LITERARY PSYCHOLOGY
Scientific psychology is a part of physics, or the study of nature; it
is the record of how animals act. Literary psychology is the art of
imagining how they feel and think. Yet this art and that science are
practised together, because one characteristic habit of man, namely
speech, yields the chief terms in which he can express his thoughts and
feelings. Still it is not the words, any more than the action and
attitude which accompany them, that are his _understanding_ of the
words, or his sense of his attitude and action. These can evidently be
apprehended only dramatically, by imitative sympathy; so that literary
psychology, however far scientific psychology may push it back, always
remains in possession of the moral field.
When nature was still regarded as a single animal, this confusion
extended to science as a whole, and tinctured the observation of nature
with some suggestion of how a being that so acts must be minded, and
what thoughts and sentiments must animate it. Such myths cannot be true;
not because nature or its parts may not be animate in fact, but because
there is no vital analogy between the cosmos and the human organism; so
that if nature is animate as a whole, or in her minute or gigantic
cycles, animation there is sure not to resemble human discourse, which
is all we can attribute to her. Myth and natural theology are
accordingly fabulous essentially and irremediably. If literary
psychology is to interpret the universe at large, it can be only very
cautiously, after I have explored nature scientifically as far as I can,
and am able to specify the degree of analogy and the process of
concretion that connect my particular life with the universal flux.
Myth is now extinct (which is a pity) and theology discredited; but the
same confusion subsists in the quarters where it is not fashionable to
doubt. History, for instance, is partly a science, since it contains
archæological and antiquarian lore and a study of documents; but it is
also, in most historians, an essay in dramatic art, since it pretends to
rehearse the ideas and feelings of dead men. These would not be
recoverable even if the historian limited himself to quoting their
recorded words, as he would if he was conscientious; because even these
words are hard to interpret afterwards, so as to recover the living
sentiment they expressed. At least authentic phrases, like authentic
relics, have an odour of antiquity about them which helps us to feel
transported out of ourselves, even if we are transported in fact only
into a more romantic and visionary stratum of our own being. Classic
historians, however, are not content with quoting recorded words: they
compose speeches for their characters, under the avowed inspiration of
Clio; or less honestly, in modern times, they explain how their heroes
felt, or what influences were at work in the spirit of the age, or what
dialectic drove public opinion from one sentiment to another. All this
is shameless fiction; and the value of it, when it has a value, lies
exclusively in the eloquence, wisdom, or incidental information found in
the historian. Such history can with advantage be written in verse, or
put upon the stage; its virtue is not at all to be true, but to be well
invented.
Philosophy fell into the same snare when in modern times it ceased to be
the art of thinking and tried to become that impossible thing, the
science of thought. Thought can be found only by being enacted. I may
therefore guide my thoughts according to some prudent rule, and appeal
as often as I like to experience for a new starting-point or a
controlling perception in my thinking; but I cannot by any possibility
make experience or mental discourse at large the object of
investigation: it is invisible, it is past, it is nowhere. I can only
surmise what it might have been, and rehearse it imaginatively in my own
fancy. It is an object of literary psychology. The whole of British and
German philosophy is only literature. In its deepest reaches it simply
appeals to what a man says to himself when he surveys his adventures,
re-pictures his perspectives, analyses his curious ideas, guesses at
their origin, and imagines the varied experience which he would like to
possess, cumulative and dramatically unified. The universe is a novel of
which the ego is the hero; and the sweep of the fiction (when the ego is
learned and omnivorous) does not contradict its poetic essence. The
composition is perhaps pedantic, or jejune, or overloaded; but on the
other hand it is sometimes most honest and appealing, like the
autobiography of a saint; and taken as the confessions of a romantic
scepticism trying to shake itself loose from the harness of convention
and of words, it may have a great dramatic interest and profundity. But
not one term, not one conclusion in it has the least scientific value,
and it is only when this philosophy is good literature that it is good
for anything.
The literary character of such accounts of experience would perhaps have
been more frankly avowed if the interest guiding them had been truly
psychological, like that of pure dramatic poetry or fiction. What kept
philosophers at this task—often quite unsuited to their powers—was
anxiety about the validity of knowledge in physics or in theology. They
thought that by imagining how their ideas might have grown up they could
confirm themselves in their faith or in their scepticism. Practising
literary psychology with this motive, they did not practise it freely or
sympathetically; they missed, in particular, the decided dominance of
the passions over the fancy, and the nebulous and volatile nature of
fancy itself. For this reason the poets and novelists are often better
psychologists than the philosophers. But the most pertinent effect of
this appeal of science to a romantic psychology was the _hypostasis of
an imagined experience_, as if experience could go on in a void without
any material organs or occasions, and as if its entire course could be
known by miracle, as the experiences of the characters in a novel are
known to the author.
