PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND THE NOVEL

Of man's first disobedience and the fruitOf that forbidden tree whose mortal root.

But it is equally obvious that Milton himself would not have tripped on the light fantastic toe with quite so much charm and cheerfulness in the lines:

But come thou Goddess fair and freeIn heaven yclept Euphrosyne

if the goddess had been yclept something else, as, for the sake of argument, Syrinx. Milton in his more reasonable moods would have allowed rhyme in theory a place in all poetry, as he allowed it in practice in his own poetry. But he would certainly have said at this time, and possibly at all times, that he allowed it an inferior place, or at least a secondary place. But is its place secondary; and is it in any sense inferior?

The romance of rhyme does not consist merely in the pleasure of a jingle, though this is a pleasure of which no man should be ashamed. Certainly most men take pleasure in it, whether or not they are ashamed of it. We see it in the older fashion of prolonging the chorus of a song with syllables like "rumty tumty" or "tooral looral." We see it in the similar but later fashion of discussing whether a truth is objective or subjective, or whether a reform is constructive or destructive, or whether an argument is deductive or inductive: all bearing witness to a very natural love for those nursery rhyme recurrences which make a sort of song without words, or at least without any kind of intellectual significance. But something much deeper is involved in the love of rhyme as distinct from other poetic forms, something which is perhaps too deep and subtle to be described. The nearest approximation to the truth I can think of is something like this: that while all forms of genuine verse recur, there is in rhyme a sense of return to exactly the same place. All modes of song go forward and backward like the tides of a sea; but in the great sea of Homeric or Virgilian hexameters, the sea that carried the labouring ships of Ulysses and Ã†neas, the thunder of the breakers is rhythmic, but the margin of the foam is necessarily irregular and vague. In rhyme there is rather a sense of water poured safely into one familiar well, or (to use a nobler metaphor) of ale poured safely into one familiar flagon. The armies of Homer and Virgil advance and retreat over a vast country, and suggest vast and very profound sentiments about it, aboutwhether it is their own country or only a strange country. But when the old nameless ballad boldly rhymes "the bonny ivy tree" to "my ain countree" the vision at once dwindles and sharpens to a very vivid image of a single soldier passing under the ivy that darkens his own door. Rhythm deals with similarity, but rhyme with identity. Now in the one word identity are involved perhaps the deepest and certainly the dearest human things. He who is homesick does not desire houses or even homes. He who is lovesick does not want to see all the women with whom he might have fallen in love. Only he who is sea-sick, perhaps, may be said to have a cosmopolitan craving for all lands or any kind of land. And this is probably why sea-sickness, like cosmopolitanism, has never yet been a high inspiration to song. Songs, especially the most poignant of them, generally refer to some absolute, to some positive place or person for whom no similarity is a substitute. In such a case all approximation is merely asymptotic. The prodigal returns to his father's house and not the house next door, unless he is still an imperfectly sober prodigal; the lover desires his lady and not her twin sister, except in old complications of romance; and even the spiritualist is generally looking for a ghost and not merely for ghosts. I think the intolerable torture of spiritualism must be a doubt about identity. Anyhow, it will generally be found that where this call for the identical has been uttered most ringingly and unmistakably in literature, it has been uttered in rhyme. Another purpose for which this pointed and definite form is very much fitted is the expression of dogma, as distinct from doubt or even opinion. This is why, with all allowance for a decline in the most classical effects of the classical tongue, the rhymed Latin of the mediÃ¦val hymns does express what it had to express in a very poignant poetical manner, as compared with the reverent agnosticism so nobly uttered in the rolling unrhymed metres of the ancients. For even if we regard the matter of the mediÃ¦val verses as a dream, it was at least a vivid dream, a dream full of faces, a dream of love and of lost things. And something of the same spirit runs in a vaguer way through proverbs and phrases that are not exactly religious, but rather in a rude sense philosophical, but which all move with the burden of returning; things to be felt only in familiar fragments ...on revient toujours... it's the old storyâ€”it's love that makes the world go round; and all roads lead to Rome: we might almost say that all roads lead to Rhyme.

Milton's revolt against rhyme must be read in the light of history. Milton is the Renascence frozen into a Puritan form; the beginning of a period which was in a sense classic, but was in a still more definite sense aristocratic. There the Classicist was the artistic aristocrat because the Calvinist was the spiritual aristocrat. The seventeenth century was intensely individualistic; it had both in the noble and the ignoble sense a respect for persons. It had no respect whatever for popular traditions; and it was in the midst of its purely logical and legal excitement that most of the popular traditions died. The Parliament appeared and the people disappeared. The arts were put under patrons, where they had once been under patron saints. The schoolsand colleges at once strengthened and narrowed the New Learning, making it something rather peculiar to one country and one class. A few men talked a great deal of good Latin, where all men had once talked a little bad Latin. But they talked even the good Latin so that no Latinist in the world could understand them. They confined all study of the classics to that of the most classical period, and grossly exaggerated the barbarity and barrenness of patriotic Greek or mediÃ¦val Latin. It is as if a man said that because the English translation of the Bible is perhaps the best English in the world, therefore Addison and Pater and Newman are not worth reading. We can imagine what men in such a mood would have said of the rude rhymed hexameters of the monks; and it is not unnatural that they should have felt a reaction against rhyme itself. For the history of rhyme is the history of something else, very vast and sometimes invisible, certainly somewhat indefinable, against which they were in aristocratic rebellion.

