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.