of the Apes," and the works of Scott, Dumas, Cooper, Gaboriau and Doyle, because we have not completely stripped off our ancestral robe of barbarism and boyhood, and the unconscious is therefore gratified by such tales. We are fascinated by marvels and mystery, and by accounts of what our ancestors did, like fishing, hunting and fighting. But a time comes when too many such books produce a sterility of exaggeration, when the heroes become too heroic, obedient to extravagant codes of honor, and triumphant over the impossible; and when the heroines become perfect beings, far above human frailties and impossibly beautiful; and when utopias are created that are too utopian in their disregard for our common human failings to command even a momentary belief; and then a reaction takes place, and during the next age, the public demand realistic novels, describing life as it is, and perferably in its sordid corners and under its most disgusting aspects and we have an age of abnormal Zolaesque fiction. So do romanticism and realism take their turns in the development of literature in every country. It is again a system of compensation working.

But Freudian wish fulfilment is present equally with compensation; as we see in examining the working of the dipus Complex in literature, i.e., the imaginative fulfilments of undirected parental affection. The normal development of affection,

as has been shown already, is from love of the parent of the opposite sex, to love of a mate; and it is bad for the happiness of the individual if either is interrupted or if the transition from the one to the other is not easy. Examples of the nervous conflicts brought on by faultiness of early affections are common in literary history; and much work of outstanding importance has resulted from them.

Thus William Cowper's mother died when he was six years of age; but that his affection for her was lasting is shown by the poignant "Lines Written on the Receipt of my Mother's Picture," which was composed when he was fifty-eight. He did not marry. Mary Unwin was his mothersubstitute, but not completely enough to heal the loss; and when he received his mother's picture, he kissed it, and hung it up where he could see it the last thing at night and the first thing in the morning. He describes his mother's tenderness, her nightly visits to tuck him in, her gifts of biscuits, her fond caresses; all was as vivid in his old age as if it had been but yesterday. This unhealthy attachment was never broken off, and, according to Freud's theory, it was the cause of his eccentricities and fits of despondency and madness.

Schopenhauer and Byron early in life quarrelled with their mothers; they became pessimists and

cynics. Edgar Allan Poe and Lafcadio Hearn both lost their mothers in infancy; they became eccentric and morbid. Molière lost his mother early, and married unhappily; he was a sad man, with misanthropic moods. Thackeray had the like misfortune, added to which he loved where he could not marry; he was an unhappy man, disposed to cynicism. Ruskin was too devoted to a mother with stern ideas on work, his early love affair was unsuccessful and his marriage was unfortunate; he suffered continually from nervous breakdowns. But Robert Browning, who had a quiet normal affection for his mother, and who had a happy marriage, was a confirmed optimist.

An author, actuated by the unconscious, may reveal his private griefs in a disguised form, and repeat them again and again in his works. Charlotte Brontë, when at school in Brussels both as scholar and teacher, fell in love with the headmaster, M. Héger; as he was a married man, she suffered perpetual disappointment. So, writes Mrs. Chadwick, "The principal male characters to be found in Charlotte Brontë's novels were those drawn from M. Héger - M. Pelet, Rochester, Robert Moore, Louis Moore and Paul Emanuel." In fact it is the constant repetition of the theme of disappointed love that points to its real existence in the author herself.

Dickens' two love affairs were connected with

girls and not grown-up women, and so, as both were disappointing, he missed making a happy marriage, with its opportunities for learning the character of woman when fully developed; Maria Beadnell (Dora in "David Copperfield ") rejected him when a boy, and Mary Hogarth (Little Nell in "The Old Curiosity Shop "), his wife's younger sister, died very young. Mary Hogarth then served as his model for women, and it is for that reason that they are so bloodless and unindividualized, a mere "galaxy of amazing dolls variously dressed."

Literature is colored by the personality of its authors, and that in its turn depends upon the unconscious; and so, in many ways, creative literature may be said to be a product coördinate with dreams, and affording the same relief to the repressed desires of its creators. Like dreams, it is one of the many marvellous pieces of natural mechanism that render life tolerable under the artificial conditions of civilization; as Keats feverishly exclaimed,

"O, ease my heart of verse and let me rest.”

CHAPTER XI

DREAMS IN LITERATURE

"My Brownies are somewhat fantastic, like their stories, hot and hot." —R. L. Stevenson, “Across the Plains."

HARDLY a long poem or story ever written but contains some reference to dreams, they are so well suited to convey a score of different ideas, or to hang an incident or fantasy upon. It would therefore be an endless and a futile task to take stock of the dream references even in our own language alone; a complete anthology would furnish out a library.

Dreams are, however, more commonly used for some purposes than for others; and it is proposed in this chapter to consider a few of them.

Shakespeare uses the word "dream " one hundred and fifty times altogether, the highest number in one play being nineteen, in " King Richard III." He used "dreamed eighteen times, "dreamt " twelve, dreaming eight, dreamer four. Shelley is still more liberal:

dream" more than one

hundred and twenty times, and

"dreams "

ninety-eight times; the verb "dream" forty-two