CONCLUSION

I

The question now arises, What effect will a knowledge of the author's unconscious have in making us appreciate his work as literature? Does it matter at all if we know whether a particular affair or a certain woman inspired a poem or not? Many critics protest against the kind of literary criticism that speculates as to whether the heroines celebrated in the sonnets of Shakespeare or Sidney were real or imaginary, whether the emotions felt by the poets were affected or genuine. These critics are not usually inclined to admit any connection between an author's life and his work.

One of the great factors in helping us understand literary works is an acquaintance with some of the episodes of the author's life. Sainte-Beuve revolutionised literary criticism by his dictum that the knowledge of an author's life helps us to follow his work the better. Dr. Johnson once said that he liked the biographical side of literature. Isaac D'Israeli, before Sainte-Beuve, showed in his Literary Character that he grasped the nature of the intimate relationship between an author and his work.

It is our contention that a literary work is better appreciated after the facts about an author's life are revealed to us, and this does not usually happen for years after his death. One of the reasons why masterpieces cannot be fully comprehended in an author's lifetime is because we do not know altogether how he came to write the works in question. Shelley and Keats were not fully understood by the critics of their times not only because of their radical views, but because the public did not know the details of the poets' relations with their parents, and the women they loved. How could a cold, stern reviewer find anything in Epipsychidion or Lamia unless he was aware of some facts about Emilia Viviani or Fanny Brawne? How was any fair estimate of either of these poets possible while the information that later times have furnished was not at hand? Many people objected when the letters of Keats to Fanny Brawne were published forty years ago, but these have helped us to understand that the cry that pervades them is the same embodied in music in the Ode to Fanny, the Ode to the Nightingale and in Lamia.

No true estimate of a man is possible till one reads the plaints of his that were not meant for the public. We should not regret the publication of the love letters of the Brownings and Carlyles. Those wonderful letters are almost as good literature as anything the authors wrote for the public. We are enabled to see the writers in an entirely different light from that in which their own works put them, and to understand these better.

It was not possible for the age in which Balzac and Goethe lived, fully to appreciate them, for it did not have their published correspondence, and could not estimate the close connection between unknown episodes in their lives and their works. I do not mean that the contemporaries of these poets could not recognise the fact that these men were geniuses, but they could not get a proper understanding of them.

In former times criticism was busy with the questions of technique, with matters of rhetoric and grammar; a writer's work furnished opportunities for discussing how near to old ideas of authorship the author approached. To-day we study an author in connection with his own life and with ours. The Shakespearean criticism of the last century is worth more than that of the two centuries following his death. Coleridge and Hazlitt devoted their discussions to showing how the great poet discussed problems that touched all of us. A number of studies and books have been published which seek to educe his personality from his work. I believe Walter Bagehot was a pioneer in this kind of work. His essay on Shakespeare—The Man appeared as early as 1853. The most successful venture of this kind has been George Brandes's great study. Other works of this nature are Frank Harris's The Man Shakespeare, and The Women of Shakespeare, both usually regarded as fantastic, but nevertheless deserving credit for their daring, mistaken as they often are. Leslie Stephen's and A. C. Bradley's essays in the Studies of a Biographer and Oxford Lectures on Poetry, respectively deserve special mention. Then there are books like David Masson's Shakespeare Personally, Robert Waters's William Shakespeare, Portrayed by Himself, and Goldwin Smith's Shakespeare: The Man. Shakespeare's greatness can be recognised though we knew little about him, yet the keynote of modern Shakespearean criticism is to endeavour to see the connection between the plays and the man.

Comes the question of the effect of psychoanalytic criticism upon our judgment of living authors. Writers like George Moore, of the living, and Strindberg, of the recently dead, have not waited for posterity to make discoveries about their love affairs. They told us about them frankly in their autobiographical works. Other writers, great poets like Yeats and Symons, have sung of their loves more or less openly in their lyrics. When posterity reads the biographies of these last two poets, that will no doubt some day be written, it will, I believe, learn that the emotions these poets expressed in their work had a real basis. But we have no right to probe into an author's private life while he is alive; we may make detailed deductions from his work, but we should not give them publicity. The reader who finds the early Kipling cynical about women, who notes Hardy constantly reiterating the tragedies caused by love, may venture to guess there must be some reason for this, but it would be a vicious criticism that made this topic the subject of an article while these men are alive. One who reads Wells' New Machiavelli or Dreiser's The Genius and observes the author's preoccupation with the marriage problem, may also draw his own conclusions about how much the fiction is inspired by reality, but it is a fitter subject for posterity to take up. Occasionally an author like Robert Herrick or Upton Sinclair has his domestic affairs dragged into the limelight, on account of the sensational interest of our newspapers, and the reader learns that novels like One Woman's Life and Love's Pilgrimage were somewhat autobiographical.

There has been a great tendency in our day on the part of authors to write autobiographical novels. We should not deprecate this tendency. When I think that Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert and Zola, Tolstoi, Dostoievsky and Turgenev, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, George Meredith and Henry James were often autobiographical, I realise that all literary men, novelists as well as poets, are compelled to wear their hearts on their sleeves by virtue of their art. That criticism which reproached Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Senancour and De Musset for having been occupied too much with themselves is unfair. With whom else would the critics have the authors occupied? A man cannot get out of himself. When he undertakes to write a book, he tells us practically beforehand that he is going to talk about himself.