That thing is difficult to define in impartial modern terms. It might well be called Romance, and that even in a more technical sense, since it corresponds to the rise of the Romance languages as distinct from the Roman language. It might more truly be called Religion, for historically it was the gradual re-emergence of Europe through the Dark Ages, because it still had one religion, though no longer one rule. It was, in short, the creation of Christendom. It may be called Legend, for it is true that the most overpowering presence in it is that of omnipresent and powerful popular legend; so that things that may never have happened, or, as some say, could never have happened, are nevertheless rooted in our racial memory like things that have happened to ourselves. The whole Arthurian Cycle, for instance, seems something more real than reality. If the faces in that darkness of the Dark Ages, Lancelot and Arthur and Merlin and Modred, are indeed faces in a dream, they are like faces in a real dream: a dream in a bed and not a dream in a book. Subconsciously at least, I should be much less surprised if Arthur were to come again than I should be if the Superman were to come at all. Again, the thing might be called Gossip: a noble name, having in it the name of God and one of the most generous and genial of the relations of men. For I suppose there has seldom been a time when such a mass of culture and good traditions of craft and song have been handed down orally, by one universal buzz of conversation, through centuries of ignorance down to centuries of greater knowledge. Education must have been an eternalviva voceexamination; but the men passed their examination. At least they went out in such rude sense masters of art as to create the Song of Roland and the round Roman arches that carry the weight of so many Gothic towers. Finally, of course, it can be called ignorance, barbarism, black superstition, a reaction towards obscurantism and old night; and such a view is eminently complete and satisfactory, only that it leaves behind it a sort of weak wonder as to why the very youngest poets do still go on writing poems about the sword of Arthur and the horn of Roland.

All this was but the beginning of a process which has two great points ofinterest. The first is the way in which the mediÃ¦val movement did rebuild the old Roman civilisation; the other was the way in which it did not. A strange interest attaches to the things which had never existed in the pagan culture and did appear in the Christian culture. I think it is true of most of them that they had a quality that can very approximately be described as popular, or perhaps as vulgar, as indeed we still talk of the languages which at that time liberated themselves from Latin as the vulgar tongues. And to many Classicists these things would appear to be vulgar in a more vulgar sense. They were vulgar in the sense of being vivid almost to excess, of making a very direct and unsophisticated appeal to the emotions. The first law of heraldry was to wear the heart upon the sleeve. Such mediÃ¦valism was the reverse of mere mysticism, in the sense of mere mystery; it might more truly be described as sensationalism. One of these things, for instance, was a hot and even an impatient love of colour. It learned to paint before it could draw, and could afford the twopence coloured long before it could manage the penny plain. It culminated at last, of course, in the energy and gaiety of the Gothic; but even the richness of Gothic rested on a certain psychological simplicity. We can contrast it with the classic by noting its popular passion for telling a story in stone. We may admit that a Doric portico is a poem, but no one would describe it as an anecdote. The time was to come when much of the imagery of the cathedrals was to be lost; but it would have mattered the less that it was defaced by its enemies if it had not been already neglected by its friends. It would have mattered less if the whole tide of taste among the rich had not turned against the old popular masterpieces. The Puritans defaced them, but the Cavaliers did not truly defend them. The Cavaliers also were aristocrats of the new classical culture, and used the word Gothic in the sense of barbaric. For the benefit of the Teutonists we may note in parenthesis that, if this phrase meant that Gothic was despised, it also meant that Goths were despised. But when the Cavaliers came back, after the Puritan interregnum, they restored not in the style of Pugin but in the style of Wren. The very thing we call the Restoration, which was the restoration of King Charles, was also the restoration of St. Paul's. And it was a very modern restoration.

So far we might say that simple people do not like simple things. This is certainly true if we compare the classic with these highly-coloured things of mediÃ¦valism, or all the vivid visions which first began to glow in the night of the Dark Ages. Now, one of these things was the romantic expedient called rhyme. And even in this, if we compare the two, we shall see something of the same paradox by which the simple like complexities and the complex like simplicities. The ignorant liked rich carvings and melodious and often ingenious rhymes. The learned liked bare walls and blank verse. But in the case of rhyme it is peculiarly difficult to define the double and yet very definite truth. It is difficult to define the sense in which rhyme is artificial and the sense in which it is simple. In truth it is simple because it is artificial. It is an artifice of the kind enjoyed by children and other poetic people; itis a toy. As a technical accomplishment it stands at the same distance from the popular experience as the old popular sports. Like swimming, like dancing, like drawing the bow, anybody can do it, but nobody can do it without taking the trouble to do it; and only a few can do it very well. In a hundred ways it was akin to that simple and even humble energy that made all the lost glory of the guilds. Thus their rhyme was useful as well as ornamental. It was not merely a melody but also a mnemonic; just as their towers were not merely trophies but beacons and belfries. In another aspect rhyme is akin to rhetoric, but of a very positive and emphatic sort: the coincidence of sound giving the effect of saying, "It is certainly so." Shakespeare realised this when he rounded off a fierce or romantic scene with a rhymed couplet. I know that some critics do not like this, but I think there is a moment when a drama ought to become a melodrama. Then there is a much older effect of rhyme that can only be called mystical, which may seem the very opposite of the utilitarian, and almost equally remote from the rhetorical. Yet it shares with the former the tough texture of something not easily forgotten, and with the latter the touch of authority which is the aim of all oratory. The thing I mean may be found in the fact that so many of the old proverbial prophecies, from Merlin to Mother Shipton, were handed down in rhyme. It can be found in the very name of Thomas the Rhymer.

