The one moral tale Poe wrote, _William Wilson_, also has great value to the psychoanalyst. For it is a study of emotional conflicts and deals with the subject of dual personality and anticipates Stevenson's famous story, _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_. Poe is William Wilson, and he even describes his school days in England in the tale. It is the history of Poe's own struggle with his unconscious, with evil. He too was a gambler and probably cheated at cards like William Wilson. There are two William Wilsons, one representative of the unprincipled, the criminal, the unconscious primitive instincts in ourselves, and the other William Wilson who is the voice of civilisation, the conscious moralist seeking to repress the other. Surely this great tale is symbolic of man's struggle with his own conscious which civilisation trying to tame. So we leave Poe. Others may take up the question of his alleged drunkenness and its overestimated effect on his art. But I have merely wished to point a few things in his work made clear with the help of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis has given the answer to those who object to Poe because of his lack of moral tone. It should be added that Poe's great attachment to his mother-in-law, Mrs. Clemm, was due to the loss of his own mother in infancy. Poe's devotion and love for women of his later life, Mrs. Osgood, Mrs. Richmond, Mrs. Lewis, and especially Helen Whitman, did not influence his work considerably in spite of the sufferings they caused him, but produced a few good single poems to some of them, notably, _To Annie_, Mrs. Richmond, and _To Helen_, Mrs. Whitman, and the pathetic, masterly letters to these women. FOOTNOTE: [H] He honoured Mrs. Osgood in the same way by republishing another poem from the _Southern Literary Messenger_ of September, 1835, written for some Eliza and opening "Eliza, let thy generous heart." This poem in the poetical works of Poe bears the title, "Lines Written in an Album." It originally was written, Woodberry surmises, to his employer's daughter, Eliza White, though Whitty believes it was addressed to his future wife, Virginia Eliza Clemm. Yet it is very likely the poem was written to one of his early sweethearts, Elizabeth Herring. 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.