CONCLUSION
I
The question now arises, What effect will a knowledge of the author's
unconscious have in making us appreciate his work as literature? Does
it matter at all if we know whether a particular affair or a certain
woman inspired a poem or not? Many critics protest against the kind
of literary criticism that speculates as to whether the heroines
celebrated in the sonnets of Shakespeare or Sidney were real or
imaginary, whether the emotions felt by the poets were affected or
genuine. These critics are not usually inclined to admit any connection
between an author's life and his work.
One of the great factors in helping us understand literary works
is an acquaintance with some of the episodes of the author's life.
Sainte-Beuve revolutionised literary criticism by his dictum that
the knowledge of an author's life helps us to follow his work the
better. Dr. Johnson once said that he liked the biographical side
of literature. Isaac D'Israeli, before Sainte-Beuve, showed in his
_Literary Character_ that he grasped the nature of the intimate
relationship between an author and his work.
It is our contention that a literary work is better appreciated after
the facts about an author's life are revealed to us, and this does
not usually happen for years after his death. One of the reasons why
masterpieces cannot be fully comprehended in an author's lifetime is
because we do not know altogether how he came to write the works in
question. Shelley and Keats were not fully understood by the critics
of their times not only because of their radical views, but because
the public did not know the details of the poets' relations with their
parents, and the women they loved. How could a cold, stern reviewer
find anything in _Epipsychidion_ or _Lamia_ unless he was aware of some
facts about Emilia Viviani or Fanny Brawne? How was any fair estimate
of either of these poets possible while the information that later
times have furnished was not at hand? Many people objected when the
letters of Keats to Fanny Brawne were published forty years ago, but
these have helped us to understand that the cry that pervades them
is the same embodied in music in the _Ode to Fanny_, the _Ode to the
Nightingale_ and in _Lamia_.
No true estimate of a man is possible till one reads the plaints of
his that were not meant for the public. We should not regret the
publication of the love letters of the Brownings and Carlyles. Those
wonderful letters are almost as good literature as anything the authors
wrote for the public. We are enabled to see the writers in an entirely
different light from that in which their own works put them, and to
understand these better.
It was not possible for the age in which Balzac and Goethe lived, fully
to appreciate them, for it did not have their published correspondence,
and could not estimate the close connection between unknown episodes in
their lives and their works. I do not mean that the contemporaries of
these poets could not recognise the fact that these men were geniuses,
but they could not get a proper understanding of them.
In former times criticism was busy with the questions of technique,
with matters of rhetoric and grammar; a writer's work furnished
opportunities for discussing how near to old ideas of authorship
the author approached. To-day we study an author in connection with
his own life and with ours. The Shakespearean criticism of the last
century is worth more than that of the two centuries following his
death. Coleridge and Hazlitt devoted their discussions to showing how
the great poet discussed problems that touched all of us. A number
of studies and books have been published which seek to educe his
personality from his work. I believe Walter Bagehot was a pioneer
in this kind of work. His essay on _Shakespeare--The Man_ appeared
as early as 1853. The most successful venture of this kind has been
George Brandes's great study. Other works of this nature are Frank
Harris's _The Man Shakespeare_, and _The Women of Shakespeare_, both
usually regarded as fantastic, but nevertheless deserving credit for
their daring, mistaken as they often are. Leslie Stephen's and A. C.
Bradley's essays in the _Studies of a Biographer_ and _Oxford Lectures
on Poetry_, respectively deserve special mention. Then there are books
like David Masson's _Shakespeare Personally_, Robert Waters's _William
Shakespeare, Portrayed by Himself_, and Goldwin Smith's _Shakespeare:
The Man_. Shakespeare's greatness can be recognised though we knew
little about him, yet the keynote of modern Shakespearean criticism is
to endeavour to see the connection between the plays and the man.
Comes the question of the effect of psychoanalytic criticism upon our
judgment of living authors. Writers like George Moore, of the living,
and Strindberg, of the recently dead, have not waited for posterity
to make discoveries about their love affairs. They told us about them
frankly in their autobiographical works. Other writers, great poets
like Yeats and Symons, have sung of their loves more or less openly
in their lyrics. When posterity reads the biographies of these last
two poets, that will no doubt some day be written, it will, I believe,
learn that the emotions these poets expressed in their work had a real
basis. But we have no right to probe into an author's private life
while he is alive; we may make detailed deductions from his work, but
we should not give them publicity. The reader who finds the early
Kipling cynical about women, who notes Hardy constantly reiterating
the tragedies caused by love, may venture to guess there must be some
reason for this, but it would be a vicious criticism that made this
topic the subject of an article while these men are alive. One who
reads Wells' _New Machiavelli_ or Dreiser's _The Genius_ and observes
the author's preoccupation with the marriage problem, may also draw his
own conclusions about how much the fiction is inspired by reality, but
it is a fitter subject for posterity to take up. Occasionally an author
like Robert Herrick or Upton Sinclair has his domestic affairs dragged
into the limelight, on account of the sensational interest of our
newspapers, and the reader learns that novels like _One Woman's Life_
and _Love's Pilgrimage_ were somewhat autobiographical.
