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_,
Volume 1, p. 196.) "_Unconscious_ brain-work is the best to develop
... latent feeling or thought. By quietly writing the thing over and
over again, I find that the emotion or idea often _develops itself_ in
the process,--unconsciously. When the best result comes, it ought to
surprise you, for our best work is out of the Unconscious." (_Life and
Letters_, Volume 1, p. 140-141.)
Again Hearn realised that fairy tales had their origin in dreams, an
idea that has been developed by Rank, Abraham and Ricklin, disciples
of Freud. Hearn saw that there was an intimate connection between
literature and dreams. He is one of the first men to have seen the
relation between dreams and supernatural literature. The following
passages are from the lecture on "The Supernatural in Literature"
in the second volume of _Interpretation of Literature_. "Whether
you believe in ghosts or not, all the artistic elements of ghostly
literature exist in your dreams, and form a veritable treasury of
literary material for the man that knows how to use them." "Trust to
your own dream life; study it carefully, and draw your inspiration from
that. For dreams are the primary source of almost everything that is
beautiful in the literature which treats of what lies beyond mere daily
experience."
Hearn, with Samuel Butler, is one of the great champions for the
theory about the power of unconscious memory over us. This idea is
one of the axioms of psychoanalysis, or rather one of its pillars. In
his essay, "About Ancestor Worship" in _Kokoro_, Hearn develops his
theories of inherited memory at length, and one might say that there
is scarcely an essay of his that does not touch on the subject. Here
he states one of the leading lessons taught by psychoanalysis. Hearn
realised that we should not starve all our primitive tendencies, as
this would lead to the destruction of some of the highest emotional
faculties with which they are blended. The animal tendencies must be
partly extirpated and partly sublimated. This is practically Freud's
theory that neurosis is produced by trying to stamp out our sexual
impulses (yet Freud does not mean that we should give these full play).
The following passage from Hearn's essay is part of the prophylaxis
of psychoanalysis. "Theological legislation, irrationally directed
against human weaknesses, has only aggravated social disorders; and
laws against pleasure have only provoked debaucheries. The history
of morals teaches very plainly indeed that our bad Kami require some
propitiation. The passions still remain more powerful than the reason
in man because they are incomparably older, because they were once all
essential to self-preservation,--because they made that primal stratum,
of consciousness out of which the nobler sentiments have slowly grown.
Never can they be suffered to rule; but woe to whosoever would deny
their immemorial rights."
He has a similar idea in his essay on "Nirvana." "Mental and moral
advance has thus far been effected only through constant struggles
older than reason or moral feeling,--against the instincts and
appetites of primitive brute life.... Only through millions of births
have we been able to reach this our present imperfect state; and the
dark bequests of our darkest past are still strong enough betimes to
prevail over reason and ethical feeling."
Hearn regarded man as an entity of millions of cells, a composite of
multiples of lives carrying out unconsciously the behests of past ages.
Man's instincts are but unconscious memories of the instincts of old.
Whitman has this idea in his _Song of Myself_, and Buddha taught this
idea which Hearn calls "the highest truth ever taught to man," "the
secret unity of life." Hearn states the view fully in his remarkable
essay on Dust. "All our emotions and thoughts and wishes, however,
changing and growing through the varying seasons of life, are only
compositions and recompositions of the sensations and ideas and desires
of other folk, mostly of dead people.--I an individual,--an individual
soul! Nay, I am a population--a population unthinkable for multitude,
even by groups of a thousand millions! Generations of generations I
am, æons of æons." Or as he states it in another essay, "Ideas of
Pre-existence," in _Kokoro_: "It is incontrovertible that in every
individual brain is locked up the inherited memory of the absolutely
inconceivable multitude of experiences received by all the brains of
which it is the descendant." There are similar ideas in Jack London's
_Star Rover_.