But the simplest way of putting this popular quality is in a single word: it is a song. Rhyme corresponds to a melody so simple that it goes straight like an arrow to the heart. It corresponds to a chorus so familiar and obvious that all men can join in it. I am not disturbed by the suggestion that such an arrow of song, when it hits the heart, may entirely miss the head. I am not concerned to deny that the chorus may sometimes be a drunken chorus, in which men have lost their heads to find their tongues. I am not defending but defining; I am trying to find words for a large but elusive distinction between certain things that are certainly poetry and certain other things which are also song. Of course it is only an accident that Horace opens his greatest series of odes by saying that he detests the profane populace and wishes to drive them from his temple of poetry. But it is the sort of accident that is almost an allegory. There is even a sense in which it has a practical side. When all is said,coulda whole crowd of men sing the "Descende CÅ“lo," that noble ode, as a crowd can certainly sing the "Dies Irae," or for that matter "Down among the Dead Men"? Did Horace himself sing the Horatian odes in the sense in which Shakespeare could sing, or could hardly help singing, the Shakespearean songs. I do not know, having no kind of scholarship on these points. But I do not feel that it could have been at all the same thing; and my only purpose is to attempt a rude description of that thing. Rhyme is consonant to the particular kind of song that can be a popular song, whether pathetic or passionate or comic; and Milton is entitled to his true distinction; nobody is likely to singParadise Lostas if it were a song of that kind. I have tried to suggest my sympathy with rhyme, in terms true enough to be accepted by the other side as expressingtheir antipathy for it. I have admitted that rhyme is a toy and even a trick, of the sort that delights children. I have admitted that every rhyme is a nursery rhyme. What I will never admit is that anyone who is too big for the nursery is big enough for the Kingdom of God, though the God were only Apollo.

A good critic should be like God in the great saying of a Scottish mystic. George Macdonald said that God was easy to please and hard to satisfy. That paradox is the poise of all good artistic appreciation. Without the first part of the paradox appreciation perishes, because it loses the power to appreciate. Good criticism, I repeat, combines the subtle pleasure in a thing being done well with the simple pleasure in it being done at all. It combines the pleasure of the scientific engineer in seeing how the wheels work together to a logical end with the pleasure of the baby in seeing the wheels go round. It combines the pleasure of the artistic draughtsman in the fact that his lines of charcoal, light and apparently loose, fall exactly right and in a perfect relation with the pleasure of the child in the fact that the charcoal makes marks of any kind on the paper. And in the same fashion it combines the critic's pleasure in a poem with the child's pleasure in a rhyme. The historical point about this kind of poetry, the rhymed romantic kind, is that it rose out of the Dark Ages with the whole of this huge popular power behind it, the human love of a song, a riddle, a proverb, a pun or a nursery rhyme; the sing-song of innumerable children's games, the chorus of a thousand camp-fires and a thousand taverns. When poetry loses its link with all these people who are easily pleased it loses all its power of giving pleasure. When a poet looks down on a rhyme it is, I will not say as if he looked down on a daisy (which might seem possible to the more literal-minded), but rather as if he looked down on a lark because he had been up in a balloon. It is cutting away the very roots of poetry; it is revolting against nature because it is natural, against sunshine because it is bright, or mountains because they are high, or moonrise because it is mysterious. The freezing process began after the Reformation with a fastidious search for finer yet freer forms; to-day it has ended in formlessness.

But the joke of it is that even when it is formless it is still fastidious. The new anarchic artists are not ready to accept everything. They are not ready to accept anything except anarchy. Unless it observes the very latest conventions of unconventionality, they would rule out anything classic as coldly as any classic ever ruled out anything romantic. But the classic was a form; and there was even a time when it was a new form. The men who invented Sapphics did invent a new metre; the introduction of Elizabethan blank verse was a real revolution in literary form. Butvers libre, or nine-tenths of it, is not a new metre any more than sleeping in a ditch is a new school of architecture. It is no more a revolution in literary form than eating meat raw is an innovation in cookery. It is not even original, because it is not creative; the artist does not invent anything, but only abolishes something. But the only point about it that is to my present purpose is expressed in theword "pride." It is not merely proud in the sense of being exultant, but proud in the sense of being disdainful. Such outlaws are more exclusive than aristocrats; and their anarchical arrogance goes far beyond the pride of Milton and the aristocrats of the New Learning. And this final refinement has completed the work which the saner aristocrats began, the work now most evident in the world: the separation of art from the people. I need not insist on the sensational and self-evident character of that separation. I need not recommend the modern poet to attempt to sing hisvers libresin a public house. I need not even urge the young Imagist to read out a number of his disconnected Images to a public meeting. The thing is not only admitted but admired. The old artist remained proud in spite of his unpopularity; the new artist is proud because of his unpopularity; perhaps it is his chief ground for pride.

