Text: Arthur Hobson Quinn, “Edgar Allan Poe and the Establishment of the Short Story,” American Fiction: An Historical and Critical Survey, New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1936, pp. 77-101

[page 77:]

CHAPTER V

EDGAR ALLAN POE AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE SHORT STORY

THE years 1829 to 1832 are landmarks in the history of the short story. At that time appeared almost simultaneously, in France and America, two artists in each country who, while not inventing the short story, modified it so that it henceforth became a definite and well recognized form. Each added qualities of his own, but in general the gain came unity of effect and in variety of material.

Prosper Mérimée and Balzac antedate Hawthorne and Poe so slightly that there can be little question of influence. In 1829 six stories of Mérimée appeared, “Mateo Falcone,” “The Vision of Charles XI,” “The Taking of the Redoubt,” “Tamango,” “Federigo,” and “The Pearl of Toledo.” The first of these is distinctly a story of character, but a careful study of the remainder indicates that the short story in France grew not out of the essay but out of the tale. Balzac's first stories, “The Executioner (El Verdugo),” “Adieu,” “Sarrazine,” “A Passion in the Desert” and “An Episode under the Terror,” came in 1830. These are stories of situation, sometimes of a horrible nature. Between their work and that of Poe there is some similarity, but it is rather in tone than in plot. There is little kinship between the Frenchmen and Hawthorne, in either plot or tone so far as this early work is concerned. Hawthorne, like Balzac, began in 1830, in The Salem Gazette, with “The Hollow of the Three Hills,” while Poe's first short story, “Metzengerstein,” did not appear until 1832, in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier. Yet, since Hawthorne's first great novel was written during the year after Poe's death, it is best to treat the younger artist first.

His romanticism, like that of the Frenchmen, was wholehearted; in its assertion of the writer's freedom to seek his themes anywhere. Yet among the many critical stupidities which have obscured the contribution of Poe to American fiction is the assumption of his exotic quality. It is not hard to disprove this error so far as his fiction is concerned. Three of [page 78:] his stories, “The Gold Bug,” “The Oblong Box,” and “The Balloon-Hoax,” are laid wholly or partly near Charleston; “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” takes place near Charlottesville, Virginia; “Landor's Cottage” is distinctly said to be near New York City and, while “The Domain of Arnheim” and “The Landscape Garden” are not located, their owner, Mr. Ellison, is clearly an American. “The Sphinx,” “Mellonta Tauta,” “X-ing a Paragrab” and “The Strange Case of M. Valdemar” are probably connected with New York City. “The Elk” is definitely laid on the Wissahickon Creek in Philadelphia. Arthur Gordon Pym starts near New Bedford, Connecticut, and The Journal of Julius Rodman is an account of pioneering in the West. As has been shown(1) Poe was constantly concerned in his stories and essays with native material.

But of even more importance is Poe's relation to the major impulse of American life of his day. He was born in 1809, six years after Jefferson bought Louisiana, and he died in 1849, when Polk had carried our territory to the Pacific. In that period of material expansion Poe was exploring in poetry and fiction the limits of the human soul. The intrepidity of the pioneer who faced death daily, the restlessness which led him to abandon a field as soon as it was conquered, are matched by the daring of the artist who “dreamed dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before” and who ventured even into those studies of insanity where he lived among beings whose emotional torments were reflections of the unceasing terror of his own life.

It is not the place in this survey to discuss the details of that life. Most of the problems have arisen from the deliberate perversion of facts by his biographers, beginning with himself, or by the invention of theories concerning his nature which reveal not his impotency but that of his critics. There is no mystery about the real Poe, the hard working man of letters, proud as a demon, yet, in order to make a living, descending to many of the tricks he despised.

It is this duality in Poe that must always be borne in mind, and which he has revealed to us in “The Imp of the Perverse.” As his friend Willis said, “He wrote with fastidious difficulty, and in a style too much above the popular level to be well paid.” Yet no service is done to Poe or to [page 79:] criticism that does not attempt to separate his great stories from his trivial ones, which dire necessity made him publish. Above all, generalities are most dangerous concerning Poe, and in consequence he has had more generalities written about him than any other American author of his day.

The most helpful classification of Poe's sixty-eight short stories divides them into four main groups: the Arabesque, the Grotesque, the Ratiocinative and the Descriptive. In 1840 Poe published his Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, terms which he may have derived from an article by Walter Scott,(2) but which he used so frequently in his fiction and criticism that he made them his own. In a letter(3) written to T. W. White, April 30, 1835, he describes the kind of story most in demand by periodicals of the time. Their nature, he says, consists “in the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque, the fearful colored into the horrible, the witty exaggerated into the burlesque, and the singular heightened into the strange and the mystical.”

The first and third of these qualities he incorporated into the Grotesque stories. They are twenty-two in number:

“The Duc de l’Omelette” (1832), “A Tale of Jerusalem” (1832), “Loss of Breath” (1832), “Bon-Bon” (1832), “Lionizing” (1835), “Four Beasts in One” (1836), “Mystification” (1837), “How to Write a Blackwood Article” (1838), “A Predicament” (1838), “The Devil in the Belfry” (1839), “The Man That Was Used Up” (1839), “Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling” (1840), “The Business Man” (1840), “Never Bet the Devil Your Head” (1841), “Three Sundays in a Week” (1841), “Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences” (1843), “The Spectacles” (1844), “The Balloon-Hoax” (1844), “The Angel of the Odd” (1844), “The Literary Life of Thingum-Bob, Esq.” (1844), “The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether” (1845), “X-ing a Paragrab” (1849). The final titles are given here, several stories appearing with other titles in periodicals at these dates.

