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able, as Freud sees well enough, even though his perception of its
caused the traumatic neurosis." The dream, that is, is the effort to
critical importance is not sufficiently strong to make him revise his
reconstruct the bad situation in order that the failure to meet it may
earlier views of the nature and function of art. The idea is one which
be recouped; in these dreams there is no obscured intent to evade
stands beside Aristotle's notion of the catharsis, in part to supbut only an attempt to meet the situation, to make a new effort of plement, in part to modify it.
control. And in the play of children it seems to be that "the child
Freud has come upon certain facts which are not to be reconciled
repeats even the unpleasant experiences because through his own
with his earlier theory of the dream. According to this theory, all
activity he gains a far more thorough mastery of the strong im
�reams, even the unpleasant ones, could be understood upon analypression than was possible by mere passive experience."
Freud, at this point, can scarcely help being put in mind of tragic
�is to have �he intention of fulfilling the dreamer's wishes. They are
m the service of what Freud calls the pleasure principle, which is
drama; nevertheless, he does not wish to believe that this effort to
opposed to the reality principle. It is, of course, this explanation of
come to mental grips with a situation is involved in the attraction
the dream which had so largely conditioned Freud's theory of art.
of tragedy. He is, we might say, under the influence of the Aristo
But now there is thrust upon him the necessity for reconsidering
telian tragic theory which emphasizes a qualified hedonism through
the theory of the dream, for it was found that in cases of war neurosuffering. But the pleasure involved in tragedy is perhaps an amsis-what we once called shellshock-the patient, with the utmost biguous one; and sometimes we must feel that the famous sense of
cathartic resolution is perhaps the result of glossing over terror with
�nguish, r�curred in his dreams to the very situation, distressing as
It was, which had precipitated his neurosis. It seemed imp'ossible to
beautiful language rather than an evacuation of it. And sometimes
interpret these dreams by any assumption of a hedonistic intent.
the terror even bursts through the language to stand stark and iso
Nor did there seem to be the usual amount of distortion in them:
lated from the play, as does Oedipus's sightless and bleeding face.
t
At any rate, the Aristotelian theory does not deny another function
�e patient recurred to the terrible initiatory situation with great
literalness. And the same pattern of psychic behavior could be obfor tragedy (and for comedy, too) which is suggested by Freud's served in the play of children; there were some games which, far
theory of the traumatic neurosis-what might be called the mithfrom fulfilling wishes, seemed to concentrate upon the representaridatic function, by which tragedy is used as the homeopathic adtion of those aspects of the child's life which were most unpleasant ministration of pain to inure ourselves to the greater pain which life
and threatening to his happiness.
will force upon us. There is in the cathartic theory of tragedy, as it
To explain such mental activities Freud evolved a theory for
is usually understood, a conception of tragedy's function which is
which he at first refused to claim much but to which, with the
too negative and which inadequately suggests the sense of active
years, he attached an increasing importance. He first makes the
mastery which tragedy can give.
assumption that there is indeed in the psychic life a repetition-com
In the same essay in which he sets forth the conception of the
pulsion which goes beyond the pleasure principle. Such a compulmind embracing its own pain for some vital purpose, Freud also sion cannot be meaningless, it must have an intent. And that intent,
expresses a provisional assent to the idea ( earlier stated, as he re
Freud comes to believe, is exactly and literally the developing of
minds us, by Schopenhauer) that there is perhaps a human drive
f ear. "Th ese d
"h
reams,
e says, " are attempts at restoring control of
which makes of death the final and desired goal. The death instinct
the stimuli by developing apprehension, the pretermission of which
is a conception that is rejected by many of even the most thorough-
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Freud and Literature
55
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going Freudian theorists ( as, in his last book, Freud mildly noted);
agining for himself more in the way of pleasure and satisfaction
the late Otto Fenichel in his authoritative work on the neurosis
than he can possibly achieve. Everything that he gains he pays for
argues cogently against it. Yet even if we reject the theory as not
in more than equal coin; compromise and the compounding with
fitting the facts in any operatively useful way, we still cannot miss
defeat constitute his best way of getting through the world. His
its grandeur, its ultimate tragic courage in acquiescence to fate. The
best qualities are the result of a struggle whose outcome is tragic.
idea of the reality principle and the idea of the death instinct form
Yet he is a creature of love; it is Freud's sharpest criticism of the
the crown of Freud's broader speculation on the life of man. Their
Adlerian psychology that to aggression it gives everything and to
quality of grim poetry is characteristic of Freud's system and the
love nothing at all.
ideas it generates for him.
