ART AND NEUROSIS
43
he wanted to lie down like a tired, child and weep away this life of
care, another asked "Why did I laugh to-night?," another explained,
in a great poem, the subtle psychological reasons for his being no
longer able to write great poetry. The public took them all at their
word.
Wherever the "blame" lies, the myth of the neurotic artist grew.
Both sides cherished it. The artist can find advantage in the notion–
it gives
him
the ancient privileges of the idiot and the fool, half-pro–
phetic creatures. That the artist's neurosis can be but a mask is sug–
gested by Thomas Mann's pleasure in representing his untried youth
as "sick" but his successful maturity as militarily robust and efficient.
And the myth has its advantage for the philistine too, a double
advantage. On the one hand, the belief in the artist's neuroticism
allows the philistine to shut his ears to what the artist says. But on
the other hand, it allows him to listen. For we must not make the
common mistake-the philistine does want to listen at the same time
that he wants to shut
his
ears. By supposing that the artist has an in–
teresting but not always reliable relation to reality, he is able to control
and modify what he is told.
If
he did not want to listen at
all
he
would say "insane"; with "neurotic," which hedges, he can listen
when he chooses.
The early attempts of psychoanalysis to deal with art went on
this philistine assumption. The artist was neurotic, the content of his
work was neurotic; since neurosis was what the analysts were trying to
get rid of, the implication was that what the artist said was not in a
correct relation to reality. The virtue of Dr. Rosenzweig's essay is that,
dealing with the neurotic element in Henry James's work, he at no
point suggests that this element in any way lessens James's valueJ as
artist or moralist. In effect he says that neurosis is a way of dealing
with reality which in real life is most uncomfortable, uneconomical
and usually ineffective, but that this judgment of neurosis in life
cannot be mechanically transferred to neurotically generated subjects
in art. He of course nowhere suggests that a neurotically generated
subject is, because of its genesis, irrelevant; indeed, tlie manner of
his treatment suggests what is surely th.e case, that every neurosis
deals with a real emotional situation of the most fundamental and
most widely relevant kind.
Yet as Dr. Rosenzweig brings
his
exposition to a close, he falls
into an error by no means so gross as the one I have described but still
a source of confusion. It might be called the inversion of the error
which finds the artist's weakness in his neurotic temperament-Dr.