It will be noticed at once that no one of the great stories of Poe is included in this list, and that fifteen of the twenty-two were written by 1841. Four of the five stories of 1832 are Grotesques.(4) In short, they [page 80:] were written primarily to sell, and he did not treat the material seriously. Although he rewrote “A Decided Loss” as “Loss of Breath” and “A Bargain Lost” as “Bon-Bon” before he republished them, there is little improvement in the new versions. While they are often amusing, there is no genial humor, only a sardonic satire. Yet even these stories have been imitated by French realists like Eugene Mouton, whose “Crapaud Blanc” or “Le Squellette homogéne” are distinctly in Poe's grotesque manner.

It is quite a different art which created the Arabesques. Within the thirty-six tales included in this group occur some of the very greatest short stories in the literature of the world. They are the products either | of Poe's inspired imagination or of his fertile fancy, and while irony appears in a few cases, like “King Pest,” he never loses, in the. Arabesques, respect for his material. That material is selected with care on account of its strangeness,its appeal to the faculty of wonder. But if the material is romantic, the background and setting are usually painted with realistic detail. It has perhaps not been sufficiently recognized how wide was his experience of places. Through his early life in Richmond, his brief stay in Boston, his army service near Charleston, his dark days in Baltimore, his brighter years in Philadelphia and his struggles against disaster in New York, he became acquainted with the principal cities of the East. His years at Charlottesville as well as his army service gave him an opportunity to see rural landscape, while, of course, his boyhood in Scotland and England widened his horizon.

A chronological arrangement of the Arabesques,

“Metzengerstein” (1832), “Manuscript Found in a Bottle” (1833), “The Assignation” (1834), “Berenice” (1835), “Morella” (1835), “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” (1835), (King Pest” (383), “Shadow — A Parable” (1835), “Silence — A Fable” (1838), “Ligeia” (1838), “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), “William Wilson” (1839), “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” (1839), “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), “A Descent into the Maelstrom” (1841), “The Island of the Fay” (1841), “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” (1841), “Eleonora” (1842), “The Oval Portrait” (1842), “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1843), “The Tell-Tale Hearty, (1843), The Black Cat’t (1802) “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (1844), “The Premature Burial” (1844), “Mesmeric Revelation” (1844), “The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade” (1845),”The Power of Words” (1845), “Some Words with a Mummy” (1845), [page 81:] “The Imp of the Perverse” (1845), “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845) “The Sphinx” (1846), “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846), “Mellanta Tauta” (1849), “Hop Frog” (1849), “Von Kempelen and His Discovery” (1849),

reveals strikingly that the most significant period of Poe's fiction lay from 1835 to 1843. Nearly two thirds of the Arabesques deal with death, suggested, feared, described, or discussed. The death of a beautiful woman, the favorite theme of his poetry, appears again in several forms, in “Berenice,” “Morell,” “Ligeia,” “Eleonora,” and “The Oval Portrait.” Sometimes death stalks through the story personified, as in “The Masque of the Red Death”; sometimes he fills us with awe by the _ shadow of his coming, as in “Shadow” or “The Fall of the House of Usher”; sometimes he is linked in our memory with a dreadful spectacle as in “Metzengerstein.” Often the threat of death is used to establish a mood of terror, as in “The Premature Burial” or “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Sometimes death is linked with the motive of revenge, as in “Hop Frog” or “The Cask of Amontillado.” Twice we are led into the after life, in “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” and “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion.” Usually it is the death of the body, but in«William Wilson” it is the death of the spirit. Death is nearly always triumphant, but in Poe's own favorite, “Ligeia,” the human will to live triumphs, if only for a moment, over the universal enemy.

Allied to the death motive, the theme of the supernatural is established in twenty-two of the Arabesques. In most of these the effect produced is that of terror. A short story is best adapted to produce this effect, for terror is dependent upon apprehension and shock and therefore, strictly speaking, it should not form the basis of a novel. When it is used as the motive of a longer work, the shocks, in order not to fail in appeal, must rise constantly in their intensity, and consequently they tend to become more and more startling till the effect degenerates by reason of excessive improbability. Poe realized this, and in his longest’ prose tale, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the supernatural is not made the basis of the story but is brought in only at the end. At least five phases of the supernatural are found represented in his short — stories. The description of the spirit world and of the relations of human beings with it appears in such stories as “Eleonora,” “The Colloquy of Monas and Una,” and “Shadow”; the denial of a natural law is gone oped in “Ligeia” or “Berenice.” “William Wilson,” “Metzengerstein” [page 82:] and “The Masque of the Red Death” are allegorical. The exaggeration of some natural law or process till it passes beyond the limits of reason is the basis of “Silence” or “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and the abnormal connection between the seat of life and some external agency appears in “The Oval Portrait.”

Classification, of course, is useful chiefly as a means of calling attention to variety; and this classification of the supernatural stories can hardly lay claim to the quality of complete exclusiveness. In his short story work, Poe used many and various methods. Generalizations, therefore, are dangerous, for often in the treatment of a single theme he is found to differ radically. “Eleonora” and “Berenice,” for example, both deal with sorrow at the death of a beautiful woman, the theme which Poe declared to be the supreme topic of art. The effect of the former is to produce the sensation of beauty of the most ethereal kind — the supernatural element is introduced by suggestion, the message from the spirit world comes like an immaterial sigh from the spirit of his departed love. Delicacy, abstraction, atmosphere, are the notes most prominent. In “Berenice” the sensation most definite is that of horror; the means are material, the supernatural element is brought in with a shock not only to the credulity but also to the good taste of the reader, as Poe himself understood.

