tive of races, are today as much esteemed and regarded by the most civilized of beings. They have come into their own again.

CHAPTER X

LITERATURE AS DREAMS

"We are all interested in the devil, because he is ourselves in our dreams and unguarded moments."

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS was first applied to literature in "The Interpretation of Dreams" (Traumdeutung), published in 1900, in which Freud gave his famous interpretation of the legend of King Edipus; and the first book entirely devoted to the subject was also Freud's, namely, his analysis of Jensen's novel "Gradiva," in 1907. In spite of the recent date of both these books, already a great body of criticism has appeared, especially in America,* and more is constantly being done.

The general idea is that literary works are wish fulfilments, in the Freudian sense, and compensatory activities in the Jungian sense, and in a manner organic products corresponding to dreams. Thus, the villains created by poets, dramatists and novelists, are compensatory reactions to the customary goodness of their lives, and the release of unconscious desires for evil;

* See "The Erotic Motive in Literature," by Albert Mondell (Boni and Liveright, New York, 1919).

Vautrin is part of Balzac's worse nature allowed rein in imagination, Mr. Hyde and John Silver are Stevenson's, Richard Varney is Scott's, Iago is Shakespeare's. So also do schoolboys obtain compensation for their dull routine of work in penny dreadfuls and blood-curdling films.

"Mr. Yeats in his last book of prose, put forward the suggestion that the artist reveals in his art not his 'self' (which is expressed in his life), but his 'anti-self,' a complementary and even contrary self. He might find in the life and works of Meredith some support for his not quite convincing theory. Meredith was an egoist in his life, and anti-egoist in his books. He was pretentious in his life, anti-pretentious in his books. He took up the attitude of the wronged man in his life; he took up the case of the wronged woman in his books. In short, his life was vehemently pro-George-Meredith, while his books were vehemently anti-George-Meredith."* This is a clear case of compensation.

Balzac was very ambitious, and plunged into wild schemes for getting rich quick; and however moral his conscious ideas were, it is by no means unlikely that his unconscious would suggest to his mind that riches, fame, and love, might be obtained by breaking the merely human laws of honesty and justice. Thrusting back the sugges*"The Art of Letters," by Robert Lynd, 1920.

tion, as we would, he could not prevent its appearance in a disguised form in the portrayal of his characters. So Vautrin, in "Lost Illusions," endeavors to persuade Eugene to marry the heiress to a fortune of a million francs, and secure the inheritance at once by having her brother, the immediate claimant, secretly murdered.

"Do you believe," asks Vautrin, otherwise Balzac's unconscious, "that there is any absolute standard in the world? Despise mankind, and find out the meshes that you can slip through in the code." Balzac's resistance, that is, the censor, is given expression to by the words of Eugene, who shouts, "Silence, sir! I will not hear any more; you make me doubt myself."

Milton's unconscious obtains an outlet in Satan, Marlowe's (and also Goethe's) in Mephistopheles, the common people of the Middle Ages in the vice and devil of the morality plays. "We are all interested in the devil, because he is ourselves in our dreams and unguarded moments."

The unconscious, with his predilection for the part of villain, would, were he given full sway, make polite society and orderly civilization a thing impossible; but the moral sense succeeds very largely in keeping him in check except in moments of distress and battle. The world carries on its activities by camouflaging the unconscious, for decency and charity's sake. "Men would not

live long in society," runs one of La Rochefoucauld's maxims, were they not the dupes of each other "; and he might well have added, of themselves.

Polite literature is equally dependent on the limitation and disguise of the unconscious but in reverse manner; it is a natural outlet for the anxiety neuroses of certain temperaments, induced by abstinence, repression, or unsatisfactory gratification of the love desire as represented, for example by Hester Prynne, Madame Bovary, Hedda Gabler and Hamlet. Literature, writes Mr. Albert Mondell, taking an extreme and morbid view of the case, is "largely a record of the anxieties and hysterics of humanity." He confounds us with instances; thus he takes Byron's unfortunate love affair with his cousin Mary Chaworth, and shows how it is the motive for some fifty of his shorter poems, and that she is represented in "Manfred" as Astarte, and in

Don Juan" as Lady Adeline. Spenser's "Amoretti' (which is certainly true), he says, and Shakespeare's "Sonnets," are also the expression of disappointed love. But we may retort that even if this be so, the enjoyment of literature is also a safety valve for the anxieties and worries of readers.

According to this view, we like such books as "Robinson Crusoe, ""Treasure Island," "Tarzan