42
PARTISAN REVIEW
fore the more surprising thaJ Freud, especially in his early writings,
should have made the gross mistake of treating the artist as if he were
a kind of neurotic escaping from reality by means of "substitute
gratifications." As Freud went forward he seems to have insisted less
on this formulation-certainly it did not have its original force with
him when, at his seventieth birthday celebration, he refused credit
for the
discovery
of the unconscious, saying that this properly belonged
to the literary masters.
Freud's early belief in the neuroticism of the artist found an
all
too fertile ground-found, we might say, the very ground from which
it sprang: for in speaking of the artist as a neurotic, Freud was but
adopting one of the popular assumptions of his age.
Most readers of this note will see in that the expression of the
bourgeois philistinism of the nineteenth century. In this they are part–
ly right. The nineteenth century established the huge basic virtue of
"getting' up at eight, shaving close at a quarter-past, breakfasting at
nine, going to the City at ten, coming home at half-past five and din–
ing at seven." To the Messrs. Podsnap of the time it was corollary to
the certainty of this virtue that the arts must celebrate it. "Nothing
else to be permitted to those same vagrants the
Arts,
on pain of ex–
communication. Nothing else To Be-anywhere!" We observe that
the day begins with rising and ends
wi~h
dinner: bed and sleep are
not part of the Reality that Is.
The excommunication of the vagrant took the form of pro–
nouncing him mentally degenerate, a device which eventually found
its apologist in Max Nordau. In the history of the arts this is new.
The poet was always known to belong to a touchy
tribe-genus irri–
tabile
was a tag anyone would know. But this is not quite to say, as,
in effect, the nineteenth century began to say, neurotic. The eighteenth
century did not find the poet to be less whole than other men and
certainly the Renaissance did not.
If
he was a professional, there
might be condescension to his social status, but in a time which de–
plored all professionalism this was simply a way of asserting the high
value of poetry, which ought not be compromised by trade. Not that
there was no mockery of poets, but a certain good nature marked
even the snubbing of the professional. No one was likely to identify
the poet with the weakling. Indeed, the Renaissance ideal held poetry
to be one of the signs of manly completeness.
The change from this view of things cannot be blamed wholly
on the philistine public. Some of the "blame" must rest with the poets
themselves. The Romantic poets were as proud of their art as the
vaunting poets of the sixteenth century, but one told the world that
