When we read that Wordsworth soothed De Quincey and John Stuart Mill, and had a tonic effect on Arnold, so that he became a leading disciple, that Shaw based his wit and philosophy on Samuel Butler, an almost forgotten contemporary, that Brandes found an affinity in writers like Shakespeare and Ibsen, we are aware that the process is the same: the later author found some earlier one who especially expressed his unconscious wishes.
Take the literary influences in literature, that of Smollet on Dickens, that of Dickens on Daudet and Dostoievsky and Bret Harte, that of Balzac on Flaubert, of Flaubert on Maupassant and Zola, of Carlyle on Ruskin and Froude, of Kipling on Jack London. All this means that the author influenced found in his master a kindred sufferer and a kindred dreamer.
Literature gives each writer or reader the means of choosing his own father as it were. When a man says he found his whole life changed by a certain book, it is equivalent to his saying that the book has merely made him recognise his unconscious; it did not put anything there that was not there before. The book had a psychoanalytic effect on him; it taught him to look at his unconscious objectively; it brought to consciousness something that was repressed. If the resistance to perceiving that unconscious had not been overcome the book could have had no effect. We hate a book often because the censorship in us is too great. When John A. Symonds describes the effects of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which he says influenced him more than any other book except the Bible, he meant Whitman cured him of neurosis, brought out his repressed feelings and made him aware of his inner wants and told him how to satisfy them.
The saying, "Tell me what you read and I'll tell you what you are," is true. People differ about the qualities of books because their own unconscious wishes have been met differently in these books.
III
What then is the cause of literary movements and what stamps the peculiarities of a literary age, if all writers draw on their unconscious? Why does a Pope appear in the age of Queen Anne and a Wordsworth at the end of the reign of George IV? Why didn't Shakespeare write in the Elizabethan age like Charles Dickens in the Victorian period? How account for the warlike character of the Saxon epic Beowulf, for the religious tone of her first poet, Cædmon; for the interest in chivalry and allegory in the Faërie Queen? What made Bunyan so absorbed in salvation, in Pilgrim's Progress, at the time the Restoration dramatists were steeped in exhibitionism and immorality? What are the causes of the notes of moral revolt in Byron and Shelley, of the romanticism of Scott, the realism of George Eliot? If the unconscious is alike in all people, and genius records the ideas and emotions formed by personal repressions, it would seem the works of all geniuses who have had similar repressions should be alike, irrespective of the ages in which they lived.
Literary historians and philosophers have accounted for the various changes in literary taste fairly satisfactorily, although they have often omitted from their investigations the factor of the personal experiences and idiosyncrasies of the author, and have emphasised too strongly the importance of the predominant ideas of the age. Yet no author starts out to express the spirit of his age. He gives vent to his unconscious which he suppresses more or less, and colours, in accordance with the literary fashion prevailing. His unconscious appears in a background of the literary machinery and ideas of the time. Since in our unconscious are present all the emotions man has had, different events may make any of them burst forth.
On account of the recent war, many dormant emotions were reanimated in us and appeared in our literature. People found that Homer's Iliad and other ancient warlike epics appealed to them more than these did in times of peace. Literature in war times becomes more related to primitive literature where the hero is the successful, brave warrior. The military and patriotic spirit had not been extinct, but quiescent.
If Milton had lived in the eighteen nineties he would probably have written problem plays and novels instead of Paradise Lost. He was unhappily married, but the fashion of his age was not to create imaginative works based on justifiable causes for seeking a divorce. He did write on the subject of divorce, however, and his views horrified his contemporaries. He stood alone. Had the tendencies of the time been to make works of the imagination out of situations in which he was personally placed, he would have no doubt done so. In his unconscious he felt about women and divorce much as Strindberg did. He retained during the Restoration his early Puritanism and religious interests, and hence published Paradise Lost. Even here he found an opportunity for expressing special views about women and describing his own forlorn condition.