But it is unnecessary for the purposes of this article that I should elaborate any further the larger inferences of the psycho-analysts with regard to the personal traits, influences, and functions of this astonishing partner of ours. All that I wish to demonstrate is that such a partner almost certainly exists and has an immense influence upon our impulses, our thoughts, and our actions. And the critical question we have to face is whether the agency of the unconscious, recognised now both by the philosophers and the psychologists, can possibly be kept out of the novel. Personally, I believe that neither the distaste of the reviewer nor that more influential factor the distaste of the public will avail to bar the conclusions of psycho-analysis from the fiction of the future. We are coming inevitably to a new test in our judgments upon human action and thought, a test that has been proved to be valid by many thousands of well-authenticated experiments. I am willing to admit that through all the ages genius has anticipated laboratory and clinical methods, and that the basis of the psycho-analytical theory was firmly established in literature before Freud applied it as a pathological method. But once such a theory as this is established—a probability one can hardly escape—how can any serious novelist afford to neglect the illumination it throws upon the subtle problems of human impulse? Is it not already tending to become a touchstone of the author's powers of observation and understanding, helping us to evaluate the intellectual productions of the writer, whether realist or romantic, who relies upon the evidence of his eyes and ears rather than upon his personal emotions and experience?
I am aware that such a postulate as this contradicts in some respects certain implications I have previously made. But it must be remembered that while the novelist's best material undoubtedly comes from his personal contacts, almost infinitely extended by his powers of entering with an emotional sympathy into the experiences of other lives either presented or recounted, he cannot entirely neglect the precedents afforded by learning. Such precedents may only serve him as a test and a formula for correction, but should he overlook them altogether he will be liable to fall into the error of regarding his personal equation as a universal standard and generalise from the atypical.
And, finally, I would submit that we are at this moment passing through a new phase of evolution that must have a characteristic effect on the fiction of the future—if the form of the novel survives the change. We may study the first evidences of this strange partnership of ours in the lower animals. In the wild what we call the unconscious appears to be the single control. It represents the genius of instinct, swift, feral, and unethical. In animals, such as the dog and the horse, age-long companions of man, we can trace the incipient rivalry of what in ourselves we regard as the representative consciousness. The horse and the dog have already learnt the meaning of conscious inhibition. At our command they can deny the spontaneous impulses of their natural desire. In civilised man that ability has been cultivated until he is able to present to the world and himself so complete an entity that we and he regard it as his proper expression. But, meanwhile, we cannot now doubt that his hidden partner has evolved with him. The impulses of the unconscious are no longer simply feral and animal. We are, a trifle unwillingly, coming to the conclusion that it is this other shadowed self that is responsible for all that is best and most permanent in literature. It is being associated with genius on the one hand, and on the other with the highest dexterity in games of skill. And is it not possible that with our growing realisation of this co-operation the "education of the subconscious"—as Varisco, the Italian philosopher, calls it—will proceed ever more rapidly? And to what end, unless it be that in the strange process of our earthly evolution this artificial shell of the conscious will be gradually broken and absorbed to reveal the single and relatively perfect individual that has been so steadily developing underground?