One is always aware in reading Freud how little cynicism there
And as much as anything else that Freud gives to literature, this
is in his thought. His desire for man is only that he should be
quality of his thought is important. Although the artist is never
human, and to this end his science is devoted. No view of life to
finally determined in his work by the intellectual systems about
which the artist responds can insure the quality of his work, but
him, he cannot avoid their influence; and it can be said of various
the poetic qualities of Freud's own principles, which are so clearly
competing systems that some hold more promise for the artist than
in the line of the classic tragic realism, suggest that this is a view
others. When, for example, we think of the simple humanitarian
which does not narrow and simplify the human world for the artist
optimism which, for two decades, has been so pervasive, we must
but on t
he contrary opens and complicates it.
see that not only has it been politically and philosophically inadequate, but also that it implies, by the smallness of its view of the varieties of human possibility, a kind of check on the creative faculties. In Freud's view of life no such limitation is implied. To be sure, certain elements of his system seem hostile to the usual notions of man's dignity. Like every great critic of human natureand Freud is that-he finds in human pride the ultimate cause of human wretchedness, and he takes pleasure in knowing that his
ideas stand with those of Copernicus and Darwin in making pride
more difficult to maintain. Yet the Freudian man is, I venture to
think, a creature of far more dignity and far more interest than the
man which any other modern psychological system has been able to
conceive. Despite popular belief to the contrary, man, as Freud conceives him, is not to be understood by any simple formula ( such as sex) but is rather an inextricable tangle of culture and biology. And
not being simple, he is not simply good; he has, as Freud says somewhere, a kind of hell within him from which rise everlastingly the impulses which threaten his civilization. He has the faculty of im-
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The Princess Casamassima
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are most likely to make an immediate appeal to the reader of today.
That they should not have delighted their contemporary public, but
on the contrary should have turned it against James, makes a lively
The Princess Casamassima
problem in the history of taste.1
In the masterpieces of his late years James became a difficult
writer. This is the fact and nothing is gained for James by denying
it. He himself knew that these late works were difficult; he wished
them to be dealt with as if they were difficult. When a young man
I
I
from Texas-it was Mr. Stark Young-inquired indirectly of James
how he should go about reading his novels, James did not feel that
N 1888, on the second of January, which in any year is likely
this diffidence was provincial but happily drew up lists which would
to be a sad day, Henry James wrote to his friend William
lead the admirable young man from the easy to the hard. But the
Dean Howells that his reputation had been dreadfully injured
hostility with which The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima
by his last two novels. The desire for his productions, he said, had
were received cannot be explained by any difficulty either of manbeen reduced to zero, editors no longer asked for his work, they ner or intention, for in these books there is none. The prose, aleven seemed ashamed to publish the stories they had already bought.
though personally characteristic, is perfectly in the tradition of the
But James was never without courage. "However, I don't despair,"
nineteenth-century novel. It is warm, fluent, and on the whole
he wrote, "for I think I am now really in better form than I ever
rather less elaborate and virtuose than Dickens' prose. The motives
have been in my life and I propose yet to do many things." And
of the characters are clear and direct-certainly they are far from
then, no doubt with the irony all writers use when they dare to
the elaborate punctilio of the late masterpieces. And the charge that
speak of future recognition, but also, surely, with the necessary faith,
is sometimes made against the later work, that it exists in a social
he concludes the matter: "Very likely too, some day, all my buried
vacuum, clearly does not pertain here. In these novels James is at
prose will kick off its various tombstones at once."
the point in his career at which society, in the largest and even the
And so it happened. The "some day" has arrived and we have
grossest sense, is offering itself to his mind with great force. He unbeen hearing the clatter of marble as James's buried prose kicks off derstands society as crowds and police, as a field of justice and
its monuments in a general resurrection. On all sides James is beinjustice, reform and revolution. The social texture of his work ing given the serious and joyous interest he longed for in his lifeis grainy and knotted with practicality and detail. And more: his time.
