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Literature and Psychology 87
from melancholy adust" known to the Elizabethans from their
psychological theories. In like fashion Oscar Campbell has tried
to show that Jaques, in As You Like It, is a case of "unnatural
melancholy produced by adustion of phlegm." Walter Shandy
could be shown to suffer from the disease of linguistic associa-
tionism described in Locke. Stendhal's hero Julien Sorel is de-
scribed in terms of the psychology of Destutt de Tracy, and the
different kinds of love relationship are obviously classified ac-
cording to Stendhal's own book De l y Amour. Rodion Raskol-
nikov's motives and feelings are analyzed in a way which sug-
gests some knowledge of clinical psychology. Proust certainly
has a whole psychological theory of memory, important even
for the organization of his work. Freudian psychoanalysis is
used quite consciously by novelists such as Conrad Aiken or
Waldo Frank. 23
The question may be raised, of course, whether the author
has really succeeded in incorporating psychology into his figures
and their relationships. Mere statements of his knowledge or
theories would not count. They would be "matter" or "content,"
like any other type of information to be found in literature,
e.g., facts from navigation, astronomy, or history. In some cases,
the reference to contemporary psychology may be doubted or
minimized. The attempts to fit Hamlet or Jaques into some
scheme of Elizabethan psychology seem mistaken, because
Elizabethan psychology was contradictory, confusing, and confused,
and Hamlet and Jaques are more than types. Though
Raskolnikov and Sorel fit certain psychological theories, they do
so only incompletely and intermittently. Sorel sometimes be-
haves in a most melodramatic manner. Raskolnikov's initial
crime is inadequately motivated. These books are not primarily
psychological studies or expositions of theories but dramas or
melodramas, where striking situations are more important than
realistic psychological motivation. If one examines "stream of
consciousness" novels, one soon discovers that there is no "real"
reproduction of the actual mental processes of the subject, that
the stream of consciousness is rather a device of dramatizing the
mind, of making us aware concretely what Benjy, the idiot in
Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, is like, or what Mrs.