THE FREUDIAN INCUBUS
The Poetic Mind. By F. C. Prescott. 8vo. 308 pages. The Macmillan Company. $2.
SOME years ago a huge and dismal book was written to prove that artists are degenerates. The manias of Max Nordau were bitterly resented and successfully demolished, and his book quickly passed into the realm of obsolete pathology, where it belonged. We have now to consider a treatise of converse nature, a work less temerarious than Degeneration and less bulky, but in many respects equally dangerous and misleading. Professor Prescott sets the thesis that the artist—he fastens on the poet as typical—is a divinity, a dreamer essentially akin to the inspired madman, a godlike agent deriving complete nourishment from the unconscious world. This idea, of course, is an historical commonplace, and owes its present revival to the fashionable influence of Doctor Freud. There seems to be no way to safeguard the arts against the invasion of the alienists and the dream-worshippers. They are incapable of regarding the artist as a human being: he must needs be an atavism or a god.
The author's favourite victims of theopneusty are Shelley, Coleridge, and Poe. Less eccentric men, such as Milton, Chaucer, Browning, and Hardy, are not so amenable to his psychoanalytic method, and are tactfully avoided. I wonder if the Professor has read The Most Romantic Episode in Literary History, a fictional reconstruction of the "divine Shelley" carried to the very limit of logical idiocy? The Shelley of Alexander Harvey is the most egregious ass that ever penned a strophe; a sublime fairy; an anaemic, crumb-tossing deity who ate, occasionally, a raisin; a figure irreconcilable with the swift intelligence that produced Prometheus Unbound and the preface thereto, the astonishing aesthetics of A Defence of Poetry, and the most elaborate lyrics in the English language. By what right does the Professor remodel Coleridge, the penetrating analyst of Biographia Literaria, into a transcendental dopester? And on what authority does he transform Poe, a sober, extremely conscious, and painfully methodical workman, into a cataleptic visionary? The Poetic Mind is an honest and patient effort to explore the operations of the creative brain, but its premises