Hearn laid emphasis on the unity of the past and present, a fundamental
principle of psychoanalysis. Hearn saw this idea in Buddhism and hence
became attached to the philosophy of this creed, and his reconciliation
of it with the theory of evolution is no mere idle dream. Leading
Buddhist scholars before Hearn saw the similarity between the theory
of heredity as taught by evolution and the doctrine of Karma or
transmigration of character. This doctrine of Karma explains also that
a man has pernicious unconquered evil instincts because he is allied to
ancestors who possessed them strongly. Buddhism taught the theory found
in evolution and psychoanalysis, that we contain in ourselves every
moral tendency and psychic attribute of millions of people and animals
from whom we have descended. We are full of shreds of our ancestors'
emotions and characteristics which are buried in our unconscious.
II
Why does Hearn harp on this idea of unconscious memory throughout his
work and in his correspondence? Why was he attracted to the question
of the eternal persistence of life even before he accepted the
philosophy of Buddhism. His pet theory was that nothing could be lost
in the universe. In one of his finest essays, "Reverie," in _Kotto_,
he gives us the secret of his life. He tells that the mother's smile
will survive everything, for life can never disappear finally from the
universe. He first states the materialistic position which assumes that
eventually all life will die and naught will be left of our labours
and struggles, and then he gives the Buddhistic idea, which holds that
nothing is lost in the universe. I think in this essay we have the
keynote to Hearn's philosophy. He lost faith in Christianity early and
with it a belief in the immortality of the individual soul. At the age
of six, he lost his mother, whom he loved, and his scepticism on the
subject of immortality made him feel that his mother was gone from him
eternally. This was painful to him and He accepted the philosophy of
Buddhism as a solace, for it taught something that was not repugnant
to his scientific sense; that life can never die out entirely, for the
universe always would exist and even if life died out on our planet,
those conditions that made it prevail here would reign either in some
other part of the universe or at a later time. Hence we all would
contribute to that life as our ancestors contribute to our lives. In
fact, Hearn once wrote he would not object to being transformed into an
insect. So if life went on forever he would still know that mother's
smile he had lost in infancy. The _Reverie_ essay is the result of his
Œdipus Complex.
In fact, Hearn formulated the idea of the Eternal Recurrence in 1880
before Nietzsche did, who wept when he discovered this by no means
new theory in August, 1881, at Silas Maria, 6,500 feet above sea.
Hearn's essay on Metempsychosis appeared in the New Orleans _Item_ and
was included in a collection published called _Fantastics and Other
Fantasies_. But Nietzsche became intensely pessimistic as the result of
his discovery, since it meant all life's tragedies would also recur.
Hearn, no doubt, abandoned the theory as a literal possibility after he
read Spencer, but he retained his belief in some of the main features
of it.
When we recall that Buckle, who was a free thinker in religious
matters, still clung to the idea of immortality of the soul because he
could not tolerate the thought of never meeting his dead mother; when
we remember that scientists like Wallace and Fiske, who were among the
pioneers of the theory of evolution, finally embraced spiritualism as
a compensation for their lost faith in religion, it should not appear
fantastic to trace Hearn's views on unconscious inherited memory and on
the Buddhistic conception of Metempsychosis, to his loss of both his
mother and his religion; for in his new belief he could meet his mother
and still not sacrifice his intellect to his belief.
Psychoanalysis might be applied to other phases of Hearn's
writings,--his interest in the gruesome and exotic. It can explain his
interest in other races like the coloured people and the Japanese; his
passion for physical beauty and his shyness. One thing that impresses
the lover of Hearn is the seeming impersonality of his work. Yet
though he says little of himself directly, you can see the sensitive,
half-blind sufferer throughout the work. For his ideas studied and
traced to their source reveal of themselves the reasons why he embraced
them.
He has described ideal love, such no doubt as he must have felt, in
_Karma_ in _Lippincott's Magazine_, May, 1890. This story has been only
recently published in book form.
His affinity for Poe and his adoption of the name The Raven in his
letters to Mr. Watkins is seen in the projecting of himself upon
that unhappy genius with whom he had so much in common. He, like
Poe, suffered from poverty, from following aristocratic traditions
in intellectual pursuit, in a devotion to physical beauty, in a love
for French literature, in an interest in extreme suffering, in the
divesting of art from morals and in wandering about from city to city.