THE AUTHOR ALWAYS UNCONSCIOUSLY IN HIS WORK

I

"No man," says Dr. Johnson in his Life of Cowley, "needs to be so burdened with life as to squander it in voluntary dreams of fictitious occurrences. The man that sits down to suppose himself charged with treason or peculation, and heats his mind to an elaborate purgation of his character from crimes which he was never within the possibility of committing differs only by the infrequency of his folly from him who praises beauty which he never saw; complains of jealousy which he never felt; supposes himself sometimes invited and sometimes forsaken; fatigues his fancy and ransacks his memory for images which may exhibit the gaiety of hope, or the gloominess of despair; and dresses his imaginary Chloris or Phyllis sometimes in flowers fading as her beauty, and sometimes in gems as lasting as her virtues."

The shrewd doctor displayed great insight into the psychology of authorship in these remarks. They form a good argument against those who deny the importance of the personal note in literature.

One objection that these critics make is that an author may deliberately conceal himself and that in fact writers have often done so. Thus a man who is happily married may write a novel or play, seething with attacks upon the marriage institution, full of cynical and bitter statements about women and love. The author may say that book does not represent his own life. It does, however, in that it shows his reaction to seeing life of this kind lived by others; it means that he has been struck by the cruelty or injustice of it, and that unconsciously he reflected that he too might but for a chance throw of the dice of fate be in the same position. His attitude towards the lives of others is part of his own life. The fact that he has suffered pain by witnessing other people's lives, shows that his own psyche is affected. The life described has been lived by some of his friends or relatives, and some of his ancestors. The griefs of others often affect us, if not like our own, at least strongly enough to make us devote ourselves to mitigating them.

Investigation however will show that the great works voicing sorrows were experienced by those who wrote about them. It is an unhappily married writer like George Sand, who has given us the novels that deal with the marriage problem. It is a disappointed lover like Heine or De Musset who writes the saddest love poems. Life is made up of so many sorrows that writers do not have to go out of their way to invent them. The rich man does not imagine himself starving and write books where the pangs of hunger are described. Such literature is written usually by a man who has starved, a man like George Gissing. The financier who has never had any business troubles as a rule will not waste energy nor court pain by trying to figure how a bankrupt feels and put those feelings in art. Such feelings are usually delineated by a man who has himself been bankrupt like Balzac in his CÆsar Birroteau. Of course, no writer could have felt all the emotions he describes. Balzac, for example, never had the troubles of Goriot, for he never had children to be ungrateful to him. But even here there must have been some personal affair, for the author had suffered from ingratitude of some other kind and all ingratitude hurts.

The author again may write merely for amusement or commercial purposes. In these cases it is true the author's personality may not be in his work any more than an editorial writer's real opinions are in the editorial which he writes in accordance with the policy of his paper. A writer may study the demands of the public and try to comply with them. In cases like these the reader may detect the insincerity or learn of it by clues. Here the works are not representative of the author and he can no more be judged by them, than a person who would invent or falsify his dreams in reporting them to a psychoanalyst. Certainly these would not reveal the unconscious. And I realise much "literature" is of this nature.

An author again may purposely conceal himself, but the key once discovered reveals him. Deliberate and continuous concealment by the author of his personality can often be detected. We know MÉrimÉe and Nietzsche were personally entirely different from what some of their books would lead us to suspect. MÉrimÉe was not cold nor Nietzsche cruel; one was too emotional and the other too genteel.

II

A good example of the follies that may follow by the refusal to adopt psychoanalytic methods in literature is seen in the case of Charlotte BrontË.