Dwelling as I do in the Dark Ages, or at latest among the mediÃ¦val fairy-tales, I am yet moved to remember something I once read in a modern fairy-tale. As it happens, I have already used the name of George Macdonald; and in the best of his books there is a description of how a young miner in the mountains could always drive away the subterranean goblins if he could remember and repeat any kind of rhyme. The impromptu rhymes were often doggerel, as was the dog-Latin of many monkish hexameters or the burden of many rude Border ballads. But I have a notion that they drove away the devils, blue devils of pessimism and black devils of pride. Anyhow Madame Montessori, who has apparently been deploring the educational effects of fairy-tales, would probably see in me a pitiable example of such early perversion, for that image which was one of my first impressions seems likely enough to be one of my last; and when the noise of many new and original musical instruments, with strange shapes and still stranger noises, has passed away like a procession, I shall hear in the succeeding silence only a rustle and scramble among the rocks and a boy singing on the mountain.

By J. D. BERESFORD

IFthe opinion of the reviewer represents in any degree the opinion of the public, psycho-analysis is becoming at once the craze and the curse of the modern novelist. The chief persons of the story, we gather, are no longer units, recognisable illustrations of acceptable and well-defined types of character, but tend to split horribly into their component parts, revealing the workings of their unconscious minds with a spiritual immodesty worthy of the immortal Sally Beauchamp. Our heroes suffer from "Å’dipus complexes" with a unanimity that must appear altogether perverse to a generation reared on the works of Charles Dickens, who consistently regarded all mothers as criminal, negligible, or insane. Our heroines are become either displayed specimens of morbid pathology or increasingly middle-aged. Finally, and as a culminating horror, we occasionally come across a novel written with such a single regard for the subjective emotions that the objective personality appears only now and then as an uncompleted cast momentarily lifted, for examination, from the matrix.

Moreover, these symptoms and their likeâ€”I still adapt and condense the current opinions of the outraged reviewerâ€”exhibit an inclination to multiply. We picture the admirer of the world's most successful novelist (Harold Bell Wright) as arching his back and spitting furiously at the first indication of a Freudian thesis. And, to conclude the indictment, it is plain that unless the novel-writing disciples of the Vienna and Zurich schools of psychology can promptly be bled to deathâ€”they have, thank God, quite miserable circulations!â€”their influence may permeate and vitiate that sane and admirable method which has given us an Ethel M. Dell, a Temple Thurston, or a Zane Grey.

This indictment represents, no doubt, an extremist attitude, the opinion of that multitude which must have its heroines pure and its morality undiluted; but it cannot be neglected solely on that account. And when we recognise, as we must, that authentic critics have also shown a bias in the same direction, we have established a case that demands both a literary and a scientific consideration.

Our analysis, however, must begin with certain exclusions. If we are to test the influence of psycho-analysis on the novel as an art-form we must take into account not only the effect, but also the manner of the incidence. For it is manifest that of all theories of the nature of man ever put forward by a reputable scientist, that of Sigmund Freud is the most attractive and adaptable for the purposes of fiction. It was a theory of sex, the all but universal theme of the novel; it emphasised various peculiarities of thought,feeling, and action that no observant, and,a fortiori, no introspective novelist could thereafter overlook; it gave a new mystery to the human mind; adumbrated the suggestion of a freer morality by dwelling upon the physical and spiritual necessity for the liberation of impulse; and, last temptation of the enervated seeker for new themes, provided material for comparatively unworked complications of motive.

Now, these appeals have inevitably influenced the writing of just those experimenters and opportunists whose novels I wish to exclude from our analysis. Their productions can only be indicative of a passing fashion; their value, at best, such as the future historian may find in the record of the epidemic symptoms they have documented. But since novels of this type have a particular significance, both in relation to our present purpose and to all literary criticism of this form of expression, we must in the first place arrive at a clear understanding of the quality that differentiates them from those other works which, whatever their failings, have another representative value.

Taking, then, an extreme and therefore ideal example, I submit that the essential difference is that between pure observation and pure feeling, or variously between an intellectual as opposed to an emotional response to experience. In the case of the experimenters we are considering, such a subject as psycho-analysis is studied from the surface, the facts and general teachings are memorised and then applied, more or less arbitrarily, to the invented or observed characters who figure in the story. Such a method when brilliantly used may produce an impression of truth, may even in rare cases lead to discovery, but in its essence it is mechanical, a mere collection and presentation of material that has not been assimilated, and hence very slightly transmuted by the writer.

The opposed example is that in which the study of, say, psycho-analysis comes to the understanding of the writer as a formula that interprets for him a mode of experience. He has, let us assume, been aware of and puzzled by a habit of thought or feeling which is suddenly and beautifully illuminated for him by the application of this new formula. Nor, in the truly representative instance, does the process halt at the first discovery, but continues to open resolutions of old difficulties hardly recognised as such until they fall within the scope of the new criterion. The danger that besets the young disciple in the first ecstasies of such an adventure is that he will inevitably be tempted to apply his touchstone too generally, to imagine that his formula will explain all life.

In such a case as this the manner of incidence, to which I referred, differs markedly from the first example. Here we get a sense of interpenetration and subsequent assimilation, in the former case rather of obliquity and reflection; the true difference being that one writer finds in psycho-analysis an aid to the understanding of human thought and action, the other merely a useful piece to add to his repertoire. And, finally in this connection, one has true value as evidence of the validity of the theory; the other has not.

Having thus cleared the ground by eliminating more particularly those literary experiments in applied psychology that have had such an irritant action on the nerves of the reviewer, I propose to test the applicability of psycho-analysis to fiction by a brief examination of certain aspects of the work of a writer who had not heard of Freud and never attempted to anticipate his method. Dostoevsky, in fact, from our point of view, may be regarded primarily as a patient rather than as a doctor.

