Even here he found an opportunity
for expressing special views about women and describing his own forlorn
condition.
Again it is likely that Shakespeare in our generation would not have
written much differently from Ibsen or Hauptmann. The marriage problem
interested him also, for he was unhappily married and loved another.
He expressed his bitterness towards woman in his sonnets, in his
characterisations of historical characters like Cleopatra and Cressida.
But he wrote no special work occupied with the theme of the hard
restrictions placed by society upon the lives of some unhappily married
people. A work of this kind would have been almost a monstrosity in
his age. Shakespeare could not have written exactly as Ibsen did,
for though in their unconscious they were alike, each had different
traditions and backgrounds to work on. No writer ignores totally
prevailing literary fashions or tastes.
It is not my purpose to go into the causes of changes in tastes,
traditions, ideas, movements. That subject has been dealt with often.
Economic reasons are great factors in developing new literary periods
and movements, yet also have much to do with this feeling of reaction
against a preceding age. The artificiality of the eighteenth century
gave way to the love of nature of the nineteenth. The demand for
reason, wit and classicism in literature disappeared gradually, to be
replaced by imagination, the utilisation of emotion and romanticism.
Wordsworth is a reaction to Pope (even though Wordsworth's nature
worship concealed his sex interest). His way was prepared by other
writers of nature like Thomson, Collins, Goldsmith, Gray, Cowper,
Crabbe, Blake and Burns. The immortality and exhibitionism of Congreve,
Wycherly, Farquar, Van Brugh and Dryden in the Restoration period were
a reaction to the Puritanism of the age of Cromwell. Bunyan, because of
his early training and physical and mental condition, however, still
clung to his early puritanism.
Yet Pope and Wordsworth were each men of their ages and wrote in
accordance with the rising literary traditions of the time, though
they also altered these. For the imitative instinct is powerful and
present in the most original writers. Shakespeare's plays are much like
those of Marlowe and Fletcher, though greater. His "plagiarisms," like
those of Milton, were extensive. It is true that often one man sets
the standard for a literary age, but he usually has predecessors. His
influence is due to the fact that he strikes responsive chords in the
unconscious of many people of his time, and the circle of his admirers
and imitators increases, so as to make him an authority.
The realistic novels of George Eliot appeared after England wearied of
the fanciful fictions of Walter Scott. A generation passed by before
the reaction set in with full force. Both writers wrote as they did,
largely in obedience to the tendencies of their times, upon which
they reacted and were reacted upon. They wrote because of personal
repressions. Their methods of expression were different, because of a
desire to comply somewhat with literary traditions. Romanticism was
fashionable in 1830, while realism was in the air in 1860.
Those readers who think that these views do not give sufficient credit
to writers for originality in literary expression should remember that
common literary forms are followed by writers who may nevertheless be
original in ideas. Only the student of literary history realises the
power of literary imitation.
Take the thousands of pastorals that flooded European literature from
Theocrities to Pope; most of them, except Spenser's _Astrophel_,
Milton's _Lycidas_, and a few others were flat and unprofitable. Note
the numerous sonnets written since the form was brought over from Italy
by Wyatt and Surrey. The extensive use of the sonnet proves poets are
imitative.
Recall the allegories with which mediæval literature abounded. Even
the great short stories of Hawthorne, who was much influenced by Bunyan
and Spenser, show traces of mediæval forms. Literary tradition is
certainly stronger than originality. And the thousands of authors of
our day who write novels and short stories, would in mediæval times
have written allegories.
The ideas and mode of expression change, and hence makes much of the
old literature obsolete. But many emotions remain eternal. We can still
feel with Sappho and the Troubadours, whereas we find our intellect
insulted by some of the religious ideas versified by Dante and Milton;
although the passages describing secular emotions win our admiration.
When we must look for an author's unconscious buried in the literary
trappings of his day we weary of the task and dismiss his work. Why can
we not read the thousands of pastorals and allegories of the mediæval
writers? Is it not largely because of the feeble intellects, and spirit
of imitation present, because of the absence of the personal note?
The unconscious is buried too deeply in rigmarole. The works have a
psychological and historical but not artistic value. The religious
and romantic instincts in many of us are buried too deeply in our
unconscious, and hence we do not sympathise with those works.
Those poets live who have been most personal. The Roman poets, Horace,
Catullus, Titullus, Propertius, Ovid, Lucretius, were personal. Even
the _Æneid_ reveals the soul of Virgil in the story of Æneas and Dido.
The unconscious is present in all literature, and the literary movement
but colours it and gives occasion for the expression or censorship of
certain phases of it. Puritan writers are not in their unconscious any
different from the "immoral" ones; only the latter relax the censor and
give full play to the unconscious, when a liberal age like that of the
Restoration or the Renaissance, permits it.
Hence, though all writers draw on their unconscious and base their work
on their personal repressions, authors of one age differ in manner
and substance from those of another, not because the unconscious is
different (which it is not), but because it is fashionable to express
only certain features of it in one age; because writers have an
instinctive tendency to comply with the literary fashions of their
age; because the time spirit colours and censors those elements of the
unconscious which appear in the literary product.
IV
Freud has shown in his _Psychopathology of Every-Day Life_ that we tend
to forget the things that are displeasing to us, that unconsciously
we avoid what has once caused us pain. The objection has been raised
to this theory that as a matter of fact it is the painful things that
we never forget, and that these impress themselves most on us. Such
critics might have taken it for granted that the scientist who laid
down the principles that the neuroses date from the earliest painful
love experiences which are never forgotten, but merely repressed and
unconscious, would not have overlooked their objections. Certainly we
do not forget painful things, but nature has so provided that we have a
tendency to repress into our unconscious annoying events and go on our
way as if they had never happened; only in symptomatic acts, mistakes,
slips of the tongue and otherwise do we betray ourselves. The man whose
wife has lied never forgets it if he has loved her. But if he has, let
us say, been slighted by a person who has not been playing a principal
part in his life, he will go on living as if that person had never
existed for him. He may unconsciously avoid the street where that man
lives, and forget about him, until some occasion may arise when he may
betray his dislike of that person in a manner he never intended; the
action is, nevertheless, the voice of his unconscious. Life would be
unbearable if we always had before us pictures of our past sufferings.