Therefore, such excellent novels of our time as Jack London's Martin Eden, Stephen French Whitman's Predestined, Maugham's Of Human Bondage and Beresford's Invisible Event are to be commended. Should these authors' renown live, posterity will learn that some of the emotional life lived by the characters had been experienced by the authors themselves. It is, however, not a matter of importance whether the mere incidents recorded in these novels actually transpired in the authors' lives.

Many of us are so constituted that we like to sit down with an author like Montaigne or Hazlitt, who takes us into his confidence. We dislike reticent and cold people in literature as much as in life. We do not ask writers to tell us about their private affairs, but we want them to talk at least indirectly about things that are close to their heart. And one may be sure they will interest us. Shakespeare unlocked his heart to us in his sonnets and in his plays as well.

It is of the world's great books that it can always be said as Whitman did of his own, "Whoso touches this book touches a man."

II

Art and literature are realities in themselves. The depicting of an event enshrines it as a thing of beauty; the event itself may be dull. We meet Falstaffs in real life and waste no time on them; put into a play by a master, Falstaff gives us an artistic thrill. How many of the people who enjoy Dickens' novels about humble people would be interested in them in real life? Dickens's magic pen makes us receive a sensation reading about them that they cannot give us themselves. It is the artist's personality and art that count.

Gissing and Flaubert wrote about ordinary people but they themselves were intellectual aristocrats; they had nothing in common with the people they wrote about (except with those who were disguised portraits of themselves). In fact, they despised them; they personally were recluses and merely sympathised with and were interested in the people they wrote about as subjects for art. If we had met Madame Bovary personally and heard her tale from her own mouth, the effect upon us would be small compared to that of the novel.

The domestic troubles of our next door neighbours may be a bore to us. We may not care to meet the people personally, but a great novel or play describing the matrimonial difficulties of fictitious characters gives us a distinct artistic thrill. The sorrows of people who lived centuries ago move us more than those of people we know, because of the magic power of art.

Those who from time immemorial called art magical were right. Many people who disparage art and literature say to the writer and the reader that they should enter the whirlpool of life, and live themselves. No advice could be more foolhardy. To read beautiful books about other people's lives is itself a high form of life, a life that only art can furnish. It also has its advantages, when we think of the characters in literature whom we enjoy reading about and yet would never care to meet. Who would really want to meet Becky Sharp or Pecksniff?

That artistic pleasure we get, mingled with actual pain on account of the sorrows of poets, is to us a decided part of our lives. The fact that we are brought into contact with a beautiful series of lines voicing human grief in such a manner that both our human and Æsthetic emotions are aroused, is a privileged pleasure that only those who can enjoy poetry may derive.

It does not follow, however, that a man must confine himself solely to the artistic or intellectual life. To know of love only through books and not through experience is not to have lived a full life. To read the views of Aristotle on friendship and never to have had any real friendships is also but leading an incomplete life.

Literature is real and to read and write it is to live.

The reader should also remember that such fearsome words as (1) "sex," (2) "incest," (3) "homosexualism," (4) "sadism," etc., include in psychoanalysis (1) love, (2) great affection between mother and son, father and daughter, brother and sister, (3) intense friendship, (4) cruelty, etc., respectively.

[A]

Delusion and Dream, Moffat, Yard & Co.

[B]

There are in English but few articles applying psychoanalytic methods to writers and thinkers. Some of them are: Alfred Kuttner's "The Artist" in Seven Arts, Feb., 1917; Wilfrid Lay's "'John Barleycorn' Under Psychoanalysis," "H. G. Wells and His Mental Hinterland" and "The Marriage Ideas of H. G. Wells" in The Bookman (N. Y.), March, July and August, 1917, respectively; A. R. Chandler's "Tragic Effects in Sophocles" in "The Monist" (1913); W. J. Karpas's "Socrates in the Light of Modern Psychology" in The Journal of Abnormal Psychology, vol. 10, p. 185; and Phyllis Blanchard's "Psychoanalytic Study of Comte" in the American Journal of Psychology, April, 1918.

Two indispensable articles are the summaries by Rudolph Acher and by Lucille Dooley of "Psychoanalytic Studies of Geniuses," published in German. The reader should study these articles in the American Journal of Psychology for July, 1911, and July, 1916, respectively.

[C]

Edgar Saltus has touched on the theme in a few of his novels, notably The Monster.

[D]

Among recently published posthumous poems of Swinburne is one called "Southward," written no doubt with his love still fresh in mind.

[E]

International Quarterly.

[F]

Published by the University of Pennsylvania.

[G]

He honoured Mrs. Osgood in the same way by republishing another poem from the Southern Literary Messenger of September, 1835, written for some Eliza and opening "Eliza, let thy generous heart." This poem in the poetical works of Poe bears the title, "Lines Written in an Album." It originally was written, Woodberry surmises, to his employer's daughter, Eliza White, though Whitty believes it was addressed to his future wife, Virginia Eliza Clemm. Yet it is very likely the poem was written to one of his early sweethearts, Elizabeth Herring.

[H]