Of his life up to the age of seven years we lack that information which would provide us with the last triumphant detail of proof. It is exceedingly improbable that that detail will ever be forthcoming. But it is a fairly safe inference from the later evidence that at some time in the course of those earlier years he suffered either some shock of terror or stress of misery that initiated the trauma which was later confirmed and emphasised by his experience on the scaffold. This inference is inherently probable, and since it might conceivably be confirmed by research and could not conceivably be disproved, we may assume it as a premise, although it is not absolutely essential pathologically.

For the remainder of his life we see him beyond all shadow of doubt suffering from a neurosis that, even if it were not the cause, was the accompaniment and not the result of his epilepsy. The form taken by this neurosis has been provisionally termed an "inferiority complex." In its milder and practically harmless forms it is perhaps the commonest instance of a morbid inhibition, despite the fact thatâ€”paceDr. Freudâ€”it depends more on the power principle of Adler than on the pleasure-pain principle so tediously insisted upon by the Vienna school. The symptoms in aggravated cases exhibit on the one side an exaggerated humility, and on the other an intolerant use of any adventitious opportunity for the use of power. Two instances of everyday experience taken from a text-book of psycho-analysis are: The driver of a heavy van brutally threatening the temporarily inferior pedestrian by the threat of running him down; and the ordinarily meek woman who takes a delight in exerting temporary superiority of position, it may be in such a trivial act as keeping anyone waiting by a pretence of inattention.

Dostoevsky, however, has himself analysed the condition so perfectly that his study might well find a place in a medical library as the ideal type of this particular neurosis. The supposed autobiographer (his name does not appear) inNotes from Underground22is, perhaps, too intelligently aware of his own condition, but it is evident that Dostoevsky's purpose could only be fully served by the form of a personal confession. It is, indeed, a confession that holds no reserves. In the earlier part of the story we see the assumed writer of the notes suffering agonies from the consciousness of his humiliation. This is followed by two attempts to assert himself, both futile. We then see him in a contest with his servant, Apollon, whose condition is a reflex ofhis own. And, finally, we get the representative instance of a brutal use of temporary superiority of position in his dealings with the unfortunate little prostitute, Liza. Moreover, the title is conclusive. The "underground" is clearly indicated as that of the mind, and if the story had been written within the last ten years the author would have been accused by the reviewers of having steeped himself in the writings of the psycho-analysts. The opening sentences, indeed, would probably have been a little too much for the sensitive, since the sketch begins: "I am a sick man ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me."

22The novels of Feodor Dostoevsky. Vol. X.White Nights and Other Stories.Constance Garnett's translations. Heinemann.

This one story would be almost sufficient testimony as to Dostoevsky's own condition, the essential part of it coming, as it does, not from observation, but from the "underground" of the writer's own mind. But if we need further evidence it can be found in almost any of Dostoevsky's novels: the valet inThe Brothers Karamazovis a fine example; Prince Myshkin inThe Idiotdevelops the theme in its less self-conscious aspect; there is more than one example inThe Possessed. But the truth is that, once started on this scent, the student of Dostoevsky cannot fail to conclude that the type dominates both the characterisation and the atmosphere of all his works.

Yet if our diagnosis rested solely on this evidence the inference would be open to attack by the layman on the grounds that Dostoevsky wrote of the Russian as he knew him; and has not Russia as a country exhibited precisely the symptoms of the neurosis we have been describing? Centuries of suppression and humiliation have been at work to foster and confirm the complex which we now see in its typical expression, although passing, as did that of the French in the last years of the eighteenth century, towards its natural sublimation.

But our evidence goes beyond the examination of Dostoevsky's imaginative writingsâ€”in which, by the way, he was continually able, within certain limitations, to sublimate his own complex. Indeed, it was not by his novels but by a study of his letters that I, personally, was led in the first instance to attempt the diagnosis. In the letters we must look chiefly for autobiographical indications rather than for the emergence of the unconscious wisdom that enriches the novels, but would be checked by the realisation of addressing a particular individual.

The first of them that attracted my attention was the adulatory tone of the letters begging for patronage, written just before the release from Siberia. One regrets, in reading them, that genius could so bemean itself. The common excuse for the tone of them is that Dostoevsky was ill and over-tried by his recent experiences, but it is just in such circumstances as these that one looks for the expression of the dominant individuality. In any case I prefer the pathological explanation. Then we come to the consideration of his jealousy of Turgenev, and of the unfortunate meeting of the two men in Switzerland. All Dostoevsky's resentment and his behaviour at the meetingin question are readily explicable by the theory of his neurosis, but the need for impartiality demands that we should ask if a perfectly normal explanation is forthcoming. Personally I have failed to find one that is consistent with an unprejudiced interpretation of Dostoevsky's general character. Apart from his prepossession, he exhibits traits of gentleness, affection, and tolerance that do not appear to me consonant with his treatment of Turgenev. He did not seek to belittle his other contemporaries. But, in this instance, like the hero ofNotes from Underground, he could not resist the unconscious desire to try and jostle his superior from thepavement.23

23Cf.op. cit., pp. 87,et seq.