For the explanation of this difference in treatment we must turn to a sentence in “Eleonora” itself:

When the mood is spiritual, as in “Eleonora,” the effect is artistic, when the mood is simply horrible and revolting, as in “Berenice,” the thought becomes diseased, and the intellect, being subverted to the mood, has no restraining influence. This accounts for the wildness, the undue emotional or moody emphasis in many of Poe's stories, as well as for those lapses from artistic sanity, such as “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” where the supernatural is degraded and the art becomes almost mechanical. But this temporary suspension of the laws of the general intellect has given rise to some of Poe's finest effects. With the sure instinct of the artist, he selected for treatment the most profound impulse in man's nature, that of self-preservation, but he went beyond the preservation [page 83:] of mere physical life and attacked the citadel of spiritual being, the integrity of human identity. Poe knew how often history records the sacrifice by suicide of physical life in order to avert madness, by which identity is lost. In the very first sentence of “The Tell-Tale Heart”:

“True, nervous, — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?

he strikes the note in its most obvious form. Not so obvious, perhaps, is the reason for his interest in the abnormal. But with the record of his dead brother and his living sister before his eyes, and with his own lesion of the brain, he must have lived in constant terror of losing his mental control. When the terror could no longer be borne, he sought oblivion in drink from the consciousness of his own identity. In one sense, it was avoiding insanity by a milder form of insanity.

Is it any wonder, considering the human instinct to deal with those matters which are forbidden, that he should combine this problem of identity with his favorite theme, the loss of a beautiful woman, in those studies, “Morell,” “Ligeia,” “Eleonora,” in which the problem is solved for good or evil by the persistence of individuality in another form? In “Morella” the hero tells us “the notion of that identity which as death is or is not lost for ever — was to me, at all times, a consideration of intense interest.” Morella, the dead wife, lives again in he child, until at the daughter's baptism the husband utters her mother's name, when she dies. In “Ligeia” the first wife returns and not only takes the form of Rowena, the second, who has died in her turn, but changes the physical appearance of Rowena to her own. These changes in “Morella” and “Ligeia” are wrought in a mood of terror, but in Eleonora” the voice of the woman who has died comes like a benediction to the lover who has taken Ermengarde in her place, and the transfer of identity is made in peace.

In “The Fall of the House of Usher” the identity is first established between Roderick Usher and the house itself — then his fear of the decay of the building deepens into a fear of the termination of the family, a loss of racial identity. “The Haunted Palace,” inserted in the story, continues in verse the theme of the ruin of the intellect through the symbolism of the decay of the house. Then the narrator notices the similarity between the twin brother and sister and the “sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature” which had existed between them. Here is again a [page 84:] form of identity which the sister's premature interment apparently destroys, but which triumphs when her spirit calls Roderick Usher to her from the other world.

Poe next carried this theme of identity into that other world. In “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” the senses lose their identity. “The taste and the smell were inextricably confounded, and became one sentiment, abnormal and intense.” Sight became sound — ”sound sweet or discordant as the matters presenting themselves at my ‘side were light or dark in shade.” A sixth sense, that of duration, usurps the place of the others, till the body of Una comes to the grave, when “the light of enduring Love” for a moment illumines the place. But finally all individual entity is lost in that of time and place. In “Mesmeric Revelation,” on the other hand, Poe reveals through the utterance of a man in a mesmeric trance the attitude of one who believes in the preservation’ of identity |even after death. The mysticism of Poe did not lead to the absorption of the individual in God. That to him would be “an action of God returning upon itself — a purposeless and futile action. Man is a creature. Creatures are thoughts of God. It is the nature of thought to be irrevocable.” Poe's conception of the relations of man to his Creator does not lose sight of the dignity which the freedom of the human will secures. Divine volition could have had its way completely, and does have it, in the inorganic life; but in organic life it permits, by the very complexity which produces violations of law, the possibility of pain. Pain is real and necessary to happiness. “Positive pleasure is a mere idea. To be happy at any one point we must have suffered at the same. . . . The pain of the primitive life of Earth is the sole basis of the bliss of the ultimate life in Heaven.” Thus in 1844 Poe expressed the idea of relativity in human happiness. It was not, of course, original with him, but he put it forcibly, and it is to be noticed that there is no railing of the individual at his Creator for the inevitable pain of this life. In this Poe was ahead of his time, and he points forward in his fiction to that glorification of the individuals responsibility which was to flower in drama in Moody and O’Neill.

In contrast to the stories which dwell upon the different forms in which identity is preserved, “William Wilson” presents a study of the terrible effects of the separation of moral ‘and physical identity. The namesake whom William Wilson meets at school is given reality by a gradual development of the struggle in Wilson's soul between admiration [page 85:] and dislike for his schoolmate. How closely Poe follows ibn this concrete relationship the more subtle ebb and flow in the power of the conscience over human action, the story alone can reveal. The low voice of the second William Wilson, his willingness to forego public triumphs over his namesake if only he is conscious of them, his dramatic appearance only at the crucial moments in Wilson's path of evil, his concealment of his countenance until the climax of the story when Wilson, maddened by drink, plunges his sword through the bosom of his victim — all are by planned with the art that conceals art, to produce the destined effect. That effect is best expressed in Poe's own words:

It was Wilson: but he spoke no longer in a whisper, and I could have fancied that I myself was speaking while he said:

It is the supreme triumph of the moral over the sensual life of the individual, the triumph of the principle of identity, which has been its own revenge.

This group of stories, unified through Poe's brilliant presentation of the dark mysteries that through all time have accompanied those who search beneath the superficial to analyze the sources of life, are the greatest of his fictions. As the Arabesques are the finest of his stories, so this series of excursions in the “ultimate dim Thule” are his supreme achievement in that division of his work. Their excellence is due not only to their originality, either of conception or combination of ideas, but also the clarity with which he described states of mind which passed the limits of ordinary comprehension. The best way to appreciate his greatness is to compare him to the triteness or cloudiness of his contemporary, Bronson Alcott, who was also dealing with problems of the unknown. To Poe the name “transcendentalist” was a red rag, and although he remained blind to the greatest exponents of the school, he is to be forgiven, for he knew instinctively that, for the purposes of fiction at least, he was on the right track.

For the supernatural, to be effective, must be at least momentarily believed. A sensation, or at least a belief in the possibility of the elements [page 86:] out of which a sensation is composed, is a powerful adjunct to the appeal of a short story of this nature. Mere belief is not enough, however, for we may believe in the possibility of events and yet remain passive on account of our lack of interest in the sensations. To vitalize the sensations there must be an emotion in the reader which is best secured by a concrete symbol upon which the emotion may center. That is why the figure of the pestilence in “The Masque of the Red Death,” or the form of the dead wife in “Ligeia” is so powerful; why the voices of the dead multitude in “Shadow” produce so great an effect; why even the teeth of Berenice, horrible as they are, fasten emotion to sensation and fix them both in memory.

