UNCONSCIOUS CONSOLATORY MECHANISMS IN AUTHORSHIP

I

There is a large body of popular literature that may be called the literature of self-deception. The author makes statements that are false, but which he wants to be true. He is aware, too, that most people like these sentiments, and he gives a forceful expression to them so that they have a semblance of truth. Dr. Johnson once said that all the arguments set forth to prove the advantages of poverty are good proof that this is not so; you find no one trying to prove to you the benefits of riches.

The literature of self-deception, which is nearly always optimistic and consolatory, derives its value as a defence mechanism. It is based on a lie but is efficacious nevertheless. Of this species Henley's famous poem ending with lines "I am Master of my fate, I am Captain of my soul" is a good example. Of course no one is master of his fate. To this class belongs much of the consolatory advice found in the stoical precepts of Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. Most religious poems and works like The Imitation of Christ may be included here.

Many writers whose lives have been sad, have written works that buoyed them up. They have affected to learn much from their calamities, although they unquestionably would have preferred not to have been victims of these misfortunes. They have pretended to exult over the failures of their ambitions when at heart they would have wished a more successful termination to them. Naturally literature of this kind is popular, although any vigorous intellect can see through the fallaciousness of the reasoning in a poem like "The Psalm of Life" or in the writings of the syndicate authors in our newspapers.

All the literary works wherein the precious and valued things in life are decried, wherein asceticism, death and celibacy are vaunted, are usually unconsciously insincere. The writer cannot have certain things and he bolsters himself up by pretending he is better off without them.

In examining a literary work we should always find out what the author's real thoughts must be, and not assume that they are what he claims them to be.

Eulogies of pain and the praise of the advantages of misfortune are forced, and though the literature abounding in such sentiments may aid some, it will only irritate those who think.

It would be interesting to collect passages from the works of writers who give us such ideas and inquire what motive prompted them. It is not very difficult to unravel the unconscious in these cases, especially if we know something of the writer's life.

Take the following lines from "Rabbi Ben Ezra" by Browning:

No doubt these lines, put in the mouth of the Rabbi, were a consolation that Browning administered to himself in his days of obscurity. It could not be possible that he really meant it. He wanted his work to be read and he wanted to have the name of poet. While it is not to the credit of a poet to seek popular applause by trying to do commonplace work, still a poet of value is anxious to be recognised as such by some people. He is not comforted that he does not attain this end; on the contrary, he is disappointed. And while it is always best to do one's utmost and to be resigned if one fails, it does not follow that the man should be satisfied with his mishap. The lines of Browning are a confession of regret for failure.

Then the various passages in the same poem seeking to show the advantages of age over youth merely tell us that after all the poet was really bemoaning his lost youth. Love and recognition came to him late in life, and as his youth was embroiled with some unsatisfactory love affairs and as he was not recognised as a great poet, we cannot say that Browning had an altogether happy youth. He would have preferred to become young again but to spend his youth more happily than he had done. He also no doubt had unconsciously before him the praises sung by poets of youth, and recalled Coleridge's beautiful plaint for his own departed youth, in the poem "Youth and Age." Browning really agreed with the sentiments of that poem, but after all what was the use of regrets? One might as well pretend that age was the better period of life, and one would then possibly be able to enjoy it. He wrote then, when past fifty, to counteract his real feelings, the lines:

Much of Browning's optimism was forced.

The most famous example of consolation for the miseries of old age is Cicero's discourse On Old Age addressed to Atticus when they were both about sixty-three years old. Cicero puts his own arguments about the advantages of old age into the mouth of Cato who is eighty-four years old. Cato tries to prove beneficial the four assumed disadvantages of old age; these are that it takes us away from the transactions of affairs, enfeebles our body, deprives us of most pleasures and is not very far from death.

Cicero really tried to console himself for the loss of his youth. Most assuredly he would rather have been young. The objections that he finds against old age are not satisfactorily removed by him and he does not state them all. Even though he does show old age has its pleasures, we read between the lines that he is aware that his body is subject to ailments, that he is shut off from certain pleasures, that he has not the energy or health or zest of life he had in youth and that he dreads death; we perceive all his arguments are got up to rid himself of these painful thoughts. People as a rule do not write on the disadvantages of youth; these are taken for granted. Rich and successful men who are old would generally be young again and give up some of the advantages of old age. Not that many people have not been happier in age than in youth, not that age is not free from those violent passions to which youth is subject, but youth still is preferable to old age and all the arguments in favour of it will not make a man want it to be reached more quickly.

