CHAPTER XVII

THE IDEAS OF LAFCADIO HEARN

I

Lafcadio Hearn anticipated many of Freud's conclusions. He understood the unity of life, in the past with that in the present, and his most persistent thought is the power and influence of the emotional life of our very distant ancestors upon our own lives.

A word should be said about Hearn's antecedents. He has himself left a tribute to his mother, who exerted a great influence upon him. She was a Greek, though one biographer, Nina Kennard, conjectures that she had oriental blood. Hearn was very much attached to her and lost her when he was only six years old by his father divorcing her. This event coloured his entire life. He tells us that there was a miniature painting in oil of the Virgin and the Child, on the wall of the room in which he slept as a child. "I fancied," he says, "that the brown Virgin represented my mother--whom I had almost completely forgotten--and the large-eyed child myself." In this infantile phantasy we see how the repressed love for his mother revived in him and how he identified her with the Virgin.

He wrote to his brother: "My love of right, my hate of wrong;--my admiration for what is beautiful or true;--my capacity for faith in man or woman;--my sensitiveness to artistic things which gives me whatever little success I have;--even that language-power, whose physical sign is in the large eyes of both of us,--came from her. It is the mother who makes us,--makes at least all that makes the nobler man; not his strength or powers of calculation, but his heart and power to love. And I would rather have her portrait than a fortune."

Hearn knew of the existence of the unconscious in the Freudian sense, and also of its influence on authorship. When he was twenty-eight, in 1878, in a letter to Mr. Krehbiel he said: "Every one has an inner life of his own,--which no other eye can see, and the great secrets of which are never revealed, although occasionally when we create something beautiful, we betray a faint glimpse of it--sudden and brief, as of a door opening and shutting in the night." (_Life and Letters_,