Canto II-9, he refers to Mary in the line "love and life together

fled," and in a Thyrza poem he uses the words, "When love and life alike were new." Mary Chaworth was really responsible for Byronism.

Whether she ever committed adultery with him and had a child by him, as is claimed by the author of _Byron, the Last Phase_, one cannot say.

In his four early volumes of poetry, published before he was twenty-one, there are many poems inspired by Mary, and four poems, written in 1805, addressed to Caroline, who was undoubtedly Mary, are of especial excellence. The poems of his youth written to her included the "Fragment," written after her marriage, in 1805, and "Remembrance," written the year after. Both of these poems were published after Byron's death. A pathetic poem, _In the Hours of Idleness_ (1807), is "To a Lady"; "Oh, had my fate been linked with thine." "When We Two Parted" was written the following year, and referred to Mary. In 1808 Byron wrote a series of sad love poems to Mary, and they were published in the next year, in 1809, in Hobhouse's _Imitations and Translations_. They include "Remind Me Not, Remind Me Not," "To a Lady," "When Man Expelled from Eden's Bowers," "Stanzas to a Lady on Leaving England," "Well! Thou Art Happy," "And Wilt Thou Weep When I Am Low," and "There Was a Time I Need Not Name." The six great poems written to Thyrza and published in 1812, with _Childe Harold_, were "To Thyrza" ("Without a stone to mark the spot"), "Away, Away, Ye Notes of Woe," "One Struggle More and I Am Free," "Euthanasia," "And Thou Art Dead and Young and Fair," and "If Sometimes in the Haunts of Men." Mary was as if dead to him, and he wrote of her accordingly. About the time of the Thyrza poems, 1811 and 1812, he wrote other poems to her like the "Epistle to a Friend" "I have seen my bride another's bride" and "On Parting New." In 1813 appeared the two sonnets, "To Genevra" and "Remember Him Whom Passion's Power"; in 1814, "Thou Art Not False, But Thou Art Fickle," "Farewell! If Ever Fondest Prayer," "I Speak Not, I Trace Not, I Breathe Not Thy Name." In 1815 appeared "There's Not a Joy the World Can Give That It Takes Away," and 1816, "There Be None of Beauty's Daughters."

Byronism, then, was due chiefly to the poet's early quarrels with his mother, the separation from his wife, but above all his rejection by Mary Chaworth.

III

Freud has told us that the idea of repression is the main pillar on which the theory of psychoanalysis rests. There has been at some time in the patient's life a serious inhibition of some desire. There are different kinds of repression, the most serious of which have a sexual basis. But the denying oneself of the play of any emotions that seek an outlet, constitutes a repression.

Sex with Freud means love in its broadest sense. The most common repression is the inability to satisfy one's love, either because the person has not met any object upon whom to lavish his affection, or if such an individual is found there is no reciprocation, or if the love is given it is later withdrawn. All these factors act in a repressive manner upon a person. For it must be understood that not only the stinting of sexual satisfaction, but the interference with all those finer emotions associated with it, cause a repression in the subject. When the emotions have been satisfied for a long time, and then there is a sudden cessation through change of heart or infidelity or death of the beloved one, the repression is very serious. It is this kind of repression that has produced most of the literature of the world.

But repression includes the stinting or uprooting of any emotion. Great grief as the result of the death of any one we love of either sex, whether friend or relative, is a repression. The death of a loved one puts the sufferer in a worse position than the man who has been stinted in a great love passion. And the great elegies in literature have been cries of poets for the death of fellow writers. _Lycidas_, _Adonais_, _In Memoriam_ and _Thyrsis_ are examples. The authors here suffered repressions in the loss of brother poets.

The grief which seems to be the greatest of all, that following on the death of a beloved child, is an instance of the most intense repression on the part of a parent. Here there is nothing really sexual, but the death of a child and the consequent agony to the parents is a far greater repression than any purely sexual one. Hugo's famous elegies on the death of his daughter which appear in the _Contemplations_ are among the greatest poems of this kind. In America we have had a few poems by Lowell, and a famous elegy by Emerson, _The Threnody_, in which the loss of children is mourned.