JOHN DONNE
By ROBERT LYND
IZAAK Walton in his short life of Donne has painted a figure of almost seraphic beauty. When Donne was but a boy, he declares, it was said that the age had brought forth another Pico della Mirandola. As a young man in his twenties, he was a prince among lovers, who by his secret marriage with his patron's niece—"for love," says Walton, "is a flattering mischief"—purchased at first only the ruin of his hopes and a term in prison. Finally, we have the later Donne in the pulpit of St. Paul's represented, in a beautiful adaptation of one of his own images, as "always preaching to himself, like an angel from a cloud, though in none; carrying some, as St. Paul was, to Heaven in holy raptures, and enticing others by a sacred art and courtship to amend their lives." The picture is all of noble charm. Walton speaks in one place of "his winning behaviour—which, when it would entice, had a strange kind of elegant irresistible art." There are no harsh phrases even in the references to those irregularities of Donne's youth, by which he had wasted the fortune of £3000—equal, I believe, to more than £30,000 of our money—bequeathed to him by his father, the ironmonger. "Mr. Donne's estate," writes Walton gently, referring to his penury at the time of his marriage, "was the greatest part spent in many and chargeable travels, books, and dear-bought experience." It is true that he quotes Donne's own confession of the irregularities of his early life. But he counts them of no significance. He also utters a sober reproof of Donne's secret marriage as "the remarkable error of his life." But how little he condemned it in his heart is clear when he goes on to tell us that God blessed Donne and his wife "with so mutual and cordial affections, as in the midst of their sufferings made their bread of sorrow taste more pleasantly than the banquets of dull and low-spirited people." It was not for Walton to go in search of small blemishes in him whom he regarded as the wonder of the world—him whose grave mournful friends "strewed ... with an abundance of curious and costly flowers," as Alexander the Great strewed the grave of "the famous Achilles." In that grave there was buried for Walton a whole age magnificent with wit, passion, adventure, piety, and beauty. More than that, the burial of Donne was for him the burial of an inimitable Christian. He mourns over "that body, which once was a Temple of the Holy Ghost, and is now become a small quantity of Christian dust," and, as he mourns, he breaks off with the fervent prophecy, "But I shall see it re-animated." That is his valediction. If Donne is esteemed three hundred years after his death less as a great Christian than as a great pagan, this is because we now look for him in his writings rather than in his biography, in his poetry rather than in his prose, and in his Songs and Sonnets and Elegies rather than in his Divine Poems. We find, in some of these, abundant evidence of the existence of a dark angel at odds with the good angel of Walton's raptures. Donne suffered in his youth all the temptations of Faust. His thirst was not for salvation but for experience—experience of the intellect and experience of sensation. He has left it on record in one of his letters that he was a victim at one period of "the worst voluptuousness, an hydroptic immoderate desire of human learning and languages." Faust in his cell can hardly have been a more insatiate student than Donne. "In the most unsettled days of his youth," Walton tells us, "his bed was not able to detain him beyond the hour of four in the morning; and it was no common business that drew him out of his chamber till past ten; all which time was employed in study; though he took great liberty after it." His thoroughness of study may be judged from the fact that "he left the resultance of 1400 authors, most of them abridged and analysed with his own hand." But we need not go beyond his poems for proof of the wilderness of learning that he had made his own. He was versed in medicine and the law as well as in theology. He subdued astronomy, physiology, and geography to the needs of poetry. Nine Muses were not enough for him, even though they included Urania. He called in to their aid Galen and Copernicus. He did not go to the hills and the springs for his images, but to the laboratory and the library, and in the library the books that he consulted to the greatest effect were the works of men of science and learning, not of the great poets with whom London may almost be said to have been peopled during his lifetime. I do not think his verse or correspondence contains a single reference to Shakespeare, whose contemporary he was, being born only nine years later. The only great Elizabethan poet whom he seems to have regarded with interest and even friendship was Ben Jonson. Jonson's Catholicism may have been a link between them. But, more important than that, Jonson was, like Donne himself, an inflamed pedant. For each of them learning was the necessary robe of genius. Jonson, it is true, was a pedant of the classics, Donne of the speculative sciences; but both of them alike ate to a surfeit of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. It was, I think, because Donne was to so great a degree a pagan of the Renaissance, loving the proud things of the intellect more than the treasures of the humble, that he found it easy to abandon the Catholicism of his family for Protestantism. He undoubtedly became in later life a convinced and passionate Christian of the Protestant faith, but at the time when he first changed his religion he had none of the fanaticism of the pious convert. He wrote in an early satire as a man whom the intellect had liberated from dogma-worship. Nor did he ever lose this rationalist tolerance. "You know," he once wrote to a friend, "I have never imprisoned the word religion.... They" (the churches) "are all virtual beams of one sun." Few converts in those days of the wars of religion wrote with such wise reason of the creeds as did Donne in the lines:
To adore or scorn an image, or protest,
May all be bad; doubt wisely; in strange way
To stand inquiring right, is not to stray;
To sleep or run wrong is. On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must and about must go;
And what the hill's suddenness resists, win so.
This surely was the heresy of an inquisitive mind, not the mood of a theologian. It betrays a tolerance springing from ardent doubt, not from ardent faith.