I
IF the opinion of the reviewer represents in any degree the opinion of the public, psycho-analysis is becoming at once the craze and the curse of the modern novelist. The chief persons of the story, we gather, are no longer units, recognisable illustrations of acceptable and well-defined types of character, but tend to split horribly into their component parts, revealing the workings of their unconscious minds with a spiritual immodesty worthy of the immortal Sally Beauchamp. Our heroes suffer from "Œdipus complexes" with a unanimity that must appear altogether perverse to a generation reared on the works of Charles Dickens, who consistently regarded all mothers as criminal, negligible, or insane. Our heroines are become either displayed specimens of morbid pathology or increasingly middle-aged. Finally, and as a culminating horror, we occasionally come across a novel written with such a single regard for the subjective emotions that the objective personality appears only now and then as an uncompleted cast momentarily lifted, for examination, from the matrix.
Moreover, these symptoms and their like—I still adapt and condense the current opinions of the outraged reviewer—exhibit an inclination to multiply. We picture the admirer of the world's most successful novelist (Harold Bell Wright) as arching his back and spitting furiously at the first indication of a Freudian thesis. And, to conclude the indictment, it is plain that unless the novel-writing disciples of the Vienna and Zurich schools of psychology can promptly be bled to death—they have, thank God, quite miserable circulations!—their influence may permeate and vitiate that sane and admirable method which has given us an Ethel M. Dell, a Temple Thurston, or a Zane Grey.
This indictment represents, no doubt, an extremist attitude, the opinion of that multitude which must have its heroines pure and its morality undiluted; but it cannot be neglected solely on that account. And when we recognise, as we must, that authentic critics have also shown a bias in the same direction, we have established a case that demands both a literary and a scientific consideration.
Our analysis, however, must begin with certain exclusions. If we are to test the influence of psycho-analysis on the novel as an art-form we must take into account not only the effect, but also the manner of the incidence. For it is manifest that of all theories of the nature of man ever put forward by a reputable scientist, that of Sigmund Freud is the most attractive and adaptable for the purposes of fiction. It was a theory of sex, the all but universal theme of the novel; it emphasised various peculiarities of thought, feeling, and action that no observant, and, a fortiori, no introspective novelist could thereafter overlook; it gave a new mystery to the human mind; adumbrated the suggestion of a freer morality by dwelling upon the physical and spiritual necessity for the liberation of impulse; and, last temptation of the enervated seeker for new themes, provided material for comparatively unworked complications of motive.
Now, these appeals have inevitably influenced the writing of just those experimenters and opportunists whose novels I wish to exclude from our analysis. Their productions can only be indicative of a passing fashion; their value, at best, such as the future historian may find in the record of the epidemic symptoms they have documented. But since novels of this type have a particular significance, both in relation to our present purpose and to all literary criticism of this form of expression, we must in the first place arrive at a clear understanding of the quality that differentiates them from those other works which, whatever their failings, have another representative value.
Taking, then, an extreme and therefore ideal example, I submit that the essential difference is that between pure observation and pure feeling, or variously between an intellectual as opposed to an emotional response to experience. In the case of the experimenters we are considering, such a subject as psycho-analysis is studied from the surface, the facts and general teachings are memorised and then applied, more or less arbitrarily, to the invented or observed characters who figure in the story. Such a method when brilliantly used may produce an impression of truth, may even in rare cases lead to discovery, but in its essence it is mechanical, a mere collection and presentation of material that has not been assimilated, and hence very slightly transmuted by the writer.
The opposed example is that in which the study of, say, psycho-analysis comes to the understanding of the writer as a formula that interprets for him a mode of experience. He has, let us assume, been aware of and puzzled by a habit of thought or feeling which is suddenly and beautifully illuminated for him by the application of this new formula. Nor, in the truly representative instance, does the process halt at the first discovery, but continues to open resolutions of old difficulties hardly recognised as such until they fall within the scope of the new criterion. The danger that besets the young disciple in the first ecstasies of such an adventure is that he will inevitably be tempted to apply his touchstone too generally, to imagine that his formula will explain all life.
In such a case as this the manner of incidence, to which I referred, differs markedly from the first example. Here we get a sense of interpenetration and subsequent assimilation, in the former case rather of obliquity and reflection; the true difference being that one writer finds in psycho-analysis an aid to the understanding of human thought and action, the other merely a useful piece to add to his repertoire. And, finally in this connection, one has true value as evidence of the validity of the theory; the other has not.
Having thus cleared the ground by eliminating more particularly those literary experiments in applied psychology that have had such an irritant action on the nerves of the reviewer, I propose to test the applicability of psycho-analysis to fiction by a brief examination of certain aspects of the work of a writer who had not heard of Freud and never attempted to anticipate his method. Dostoevsky, in fact, from our point of view, may be regarded primarily as a patient rather than as a doctor.