It had always been noticed that several similar motives appeared in her novels; the love of a girl for her school master, a married man; an intense craving for affection; and pictures of sad partings. It was known that Charlotte had attended the school of M. Heger, a married man in Brussels, that she had left it and then returned, and later departed finally. There were critics who suspected that Charlotte was really in love with her teacher and that various scenes in her novels had their counterpart in reality. Among these were Sir Wemyss Reid, Augustine Birrel and Angus Mackay. But other critics scoffed at the idea. So great a BrontË student as Clement Shorter said it would be the act of treachery to pry into the writer's heart. May Sinclair, especially, repudiated with indignation the possibility that BrontË drew on actual facts for her novels; and her purposes in writing her The Three BrontËs, was to demolish the theory that Charlotte BrontË was in love with M. Heger. But shortly after this work appeared there were published in 1913 in the London Times one of the "scoops" of the age, four pathetic heart burning love letters by Charlotte BrontË to M. Heger, written without pride, pleading for a little affection. The secret was out; there could be no doubt that the scenes of unrequited love in her novels were due to her own unreciprocated love for M. Heger and that Charlotte was Lucy Snowe and Jane Eyre in Villette and Jane Eyre, respectively. Miss Sinclair wrote an article attacking the publishing of the letters which had disproved her theory.

An excellent study of the influences of Charlotte's sad love affair on her work was made by Mrs. Ellis H. Chadwick in her In the Footsteps of the BrontËs. It is really a psychoanalytical study, for it traces the novelist's work to her repressions. Another study has been promised by Lucille Dooley, who made several abstracts of psychoanalytical studies of genius from essays by Freud's disciples, in the American Journal of Psychology.

I just wish to point out a few of the influences of BrontË's love affair upon her work. Charlotte BrontË published Jane Eyre in October, 1847, and wrote in 1848: "Details, situations which I do not understand and cannot personally inspect, I would not for the world meddle with.... Besides not one feeling on any subject, public or private, will I ever affect that I do not really experience."

After she left Brussels on December 29, 1843, she wrote that she suffered much and that she would never forget what the parting cost her. This departure inspired the description of the flight from Thornfield (which is Brussels in Jane Eyre), the part of the novel which she told her biographer appealed to her most.

In her letters to Heger which were published she begs for sympathy as a beggar for crumbs from the table of the rich man. In the second letter written in 1844 she tells how she waited six months for a letter and she sent this one through friends. In Villette, in the twenty-fourth chapter, she wrote how Lucy Snowe studied to quench her madness because she received no letters. "My hour of torment was the post hour." She wrote that in all the land of Israel there was but one Saul, certainly but one David to soothe him. Heger was the David, she says symbolically, to soothe her. (In the novel Heger is called Paul Carl David Emanuel).

Villette is the most autobiographical of her novels. It appeared in the beginning of 1853 and had occupied the author the previous two years. It cost her great effort and she recalled in it the sleepless nights in Brussels about which she told Mrs. Gaskell; her anxieties were caused by her hopeless love for M. Heger. She knew that the novel would be recognised by the Hegers, and she printed in it a statement that the author reserved the rights of translation, as she feared M. Heger would read it if it were translated into French. She first had wanted to publish it anonymously. She also refused to make a happy ending which was wanted by the publishers; she would not have Paul and Lucy marry, for such was not the case in real life. (Jane Eyre, however, married Rochester.) The book is full of the Hegers, even their children being in it. Madame Heger does not figure in a favourable light, and one could hardly expect a girl to admire the wife of the man she loved herself.

The interval between the first and last of the letters published in the Times is about two years, which covers the saddest period of her life, the time she left Brussels finally on December 29th, 1843, and end of 1845. She had gone to Belgium originally in February, 1842; she was then twenty-six and Heger was seven years her senior. She left in November, 1842, when her aunt died, and returned in January, 1843. Heger wanted her to return and Charlotte was only too eager, though she could have received a better position. She describes this second trip in Villette. She left finally because Mme. Heger really did not want her services.

Charlotte's brother Branwell also fell in love with a married person, the wife of his employer.

Charlotte BrontË drew herself as a man in her first novel, The Professor. She calls herself William Crimsworth, who loves his teacher, Mlle. Reuter. The account she gives of the parting of the student with his teacher is again reminiscent of her memories of parting from M. Heger. She drew herself then just once in this rÔle of the male lover.

"The principal male characters," says Mrs. Chadwick, "to be found in Charlotte BrontË's great novels were those drawn from M. Heger, M. Pelet, Rochester, Robert Moore, Louis Moore and Paul Emanuel."

