because painful, they are by a defensive process, repressed. These desires, however, are still proper to the individual; they are not removed, but only transferred to unconsciousness; and there remain operative. That is, they are still capable of starting various mental processes. One of these processes is that of dreams. Our unconscious wishes — those which are impracticable, or which are painful, shameful, or otherwise intolerable, and thus are driven from our conscious waking minds are fulfilled for us in sleep. And biologically considered, the function of dreams is this, that they satisfy and allay mental activities which otherwise would disturb sleep. By affording a necessary expression or discharge they secure mental repose. The dream is thus the “guardian of sleep." The function of day dreams and hallucinations is doubtless the same to relieve the overburdened mind. and secure a comfort not to be found in the presence of reality. Speaking of the apparition already mentioned, Goethe says: "Whatever the explanation of these things may be, the wonderful phantom gave me at that moment of separation some alleviation."

Some readers may be inclined to doubt the existence of this repression, of unconscious desires, and in general of the "unconscious" which plays so large a part in Dr. Freud's theory. They may be inclined to believe that a person is definitely aware at any moment what his desires are, and his motives for action; and that unconscious desires and motives are a fiction. Such a belief is, as we shall see in a moment, strongly opposed by the best evidence in literature. "The uttered part of a man's life," as Carlyle observes, "bears to the unuttered unconscious part a small unknown proportion; he himself never knows it, much less do others."2

If poetry then, as we have seen, like dreams, has for its purpose the imaginary gratification of our desires, it also, like dreams, proceeds from an unconscious rather than a conscious mental activity, and has its origin in unconscious sources. Poetry is not produced by the poet spontaneously, by a voluntary action of the intellect; it emerges 'Cf. Die Traumdeutung, p. 304.

Essays, "Sir Walter Scott."

involuntarily and unconsciously as the result of a hidden activity, which, therefore, we cannot readily investigate, and which we call, without attaching definite meaning to the words, that of the "poetic imagination." Poetry, as Shelley declares, is "created by that imperial faculty whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man." The attitude of the poet is never that of the man of science, who can trace his work definitely step by step from inception to completion; it is rather that of Voltaire, who, on seeing one of his tragedies performed, exclaimed, "Was it really I who wrote that?" The testimony of poets and critics to this effect is universal and familiar to every student of literature. It seems advisable, however, to quote from some of them.

"Many are the noble words in which poets speak concerning the actions of men," Plato makes Socrates say, "but they do not speak of them by any rules of art; they are simply inspired to utter that to which the Muse impels them. . . . God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses divines and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them. to be speaking not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God himself is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us.' According to Spenser, poetry is "no art, but a divine gift and heavenly instinct, not to be gotten by labor and learning, but adorned with both, and poured into the witte by a certain Enthousiasmos or celestiall inspiration.' 3 The imagination, on the authority of Shakespeare, "bodies forth the forms of things unknown."4

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The expressions of more recent poets and critics are to the same effect. This "instinct of the imagination,' says Hazlitt, “works unconsciously like nature, and receives its impressions from a kind of inspiration. Scott, the

P. 2.

'Defense of Poetry, ed. Cook, p. 7.

'Ion, Jowett's Translation, third edition, Vol. I, p. 502.

Quoted with part of the preceding, by Woodberry, The Inspiration of Poetry,

'Midsummer Night's Dream, Act V, Sc. 1.

"English Comic Writers, ed. W. C. Hazlitt, p. 147.

sanest of poets, says: "In sober reality, writing good verses seems to depend upon something separate from the volition of the author." George Eliot, living in the clear light of modern science, declared "that in all she considered her best writing there was a 'not herself' which took possession of her, and that she felt her own personality to be merely the instrument through which this spirit, as it were, was acting." Goethe says: "There is a sense in which it is true that poets, and indeed all true artists must be born and not made. Namely, there must be an inward productive power to bring the images that linger in the organs, in the memory, in the imagination, freely without purpose or will to life." This is the opinion of those we should call poets of art as well as of poets of inspiration. "It is not well in works of creation," Schiller writes, "that reason should too closely challenge the ideas which come thronging to the doors. . . . In a creative brain reason has withdrawn her watch at the doors, and ideas crowd in pellmell."3 Voltaire wrote to Diderot: "It must be confessed that in the arts of genius instinct is everything. Corneille composed the scene between Horatius and Curiatius just as the bird builds its nest."4

Voltaire's expressive figure agrees curiously with that in Emerson's "Problem," which with "Spiritual Laws" throws much light on this subject:

"Know'st thou what wove yon woodbird's nest

Of leaves, and feathers from her breast?