Another group of the Arabesques consists of Poe's excursions into the domain of science. Contemporary interest led him into a study of the effects of hypnotism in “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” one of his failures to distinguish the point at which horror changes to mere repulsion. “Some Words with a Mummy” reflects his interest in galvanism; “Hans Pfaall” is on the border line between the Arabesque and the Grotesque, a half-serious attempt to match himself with those who had written about journeys to the moon. But Poe, like other writers of the nineteenth century, preferred to satirize the dogmatic claims of science, “and this group of the Arabesques rarely rises to the height of “The Descent into the Maelstrom,” where the interest indeed lies rather in the establishment of the mood than in the accuracy of the details.

Yet the relations of Poe to his imitators in the field of the scientific romance would furnish material for a volume. In order to estimate it properly, it would be necessary not only to compare his work with that of his imitators, especially Jules Verne in France, but also to trace back the path of possible mutual sources in the romantic school of the late eighteenth century in England. There seems to be, however, a decided difference between Poe's scientific romance and that of the French school. It has not perhaps been observed that Poe was both preceded and followed by writers of scientific romance who were concerned largely with establishing probability by means of detailed accounts of facts; while Poe spent his chief strength upon those imaginative flights such as the ending of Arthur Gordon Pym. If one traces, for example, the romantic accounts of voyages to the moon of which Cyrano de Bergerac and Voltaire and Lamartine had given examples, it is to be noticed that the imagination is hardly kept in check at all by objective reality. With [page 87:] Defoe, on the contrary, the reality of objective detail is of importance, and the art of Defoe is spent largely in the endeavor to secure probability. Poe was concerned with probability, of course, but his methods included a much wider knowledge of modern science than Defoe, and emphasis has been laid by recent writers(5) upon his contribution in this direction. Poe's logic and clarity have impressed French critics, however, so greatly that they have, relatively speaking, underestimated the importance of his imaginative contribution. It is really not the accuracy of his scientific details for which he is to be most commended. Poe, as a matter of fact, hardly took them seriously. In “Hans Pfaall,” for example, he introduces humorous and grotesque elements and really negatives the whole scientific atmosphere of his story by bringing the messenger from the moon to the earth without any explanation whatever. Were he living now, he would take great satisfaction in knowing that the dirigible balloon R-34 came over in 1919 in exactly the number of hours which he had brought his own balloon over the Atlantic Ocean. But Poe knew himself that the marvelous passage at the end of Arthur Gordon Pym was greater than the pseudo-scientific romance that he had created.

The methods by which Jules Verne made use of Poe's ideas illustrates to a certain degree the return of the impulse of the scientific romance upon itself. Like Defoe he is largely concerned with the establishing of probability. In his “Un Drame dans les Airs” a madman takes charge of a balloon, it is true, but he reasons lucidly in his conduct of it. In is Cing Semaines en Ballon all the realistic details are given. Most interesting, perhaps,.is his sequel to Arthur Gordon Pym, Le Sphinx des Glaces. He continues the story by reviving some of the survivors, follows the path of Pym, but, when they get to the island Tsalal, Verne departs from his model. There is no white terror, and when they approach the isle the supernatural elements do not appear. Verne dismisses them by concluding that Pym had hallucinations, and that the great white figure was a magnetic mountain with the form of a sphinx. This is only one of the instances in literature in which realism has attempted to destroy through its efforts at probability a great romantic creation. If any other evidence were needed to prove that Verne wore his science with a solemn air, it is his derivation of the dramatic climax of [page 88:] his Tour du Monde en quatre-vingts Jours, from Poe's “Three Sundays in a Week”; or his story of “Docteur Ox” from a combination of “The Devil in the Belfry” and “Eiros and Charmion.” Poe would not have mixed those two notes.

There are six Ratiocinative stories, two of which, “The Oblong Box” and “Thou Art the Man,” are really burlesques of the detective story and might perhaps be classed among the Grotesques. But the four great tales, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Rogét” (1842), “The Gold Bug” (1843), and “The Purloined Letter” (1844), are masterpieces of their kind. They were not the first stories of ratiocination, and Poe had evidently read Voltaire and some of the similar tales that appeared in Blackwood's Magazine. But Poe differs from these earlier writers and from the hosts of his imitators in several ways. The great mass of detective stories fail because there really is no problem; the efforts of the writers are devoted to throwing dust in the eyes of the reader and persuading him there is some mystery concerning a crime, for which, however, there is usually no motive. The result is mere irritation. But Poe always provides a problem, and there is never any attempt to deceive. On the contrary, Poe identifies the reader with the gradual unfolding of the solution until he secures that coöperation between writer and reader which means success. Poe brought to this work not only a keen analytical mind and mathematical powers of a high order, but also imagination, and it is this combination which he places before us in “The Purloined Letter.” Here Dupin, the analyst, is at his best, even more truly a character than in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Here again Poe differs from his successors. Dupin is a real person; his imitations are mere names. In “The Purloined Letter” we are made aware through the appeal for help by the Prefect that a letter has been stolen from “an exalted personage,” and that the thief, the Minister D —— , is known but is protected by the danger which the disclosure of the letter would create; the problem is to secure the return of the letter secretly. Poe therefore apparently gives up at once the most interesting feature of such a search, the discovery of the robber. He also discards with scorn the mechanical methods of search in which Conan Doyle and others revel. The Prefect has examined D —— ‘s house thoroughly, and the letter has not been found on the premises or upon his person. Thus “The Purloined Letter” starts where the usual story ends. Dupin proceeds to study the character of D ——. D —— is a mathematician, [page 89:] also a poet, therefore he is dangerous, for he will evidently not hide the letter in any usual place. Dupin visits D —— ‘s lodgings, sees a half-torn letter carelessly left in a rack, and decides that D —— has chosen to protect his theft by leaving it where the police, whose limitations are applied, would leave it undisturbed. Here a lesser artist would have ended the story. But Dupin does not take the letter at once. He observes it carefully, returns the next day with a facsimile, arranges for a disturbance in the street, and, while D — ‘s attention is engaged, substitutes the false for the real letter. Here, at the very end, Poe provides a motive for Dupin's interest beyond that of the mere detective. D —— has been using his power over a woman for political blackmail. Not knowing that his power has left him, he will again try to persecute her and will be defied and ruined. Dupin even writes a message to D —— in the false letter, for he hates him for injuries to himself as well as for his unprincipled conduct. We thus have human characters and motives, and a problem solved by the identification of the detective not only with the mental but also with the imaginative processes of the criminal.