Hence we may conclude as a rule that when a motive appears often, or a note persists continuously, in a writer's work, there were reasons therefor in his personal life. Charlotte BrontË was no exception to the rule.

She married in 1854 but did not really love her husband. Poor Charlotte BrontË! She married late and not for love, and all her youth she craved love and wanted to marry and be a mother. She betrays herself in a dream reported in the twenty-first chapter of Jane Eyre. Had she known that dreams are realised unconscious wishes she might never have recounted this dream, a frequent one among women, both married and unmarried, who have no children.

"During the past week scarcely a night had gone over my couch that had not brought with it a dream of an infant, which I sometimes hushed in my arms, sometimes dandled on my knee, sometimes watched playing with daisies on a lawn, or, again, dabbling its hands in running water. It was wailing this night and laughing the next; now it nestled close to me, and now it ran from me; but whatever mood the apparition evinced, whatever aspect it wore, it failed not for seven successive nights to meet me the moment I entered the land of slumber."

Literature can scarcely present a more personal confession in disguised form. That dream of Jane Eyre's was Charlotte BrontË's, who wanted to have children by M. Heger.

III

The value of the study of an author's works in connection with his life is also seen in the case of Dickens. An excellent book by Edwin Pugh, Charles Dickens Originals, really applies the psychoanalytic method, to a large extent, to Dickens's work.

Some of the main influences in Dickens's life and work were due to two girls, Maria Beadnell, his boyhood sweetheart, who rejected him, and Mary Hogarth, his wife's sister, who died young. These women were respectively the models of Dora in David Copperfield, and Little Nell.

The story of Dickens's early love became known a half dozen years ago when his letters to Miss Beadnell were published. He was eighteen when he loved her, and when she finally rejected him he wrote to her saying he could never love another. Not long afterwards he married. In 1855, when he was nearly forty-four years old, he said in a letter to his future biographer, Forster, that he could never open David Copperfield "without going wandering away over the ashes of all that youth and hope, in the wildest manner." He was thinking of his love for Maria, for the reference in the letter is to Dora, of whom Maria was the prototype. She also appears as Dolly Varden in Barnaby Rudge. He again draws her in Estella in Great Expectations, and describes the sufferings that Pip, who is himself, had undergone on account of her.

In 1855 Maria Beadnell, who had become Mrs. Henry Winter, wrote to the author, and he agreed to meet her clandestinely. He was unhappily married but not yet separated from his wife. The separation came a few years later. Dickens was disillusioned when he met Mrs. Winter; she was homely and stout. He describes his disillusionment in Little Dorrit, where Mrs. Winter is Flora Finching. "Flora whom he had left a lily, had become a peony." And then he gives way to a personal pathetic cry. He could no longer love his first love, he was not in love with his wife; with all his fame and wealth he had missed the greatest pleasure in life. "That he should have missed so much, and at his time of life should look so far about him for any staff to bear him company upon his downward journey and cheer it—was a just regret." He looked into the dying fire by which he sat and reflected that he too would pass through such changes and be gone. Thus we can trace the childwife Dora and the sufferings of Pip to Dickens's first love.

Mary Hogarth, who helped to shape Dickens's ideals of women, was a younger sister of his wife, and she died as a girl. Dickens was so shocked by this that he could not go on for a while with his Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist. This was about 1837, when he was twenty-five. He has left a number of records of the great and lasting effect upon him of the grief he felt. He describes a dream where he sees her; he thinks of her when in America. She was his model for Little Nell and he wrote that old wounds bled afresh when he wrote this story. But she was responsible for all those pure, bloodless girls, lacking in individuality, which fill his pages. She died when she was innocent of worldly guile, and unconsciously was the type before him when he drew women. He could not understand the modern intellectual woman and he owes this literary deficiency to his misfortune. "And so he presents to us," says Mr. Pugh, "that galaxy of amazing dolls variously christened Rose Maylie, Kate Nickleby, Madeline Bray, Little Nell, Emma Haredale, Mary Graham, Florence Dombey, Agnes Wickfield, Ada Clare and Lucy Manette.... Modern criticism has exhausted itself in scathing denunciation of these poor puppets. And yet there is perhaps something to be said in defence of the convention that created them. Dickens was never a self-conscious artist. He had indeed no use for the word Art." His female types were the result of his faith in the perfection of woman as he saw it in Mary Hogarth.

