II
Psychoanalysis is always interested in learning exactly how literary masterpieces are born. Just as it seeks to know through dreams what are some of the hidden secrets in the unconscious, so it tries to discover what unconscious life made the writer project his vision.
Two of the most famous love stories of the eighteenth century which had a personal background, and whose evolution have been told by the authors, themselves, were Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloise (1760), and Goethe's Sorrows of Werther (1774). They were the predecessors of the entire field of autobiographical love-lorn lugubrious literature that pervaded Europe in the early decades of the nineteenth century. George Brandes has shown how Chateaubriand, Madame de Stael, Senancour, Byron, George Sand and others owed much of their methods of recording their love troubles to these two novels. We to-day scarcely realise the great vogue that these tales at one time had.
The authors have given us accounts of the birth of these novels. Both of these geniuses had been frustrated in their loves; as a result they created mental fantasies and lived in a more pleasant world of their own creation, and finally, bursting with desire for expression, produced their novels. The unconscious life buried in them came forth and was crystallised in art. Rousseau's Confessions and Goethe's autobiography, Poetry and Truth, tell us how the novels came to light.
In the ninth book of the Confessions, Rousseau informs us that when he reached the age of forty-five, he realised that he had really never enjoyed true love. As a result he began living in a fantastic world where his craving was satisfied. He realised his wishes in his day dreams. "The impossibility of attaining real beings," he says, "threw me into the regions of chimera, and seeing nothing in existence worthy of my delirium, I sought food for it in the ideal world, which my imagination quickly peopled with beings after my own heart." He tells us how he valued love and friendship, and that he created two female friends according to his taste, that he gave one of them a lover, who was also the platonic friend of the other lady; that in this friend and lover he drew his own portrait. He imagined that there were to be no rivalries or pain. These fictions, he continues, gained in consistence. He then had an inclination to put on paper this situation of fancy. "Recollecting everything I had felt during my youth, this, in some measure, gave me an object to that desire of loving which I had never been able to satisfy, and by which I felt myself consumed." Here we have the secret. He sought in art what he had not in reality. At first he wrote incoherent letters, just as his feelings prompted him, and he thus completed the two first parts of the novel (which is in the form of letters) without a conscious effort to make a connected work.
At this time Rousseau, who was a married man, fell in love with the wife of D'Holbach, Sophia D'Houdetot. He loved her madly. He says, "It was not until after her departure that, wishing to think of Julia (his heroine), I was struck with surprise at being unable to think of anything but Madame D'Holbach." He now identified the real with the ideal; he found the woman of his dreams. But now his troubles began. Union with his beloved Countess was impossible. New emotions rose within him, as material for his novel. The work really wrote itself. He originally formed an ideal because he was not loved by any one who fulfilled that conception. When he discovered such a person and she was beyond his attainment, he imagined himself as her lover. All the misery he recorded had its counterpart in his personal experience. Without the unconscious reveries which he indulged in as a result of his needs and tribulations, the novel would not have been written.
After the story was published, women worshipped the author. It was recognised that he was the hero of the book, and it was generally believed that the characters were not fictitious. The novel gives us an account of the real Rousseau at least as fully as the Confessions themselves, where facts are not always truthfully reported.
Goethe has recorded just as minutely the origin of his Sorrows of Werther. He traces the book back to his love for Charlotte Buff, the betrothed of a friend of his. He resolved to give free play to the idiosyncrasies of his inner nature. He describes how he had day dreams and how he held mental dialogues with different people. He then was led to record these fancies on paper. The substances of his novel "were first talked over with several individuals in such imaginary dialogues, and only later in the process of composition itself were made to appear as if directed to one single friend and sympathiser." He became weary of life, and had suicidal thoughts. He then heard of the suicide of his friend Jerusalem, who had been in love with a married woman. Goethe saw that he was really in the same position as his friend; his loved one belonged to another. "On the instant," Goethe goes on, "the plan of Werther was formed, and the whole drew together, and became a solid mass. I was naturally led to breathe into the work I had in hand all the warmth which makes no distinction between the imaginary and the actual." He wrote the book in four weeks. "I had written the little volume, almost unconsciously like a somnambulist." As a result he freed himself from his suffering. The artist stepped in and cured the man. Goethe illustrates the theory that artistic creation acts as a self-cure of a developing neurosis. "By this composition," Goethe wrote, "more than by any other, I had freed myself from that stormy element in which ... I had been so violently tossed to and fro. I felt as if I had made a general confession and was once more free and happy, and justified in beginning a new life."
The public thought that the book was solely the history of young Jerusalem's tragic love affair, and did not altogether understand that the cry was Goethe's own. His mental dialogues and the longings of his inner spirit found expression in this novel. His sufferings were undecipherable by the public, he tells us, because he worked in obscurity. He also gave the attributes of several women to Lotte, and hence several ladies claimed to have been the original models.
Thus we see how two great love stories were created almost unconsciously by the authors. Day dreams and actual love; the longing for reality, for lack of which imaginary situations were created; and the putting down in the form of letters and dialogues the ideas and emotions that burst forth, all led to the shaping of the literary product.