Much the same methods had been used in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” to prove that the assassin was not human, while in “Marie Rogêt” the analysis was more external, since Poe was working upon the details of a real murder and was not able to exercise his imagination to the same degree. In “The Gold Bug” the solution is obtained through the unraveling of a cryptogram, purely an intellectual exercise, in which Poe was unusually skilled. In the first paragraph of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” as it appeared in the original manuscript, in Graham's Magazine and in the 1843 edition, he speaks of the possibility of the existence of a distinct organ devoted to analysis. ‘That he omitted this paragraph in the revised version which appeared in the collection of his tales published in 1845, may indicate that he felt he had overestimated the importance of the analytical faculty. In any event, the fact that Po wrote so few ratiocinative stories has been frequently commented upon. He was the first great artist in the field, and he gave an impetus to the writing of such tales in France and England hardly to be overestimated. The answer to the apparent paradox is to his credit. He knew that while he was first in this field, the field itself was not of large importance. Others could go on and write detective stories if they wished. But no one else could write the Arabesques.

The Descriptive stories, “The Landscape Garden” (1842), its expanded [page 90:] form “The Domain of Arnheim” (1847), “The Elk” (1844), and “Landor's Cottage” (1849), are interesting mainly through their revelation of Poe's love of natural beauty and his early recognition of the possibility of a profession which should not only restore but also improve nature. There is little or no attempt to establish any relation between human beings and inanimate nature. It remains a spectacle, or, as Poe says of Landor's cottage, “Its marvellous effect lay altogether in its artistic arrangement as a picture.”

Of the two longer narratives of ‘Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1837-1838) becomes important only after he leaves his sources, Irving's Astoria, Benjamin Morell's Narrative of Four Voyages to the South Seas and the Pacific, and the Address of J. N. Reynolds,(6) made in the House of Representatives in 1836. The details of Pym's voyage as a stowaway grow more horrible until they become tiresome, but we are rewarded at the end by the powerful description of the imaginary region into which the boat of the voyagers drifts on to destruction. The Journal of Julius Rodman is a rewriting of earlier accounts of explorations in the West and Northwest, based upon Irving's Astoria and Captain Bonneville and upon the History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark.(7) There is, however, no imaginative flight comparable to the ending of Arthur Gordon Pym. Poe contented himself with modifying and rearranging details with an eye to the picturesque, but the fictional elements are unimportant.

After all, these two narratives are most significant in their evidence that the long story was not his province. His conception both of the poem and the story included brevity as its first requisite. The oft quoted passage from his review of Hawthorne's short stories(8) makes clear Poe's standards for this literary form which he did so much to establish:

Were I called upon, however, to designate that class of composition which, next to such a poem as I have suggested, should best fulfil the demands and serve the purposes of ambitious genius, should offer it the most advantageous field of exertion, and afford it the fairest opportunity of display, I should speak [page 91:] at once of the brief prose tale. . . . The ordinary novel is objectionable in the poem. As the novel cannot be read at one siting, it cannot avail itself of the immune benefit of totality. Worldly interests, intervening during the pauses of perusal, modify, counteract and annul the impressions intended. But simple cessation in reading would, of itself, be sufficient to destroy the true unity. In the brief tale, however, the author is enabled to carry out his full design without interruption. During the hour of perusal, the soul of the reader is at the writer's control

A skillful artist has constructed a tale. He has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents, but having deliberately conceived a certain single effect to be wrought, he then invents such incidents, he then combines such events, and discusses them in such tone as may best serve him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very first sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then in his very first step has he committed a blunder. In the whole composition there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale, its thesis, has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed

— and end absolutely demanded, yet, in the novel, altogether unattainable.

Poe carried out this theory of the short story in his own work. It will be noticed that he does not mention the revelation of character as important; it is the effect he is after, and his tales are primarily short stories of effect. That his characters are often pet is perhaps because they live in an atmosphere of the abnormal or the wonderful. To criticize them as unreal is easy, but one should establish first the meaning of “reality.” For Poe's purposes they are part of the general effect; to have placed an ordinary person of common sense, engrossed with the task of earning his own living, into “Ligeia” or “The Fall of the House of Usher” would have been simply to misunderstand the meaning of art. For characters who are engaged in testing the limits of human endurance, in looking back to the shadows of preëxistence of forward to those of the future life, a large leisure and unlimited opportunities are essential.

But those who say that Poe has created no characters have failed utterly to recognize that vibrant sensitive nature who creates characters and then steps in among them, giving them, through the thought and feeling, such life as they possess. The poet who sees the last fairy in “The Island of the Fay,” the lover of Eleonora or of Ligeia, the [page 92:] tortured soul of William Wilson, even the friend of Roderick Usher, Who passes with him through scenes of terror, is a human being. He is a lonely soul, but he is not to be pitied for he is his own best companion and therefore he has solved the problem of living. The nature lover who could write “In truth, the man who would behold aright the glory of God upon earth must”in solitude behold that glory” was in one of his most sincere moods. Tradition in Philadelphia still tells of the solitary man who walked upon the shores of the Wissahickon Creek and lay for hours drinking in the beauty of the landscape. Here again the danger of generalities is great. While we can identify Poe with some of his heroes, there are others who are as remote as can be from the “quiet, unobtrusive, thoughtful scholar” whom George R. Graham knew. Poe could dramatize crime, or diseased mental states, but it is not necessary to believe that he was a hereditary hypochondriac because he makes Julius Rodman one, more especially since in the description of Rodman he was following, at times verbally, the description of Merriwether Lewis as given by President Jefferson!