Two women who did not influence his work are his mother and his wife. He entertained no affection for either. He had no pleasant memories of his mother because she was indifferent to his sufferings when he worked as a boy in the blacking factory. She is drawn in Mrs. Nickleby. David Copperfield's mother may also have been an idealised portrait of Dickens's own mother, but Mrs. Copperfield resembles more the Little Nells and other characters based on Mary Hogarth in her colourlessness, and her goodness. Dickens's own wife scarcely, if ever, served as a model for any of his female characters. They lived apart for the last twelve years of the author's life.

Dickens's greatness lies in his portrayals of male characters. He was poor in his female characterisation because Mary Hogarth unconsciously influenced him into drawing spineless women and he kept the painful memories of his love affair with Maria Beadnell suppressed except to caricature her in Dora and Estella and Flora. When we think of Dickens we have memories of men like Sam Weller, Micawber (Dickens's father), Uriah Heep, Pecksniff, and others. Why he especially excelled in characterisation of these types familiarly known all over the world, and how he was led to that peculiar "exaggerative" portrayal of eccentric creatures is a theme which can be explained by psychoanalytic theories and the application of Freud's theories of the comic, and a study of the originals and the types Dickens met in his life. It should also be remembered that this style of character portrayal was common in Dickens's youth, and he also imitated other writers.

IV

Swinburne has been usually regarded as an impersonal poet, though some of his critics have tried to see in the accounts of derelictions from the path of virtue in the poems, records of actual experiences. The poet has himself written something on the subject. In the Dedicatory Epistle of 1904 to the collected edition of his works he wrote: "There are photographs from life in the book (Poems and Ballads, 1865); there are sketches from imagination. Some which keen-sighted criticism has dismissed with a smile as ideal or imaginary were as real and actual as they well could be; others which have been taken for obvious transcripts from memory were utterly fantastic or dramatic.... Friendly and kindly critics, English and foreign, have detected ignorance of the subject in poems taken straight from the life, and have protested that they could not believe me were I to swear that poems entirely or mainly fanciful were not faithful expressions or transcriptions of the writer's actual experience and personal emotion."

The poet does not tell us which poems were fanciful and which were not. He does let us know that some of the poems were the record of his own experience. I propose to show that many of the poet's best known poems had a personal background and thus to differ with the theory usually prevalent that Swinburne, instead of having sung his own soul, was but a clever manipulator of rhyme and metre. The clue to the investigation is furnished by our knowledge that one of his greatest poems in the Poems and Ballads, "The Triumph of Time," was inspired by the one love disappointment of his life. It was written in 1862 when he was twenty-five years old and "represented with the exactest fidelity," says Gosse, his biographer, "his emotions which passed through his mind when his anger had died down, and when nothing remained but the infinite pity and the pain." Swinburne met the young lady at the home of the friends of Ruskin and Burne-Jones, Dr. John Simon and his wife. She was a kinswoman of theirs. She gave the poet roses and sang for him. She laughed in his face when he proposed. He was hurt grievously and went up to the sea in Northumberland and composed the poem. The poet told Gosse the story in 1876.

The poem is a cry of a wounded heart; one of the most powerful in all literature. The poet recounts all his emotions and foresees that this affair will influence his life. Many lines in it are familiar to Swinburne lovers, such as "I shall never be friend again with roses," "I shall hate sweet music my whole life long." It is one of Swinburne's masterpieces and Rupert Brooke considered it the masterpiece of the poet.

One may now see that the terrible declamation against love, one of the lengthiest and best choruses in his play Atlanta in Calydon, rings with a personal note. The lines beginning "For an evil blossom was born" constitute one of the most bitter outcries against love in literature. Unconsciously, memories of his lost love were at work and the chorus must have been written about the same time as "The Triumph of Time." The play itself was published in 1864. Swinburne is the Chorus and thus chants his own feelings in the Greek legend he tells.