There has been a great tendency in our day on the part of authors to
write autobiographical novels. We should not deprecate this tendency.
When I think that Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert and Zola, Tolstoi,
Dostoievsky and Turgenev, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot,
George Meredith and Henry James were often autobiographical, I realise
that all literary men, novelists as well as poets, are compelled
to wear their hearts on their sleeves by virtue of their art. That
criticism which reproached Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Senancour and De
Musset for having been occupied too much with themselves is unfair.
With whom else would the critics have the authors occupied? A man
cannot get out of himself. When he undertakes to write a book, he tells
us practically beforehand that he is going to talk about himself.
Therefore, such excellent novels of our time as Jack London's _Martin
Eden_, Stephen French Whitman's _Predestined_, Maugham's _Of Human
Bondage_ and Beresford's _Invisible Event_ are to be commended. Should
these authors' renown live, posterity will learn that some of the
emotional life lived by the characters had been experienced by the
authors themselves. It is, however, not a matter of importance whether
the mere incidents recorded in these novels actually transpired in the
authors' lives.
Many of us are so constituted that we like to sit down with an author
like Montaigne or Hazlitt, who takes us into his confidence. We dislike
reticent and cold people in literature as much as in life. We do not
ask writers to tell us about their private affairs, but we want them to
talk at least indirectly about things that are close to their heart.
And one may be sure they will interest us. Shakespeare unlocked his
heart to us in his sonnets and in his plays as well.
It is of the world's great books that it can always be said as Whitman
did of his own, "Whoso touches this book touches a man."
II
Art and literature are realities in themselves. The depicting of an
event enshrines it as a thing of beauty; the event itself may be dull.
We meet Falstaffs in real life and waste no time on them; put into
a play by a master, Falstaff gives us an artistic thrill. How many
of the people who enjoy Dickens' novels about humble people would be
interested in them in real life? Dickens's magic pen makes us receive a
sensation reading about them that they cannot give us themselves. It is
the artist's personality and art that count.
Gissing and Flaubert wrote about ordinary people but they themselves
were intellectual aristocrats; they had nothing in common with the
people they wrote about (except with those who were disguised portraits
of themselves). In fact, they despised them; they personally were
recluses and merely sympathised with and were interested in the people
they wrote about as subjects for art. If we had met _Madame Bovary_
personally and heard her tale from her own mouth, the effect upon us
would be small compared to that of the novel.
The domestic troubles of our next door neighbours may be a bore to us.
We may not care to meet the people personally, but a great novel or
play describing the matrimonial difficulties of fictitious characters
gives us a distinct artistic thrill. The sorrows of people who lived
centuries ago move us more than those of people we know, because of the
magic power of art.
Those who from time immemorial called art magical were right. Many
people who disparage art and literature say to the writer and the
reader that they should enter the whirlpool of life, and live
themselves. No advice could be more foolhardy. To read beautiful
books about other people's lives is itself a high form of life, a life
that only art can furnish. It also has its advantages, when we think
of the characters in literature whom we enjoy reading about and yet
would never care to meet. Who would really want to meet Becky Sharp or
Pecksniff?
That artistic pleasure we get, mingled with actual pain on account of
the sorrows of poets, is to us a decided part of our lives. The fact
that we are brought into contact with a beautiful series of lines
voicing human grief in such a manner that both our human and æsthetic
emotions are aroused, is a privileged pleasure that only those who can
enjoy poetry may derive.
It does not follow, however, that a man must confine himself solely to
the artistic or intellectual life. To know of love only through books
and not through experience is not to have lived a full life. To read
the views of Aristotle on friendship and never to have had any real
friendships is also but leading an incomplete life.
Literature is real and to read and write it is to live.
* * * * *
Transcriber's Notes:
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Obvious printer's errors corrected.
Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as
possible, including obsolete and variant spellings, non-standard
punctuation, inconsistently hyphenated words, and other inconsistencies.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Erotic Motive in Literature, by Albert Mordell