One element of our interest must be the question of how some
1 Whoever wishes to know what the courage of the artist must sometimes be
of J ames's prose ever came to be buried at all. It is not hard to uncould do no better than to read the British reviews of The Bostonians and The
derstand why certain of James's books did not catch the contem
Princess Casamassima. In a single year James brought out two major works; he
thought they were his best to date and expected great things of them; he was told by
porary fancy. But the two books on which James placed the blame
the reviewers that they were not really novels at all; he was scorned and sneered at
for his diminishing popularity were
and condescended to and dismissed. In adjacent columns the ephemeral novels of
The Bostonians and The Prin
the day were treated with gentle respect. The American press rivaled the British in
cess Casamassima, and of all James's novels these are the two which
the vehemence with which it condemned The Bostonians, but it was more tolerant
of The Princess Casamassima.
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social observation is of a kind that we must find startlingly prescient
is passing over into rottenness, that the peculiarly beautiful light it
when we consider that it was made some sixty years ago.
gives forth is in part the reflection of a glorious past and in part
It is just this prescience, of course, that explains the resistance of
the phosphorescence of a present decay, that it may meet its end
James's contemporaries. What James saw he saw truly, but it was
by violence and that this is not wholly unjust, although never benot what the readers of his time were themselves equipped to see.
fore has the old sinful continent made so proud and pathetic an
That we now are able to share his vision required the passage of
assault upon our affections.
six decades and the events which brought them to climax. Henry
James in the eighties understood what we have painfully learned
II
from our grim glossary of wars and concentration camps, after having seen the state and human nature laid open to our horrified in
The Princess Casamassima belongs to a great line of novels which
spection. "But I have the imagination of disaster-and see life as
runs through the nineteenth century as, one might say, the very
ferocious and sinister": James wrote this to A. C. Benson in 1896,
backbone of its fiction. These novels, which are defined as a group
and what so bland a young man as Benson made of the statement,
by the character and circumstance of their heroes, include Stendhal's
what anyone then was likely to make of it, is hard to guess. But
The Red and the Black, Balzac's Pere Goriot and Lost Illusions,
nowadays we know that such an imagination is one of the keys to
Dickens' Great Expectations, Flaubert's Sentimental Education;
truth.
only a very slight extension of the definition is needed to allow the
It was, then, "the imagination of disaster" that cut James off
inclusion of Tolstoi's War and Peace and Dostoevski's The Idiot.
from his contemporaries and it is what recommends him to us now.
The defining hero may be known as the Young Man from the
We know something about the profound disturbance of the sexual
Provinces. He need not come from the provinces in literal fact, his
life which seems to go along with hypertrophy of the will and how
social class may constitute his province. But a provincial birth and
this excess of will seems to be a response to certain maladjustments
rearing suggest the simplicity and the high hopes he begins within society and to direct itself back upon them; D. H. Lawrence he starts with a great demand upon life and a great wonder about
taught us much about this, but Lawrence himself never attempted a
its complexity and promise. He may be of good family but he must
more daring conjunction of the sexual and the political life than
be poor. He is intelligent, or at least aware, but not at all shrewd
Henry James succeeds with in The Bostonians. We know much
in worldly matters. He must have acquired a certain amount of
about misery and downtroddenness and of what happens when
education, should have learned something about life from books,
strong and gifted personalities are put at a hopeless disadvantage,
although not the truth.
and about the possibilities of extreme violence, and about the sense
The hero of The Princess Casamassima conforms very exactl.y to
of guilt and unreality which may come to members of the upper
type. The province from which Hyacinth Robinson comes is a city
classes and the strange complex efforts they make to find innocence
slum. "He sprang up at me out of the London pavement," says
and reality, and about the conflict between the claims of art and of
James in the preface to the novel in the New York Edition. In