Swinburne may have had other love affairs though Gosse tells us this was his only one. I find memories of the unfortunate episode throughout the entire first volume of Poems and Ballads, and note recurrences to the theme in later volumes. In one of his best known poems, "The Forsaken Garden," written in 1876, he dwells on the death of love. The idea of love having an end is repeated with much persistency throughout many of his poems; he so harps on the same note, that the suspicions of critics should have been roused before we learned about the romance of his life. No doubt the reason he was attracted to the love tragedy of Tristram of Lyonesse, published in 1882, was because of his own tragic experience; and in the splendid prelude (written, Gosse tells us, in 1871) we see the effects of his love affair.

We have evidence of Swinburne's grief in two of the greatest poems of the Poems and Ballads, where it was least suspected, in "Anactoria" and "Dolores," poems whose morality he had to defend. He pours some light on the subject in his Notes on Poems and Reviews, published as a reply to his critics after the issue of his Poems and Ballads in 1865. Of "Anactoria" he said: "In this poem I have simply expressed, or tried to express, that violence of affection between one and another which hardens into rage and deepens into despair.... I have tried to cast my spirit into the mould of hers (Sappho), to express and represent not the poem but the poet.... As to the 'blasphemies' against God or gods of which here and elsewhere I stand accused—they are to be taken as the first outcome or outburst of foiled and fruitless passion recoiling on itself."

In other words he was singing his own grief through Sappho. The rage and despair were Swinburne's own and the "blasphemies" were his own reaction to frustrated love.

On "Dolores," the poet says: "I have striven here to express that transient state of spirit through which a man may be supposed to pass, foiled in love and weary of loving, but not yet in sight of rest; seeking rest in those violent delights which have violent ends in free and frank sensualities which at last profess to be no more than they are."

No doubt the poet gave himself up to light loves as a result of his disappointment. But the point here to be remembered is that the poem is by his own confession a result of a state of spirit through which a "man foiled in love" (the poet himself) may be said to pass and through which Swinburne did pass.

Let us examine some of his lyrics, chiefly those in his first volume where we can see the result of the love affair.

In "Laus Veneris" he breaks off from his story to say:

He spoke here from personal memories.

After he tells the story of "Les Noyades," of the youth who was bound to a woman who did not love him and thrown into the river Loire, the poet ends abruptly, and addresses his own love, regretting that this could not have happened to him. He re-echoes the sentiment in "The Triumph of Time" where he wishes he were dead with his love. Yet no critic has ventured to see how Swinburne was drawn to this tale by his unconscious, by the fact that he had lost his love; and no critic dreamed of claiming that the following concluding lines were personal and addressed to the kinswoman of the Simons:

His address to the spirit of Paganism, the "Hymn of Proserpine," which should not necessarily bring up thoughts of his love tragedy, nevertheless begins, "I have lived long enough, have seen one thing, that love hath an end," and later on he complains that laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day, but love grows bitter with treason and laurel outlives not May. I fear that the poet deserves more sympathy than he has hitherto been accorded. He had accused his love of having encouraged him, hence he knew what he meant when he sang those sad words "love grows bitter with treason."

Two other pathetic poems are "A Leave Taking" where he constantly reiterates "she would not love" and he turns for consolation to his songs; and "Satia de Sanguine" where he says, "in the heart is the prey for gods, who crucify hearts, not hands."

In "Rondel" he begins:

In the "Garden of Proserpine," he sings,

This poem shows his longing for rest after his sad experience; he is tired of everything but sleep.

In "Hesperia" he again refers to his troubles:

Even in "The Leper" he gives us an inkling of his great love by describing the devotion of the lover for the smitten lady. "She might have loved me a little too, had I been humbler for her sake."

All these poems appeared in his first volume and were written within at least two years after his sorrow. He can scarcely write a poem or chant about a woman or retell an old myth or legend, or venture a bit of philosophy but he unconsciously introduces his aching heart. The burden is always that love has an end or lives but a day.

There are other poems in the first volume where the personal note is present and yet very little attention has been called to this.

