SHALLOW WATERS.
I WRITE in the first flush of anger. Mr. Robert Graves has succumbed to a malady that Englishmen catch more easily than any other race—mediocrity, one might unkindly call it. It has been the pride and function of the English to be sane. England has been the point where the world was averaged out and balanced : she has been, literally, a clearing-house for thought ; in a sense, she has been the type and measure of humanity. And while England keeps motion and fire in her sanity she is the most progressive of nations ; she can make a high value from her equilibrium if she gives energy to it by initiative. But common sense can be the worst vice. To be sane and fiery is the most wholesome condition of spirit. To be sane and tepid is deadly, for nothing comes of it ; it is better not to Hire-than to live in commonplaces. The man who takes a. sensible view through cowardice, who is sceptical without despair, who belieN.-es without ecstasy, has killed in himself the divine life ; ' or was born dead. It is a shock to find Mr. Graves ranging himself upon the side of those who are sane and tepid. He has subscribed to the c,orofortirig blasphemy of Our saintly George Herbert " In shallow waters heaven cloth dwell ; Who dives on further may find hell."
It is not beside the point to dwell on the function of England in reviewing Mr. Graves's book. For -Mr. Graves is writing about psycho-analysis, and the impetus to psycho-analysis has so far come from Central Europe. It is important to learn in what way the disproportions of the new theory may be corrected ; and, if we might judge by precedents, the specifically English reaction to the theory would be valuable as a portent. Unfortunately, there is not yet any original school of psycho-analysis in England. Dr. Ernest Jones and his f011iKvers are loyal Freudians ; they add nothing and they take away nothing. The late Dr. Rivers and his for- lowers are worse-; they add nothing, they take away much. And Mr. Graves is a follower of Dr. Rivers.
The most central fault lies in his treatment of the part in life of sex. Psycho-analysts have held that in every act, every turn of speech and turn of body, we can trace the impulse of sexual desire. In ambition, in social service, in stroking a eat, in WT.' iting a poem, they haVe discovered a sex-motive. The sexual life of babies,- they affirm, is prodigious ; it is undifferentiated, it spreads itself over everything, it is an innocent sexuality, but essentially it is the same as the sexual life of adults. Because of a baby's lack of discrimination, however, they call him " polymorphous perverse." Now this view is certainly abhorrent to common sense. Mr. Graves, therefore, rejects it out of hand ; and thus flouts an immense mass of evidence from which the psycho-analytic theory had been drawn. Only a few actions, he states, are grounded in sex, only a few dreams can be interpreted as symbolic- of sexual wishes. There are dreams which are reminiscent, there are dreams which express conflict of purposes ; dreams which are prophetic, dreams which are nothing. Mr. Graves never guesses that in denying that all actions and dreams have an element of sex he is denuding and impoverishing them.
The One claim that psycho-analysis has to more than spiceialized interest lies in this—it has laid open a new wealth of complieatiOn in life ; it has enriched life. Sex ? Well, call it se* ; we shall set no taboo upon the word. Yes, every
ieSitire behind it the drive of sexual appetite. But now,' not quarrelling over words, we can expand that • term " ; and, really, if anyone should have an unconquerable distaste for the word, let him abandon it altogether ; 'only not let him forget the richness which was signified by the ;-,term:' Stroking a cat, writing a poem, we shall call love. very'philOsophical word for it. ' We can even call it, with -;the theologians, love of God. That hunger after the outside ,• 'world, that Will to affect our surroundings with our personality, 15-ivith ourselveS ; the appeal for power or sympathy, the feeling. we lack and deMand all in the universe that is not ikurselves, we shall not call ambition, greed, egotism, supremacy `veomplex ; that, too; is love. We Shall not say, with the psycho- analysts, that love is sublimated sex. Physical passion; in truth, is love that has lost its way.• Then—I can only suggest ieir- the moment, f could never exhaust the idea—there is the completion and balance` to the disproportions of psycho analysis. We must not refuse sex its part in every detail of life we must make every detail of life fuller still of meaning and vial*. A dream, the vaguest, the least lively of our states of consciousness, has yet the whole of our complicated -being Ailjt. • L. r.! Mi. Graves is: vowed to Professor Rivers's theory of :4' conflicts " ; indeed, taken-out 'ofthe hands of its eX- 'Ponents, the theory is useful. Let us put it in this way. alone of created beings, is the victim of a divided will. His memory of the past, his experience of act and disappoint- rnent and his recognition of cause and effect, his logical intelligence, has split his desire into two. One will keeps -steadily driving him to take what he wishes without regard ' for consequences. One wilt urges him to escape from the ',dissatisfactions that he !mows, -have followed upon this or Ilist course of action. And from the quarrel of these two
comes bad conscience, comes neurosis. If he shuts his eyes to either prompting, yet they continue at Strife; he throWs himself into an artificial world, and, often enough, his life in the actual world becomes disorganized. The only solution is to act continually in a way which satisfies both promptings, which reconciles these contraries. Nor is this beyond hope ; for the first will, the animal will, the unconscious will, is not committed to any definite act ; it is a type of act that it demands. The second will, the conscious will, objects only to definite acts.
But see how Mi. Graves fails us. He quotes with approval a case that Dr. Rivers records. A doctor whO had been horrified beyond bearing at the scenes he witnessed during the War found himself with an inexplicable revulsion from his profession. He gives, too, the case of a drunkard who is overwhelmed with shame for his lack of self-control. The solutions suggested are that the doctor should take up another profession, the drunkard should frequent a reformed public house. Now, those are shifts that arc sometimes necessary in our hurried world ; but they are . not solutions. The two wills have not been reconciled. The solutions that should be aimed at are, of course, that the doctor should so gain command over himself that it does not in the slightest matter to him whether he continues in his profession or leaves it ; the drunkard should not feel tortured whether he drinks or abstains. Mr. Graves, in fact, is an advocate of slave- morality.
It is most painful to ,observe Mr. Graves's application of psycho-analysis to literary criticism. He examines " La Belle Dame sans Merci ; and what does he extract from it ? He finds in it the details of Keats's life which we already knew. He examines Kubla Khan, and finds in it the cir- cumstances under which it was composed. Psycho-analysis can, undoubtedly, be applied to a criticism of literature. Neurosis is demoniac possession ; genius is, in the same measure, angelic possession. Psycho-analysis has explored the demoniac states of consciousness in much detail ; it can explore the angelic states of consciousness, and, in so doing; will give us a new form of criticism. It is worse than useless to look for demons in a work of genius.
I am sorry that I have been compelled, through the depth of my disagreement and the shortness of my space, to be scrappy and quick. I should have liked to argue more suavely and to draw my threads together with more thoroughness. Mr. Graves, I hope, will nevertheless hear me with patience and recognize that I speak, more than usually, with frankness and feeling, and will accept my seriousness as a mark of
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