II
The literary works that we like best are those which tell of the frustration of wishes like our own. We prefer to read about troubles like those we have suffered, to lose ourselves in the dreams and fantasies built up by authors, akin to those we have conjured up in our own imagination.
We prefer a book that apologises for us, that tells of strivings and repressions such as we have experienced. We get a sort of pleasure then out of painful works, in which our sorrows and wants are put into artistic form, so as to evoke them again in us. It depends often on the character of our repression as to the nature of the books we like. If we have overthrown the authority of our fathers or experienced a painful love repression because we were hampered by social laws, if we have broken with our religious friends or been crushed by some moneyed powers, we may become of a revolutionary trend of mind and hence prefer writers with radical opinions. In our time there have arisen a number of geniuses who voiced such opinions; having experienced repressions on account of the customs of society, they sang and wrote of those repressions and attacked those customs. The great love felt by the young man who does not fit into the social order, for writers like Whitman, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Shaw, and others, is because these writers approve an individualism that he seeks to cultivate. He who is grieved by the tyranny of the philistine and the bourgeois, the hypocrite and the puritan, finds himself consoled by writers who were also victims of such tyranny.
If we are somewhat more neurotic than the average person, or even abnormal, we go to the writers who are neurotic and abnormal. Why did Baudelaire love Poe so much? Because he saw in him another Baudelaire, a dreamer out of accord with reality, a victim of drink and drugs, a sufferer at the hands of women, an artist loving beauty and refusing to be a reformer. Hence he translated Poe's works, swore to read him daily, and imitated him. Baudelaire's unconscious recognised a brother sufferer in Poe; he wanted to have the same ideal conditions Poe imagined in his dreams; he suffered from the same neuroses that Poe suffered. These two writers became the idols of the French decadent writers, and Huysmans, Mallarmé and others loved them. The French decadents found affinities with ancient authors, especially the Roman poets of the Silver Age, Petronius and Apuleius. Oscar Wilde, Dowson and Arthur Symons in our literature belong to the group who found themselves in harmony with the French decadents.
Literary influences are due to definite reasons and follow regular laws. Though sometimes authors appeal to us who are just the opposite of ourselves, we, as a rule, love those writers who write of our own unconscious wishes.
What is the secret of the universal appeal of Hamlet? Is it not because many of us, like him, have been in conflict wherein we could not act because there was an external obstacle? Dr. Ernest Jones found a reason for Hamlet's inability to act in an unconscious feeling of guilty love for his mother. He was jealous of his uncle, the murderer of his father, and also the successful rival to Hamlet in his mother's affections. This psychoanalytic interpretation made by Dr. Ernest Jones adds a new element to the old theory of Hamlet's struggle with fate. Hamlet has given rise to a series of characters in literature characterised by inaction, by thinking and not doing. Russian literature, with its Rudins and Oblomovs, has recognised in this portrayal by Shakespeare a common Russian type. Hamlet, nevertheless, had good reason for not being able to act, and finally did act, though he made a bungle of it all.
Byron and Shelley have had more imitators and lovers than any of the poets of England of their time. We know the influence of each of them on Tennyson and Browning respectively, though the Victorians later departed from the footsteps of their masters and became conservative. But the causes that made Heine, Leonardi, De Musset and Pushkin love Byron were the same as those which drew to Shelley, the republican melodist Swinburne, James Thomson, the atheist author of the City of Dreadful Night, Francis Thompson, the Catholic maker of beautiful forms out of his own sufferings, and the unhappy lyricist Beddoes, who committed suicide. The later poets found Byron and Shelley singers of unconscious wishes of their own, portrayers of moods and sorrows like those they felt and constructors of means of ridding the world of such griefs by plans they largely approved.
The reason for the universal appeal of the Bible is because of the variety in this library of books; there is always some chapter that expresses our unconscious wishes.
The Old Testament, especially, satisfies our unconscious. This is due to the psalms voicing human sorrow, and the prophecies of Isaiah ringing with a passionate love for justice, to the pleasant tales that appeal to our youthful fancy like those of Joseph and his brethren, and Ruth, and the philosophical drama of Job, in whose sufferings we see our own, to the epicureanism and melancholy in Ecclesiasticus, and the military exploits of Joshua and David. The Bible appeals as literature to many who do not believe in dogma or miracles, to many who find parts of it cruel and unjust because it is a varied collection of books, and, as a result, the unconscious wishes and means of gratification of some of the writers must meet our own, separated as we are from them by thousands of years.