ARGUMENTATIVES

Southland Times, Issue 18975, 23 June 1923, Page 9 (Supplement)

ARGUMENTATIVES

FREUD AND ART 111,

(By

“Inquisitor.”)

An attempt has been made to show that it is not the higher conscious levels of the mind that control the destinies of our lives. It is in the unconscious that the human dynamo resides; a mighty well of psychic energy, an insurgent force which is fortunately, amenable to a great extent to the exigencies of the modern “civilizee’s” life, but at times breaking down all barriers and thereby spreading possible ruin and desolation. The fact that this gigantic storehouse of energy does play a considerable part in the life of the psyche can hardly be denied, though there is considerable room for discussion as to whether Frend is altogether justified in laying the stress he does upon the supposed influence of sex. But this is an academical problem which we can safely to bide its time. The part played by the unconscious in the inspiration of all forms of art has already been stressed and examples quoted from the lives and works of Cowper, Dowson and others to show that if only held as a tentative theory, Freud does seemingly throw a few beams of light on many obscure spots. Perhaps his magic rays are a little too penetrating and for this reason defeat the purposes of their manipulator. An X-ray photograph of an early picture of the Madonna might conceivably throw some light on the nature of the materials used by the Venetian painters of the Sixteenth Century, but the soul of the picture as well as its artistic merits wculd be obliterated. Freud has placed in the hands of psychologically-minded literary critics, a deadly weapon, though one if wielded reasonably, might prove of inestimable service towards the genuine seeker for truth. It may be held that genius is too sacred to tamper with in the somewhat heartless manner that has been done by Mordell in the “Ere tic Motive In Literature.” But the world cannot wait on sentiment. It is, no doubt, regrettable that the sins of Messrs Byron, Whitman and other literary luminaries should be relentlessly exposed to the world, but fortunately, whilst there is some temptation on the part of a few to hurl their puritanical bricks at them, sin is not the standard whereby we measure the value of even the most abandoned reprobate’s work.

On the line that we have been pursuing. James Thomson, of “The City of Dreadful Night,” affords a particular good subject for analysis. Thomson’s work, which is undoubtedly of high literary merit, reeks with an abject fatalism and crude materialism. If we knew nothing at all of this luckless author a dissection of his masterpiece with the aid of the psycho-analytic scalpee would have afforded all the material needed for piecing together some of the biological essentials. Take for example a verse, which is typical of the whole:— The sense that every struggle brings defeat Because Fate holds no prize to crown success; That all the oracles are dumb or cheat Because they have no secret to express That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain Because there is no light beyond the curtain; That all is vanity and nothingness.

Or this: I find no hurt throughout the Universe Of good or ill, of blessing or of curse; I find alone Necessity Supreme; With infinite Mystery, abysmal, dark Unlighted ever by the faintest spark For us the flitting shadows of a dream.

Whether Thomson, in his heart of hearts actually accepted such a dismal creed, it matters little. Freud’s researches teaches us not to be too anxious to take at their face value even the most ingenuous confession of faith. An individual, if he is so minded can give assent to any form of stupidity and invent a plethora of rational reasons for accepting it. In this connection, it is rather interesting to examine the memoirs of a Kaiser Wilhelm 11, or those of any other of the equally bloodthirsty tyrants of the past and we will find that they have not the slightest apparent difficulty in glossing over even their most fiendish enermities. It is an axiom that can hardly be disputed that the worst tyrants have always been actuated with the highest motives for the ultimate good of not themselves, but of their unfortunate subjects. This at least has always been their excuse, but it is unnecessarily unjust to suggest that in the vast majority of cases the Cromwells and the Napoleons have fervently believed that they were the accredited agents of the All Highest in carrying out His work on earth.

If Fate had been a little kinder, it is conceivable that Thomson might have been a serene idealist. He was left an orphan at nine, and after being brought up on charitable doles he became a schoolmaster in the British Army. This was at seventeen. A little later he met Charles Bradlaugh, the iconoclastic secularist, who was to have a deep impression on him. About this time he fell in love with a beautiful girl, and at nineteen he left Ireland for England, in order to seek a better position to enable him to marry her. But she died a few months afterwards, and this is the beginning of the end, and Frank Harris, who knew the poet intimately, tells us that Thomson throughout his life ascribed his downfall to this. Thirty years later, in a poignant little verse, “T Had a J wretchedness and desolation is still mani» tested. He speaks there:— You would have kept me from the dearest sands Bestrewn with bleaching bones, And led me through the friendly fertile lands, And changed my weary moans. Thomson lived perpetually in the “City of Dreadful Night,” the only escape from which was provided by fiery maledictions against all the evils, imaginary and otherwise, of this life of “nameless woes.” This is what the Freudians call the sublimination process. The real cause of it could not be banished to the unconscious and forgotten like so many less potent experiences could, and relief is found in either making war on the world, which is tantamount to suggesting that the world itself was to blame for all the trouble in the first place, or if sane expression could not be given it would have meant that the mind would collapse altogether. We may find exactly the same process at work in Swinburne, Gissing, O. Henry, Dowson, Theodore Dreiser, Maupassant, Pierre Loti, Hubert Crackanthorpe, and many other moderns. Sublimination is a way of escape from the direful evils that afflict the human soul, and the sanity and happiness of the individual psyche concerned is in direct ratio with the success achieved.

The following pregnant sentences from one of Lafcadio Hearn’s lectures on Browning is a succinct epitome of the fundamental dogma of Freud:—“Does any man in this world ever tell the exact truth about himself? Probably not. No man understands himself so well as to be able to tell the exact truth about himself. It is possible that this man believes himself to be speaking truthfully, but he certainly is telling a lie, a half-truth anU’ « his exact

words, but the exact language of the speaker in any one of Browning’s monologues does not tell the truth, it only suggests the truth'.' We must find out the real character of the person, and the real, facts of the case; from our own experience of human nature.”