The unconscious is present in all literature, and the literary movement but colours it and gives occasion for the expression or censorship of certain phases of it. Puritan writers are not in their unconscious any different from the "immoral" ones; only the latter relax the censor and give full play to the unconscious, when a liberal age like that of the Restoration or the Renaissance, permits it.
Hence, though all writers draw on their unconscious and base their work on their personal repressions, authors of one age differ in manner and substance from those of another, not because the unconscious is different (which it is not), but because it is fashionable to express only certain features of it in one age; because writers have an instinctive tendency to comply with the literary fashions of their age; because the time spirit colours and censors those elements of the unconscious which appear in the literary product.
IV
Freud has shown in his Psychopathology of Every-Day Life that we tend to forget the things that are displeasing to us, that unconsciously we avoid what has once caused us pain. The objection has been raised to this theory that as a matter of fact it is the painful things that we never forget, and that these impress themselves most on us. Such critics might have taken it for granted that the scientist who laid down the principles that the neuroses date from the earliest painful love experiences which are never forgotten, but merely repressed and unconscious, would not have overlooked their objections. Certainly we do not forget painful things, but nature has so provided that we have a tendency to repress into our unconscious annoying events and go on our way as if they had never happened; only in symptomatic acts, mistakes, slips of the tongue and otherwise do we betray ourselves. The man whose wife has lied never forgets it if he has loved her. But if he has, let us say, been slighted by a person who has not been playing a principal part in his life, he will go on living as if that person had never existed for him. He may unconsciously avoid the street where that man lives, and forget about him, until some occasion may arise when he may betray his dislike of that person in a manner he never intended; the action is, nevertheless, the voice of his unconscious. Life would be unbearable if we always had before us pictures of our past sufferings. In fact, a neurosis is brought about by the fact that we don't forget. As Freud said, the hysteric suffers from reminiscences or fantasies based on painful events in the past.
The principle of unconscious avoiding of the painful is at the basis of the rejection of the world's great books, both old and new. Literary criticism is influenced by our tendency to ignore what causes us pain.
The world has not always realised the reason for the opposition to a new great thinker, or an advanced idea or book. We have contented ourselves by asserting that the world was not yet advanced enough intellectually to perceive their greatness. We know, however, that often the most intellectual people of an age are the first to reject a new idea. Men like Carlyle and Lord Beaconsfield would have nothing to do with the theory of evolution. Darwin's chief opponents were among the leading biologists of the time.
The fact of one's being born in an earlier generation from the man who propounds the new idea, is a large factor in the rejection of it. Another unconscious reason for the repudiation of the new idea is that it would cause us pain if it were true. We would also feel that we had been dupes all our lives. We had been smugly following a pleasant delusion that brought us some happiness and suddenly we see our bubble pricked. We had been following a course of thinking and conduct, that is now impeached by the new discovery. If a man has written several books on miracles, original sin, and other dogmas, in which he believes, and has spent all his life studying the subjects, he could not accept a book which rejects his ideas; it would mean that he had wasted his life. His aversion to concur with the conclusions of that new book is nature's means of preventing him from suffering great pain; it is a defence action. If a preacher has advised thousands of couples who were unhappy not to divorce and not to remarry some one with whom they might have been happy, he would be the last man to see the greatness of a work that shows divorce may be a humane and beneficial act in some cases, for it would mean that he would have to admit he has ruined the lives of many people.
The real objection by man to the Copernican theory was that it reflected on his religion and his vanity; it was annoying to hear that the earth was not the centre of the universe. The Darwinian theory was a still more painful discovery because it placed man among the descendants of animals and taught that he was a by-product like them. The facts, however, in both cases, were so overwhelming that many managed to accept them and still keep their religious beliefs intact, for these still give consolation. In spite of Copernicus and Darwin, we still live as if the world were the centre of the universe and man its most divine product.
The most personal and human argument in favour of a belief in personal immortality of the soul, of communion with the dead or a Providential Personal God, is that life would be sad if these theories were not true; they must hence be true. Tennyson, in his In Memoriam, has the popular attitude. If life didn't live for ever more, then "earth is darkness at the core and dust and ashes all that is." But our wishes must recede before logic and facts.
A great idea, then, is not accepted if its conclusions are painful to us when a more pleasant idea has prevailed; every idea is rejected when its possible truth would mean that we have been living in error and wasting our lives. New ideas are nearly always made to fit in with the old views.