Or how the fish outbuilt her shell,
Painting with morn her annual cell?

"The hand that rounded Peter's dome
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome
Wrought in a sad sincerity:

Himself from God he could not free;
He builded better than he knew;

The conscious stone to beauty grew.

'Lockhart, Life of Scott, Chap. XXXVIII, Letter to Lady L. Stuart.

Cross, Life of George Eliot.

Quoted by Hirsch, Genius, pp. 31-33.

'April 20, 1773.

"These temples grew as grows the grass;
Art might obey, but not surpass.
The passive Master lent his hand.

To the vast soul that o'er him planned."

We may stop a moment more over two writers whom we have already considered in some detail - Bunyan and Shelley. Taine writes of Bunyan's imagination: "Powerful as that of an artist, but more vehement, this imagination worked in the man without his co-operation, and besieged him with visions which he had neither willed nor foreseen. From that moment there was in him, as it were, a second self, ruling the first, grand and terrible, whose apparitions were sudden, its motions unknown, which redoubled or crushed his faculties, prostrated or transported him, bathed him in the sweat of agony, ravished him with trances of joy, and which by its force, strangeness, independence, impressed upon him the presence and the action of a foreign and superior master."

Shelley's inspiration must have been of a similar order. Trelawny tells of finding Shelley alone one day in a wood near Pisa, with the manuscript of one of his lyrics: "It was a frightful scrawl, words smeared out with his fingers, and one upon another, over and over in tiers, and all run together in the most admired disorder.... On my observing this to him, he answered, 'When my brain gets heated with a thought, it soon boils, and throws off images and words. faster than I can skim them off. In the morning when cooled down, out of the rude sketch, as you justly call it, I shall attempt a drawing.' "2 We have seen that with Shelley bodily heat was conducive to dreams and poetry. So here he describes the heat of inspiration; as he does also in the following from the Defense of Poetry: "Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, 'I will compose poetry.' The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower 'English Literature, Book II, Chap. V, Sec. 6.

Symonds, Shelley, p. 166.

which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious fortunes of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure."

Poetical creation, then is generally described as an instinctive and unconscious process. Poetry is not a conscious product of the intellect, but the manifestation or symptom of an inner uncontrolled activity. What does this mean? We have seen that poetry is the expression of desires. Is it not natural to suppose that the desires of the poet, as of the dreamer, are impeded and consequently repressed, forced back into unconsciousness. These desires are prevented from serving as motives for conscious action. looking toward gratification; thus failing of expression they become unconscious but still remain operative in another manner that is, in starting an activity affording a fictional gratification. If this is the case then poetry, like dreams, has its source in repressed and unconscious desires. Let us see what further support is to be found in literature for this view.

In one of his critical essays, which has been too much overlooked, John Keble "proposes by way of conjecture" the following definition: "Poetry is the indirect expression in words, most appropriately in metrical words, of some overpowering emotion, ruling taste, or feeling, the direct indulgence whereof is somehow repressed." Keble's exposition of this definition is well worth the reader's attention. As a whole it cannot be even summarized here. Some parts of it, dealing with the nature of the poet's indirect expression, with the function of metre, and with the kinds of poetry, will be noticed later. For the present we are concerned with Keble's theory of repression in poetry which is in substance that poetry is the expression of repressed emotion, or, substituting terms which he uses on another page, of repressed "desire or regret." Keble says nothing of the unconscious origin or production of poetry; otherwise his theory is obviously in general agreement with that

2

'The British Critic, Vol. XXIV, p. 426, - a review of Lockhart's Life of Scott, reprinted in Occasional Papers and Reviews, 1877. See also Keble's De Poeticae Vi Medicâ; Praelectiones Academicae Oxonii Habitae, 1844.

"Keble's theory is founded on Aristotle's; cf. ibid., pp. 428, 435. He perhaps does some violence to Aristotle's imitation in translating it expression; but his theory is in substantial agreement with Aristotle's.