To produce his effect, Poe made use of every form of material that lay at hand.(9) From English and American magazines, of which he was an omnivorous reader, and from encyclopedias, he culled incidents, ideas, and situations, and with the high courage of the great adaptors, made them his own. One of the most interesting parallels with an American novelist lies in the similarity between “The Pit and the Pendulum” and the fifteenth chapter of Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly. Huntly comes to life after his fall into the pit in much the same way as the sufferer in Poe's story, and he believes he is the victim of a tyrant who has shut him in a dungeon. His hunger becomes so great that he contemplates killing himself with a tomahawk, with its obvious resemblance to the blade of “a great pendulum. The torment of the thirst caused by the panther Huntly kills and eats may have given rise to the effect of the highly seasoned meat upon the anonymous narrator in “The Pit and the Pendulum.” The most interesting similarity, however, arises from the method of producing terror in both victims because their attempts at escape are blocked by darkness and their unfamiliarity with the surroundings, in brief, by depriving them of their usual experiences. Some of Poe's best [page 93:] effects are secured by similar negations of various kinds. “There is no quiet there, nor silence” in the land in which “Silence” is laid. “Ligeia” begins, “I cannot for my soul remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia.” It is not a mere trick. The exquisite description of the changes which the death of Eleonora makes in the Valley of the Many Colored Grass is built upon the same principle. He could have learned this lesson from Brown without going to any foreign source

In fact the efforts to derive Poe from English or Continental literature have not been very successful. For the best way to arrive at an appreciation of his genius is to compare, for example, “William Wilson” with its Spanish and German parallels. The basic idea of a double personality has long been common property. Poe may have been prompted to write his story by a brief account of a proposed drama by Lord Byron, recorded by Washington Irving,(10) which was to have dealt with a double who died by the sword thrust of the hero and revealed himself as the conscience of his destroyer. Poe probably read the Knickerbocker and certainly read The Gift, for he had a story in the same number; the speculations concerning his use of a play of Calderón which gave Byron through Shelley, the idea of his drama, should have been settled by Woodberry's note.(11)

What Poe used were general suggestions, but he lifted the story, through the methods already outlined, into a much higher spiritual plane, and, by laying its scene amid the recollections of his own school days at Stoke Newington, he endowed it with reality.

Even less did he take, if he took anything at all, from Ernest T. Hoffmann's “Elixiere des Teufels,” for the apparent resemblances(12) can be accounted for more easily by reference to Irving's account, and the final victory of the monk over his insane double is completely different from the catastrophe in “William Wilson.” Poe may have read in translation Hoffmann's collection of tales, Die Serapionsbrüder (1819-1821), [page 94:] stories which were supposed to have been read before a club, just as Poe's projected Tales of the Folio Club were presumed to be read. But surely that idea might occur to anyone. Very little actual similarity in the stories is to be found. We might believe that the cleft in the House of Usher had been suggested by a similar appearance in Hoffmann's “Das Majorat,” if it had not been for the fact that Scott mentions this occurrence in his article on the supernatural, which Poe probably saw. The closest parallel is that between Hoffmann's “Doge und Dogaressa” and Poe's “The Assignation.” But here again the climax is quite different. Poe himself denied the influence in the preface to his Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque: “If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany but of the soul.” This sentence might, of course, be taken as evidence to the contrary,(13) had it not been for Poe's mention of some of the English stories from which he had received ideas in his “How to Write a Blackwood Article.” Evidently he felt that the difference between “The Man in the Bell”(14) and “The Pit and the Pendulum” would be as obvious as their similarities, or he would not have given the source-hunters such a good lead. He would certainly have been amazed at the suggestion that “Silence” is derived from “Monos and Daimonos,”(15) apparently on the ground that a character in each sits on a rock and is fond of solitude. “Monos and Daimonos” is a rambling narrative — ”Silence” is a brief piece of imaginative prose.

He may indeed have seen “Monos and Daimonos,” for in the same issue of The New Monthly Magazine appeared a tale “Frogere,” which illustrates the methods by which Poe built up a story. “Hop-Frog,” that powerful and gruesome story of Poe, relates the revenge of a court jester whom the king has forced to drink wine, which the jester loathes, and whose love, Trippeta, has been grossly insulted by the king when she pleads for him. The jester waits his chance, until the king commands him to design a costume for him and his courtiers at a masquerade. Hop-Frog dresses them as orang-outangs, covered with tar and flax, chains them together and, by a clever device, drags them up through the ceiling, setting fire himself to the king's coat and escaping through the [page 95:] roof. The source of this story is usually given(16) as Lord Berners’ translation of Froissart. But Froissart's narrative simply provides the background of a masquerade in which King Charles VI and five courtiers are dressed as satyrs, and, through an accident, the coats of the courtiers are set on fire. The king is not injured. As Professor Campbell has shown, Poe could have read an excerpt from Froissart's tale in The Broadway Journal(17) and a comparison of the excerpt with the original tale(18) proves that he need not have read that original at all. But what makes “Hop-Frog” such a great story is the way Poe breathes into the crippled jester the incarnate spirit of revenge. There is no jester and no revenge in Froissart. Did Poe then take from “Frogere,”(19) a story of a jester at the court of the Emperor Paul of Russia, who is made the victim of a cruel jest by the Emperor and who in revenge is a party to the Emperor's death, the suggestion for “Hop-Frog”? The titles indicate it. But if so, Poe has changed the nature of the jest completely. The point to be stressed is that Poe created that portion of the story which is important, that the mere names become characters, a human motive of revenge is not merely indicated, but made the climax of the story. It seems therefore almost a critical stupidity to speak of the “sources” at all. By a curious coincidence, Hawthorne in his American Note-Books in 1838 speaks of the same historic incident.

