"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.