Carlyle was the author of many statements meant to salve his own wounds. One of his famous hobbies was to attack people who seek happiness, no doubt because that is the very thing he himself sought his whole life long. He told them to seek blessedness. Let us examine the following passage from one of the most famous chapters of Sartor Resartus, entitled "The Everlasting Yea."

"I asked myself: What is this that, ever since earliest years, thou hast been fretting and fuming, and lamenting and self-torturing, on account of? Say it in a word; is it not because thou art not happy?.... Foolish soul! What act of legislature was there that thou shouldst be happy?... Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe ... there is in man a Higher than love of Happiness: he can do without happiness, and instead thereof find Blessedness."

We can discern under all this Carlyle's despair because he is not happy. TeufelsdrÖck, who is Carlyle's picture of himself, had a sweetheart who was stolen by a friend. One may be sure that TeufelsdrÖck would have given up his ideal of blessedness if this misfortune could have been prevented. No doubt, like Carlyle, he had dyspepsia, was poverty-stricken and had a hard path to travel to success. Of course he would have wished to have had a good stomach, to be free from money troubles, and to be recognised. All these fortunate circumstances were not his. He had to say to himself, "Away with them. I am better off without them." But it is certain he never could have really felt this way. We learn from Carlyle's recently published letters, written to his future wife in his courting days, that he was unhappy for personal reasons; because she coquetted with him or jilted him, because he was unsuccessful, because he was poor, etc. He whined only too much though no doubt he had reason therefor. He is full of the Byronism which he affected to despise.

It is likely that Browning and Carlyle, who remain, nevertheless, among the greatest English writers, may have thought at the time of writing that they believed what they said. But psychoanalysis teaches us that we do not really know our own minds. We may think we are honest when we really are deceiving ourselves.

A writer may seek an effect which is attained by lauding a moral sentiment. Did not Shelley profess to believe in immortality of the soul, in his elegy on Keats, Adonais, while we know from a prose essay of his that he did not believe in immortality?

We should try to learn the whole truth from the fractional part of it or unconscious lie that authors give us. We will find a personal background for all their theories, a past humiliation or a present need, which will explain the origin of the ideas professed.

When we read in his Autobiography that Spencer ascribes his nervous breakdown to hard work, if we are Freudians we figure that Spencer has not told us the truth. We know that most cases of breakdown have had a previous history, usually in some love or sex repression. We are aware that Spencer was a bachelor who never had his craving for love satisfied, and probably led a celibate life. This led to his nervous troubles. This is merely one instance where by the aid of psychoanalysis we can read more than the author reveals.

There are many instances where critics who had never heard of psychoanalysis still applied its principles. In his essay on Thoreau, Stevenson dilates on Thoreau's cynical views on friendship. When Stevenson inserted the essay in his Familiar Portraits he wrote a little introductory note, in which he shows he penetrated the secret of Thoreau's views. Thoreau was simply seeking to find a salve for his own lack of social graces. His strange views and personality made him almost an impossible friend.

II

Even a great writer like Goethe deceived himself, as one can see by a famous passage in his autobiography as to why Spinoza appealed to him. In the fourteenth book he says that his whole mind was filled with the statement from the Ethics, that he who loves God does not desire God to love him in return. Goethe desired to be disinterested in love and friendship, and he says that his subsequent daring question, "If I love thee, what is that to thee?" was spoken straight from his heart.

Great as Goethe's intellect was, he could not perceive that his partiality for this passage from Spinoza was due to the consolation he found in it for unreciprocated love. This particular sentiment from the profound work of that philosopher is really one of the least valuable parts of the work. It was probably inspired unconsciously by the philosopher's rejection at the hands of Miss Van den Ende, whom he meant to marry. The Ethics was finished when the author was about thirty-three. Spinoza, who led the life of a celibate, sublimated his repressed love into philosophic speculation. When he wrote the passage in question he was consoling himself for loving a girl who did not care for him. The mechanism was: "I am not such a fool after all, because I love a girl who does not love me; why should I even want her to do so; don't we love God, and yet don't want Him to love us in return?" Goethe, having gone through the harassing experience that led to the writing of Werther, repeated the mental processes that Spinoza must have gone through in creating the sentiment about our not desiring God to love us in return.

