A LITERARY COINCIDENCE Sta,—Mr. Angus Watson, in your issue of
October 18th, calls attention to the similarity of theme in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Edgar Allan Poe's Narrative of William Willson. Poe's motif is still more closely followed in Robert Louis Stevenson's little masterpiece Markhetm, where the murderer is confronted by his former self and is thereby shocked into giving himself ap to justice. Again in Q's unfairly neglected book Foe Farrell, a pursuit begun righteously degenerates into vindictiveness, and in despair the pursued drowns himself. When he is taken out of the water he is found to have assumed the countenance originally that of the pursuer.
I do not think the theme is quite so unusual as Mr. Watson seems to believe. It is really based on something familiar to medical psycho!4sts, namely, self-criticism by the super-ego which has become intolerably painful. It implies a certain dissociation in the personality, a subject which always interested R. L. S. as illustrated by his Strange Story of Dr. lekyll and Mr. Hyde.—Faithfully yours,
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