If there were no repression, there would be little literature.

The varieties of repressions are as numerous as the emotions to which we are subject. For the inability to satisfy any emotion is a repression; the deprivation of an emotion long gratified, the conquering of a habit or the struggle for activity of a partially extinct emotion, are repressions. The feeling of loneliness or homesickness, which has given rise to much good literature, shows repressed emotion. The wish to wreak revenge or to punish evil or to do away with injustice or to devote oneself to the following of an ambition or the pursuit of a certain kind of labour, are all symptoms of repressions.

IV

Psychoanalysis starts with the assumption that the entire past in a man's life, beginning with the first day of his birth, is always with him and is really never forgotten. That which has seemed to pass out of the haunts of memory, has become part of our unconscious, and is often revived in dreams. Nothing is really ever forgotten. De Quincey understood this and discourses on the subject in his _Confessions of an Opium Eater_ and thus anticipates an important modern psychological discovery.

Longfellow said, "Let the dead past bury its dead." Ah, if it only could! Ghosts of sorrows and griefs that we thought laid away still revisit us even in our waking hours. They stalk before us and open up closed wounds and we learn that these are not yet healed. They awaken memories of agonies that again smite us; they make us hearken back to unkind words dealt us, to suffering inflicted, to injustice done. Shocks which time had made obtuse are revived; we reap the harvest of anxieties garnered in our hearts; and we discover that the old despair has not altogether vanished but still occasionally gnaws us.

The dead rules the living; forgotten incidents, soul-wrecking mistakes, chance misfortunes still dominate us. We recall the mortification of a decade or two ago and as its details are resurrected, we again live through the madness of past years. Prejudices are thus built up, unreasonable indeed. We become averse to a face that reminds us of a countenance belonging to a person who troubled us.

The old poverty still haunts us in our present prosperity; memories of unpleasant toil in the past may make us shrink in terror in our newly found leisure or congenial labour. Mark Twain describes how in his prosperity he would dream that he had to return to the hated lecture platform or that he was again a pilot on the Mississippi River. Past solitude may still send its roots down to the present and leave us lonely in society. He who has known a starved body or many unfulfilled desires, he who has been the victim of ridicule or persecution or never before been encouraged or sympathised with, remembers the past only too well, even when the world honours him with recognition.

Impressions are strongest in youth and hence molest us in old age. The finer our nerves, the less easy is it to forget. The mother who has lost a child cannot forget the misfortune even after other children are born.

It is life's grimmest tragedy that we carry within us ghosts of our old days--ghosts which take us by surprise with their vigour. They mock us at their will; we are tormented unawares; we travel about with them and cannot shake them off. They stand beside us when we love; they take the savour out of our food; they dangle at our footsteps when we go to the house of mirth; they trail us in ghastly pursuit long after we have emerged from the house of mourning. Hence when the poet sings and the philosopher speculates, when the storyteller gives us a tale, unconsciously those old ghosts are with him and get between the lines of his writings. An unseen spirit seems to move his pen and he tells more than he had desired and he gives voice to emotions that he had sought to suppress or regarded as long since buried in a sepulchre that was impenetrable. But the dead passions and tear stained griefs come gliding forth and pierce all barriers and dictate to him. They even wish to be remembered, to be made as enduring in art as in life. They never weary of uttering their sentiments; they pursue the human race to eternity. And when we read of the troubles of man whether in the _Bible_ or the _Iliad_, they are familiar often to us because they are our own. The author cannot escape the past and he always opens up more channels of his heart than he has suspected. His work shows that his old sorrows rise up like the phœnix from its own ashes. His ghosts appear in his art; the fires that were thought smouldering are lighted and we as readers are caught in the flames and are purged in them.

Psychoanalysis tries to rid us of the evil influences of the past by making us aware of the unconscious disturbances.