Criticism of knowledge is thus based on the amazing assumption that a
man can have an experience which is past, or which was never his own.
Although criticism can have no first principle, I have endeavoured in
this book to show how, if genuinely and impartially sceptical, it may
retreat to the actual datum and find there some obvious essence,
necessarily without any given place, date, or inherence in any mind. But
from such a datum it would not be easy to pass to belief in anything;
and if the leap was finally taken, it would be confessedly at the
instance of animal faith, and in the direction of vulgar and
materialistic convictions. Modern critics of knowledge have had more
romantic prepossessions. Often they were not really critics, saying _It
seems_, but rebels saying _I find_, _I know_, or empiricists saying
_Everybody finds_, _Everybody knows_. Their alleged criticism of science
is pure literary psychology, gossip, and story-telling. They are
miraculously informed that there are many minds, and that these all have
a conventional experience. What this experience contains, they think is
easily stated. You have but to ask a friend, or make an experiment, or
imagine how you would feel in another man’s place. So confident is this
social convention, that the natural world in which these experiences are
reported to occur, and the assumed existence of which renders them
imaginable, may be theoretically resolved into a picture contained in
them. Thus the ground is removed which sustained all this literary
psychology and suggested the existence of minds and their known
experience at all; yet the groundless belief in these minds, and in
copious knowledge of their fortunes, is retained as obvious; and this
novelesque universe is called the region of facts, or of immediate
experience, or of radical empiricism. Literary psychology thus becomes a
metaphysics for novelists. It supplies one of the many thinkable systems
of the universe, though a fantastic one; and I shall return to it, under
the name of psychologism, when considering the realm of matter. Here I
am concerned only with the evidence that such masses of experience exist
or are open to my inspection.
No inspection is competent to discover anything but an essence; what
social intuition touches is therefore always a dramatic illusion of life
in others or in myself, never the actual experience that may have
unfolded itself elsewhere as a matter of fact. Yet this dramatic
illusion, like any given essence, may be a true symbol for the material
events upon which the psyche is then directed; in this case, the life of
other people, or my own past life, as scientific psychology might
describe it. A good literary psychologist, who can read people’s minds
intuitively, is likely to anticipate their conduct correctly. His
psychological imagination is not a link in this practical sagacity but a
symptom of it, a poetic by-product of fineness in instinct and in
perception. Slight indications in the attitude or temper of the persons
observed, much more than their words, will suggest to the sympathetic
instinct of the observer what those persons are in the habit of doing,
or are inclined to do; and the stock idea assigned to them, or the stock
passion attributed to them, will be but a sign in the observer’s
discourse for that true observation. I watch a pair of lovers; and it
requires no preternatural insight for me to see whether the love is
genuine, whether it is mutual, whether it is waxing or waning, irritable
or confident, sensual or friendly. I may make it the nucleus of a little
novel in my own mind; and it will be a question of my private fancy and
literary gift whether I can evolve language and turns of sentiment
capable of expressing all the latent dispositions which the behaviour of
those lovers, unconscious of my observation, suggested to me. Have I
read their minds? Have I divined their fate? It is not probable; and yet
it is infinitely probable that minds and fates were really evolving
there, not generically far removed from those which I have imagined.
The only facts observable by the psychologist are physical facts, and
the only events that can test the accuracy of his theories are material
events; he is therefore in those respects simply a scientific
psychologist, even if his studies are casual and desultory. Whence,
then, his literary atmosphere? For there is not only the medium of words
which intervenes in any science, but the ulterior sympathetic echo of
feelings truly felt and thoughts truly rehearsed and intended. I reply
that whereas scientific psychology is addressed to the bodies and the
material events composing the animate world, literary psychology
restores the essences intervening in the perception of those material
events, and re-echoes the intuitions aroused in those bodies. This
visionary stratum is the true immediate as well as the imagined
ultimate. Even in the simplest perceptions on which scientific
psychology, or any natural science, can be based, there is an essence
present which only poetry can describe or sympathy conceive. Schoolroom
experiments in optics, for instance, are initially a play of intuitions,
and exciting in that capacity; I see, and am confident and pleased that
others see with me, this colour of an after-image, this straight stick
bent at the surface of the water, the spokes of this wheel vanishing as
it turns. For science, these given essences are only stepping-stones to
the conditions under which they arise, and their proper æsthetic nature,
which is trivial in itself, is forgotten in the curious knowledge I may
acquire concerning light and perspective and refraction and the
structure of the eye. Yet in that vast, vibrating, merciless realm of
matter I am, as it were, a stranger on his travels. The adventure is
exhilarating, and may be profitable, but it is endless and, in a sense,
disappointing; it takes me far from home. I may seem to myself to have
gained the whole world and lost my own soul. Of course I am still at
liberty to revert in a lyrical moment to the immediate, to the
intuitions of my childish senses; yet for an intelligent being such a
reversion is a sort of _gran rifiuto_ in the life of mind, a collapse
into lotus-eating and dreaming. It is here that the Muses come to the
rescue, with their dramatic and epic poetry, their constructive music,
and their literary psychology. Knowledge of nature and experience of
life are presupposed; but as at first, in the beginnings of science,
intuition was but a sign for material facts to be discovered, so now all
material facts are but a pedestal for images of other intuitions. The
poet feels the rush of emotion on the other side of the deployed events;
he wraps them in an atmosphere of immediacy, luminous or thunderous; and
his spirit, that piped so thin a treble in its solitude, begins to sing
in chorus. Literary psychology pierces to the light, to the shimmer of
passion and fancy, behind the body of nature, like Dante issuing from
the bowels of the earth at the antipodes, and again seeing the stars.
