PSYCHOLOGY AND FICTION

Otago Witness, Issue 3590, 2 January 1923, Page 24

PSYCHOLOGY AND FICTION

AUTHORS’ CLUB DEBATE. \ (From Ocr Own Correspondent.) LONDON, October 13. Professor Jolm Adams (London University), ae the guest of the Authors’ Club, this week provided its members with an interesting address that resulted in an informing discussion on Psychology and Fiction. The Chairman (Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins) thought there were two extraordinary features about childhood—ono the desire to acquire personal property, and the other to be present on occasions upon which the presence of children was not required. These two instincts went very deep into human nature, and accounted for a great deal of trouble in politics. TWO KINDS OF PSYCHOLOGY. From the welter of definitions of the question, “ Is there any difference between psychology and fiction ?” Professor Adams •aid two stand out with prominence: (1) The study of consciousness; (2) the study of behaviour. Naturally novelists select the latter. But even this hopeful definition dees not ffuite meet the case of the writer, of fiction.

He studies behaviour, no doubt, but in quite a different spirit from the psychologist. The scientific spirit is or ought to be absent from the novelist. He shares in the feelings of the characters he creates. He feels with them. The psychologist stands coldly , aloof. Thackeray, weeping as he penned the death of Colonel Newcome, had nothing in common with the psychologist. Coquelin, holding animated converse with h,is demon while impressing his audiences', was more to the psychologist’s taste. Yet all feel that the novelist is a kind of psychologist. Do we not have the psychological novel, and do not novelists talk a great deal about psychology? The qualities essential to the one branch of writing are sometimes thought to be transferable t-o the other. There are really two different kinds of psychology. The old-fashioned psychology that every educated man was expected to know —the sort of thing written by Stewart, Reid, Hamilton, and Brown—could- be applied in an easy way to the needs of social life. It was not too technical, and had a gentlemanly ring about it. Philosophy was its realm rather than science. Since then its tendency has been more and more away from metaphysics and towards physical science, and even mathematics. Titchener tells that the psychological text-book of the future will be as full of formula; as the text-books on physics are today, and, honest man, he does a good deal

in his own writing to justify his threat. Not this way lies the novelist's desires. Little help can he hope for from mathematical equations.—(Cheers and laughter.) The novelist’s psychology is not scientific, but artistic. He deals, not with types, but with individuals. No doubt, in order to understand the individual, he must, to some extent at least, study the type. But there is nothing more melancholy in fiction than the dominance of type. The novelist claims to be a creator, and must be allowed freedom in his work. Yet he must study the common element of humanity in order to keep his characters within the realm of possibility. For him psychology has a negative rather than a positive value.' The time spent in its study must be regarded in the light of insurance investment rather than a direct help in his creative work. It would be absurd to deny to Sir James Barrie a knowledge of psychology; it would be equally absurd to expect him to know anything about Titchener’s formulae. The artistic psychologist is as important as the scientific but the work of the two is quite different. The novelist has no more need for scientific and qualitative psychology than lie has of physiology. Each might possibly he of use in working up a plot—nothing can come amiss to the modern writer of fiction—but in the actual practice his craft as such it has no place. There is a good deal in common between the dream and the novel. Since the psycho-analysts are reducing the interpreting of dream’s to something approaching a science, it is obvious that the novel lends itself to treatment by this developing method. Reading the man in his novel is no new thing, but writers of fiction must recogriise that this new instrument is going to put fresh power into Slie hands of book appraisers. Everyone who publishes a novel puts into the hands of the critics a body of evidence about the inner workings of his mind. It is only fair to give him the usual police warning that anything he may say will be used in evidence against him. —(Cheers and laughter.) DEGREES OF MECHANISM. Vlr Hamlin Garland, the eminent American writer, confessed that his work was a kind of day dream. Beyond that it v.-as a kind of auto-hypnosi3. He found that if ho went into a familiar room at the same hour of the morning and put a piece of blank paper before him and took his pen in his hand, he could consciously go on with his work. He found himself exceedingly sensitive to certain kinds of interruption—wallpaper and furniture. Some people •imagined that because a man of his type went regularly to his work he was mechanical in it. Now he was mechanical only to the point of inducing this hypnotic state. After he had provided all these familiar and supposedly delightful surroundings he wrote if he could He did not know what this unconscious self was, and lie did not care a hang so long as it helped him and did the work for him, at it did. The painter in painting a landscape used the same thing. He could not write fiction that was worth anything, so far as it was worth anything, unless this sub-conscious life came .Jk and helped him, and often he had found it very helpful to go over the chapters he had written during the day just before going to sleep. -He would fall as!«p with the problem in his mind as it became lazy with slumber, and the next morning the problem would be solved. He did not know who did it, but somebody seemed to oome in and help him out. He never had planned a story ahead —it had flown from the point of his pen- in some mysterious fashion.