The poem "Felise," with its quotation from Villon, "Where are the Snows of Yesterday," is I believe a personal poem, based on an actual or desired change between him and his lost sweetheart, that is, if this poem refers to her. Some day new data may appear to tell us whether the facts of the poem had any basis in reality. It seems that a year after the poet's love was rejected by the girl, she wished to win his love back and that he now scorned her. The poem was written, Gosse conjectures, in 1864, but 1863 is most likely the date from the internal evidence, as she rejected him in 1862. Swinburne refers to the change a year had brought:

He exults cruelly; in the new situation he is revenged.

He concludes:

If she ever sought a return to the poet's affections, he refused to receive her. He had hoped she might seek to return; read the following lines from "The Triumph of Time," where he takes the same stand that he does in this poem.

No, never would he take her back. Whether the incident of her asking to be restored to his affections happened or not is unimportant, relatively. Sappho prayed to Aphrodite to reverse the situation of her love and make the rejecting lover come to her suppliant; a situation that every suffering lover wants, and as we know, very often happens.

One of the finest poems inspired by his love, "his sleek black pantheress," is the poem called "At a Month's End," published in 1878 in the second series of Poems and Ballads. He recalls the old days and his grief is not now so maddening. He sighs:

The late Edward Thomas, killed in the war, was certainly in error when he concluded that Swinburne did not directly express personal emotion and that few of the pieces could have been addressed to one woman and that he never expressed a single hearted devotion to one woman except in "A Leave Taking." We need not insist that one woman was always in his mind, but one woman inspired most of his love passages. New information may show that other women inspired some of his love verse.[E]

Another phase in studying the poet that has interested readers is whether he actually figured in the light and lewd loves he sang. This is rather dangerous ground, and one cannot delve with certainty here. Nor is this matter so important as the question of the connection between a grand passion and the poems. The poet says in his notes in reply to critics that "Dolores" and "Faustine" are merely fanciful. Gosse has been censured for not having written an honest biography and for having passed over certain episodes in the poet's life. It had often been rumoured that the poet did lead, occasionally, a dissipated life. In the late seventies he was rescued by his friend Watts-Dunton from the effects of presumable long dissipation. After that time the poet's life was normal and the publication of the early poems of passion became a source of regret to him. He never again returned to that strain and incidentally rarely wrote work that was equal to his first period. It may then be true that some light loves and immoral women inspired poems like "Anima Anceps," "A Match," "Before Parting," "Rococo," "Stage Love," "Interlude," "Before Dawn," "Faustine," "Dolores," "Fragoleeta," "Aholibah," etc.

Swinburne then, who of all lyric poets was the one deemed least to have drawn on his personal life for material, has done so in great measure.

His "Thalassius" gives us his spiritual autobiography. At the age of fifty-five he recurred to his childhood scenes and gave us memories of them in his drama The Sister (1892) where he drew himself in Clavering. His The Tale of Balen, published a few years later, is also personal.

In spite of the fact that the poet elaborated and gave us such rich verse, he wrote from the unconscious. The first stanzas of "A Vision of Spring in Winter" were composed in sleep. He awoke at night and penned the verses he had composed. His "A Ballade of Dreamland" was written in the morning without a halt. Swinburne worked from impulse.

Swinburne's affinity to Shelley calls for special comment. He was attracted to him, because Shelley too, like Swinburne, hated monarchy and the church, because he had a mastery over melody in verse, because he was persecuted. He wrote to his youngest sister (Leith: Swinburne, Page 221): "I must say it is too funny—not to say uncanny—how much there is in common between us two; born in exactly the same class, cast out of Oxford—the only difference being that I was not formally but informally expelled—and holding and preaching the same general views in the poems which made us famous." This is a good illustration of the process of projection in literature. Swinburne was attracted to Shelley because he was most like him.

The influence of his mother, Jane Swinburne, was a determining factor in his life. She guided his reading and took care of him and he was mentally a good deal like her. He was very much attached to her and no doubt she unconsciously is present in much of his work. She died in 1896 when eighty-seven years old and her death left him a changed man and was the tragedy of his later life. When she came to live with him before her death he wrote a poem of welcome to her, "The High Oaks," and when she died he wrote "Barking Hall."