For our present purpose, however, it is not necessary to prove that Dostoevsky himself was the victim of a particular neurosisâ€”although the argument is slightly strengthened if that hypothesis be admittedâ€”since it is primarily only my intention to show that certain morbid conditions of mind, now clearly indicated and with obvious limitations explained by the psycho-analysts, may be artistically treated in the best fiction. Another instance of this, which may be briefly referred to, is that afforded by the writings of D. H. Lawrence, who in all his novels has demonstrated with the passionate conviction that is a witness to his genius the strange and occasionally dissociated workings of the unconscious mind. In this case we are confronted with just such a sex obsession as delights the faithful disciples of the Vienna school, but the particular type of complex is not of any importance in this connection.

The result of our preliminary examination may be summarised as the posing of two deductions: the first, that the deliberate, intellectual use in the pages of a novel of the teachings of psycho-analysis produces an effect upon the reader that may be variously irritating, unconvincing, and negligible, but is rarely, if ever, psychologically valuable; the second, that a writer of genius such as Dostoevsky has, in one sense, forestalled the conclusions of this branch of psychology and used them to the benefit of literature. At first sight these two deductions may appear to disclose an inherent contradiction, namely, that the theories of psycho-analysis can and cannot be used for the purposes of fiction; but this apparent contradiction is instantly resolved by a consideration of the manner of treatment. Briefly we may assume that, according to precedent, a true form of self-expression must bear the impress of spontaneity, and hence that a novelist's learning is comparatively valueless to him until it has been so assimilated and transmuted as to become a personal experience and conviction.

This last proposition, however, opens the second phase of our thesis, presenting as it does the obvious deduction that such a theory as that of psycho-analysis properly comprehended and applied may become a powerful influence in the novel of the future. But to decide that we must consider, first, how far the theory is a new one, and, secondly, in what respects it illuminates the problems of normal psychology.

The answer to the first question can be stated quite briefly. The knowledge of the facts upon which Freud's pathological method was founded are as old as folk-lore. Certain symbols that the modern practitioner recognises as having a peculiar significance in the dreams of his patient are the same symbols that were used not only in Greek and Norse mythologies, but also in the most primitive rites of the savage. What is new is primarily the pathological method by which the unconscious mind may be induced to reveal its dangerous secrets; but from the study of this method there is arising the outline of a new psychology for which we have no true precedent. Glimmerings and faint foreshadowings there may have been, but no sure recognition or understanding; and the answer to our second question involves some inquiry into what this new psychology implies.

Let me begin by saying that psycho-analysis throws very little light on the problem of the survival of the personality, and Dr. Jung, in his address to the Society for Psychical Research last April, refused to admit the probability of any authentic message having been received from departed spirits. We are able, therefore, to confine ourselves strictly to the study of humanity in its normal, that is to say, in its terrestrial, condition, and find our main point of convergence from older psychologies in the intensive observation of that element of our make-up which is now commonly spoken of as "the unconscious."

A scholarly history designed to collate the main facts of man's attitude towards and tentative realisations of his own duality would make uncommonly interesting reading; but outside religion and imaginative literature no real attempt was made tocharacterisethe unconscious mind until Freud began to practise a pathology that relied upon the interpretation of dreams as an essential part of the method of diagnosis. In the past the oneirocritic was solely concerned with the significance of the dream in so far as it foretold the future; the Freudian analysis, before Jung restored the balance of factors, was equally single-minded in relating it to the past. And this change of attitudeâ€”so startling in its implications that it almost makes a break in the continuity of thoughtâ€”tended very quickly to crystallise a host of speculations that had awaited a unifying hypothesis. For this method of interpreting the dream, supported as it was by verifiable results in the patient's nervous, mental, and physical condition, could only signify that we are endowed with a double consciousness, and that under a suitable stimulus the deeper consciousness could be examined and, as I have said, characterised. We are, in short, confronted with the theorem of a dualpersonality24in every human being, in which the second person has peculiarand essential functions, both in connection with our sanity and with our physical well-being. What precisely is the scope of these functions we are not yet in a position to say, but we can formulate with reasonable certainty various characteristic activities, tendencies and modes of expression, common to this second personality, that are of the greatest importance to modern psychology.

24In using the term "dual personality" I beg an essential question for the sake of a convenient image; but it must not be assumed that what I describe hereafter as a second personality is recognised as such by psychologists. It is possible that the unconscious bears some such relation to the conscious as desire bears to purpose, instinct to reason, or reflexive to deliberative action. But see also in this connectionDe l'Inconscient au Conscient, by Dr. Gustave Geley, Paris. 1919.

We must, for example, face the deduction that the unconscious can suffer from a queer and hitherto unrecognised form of ill-health. A sudden fright, for instance, more particularly in childhood, has apparently the effect of breaking the liaison in this one particular relation between the conscious and the unconscious minds. The shock itself, whatever it may be, is not remembered by the conscious mind, and this failure of contact between the unconscious and objective reality seems to produce a condition comparable to nervous worry. Speaking figuratively, one may say that the second personality becomes the victim of a growing obsession, and begins to concentrate its efforts more and more upon signalling its message of distress. And surely the strangest of all the strange facts that have recently been described concerning this amazing partnership of ours is that the second personality cannot communicate with the first except in the language of symbol. The means by which that vital message can be transmitted is, generally, in the first instance by a dream. But this dream does not picture the actual circumstances of the original shock, but seeks to describe it by a method that Dr. Maurice Nicoll has compared to that of the political cartoon. Night after night the message of distress is delivered with diligent ingenuity in a picture language the images of which are frequently taken from casual and unimportant experiences of the dreamer's waking life, such experiences being presented in the form of an allegory which, rightly interpreted, has a bearing on the urgent cause of distress. When this mode of communication fails, more drastic steps are taken and the physical actions of the body may be influenced in the form of a mania. A youth or a young woman shocked by a sudden sexual experience or revelation to the point of conscious forgetfulness of the incident in question may develop a mania for the continued cleansing of the handsâ€”again, be it noted, the message being conveyed by a symbol. Or the effect may be the development of a phobia that in extreme cases may cause the death of the patient.