In fact, a neurosis is brought about by the fact that we don't forget.
As Freud said, the hysteric suffers from reminiscences or fantasies
based on painful events in the past.
The principle of unconscious avoiding of the painful is at the basis of
the rejection of the world's great books, both old and new. Literary
criticism is influenced by our tendency to ignore what causes us pain.
The world has not always realised the reason for the opposition to
a new great thinker, or an advanced idea or book. We have contented
ourselves by asserting that the world was not yet advanced enough
intellectually to perceive their greatness. We know, however, that
often the most intellectual people of an age are the first to reject a
new idea. Men like Carlyle and Lord Beaconsfield would have nothing to
do with the theory of evolution. Darwin's chief opponents were among
the leading biologists of the time.
The fact of one's being born in an earlier generation from the man
who propounds the new idea, is a large factor in the rejection of it.
Another unconscious reason for the repudiation of the new idea is that
it would cause us pain if it were true. We would also feel that we
had been dupes all our lives. We had been smugly following a pleasant
delusion that brought us some happiness and suddenly we see our bubble
pricked. We had been following a course of thinking and conduct,
that is now impeached by the new discovery. If a man has written
several books on miracles, original sin, and other dogmas, in which he
believes, and has spent all his life studying the subjects, he could
not accept a book which rejects his ideas; it would mean that he had
wasted his life. His aversion to concur with the conclusions of that
new book is nature's means of preventing him from suffering great pain;
it is a defence action. If a preacher has advised thousands of couples
who were unhappy not to divorce and not to remarry some one with
whom they might have been happy, he would be the last man to see the
greatness of a work that shows divorce may be a humane and beneficial
act in some cases, for it would mean that he would have to admit he has
ruined the lives of many people.
The real objection by man to the Copernican theory was that it
reflected on his religion and his vanity; it was annoying to hear that
the earth was not the centre of the universe. The Darwinian theory
was a still more painful discovery because it placed man among the
descendants of animals and taught that he was a by-product like them.
The facts, however, in both cases, were so overwhelming that many
managed to accept them and still keep their religious beliefs intact,
for these still give consolation. In spite of Copernicus and Darwin, we
still live as if the world were the centre of the universe and man its
most divine product.
The most personal and human argument in favour of a belief in personal
immortality of the soul, of communion with the dead or a Providential
Personal God, is that life would be sad if these theories were not
true; they must hence be true. Tennyson, in his _In Memoriam_, has the
popular attitude. If life didn't live for ever more, then "earth is
darkness at the core and dust and ashes all that is." But our wishes
must recede before logic and facts.
A great idea, then, is not accepted if its conclusions are painful to
us when a more pleasant idea has prevailed; every idea is rejected when
its possible truth would mean that we have been living in error and
wasting our lives. New ideas are nearly always made to fit in with the
old views.
The theory of evolution became acceptable only when it was demonstrated
to the satisfaction of the religionists what at first did not seem
apparent to them, that it interfered neither with a belief in a
personal God, Christianity nor the immortality of the soul.
Literary men who are advanced are admired often for qualities that
do not constitute their real greatness. The conservatives praise the
daring poet for his style, after he has made his way; or they select
a few of the minor ideas he champions and ignore the greater ones.
They will not accept the Hardy who wrote _Jude the Obscure_, but the
Hardy of _Far From the Maddening Crowd_; they will admire the early
harmless lyrics of John Davidson instead of the profound testaments
and later plays, whose real greatness was shown by Dr. Hayim Fineman
in his monograph on _John Davidson_.[G] They praise Swinburne for his
melody, Ibsen for his technique and Shaw for his wit, but can see no
intellectual value either in the _Songs Before Sunrise_, or _Peer
Gynt_, or _Man and Superman_. They overlook the value of Byron's _Don
Juan_ or _Cain_, because these works contain ideas that hurt most,
and instead they lavish compliments on harmless descriptions like the
address to the ocean, or the account of the battle of Waterloo. They
like Shelley's lyrics and see nothing in his ideas.
The "conspiracy of silence" that has often greeted many great men was
at times unconscious. People are not prone by nature to investigate
something which might bring painful results. They prefer to let it
alone altogether. The motive of ignoring a great book is founded on
one of displeasure. Hence morbid and pessimistic books, revolutionary
ideas, iconoclastic views on religion, morals or philosophy, new
discoveries in science, encounter opposition. We do not want to be
disturbed in our complacency. For the disturbance is, after all, made
by those who do not fit into the old order; their own discoveries are
defence processes. But gradually it is seen that these writers express
universal wants.
The opposition met by all investigations in the subject of sex, is an
example of man's effort to thrust painful things out of sight. The
barrier raised against Freud himself rises largely from three leading
ideas of his, those on the sexual significance of symbols in dreams and
the attributing of neurosis to sexual causes, and the theory that the
infant has a sexual life of its own. In spite of his broad use of the
term sexual and his many demonstrations of the truth of these ideas,
man does not want to believe them. Jung and Adler, who lay little
stress on the sexual element, have made the theory of psychoanalysis
acceptable to many; but Freud objects to the use of the word
psychoanalysis by disciples who have taken out of his theory something
he considers essential.
FOOTNOTE:
[G] Published by the University of Pennsylvania.