Goethe imagined that love could be disinterested, and this is really not so. The lover seeks a return of his love, for that is just what love means. Those novels where sacrificing lovers turn over the women they love to rivals, as in George Sand's Jacques and Dostoievsky's Injured and Insulted, do not show disinterested love, but merely obedience to an abstract idea with which the whole individual's psychic and physical constitution is not in harmony at all. Goethe tried to be different from what he really was. The question, "What is that to thee if I love thee?" with its corollary that the love need not be returned, did not come, as Goethe thought, straight from his heart. His interest in Spinoza's sentiment, just as the creation of it by Spinoza, was a self curative process for grief because of disprised love. All psychoneuroses are unsuccessful efforts to purge one's self of repressed feelings.

Now let us investigate the sentiment itself, and we will see under analysis it has no value intellectually.

As a matter of fact, there is no warrant for Spinoza's assumption that man does not desire that God love him in return. All religion is based on the principle that God loves us and cares for us more than he does for other animals, or more than he does for other tribes or religious sects. Prayers are made to God to make us happy and prosper and satisfy our wants. This is tantamount to saying we want His love. If God, or Nature, as Spinoza understood Him, was only a malevolent force and gave us undiluted pain, we would not love Him or her. Again, man does not love God or Nature in the sense that he loves a woman, so even if Spinoza were right that man does not desire to be loved by God or Nature in turn, it is because that love does not promise the pleasure derived from the returned love of the woman.

The truth is that both Spinoza and Goethe would have preferred to have had their love returned, and had such been the case, they would not have occupied themselves with this fatuous idea.

III

Then there is the reaction-impulse and the infantile regression in writers. Many books are written by their authors to counteract certain impulses. They feel that their course of conduct or thought was reprehensible, and they try to make amends for this. They become fanatical converts; they show a regression to a fixed period in their own lives, and return to the religion of their parents. Writers who in spite of being unable to believe in religious dogmas, miracles, ascetic notions of morality, nevertheless return in later life to the religions advocating these, belong to this class. The leading of a wicked life, but more often the influence of childish memories of a religious household, are responsible for such conversions. The converts feel young again; pleasant recollections of the mother or father and delicious memories of school days play a part in the process. Many free thinkers who have had a theological training never really outgrow this.

Tolstoi's conversion was due to the wild days he spent as a young man. He was a proud aristocrat, and gave play to all his instincts; he was an atheist and pessimist, he was a gambler and a rake. He shows us his evolution in his various novels and autobiographical works. He finally came to deify ignorant peasants and advocated extreme non-resistance. He worshipped poverty, practised self-abnegation, and derogated sex. But, after all, his latter views are but the reactions to the life he led in youth, and a regression with some changes to views he was taught in childhood.

The same is true of Strindberg, who as a young man was an atheist, and a believer in free love; through the sufferings brought about by his three marriages and his attacks of insanity, he "turned." He looked with disapproval upon his early ideas, attributed much of his misery to his entertaining them; hence he discarded them, and returned to the religious views he held as a child. But his greatest work belonged to the period when he held liberal ideas.

Dostoievsky was really always a devout orthodox Christian, even in his early revolutionary days. His great suffering in Siberia chastened him, and made him find a welcome religion in the religion of suffering, a guide in Christ who suffered. He is always at pains in his later novels to prove the existence of a personal God—a fact which makes one suspect that he had his own doubts, and that he tried to rid himself of them by his writing. Being also an epileptic, he would, particularly in these attacks, digress to infantile fixations and they would lead him to worship his sublimated "Father in Heaven."

There are many who naÏvely insist that these men, when they went back to the belief of childhood days, had at last come to see the truth. The point of view taken is dependent on whether a man considers belief in the dogma of a religion a fetter or an asset.