Now, the points of immediate interest in this amazing process are, firstly, what may be called the anxiety of the unconscious to communicate its distress; and, secondly, the inability to convey its message by any means other than that of symbol. From the former observation it may perhaps be inferred,inter alia, that it is vital to the functions of the unconscious that it should have universal touch with the objective realities of its partner; from the second, that the existence of a trauma causing a breach between the two minds is of such a nature that direct communication becomes impossible along that particular circuit. For, although it is true that the majority of dreams emerge in this form, they also contain now and then plain statementsthat solve a perplexity; and it is difficult to understand why in cases of such vital urgency, an image of the conditions responsible for the original trauma should not be directly presented, unless there is some nervous dissociationâ€”it may be an actual physical displacement or temporary rearrangement of cell tissueâ€”producing a restricted amnesia in the conscious mind.

Proceeding now with the characterisation of the unconscious, we come to that aspect of it which has above all others tickled and excited the popular imagination. In this aspect the unconscious figures as the crouching beast of desire, the primitive immoral instigator of all the animal passions, a thing of wonderful abilities and capable of amazing physical dexterities, but before all else unethical and uncivilised. But sorry as I am to destroy so romantic and intriguing a creation, I must admit that Dr. Jung's researches do not uphold this view of the unconscious as a universal type. It is, indeed, well established in the mythologies and appears as the serpent, a favourite symbol, in the second chapter of Genesis; but the individual may at once put away the fear, or the hope, that he himself is harbouring so fearful a beast. For, if we may argue from those abnormal instances that furnish the bolder illustrations of tendency, we have excellent grounds for following Jung in the assumption that the unconscious is the complement of the conscious. Is a man brutal, then he is suppressing the urgency to gentleness that wells upâ€”an uncertain and impeded flow, no doubtâ€”from the depths of his being; and we remember the callous murderer exhibiting a tender solicitude for some feeble animal. Is he a miser, he is occasionally tortured by promptings to an absurd generosity. Is he a loose-liver, he suffers from an unappeasable longing after chastity. The saint is tempted by his unconscious being to sin: the sinner to renounce the devil and all his works. In short, the character of the unconscious is as various as the character of man; although in this civilised world of ours, in which the dominant restrictions of society are in the direction of sex and decency, we are naturally inclined towards a generalisation that presents the unconscious as a creature of immodesty and lust....

But it is unnecessary for the purposes of this article that I should elaborate any further the larger inferences of the psycho-analysts with regard to the personal traits, influences, and functions of this astonishing partner of ours. All that I wish to demonstrate is that such a partner almost certainly exists and has an immense influence upon our impulses, our thoughts, and our actions. And the critical question we have to face is whether the agency of the unconscious, recognised now both by the philosophers and the psychologists, can possibly be kept out of the novel. Personally, I believe that neither the distaste of the reviewer nor that more influential factor the distaste of the public will avail to bar the conclusions of psycho-analysis from the fiction of the future. We are coming inevitably to a new test in our judgments upon human action and thought, a test that has been proved to be valid by many thousands of well-authenticated experiments. I am willing to admit that through all the ages genius has anticipated laboratory andclinical methods, and that the basis of the psycho-analytical theory was firmly established in literature before Freud applied it as a pathological method. But once such a theory as this is establishedâ€”a probability one can hardly escapeâ€”how can any serious novelist afford to neglect the illumination it throws upon the subtle problems of human impulse? Is it not already tending to become a touchstone of the author's powers of observation and understanding, helping us to evaluate the intellectual productions of the writer, whether realist or romantic, who relies upon the evidence of his eyes and ears rather than upon his personal emotions and experience?

I am aware that such a postulate as this contradicts in some respects certain implications I have previously made. But it must be remembered that while the novelist's best material undoubtedly comes from his personal contacts, almost infinitely extended by his powers of entering with an emotional sympathy into the experiences of other lives either presented or recounted, he cannot entirely neglect the precedents afforded by learning. Such precedents may only serve him as a test and a formula for correction, but should he overlook them altogether he will be liable to fall into the error of regarding his personal equation as a universal standard and generalise from the atypical.

And, finally, I would submit that we are at this moment passing through a new phase of evolution that must have a characteristic effect on the fiction of the futureâ€”if the form of the novel survives the change. We may study the first evidences of this strange partnership of ours in the lower animals. In the wild what we call the unconscious appears to be the single control. It represents the genius of instinct, swift, feral, and unethical. In animals, such as the dog and the horse, age-long companions of man, we can trace the incipient rivalry of what in ourselves we regard as the representative consciousness. The horse and the dog have already learnt the meaning of conscious inhibition. At our command they can deny the spontaneous impulses of their natural desire. In civilised man that ability has been cultivated until he is able to present to the world and himself so complete an entity that we and he regard it as his proper expression. But, meanwhile, we cannot now doubt that his hidden partner has evolved with him. The impulses of the unconscious are no longer simply feral and animal. We are, a trifle unwillingly, coming to the conclusion that it is this other shadowed self that is responsible for all that is best and most permanent in literature. It is being associated with genius on the one hand, and on the other with the highest dexterity in games of skill. And is it not possible that with our growing realisation of this co-operation the "education of the subconscious"â€”as Varisco, the Italian philosopher, calls itâ€”will proceed ever more rapidly? And to what end, unless it be that in the strange process of our earthly evolution this artificial shell of the conscious will be gradually broken and absorbed to reveal the single and relatively perfect individual that has been so steadily developing underground?