Such a poetic interpretation of natural things has a double dignity not
found in sensuous intuitions antecedent to any knowledge of the world.
It has the dignity of virtual truth, because there are really intuitions
in men and animals, varying with their fortunes, often much grander and
sweeter than any that could come to me. The literary psychologist is
like some antiquary rummaging in an old curiosity shop, who should find
the score of some ancient composition, in its rude notation, and should
sit down at a wheezy clavichord and spell out the melody, wondering at
the depth of soul in that archaic art, so long buried, and now so feebly
revealed. This curious music, he will say to himself, was mighty and
glorious in its day; this moonlight was once noon. There is no illusion
in this belief in life long past or far distant; on the contrary, the
sentimentalist errs by defect of imagination, not by excess of it, and
his pale watercolours do no justice to the rugged facts. The other merit
that dignifies intuitions mediated by knowledge of things, is that they
release capabilities in one’s own soul which one’s personal fortunes may
have left undeveloped. This makes the mainspring of fiction, and its
popular charm. The illusion of projecting one’s own thoughts into remote
or imaginary characters is only half an illusion: these thoughts were
never there, but they were always here, or knocking at the gate; and
there is an indirect victory in reaching and positing elsewhere, in an
explicit form, the life which accident denied me, and thereby enjoying
it _sub rosa_ in spite of fate. And there are many experiences which are
only tolerable in this dream-like form, when their consequences are
negligible and their vehemence is relieved by the distance at which they
appear, and by the show they make. Thus both the truth and the illusion
of literary psychology are blessings: the truth by revealing the minds
of others, and the illusion by expanding one’s own mind.
These imaginative blessings, however, are sometimes despised, and
philosophers, when they suspect that they have no evidence for their
psychological facts, or become aware of their literary flavour,
sometimes turn away from this conventional miscellany of experience, and
ask what is the substantial texture of experience beneath. Suppose I
strain my introspection in the hope of discovering it; the picture (for
such a method can never yield anything but pictures) may be transformed
in two ways, to which two schools of recent literary psychology are
respectively wedded. One transformation turns experience, intensely
gaped at, into a mere strain, a mere sense of duration or tension; the
other transformation unravels experience into an endless labyrinth of
dreams. In the one case, experience loses its articulation to the extent
of becoming a dumb feeling; and it is hard to see how, if one dumb
undifferentiated feeling is the only reality, the illusion of many
events and the intuition of many pictures could be grafted upon it. In
the other case experience increases its articulation to the extent of
becoming a chaos; and the sensitive psychology that dips into these
subterranean dreams needs, and easily invents, guiding principles by
which to classify them. Especially it reverts to sexual and other animal
instincts, thus grafting literary psychology (which in this field is
called psycho-analysis) again on natural substance and the life of
animals, as scientific psychology may report it.
This natural setting restores literary psychology to its normal status;
it is no longer a chimerical metaphysics, but an imaginative version,
like a historical novel, of the animation that nature, in some
particular regions, may actually have possessed. The fineness and
complexity of mental discourse within us may well be greater than we can
easily remember or describe; and there is piety as well as ingenuity in
rescuing some part of it from oblivion. But here, as elsewhere, myth is
at work. We make a romance of our incoherence, and compose new unities
in the effort to disentangle those we are accustomed to, and find their
elements. Discourse is not a chemical compound; its past formations are
not embedded in its present one. It is a life with much iteration in it,
much recapitulation, as well as much hopeless loss and forgetfulness. As
the loom shifts, or gets out of order, the woof is recomposed or
destroyed. It is a living, a perpetual creation; and the very fatality
that forces me, in conceiving my own past or future, or the animation of
nature at large, to imagine that object afresh, with my present vital
resources and on the scale and in the style of my present discourse—this
very fatality, I say, reveals to me the nature of discourse everywhere,
that it is poetry. But it is poetry about facts, or means to be; and I
need not fear to be too eloquent in expressing my forgotten sentiments,
or the unknown sentiments of others. Very likely those sentiments, when
living, were more eloquent than I am now.