In English literature we have as examples of reactions, both in religion and politics, the Lake School poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey. All of them later turned away from the republican and pantheistic ideas of their youth. The reason Southey fought so bitterly against free thinkers like Byron and Shelley, is that in youth he, like them, also was attached to the ideas of the French Revolution. He became a Tory of Tories, showed disapproval of all the leading thinkers of the time, of men like Hazlitt, Lamb and Hunt. Liberal ideas, it is well known, have no greater enemy than a renegade liberal. Southey was sufficiently pilloried by Byron in the Vision of Last Judgment, and the psychology of his reaction has been drawn in the portrait of him by Hazlitt in The Spirit of the Age, while the gentle Lamb has administered to him a rebuke in the immortal Letter of Elia to Robert Southey.

When one reads the theological works of the gifted Coleridge, such as The Aids to Reflection and some of the Table Talk, and ponders on the spectacle of this former Spinozist and Unitarian, speaking in defence of dogmas that have not one logical argument in their favour, one is amazed. Poor Coleridge! What a wreckage of the human intellect is often made by private misfortunes. Here was the greatest literary critic and one of the subtlest poets England ever had, talking about supernatural miracles as though they were not even to be questioned. "The image of my father, my reverend, kind, learned, simple-hearted father, is a religion to me," he once said, thus giving us the key to his reaction. The elder Coleridge was a vicar, and died when the poet was nine years old. The poet became religious because of his repressed childish affection for a religious father who influenced him.

As for Wordsworth, he was sufficiently punished for his reaction, in that in later life he was never able to do creditable literary work. And Shelley's poem, "To Wordsworth," and the lines of Browning beginning, "Just for a handful of silver he left us," generally thought to refer to Wordsworth, were deserved rebukes.

The reaction impulse plays a great rÔle in shaping the destinies of literary men. It sometimes sweeps an entire age and gathers all before it. This happened in France in that period of French Literature which Brandes called the Catholic Reaction, when Chateaubriand, De Maistre, Bonald, and others were influential. It again occurred in the same country in the early nineties when leading free thinkers like Bourget and Huysmans went from the extreme radical position to Catholicism. Only great writers like Zola and Anatole France were able to keep their heads clear. Now most of these converts really were always at heart religious. They never emerged from the associations of their religion even though their intellects would not enable them to believe some of its dogmas. Unconsciously Bourget and Huysman were always Catholics in feeling.

Hawthorne wrote a story in which he imagines some of the dead English poets of the early decades of the nineteenth century continuing to live, and living a life in complete reaction to their youthful lives. He pictures the atheist Shelley as becoming a Christian, a prediction that might have come true; for had Shelley died at seventy instead of thirty, he might have changed, as there was some similarity between his ideas of "perfectibility" and those of Christianity. This is, however, a mere surmise, as one of the last letters he wrote contains an attack on Christianity.

There are numerous instances of the reactionary impulse in literature. Shakespeare, who was of plebeian origin, often attacked the common people in his plays. He wrote favourably of nobility, and had little sympathy with democracy. Nietzsche, who was gentle personally and suffered much pain in his life, wrote in defence of cruelty, wished to do away with pity, sought to kill the finer emotions, and thought invalids should be left to die instead of being allowed to be cured. He was creating a system in philosophy whose ruling ideas were the very opposite to those which governed his private life. He could not even witness another's pain. Professor Eucken tells a story illustrating Nietzsche's gentleness. When that philosopher of the superman orally examined a student who did not answer correctly, Nietzsche would prompt him and answer the question for him, as he was unable to witness the student's discomfiture. Burns gave us some poetic outbursts against the crime of seduction, probably because he himself was guilty of it. Thackeray, who was hopelessly in love with a married woman, Mrs. Brookfield, and was rejected by her, affected to be very cynical at disappointed lovers and ridiculed them in his Pendennis. Cicero, who loved glory, wrote against it.

So men are often the very opposite of what they appear in their books, but this is done also unconsciously, although sometimes the effort may be deliberate. Converts are fanatics. Reformed drunkards are the most convinced prohibitionists. The severest moralists and Puritans are often former rakes. The man who rails most bitterly against a vice may often be suspected of struggling against temptation with it.

Similarly, the fact that professors in exact sciences and devotees to a philosophy of materialism, often become the most ardent exponents of spiritualism, may be due to an unconscious reaction on their part. No doubt the desire to believe that the dead can still communicate with us is the real basis of this belief. It seems that scientists like Lodge, Crookes, Barrett, Wallace and Lombroso, who have done so much to spread spiritualism, should be the last persons to embrace absurd beliefs so at variance with the principles which these men profess in their scientific work.