Of more importance in “How to Write a Blackwood Article”is his remark that “Sensations are the great thing. Should you ever be drowned or hung, be sure and make a note of your sensations — they will be worth to you ten guineas a sheet.” The recommendations he made to the hypothetical author not only satirize the staccato style of John Neal, but also reveal Poe's own system of creating an atmosphere of learning from a ready reference book of allusions. Who can criticize him for his many secondhand references when he has so disarmingly revealed the machinery by which the grotesque stories — and even some of the weaker arabesques — were made up to sell?

It is much more profitable, in a survey of fiction, to observe his methods than the reputed sources of his material. Poe first among American [page 96:] writers of fiction understood how to begin at the beginning. The subjective, essay-like introductions of Irving, the introductory devices like “Mine Host” in Hawthorne's “Legends of the Province House” vanish. One has not read ten words in “The Fall of the House of Usher” before the tone of terror is established. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” the first words strike the keynote of the desired effect. The climax is equally well handled. In his very first story, the wild ride of the Prince Metzengerstein into the flames has the directness, the vigor, the economy of the reader's attention, that Poe gave to the short story:

He was to carry the art of the climax to even greater heights in the sudden fall of the Shadow at the feet of the seven assembled guests, in the resurrection of Ligeia, in the living death of William Wilson. In brief,| he was carrying out his own theory of the short story, and in doing this he was meeting the standard set by the most exacting critic of his time.

The strongest influence of Poe shows naturally in those phases of his work which were most easily imitated. The difference between Poe's methods in the ratiocinative story and those of his imitators has already been indicated. Of the Arabesques, the story of the supernatural and the pseudoscientific story found their most artistic expression in the work of Fitz-James O’Brien (1828-1862). This Irish-American, who came to this country in 1852, may rightly be treated here not only because of his death on the battlefield in defence of the Union, but also since his short stories seem to have begun with his residence in New York. O’Brien's work was uneven, and he experimented in the popular types of farce like “Belladonna” (1854), which seems to have been the first of the many stories he published in Harper's Magazine, or the sketches of social life like “The Beauty” or “A Drawing Room Drama,” which give every evidence of haste.

His greatest talent lay in the treatment of the supernatural. “What Was It?”, published in Harper's for March, 1859, for sheer originality of conception rivals the best fiction of its kind. It belongs to that phase of the supernatural in which the effect is produced by the failure of one [page 97:] or more of the senses to react when brought into contact with a s brings it within the larger class which results from denial of some natural law, and it is one of the most effective as it is one of the most natural of devices. The originality of O’Brien's conception rests in his choice of the sense that is to fail to act.

The ghosts with which our literature is stocked usually fall into one group, those which can be seen but which fail to appeal to any other of the senses. Their authors have probably reasoned that the effect of terror was greater on account of this lack of appeal. They failed, however that the belief in the possibility of the appearance was weakened by the failure of each added sense to operate and that the supernatural is most effective when as many as possible of the senses may act except the most powerful, that of sight. O’Brien may have reasoned may have reasoned this out or he may have arrived at the result by the sheer force of genius, but in any case he arrived at the result. In the story “What Was It?”, after preparing the way by a discussion of the most effective methods of producing terror, he tells of the mysterious something which drops on the chest of the hero while he lies in bed awaiting sleep. After a frightful struggle, he subdues the “thing” and is horrified to find after he turns on the light that he can see nothing, although he holds his captive in his grasp. He can hear the rapid breathing, and feel the writhing of the strange being, but to the eyes of the inmates of the house who have been awakened by his cries, he is holding nothing. He proves to them that he is not insane by dropping the monster on the bed, where it makes the impression of a small human being. The visitor finally dies of starvation, as no food can be found which it will eat. The effectiveness of the story is truly remarkable. The methods are those of Poe; the opening sentences being strikingly like the beginning of “The Black Cat,” but the conception is O’Brien's. It was used long afterwards by Maupassant in “Le Horla,” but in unity of construction and in realism of detail the Irish-American surpassed the great Frenchman.

Equally original is the conception, in “The Diamond Lens” (1858), of a microscopist who grinds a diamond into the most powerful lens in the world. Through this he sees in a drop of water a beautiful form with whom he falls in love. The utter hopelessness of his emotions when he realizes that the drop must evaporate and that she can never know him, lifts the story beyond the mere cleverness of pseudoscientific supernaturalism, for it indicates without comment the helplessness of man [page 98:] before the inexorable laws of Nature. “The Wondersmith,” in which a set of mannikins who are endowed with fiendish attributes turn on their creator and ‘his allies and kill them, is another artistic success, and again O’Brien anticipated such recent dramatic treatments of the theme as the robots of R. U. R. O’Brien has the courage not to explain his super-natural effects, and indeed in his best stories an explanation would ruin the effect.

In the year 1832, when Poe's first short story appeared, James Hall (1793-1868) published his Legends of the West. Born in Philadelphia, a pioneer, a soldier, a lawyer, and an editor, he knew the country from his birthplace to the Mississippi and beyond it. In his work we see the survival of that combination of the tale and the character sketch out of which the short story grew. With more understanding and sympathy than Timothy Flint, and with far greater sense of form, he wrote of the various types that made up the frontier, including the faith doctor, the backwoodsman, the hunter, the settler and the Indian, noting the singular phraseology of the people, their originality and their figures of speech.

