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.