By ROBERT LYND

IZAAKWalton in his short life of Donne has painted a figure of almost seraphic beauty. When Donne was but a boy, he declares, it was said that the age had brought forth another Pico della Mirandola. As a young man in his twenties, he was a prince among lovers, who by his secret marriage with his patron's nieceâ€”"for love," says Walton, "is a flattering mischief"â€”purchased at first only the ruin of his hopes and a term in prison. Finally, we have the later Donne in the pulpit of St. Paul's represented, in a beautiful adaptation of one of his own images, as "always preaching to himself, like an angel from a cloud, though in none; carrying some, as St. Paul was, to Heaven in holy raptures, and enticing others by a sacred art and courtship to amend their lives." The picture is all of noble charm. Walton speaks in one place of "his winning behaviourâ€”which, when it would entice, had a strange kind of elegant irresistible art." There are no harsh phrases even in the references to those irregularities of Donne's youth, by which he had wasted the fortune of Â£3000â€”equal, I believe, to more than Â£30,000 of our moneyâ€”bequeathed to him by his father, the ironmonger. "Mr. Donne's estate," writes Walton gently, referring to his penury at the time of his marriage, "was the greatest part spent in many and chargeable travels, books, and dear-bought experience." It is true that he quotes Donne's own confession of the irregularities of his early life. But he counts them of no significance. He also utters a sober reproof of Donne's secret marriage as "the remarkable error of his life." But how little he condemned it in his heart is clear when he goes on to tell us that God blessed Donne and his wife "with so mutual and cordial affections, as in the midst of their sufferings made their bread of sorrow taste more pleasantly than the banquets of dull and low-spirited people." It was not for Walton to go in search of small blemishes in him whom he regarded as the wonder of the worldâ€”him whose grave mournful friends "strewed ... with an abundance of curious and costly flowers," as Alexander the Great strewed the grave of "the famous Achilles." In that grave there was buried for Walton a whole age magnificent with wit, passion, adventure, piety, and beauty. More than that, the burial of Donne was for him the burial of an inimitable Christian. He mourns over "that body, which once was a Temple of the Holy Ghost, and is now become a small quantity of Christian dust," and, as he mourns, he breaks off with the fervent prophecy, "But I shall see it re-animated." That is his valediction. If Donne is esteemed threehundred years after his death less as a great Christian than as a great pagan, this is because we now look for him in his writings rather than in his biography, in his poetry rather than in his prose, and in hisSongs and SonnetsandElegiesrather than in hisDivine Poems. We find, in some of these, abundant evidence of the existence of a dark angel at odds with the good angel of Walton's raptures. Donne suffered in his youth all the temptations of Faust. His thirst was not for salvation but for experienceâ€”experience of the intellect and experience of sensation. He has left it on record in one of his letters that he was a victim at one period of "the worst voluptuousness, an hydroptic immoderate desire of human learning and languages." Faust in his cell can hardly have been a more insatiate student than Donne. "In the most unsettled days of his youth," Walton tells us, "his bed was not able to detain him beyond the hour of four in the morning; and it was no common business that drew him out of his chamber till past ten; all which time was employed in study; though he took great liberty after it." His thoroughness of study may be judged from the fact that "he left the resultance of 1400 authors, most of them abridged and analysed with his own hand." But we need not go beyond his poems for proof of the wilderness of learning that he had made his own. He was versed in medicine and the law as well as in theology. He subdued astronomy, physiology, and geography to the needs of poetry. Nine Muses were not enough for him, even though they included Urania. He called in to their aid Galen and Copernicus. He did not go to the hills and the springs for his images, but to the laboratory and the library, and in the library the books that he consulted to the greatest effect were the works of men of science and learning, not of the great poets with whom London may almost be said to have been peopled during his lifetime. I do not think his verse or correspondence contains a single reference to Shakespeare, whose contemporary he was, being born only nine years later. The only great Elizabethan poet whom he seems to have regarded with interest and even friendship was Ben Jonson. Jonson's Catholicism may have been a link between them. But, more important than that, Jonson was, like Donne himself, an inflamed pedant. For each of them learning was the necessary robe of genius. Jonson, it is true, was a pedant of the classics, Donne of the speculative sciences; but both of them alike ate to a surfeit of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. It was, I think, because Donne was to so great a degree a pagan of the Renaissance, loving the proud things of the intellect more than the treasures of the humble, that he found it easy to abandon the Catholicism of his family for Protestantism. He undoubtedly became in later life a convinced and passionate Christian of the Protestant faith, but at the time when he first changed his religion he had none of the fanaticism of the pious convert. He wrote in an early satire as a man whom the intellect had liberated from dogma-worship. Nor did he ever lose this rationalist tolerance. "You know," he once wrote to a friend, "I have never imprisoned the word religion.... They" (the churches) "are allvirtual beams of one sun." Few converts in those days of the wars of religion wrote with such wise reason of the creeds as did Donne in the lines:

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