His description of the French settlers — at Carondelet in Louisiana — is sympathetic in its contrast between the easy rule of the French and the oppressive rule of the English. At times Hall goes back to the eighteenth century, as in “Michel de Coucy,” a story of Illinois near the Mississippi (Prairie de Rocher), about 1750, an amusing tale of French and Spanish jealousy. His humor is delightful; his descriptive power, especially of the prairies, is illustrated by a story like “The Emigrants.” One of the most interesting tales is the vindication in “The Indian Hater” of Monson, whose wife, mother, and children had been destroyed by the Indians, and who devoted himself to revenge.

The second volume, The Soldier's Bride and Other Tales (1833), does not equal The Legends of the West, since it is made up of romantic tales or essay-like descriptions of places or eccentric characters. The supernatural is fairly well done in “Pete Featherton,” laid in Kentucky. The Tales of the Border (1835) contains much better characterization. In this volume, he developed again the motive of revenge in “The Pioneer,” a well written character story of a circuit rider who tells how his father and mother were killed by Indians and his sister carried off, and how for years he had devoted himself to revenge, Then, meeting his sister as the apparently contented wife of an Indian and mother of [page 99:] two children, he had had a revulsion of feeling and had determined to undo some of his own career of passion and revenge. In “The French Village” published first in his magazine, The Western Souvenir, in 1829, Hall draws a contrast between the contented life of the inhabitants under French rule and their disappearance before American “progress.” His skill in character drawing is shown too in the picture of Pierre, the French barber in “The Dark Maid of Illinois,” who thinks the prairie fire is a sign from Heaven on account of his marriage to the daughter of the chief of the Illini. Even better is “The New Moon,” a story of the marriage of New Moon, a daughter of the chief of the Omawhawam to Bolingbroke, a white trader, who is a cold-blooded creature and weds her simply to gain advantage in the business he is conducting.

The best stories in these early volumes were collected in 1846 under title of The Wilderness and the War Path. Hall added two fine studies of Indian nature in “The Black Steed,” in which the qualities of courage, persistence and wariness are made vividly alive in the person of the hero, and “The Red Sky of the Morning,” a description of the hardships of the Indians in the Chippewa region on Lake Superior. His Indians are a fair compromise between the idealized portrait of the noble red man and the bloodthirsty savages of Bird, who may indeed have taken a hint from Hall for his character of Nick of the Woods. Hall's one novel, Harpe's Head (1833), is laid in Virginia and Kentucky at the end of the eighteenth century. “Harpe,” the ruffian, is a sinister figure and remains in the memory. So does “Hark Short,” the queer boy of North Carolina origin, who lives a lonely existence, unable to take advantage of the offers of those he has assisted, such as Colonel Hendrickson, whom he saves from the Indians. He is a remarkable picture of a human being who has grown up without kindness and is purely animal in his nature.

Hall does not hesitate to depict the unattractive side of the frontier, especially the violence of the outlaws. But his most striking quality, that of liberality, kept him from the wild exaggerations that disfigure Simms’ border romances with purely typical figures. He left the first authentic picture of the West that our early short story produced, and he showed the capacity of the form in dealing with the varied incidents and characters of the frontier. For many years his fiction was the source and the model for later writers, just as his historical and descriptive writings, such as his Sketches of History, Life, and Manners in the [page 100:] West (1835), or its revision, The Romance of Western History; or, Sketches of History, Life and Manners in the West (1857), have furnished later historians with a vivid and authoritative account of the settlement of the region he knew so well.

Even more realistic were the sketches which Caroline M. Kirkland (1801-1864) published in 1839 under the pen name of Mrs. Mary Clavers as A New Home — Who’ll Follow?; or Glimpses of Western Life. So real indeed are they that they lie on the border line of fiction and the essay, and stem from Our Village, by Miss Mitford, herself perhaps inspired by Irving. The voyage to Michigan, the purchase of lots in what becomes “Montacute,” the selling of swamps and the suffering from fever and ague antedate Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit and later American realistic pictures of the frontier. The Montacute Female Beneficent Society, with Mrs. Campaspe Nippers at its head, is acutely described as “the hotbed from which springs every root of bitterness among the petticoated denizens of Montacute.” Long before Sinclair Lewis, Mrs. Kirkland drew a picture of the tyranny of opinion in a small Western town.

Another writer of short stories, whose vitality has secured them a place in any survey of fiction, was Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (1790 1870). Born in Augusta, Georgia, he reproduced life in that state in his Georgia Scenes (1835), with a veracity and a humor that provide a startling contrast with most of the idealistic fiction of the day. Georgia Scenes, like Halls stories, are partly tales and partly descriptive essays. Their importance lies in the faithful picture of life in Georgia, at periods from 1809 to 1835. It is no romantic plantation life; it is a lower middle-class frontier — cruel, rough, ‘vigorous, and bearing evidence of the truth of its portrayal on every page. Longstreet showed his ability to plan a climax in such a story as “Georgia Theatrics,” in which a traveler (and the reader) is horrified at overhearing the agonized cries of a boy apparently having his eyes gouged out by another, only to find that he has been listening to a rehearsal for a real contest. The effect of this sketch is increased when we read in “The Fight” of the brutality of personal conflict in Georgia at that time. Again, in “The Dance,” a middle-aged man indulges in sentimental memories concerning his hostess, whom he had known twenty years before, only to find she has entirely forgotten him. There is delicious irony in “The Horse Swap,” in which a trader congratulates himself on having disposed of a horse arr pest known is [page 101:] with a sore back, only to find his new nag to be blind and deaf. The best known is “The Militia Company Drill,” describing the complete lack of unity and discipline of Captain Clodpole's band. According to the preface, this sketch was contributed by a friend,(20) but in any event, it is the undoubted source for Thomas Hardy's famous scene in The Trumpet Major. It was a free life that Longstreet represented, before the Evangelical repression of dancing and card-playing had become established. So true indeed was his picture that later, when he had become a Methodist clergyman and a college president, he is said to have endeavored to suppress the sketches. But they remain to delight Lo human nature, even in the raw, and in the development of fiction they pointed the way in which Mark Twain and Bret Harte were to find success.

The short story in America was to take many forms, but one quality which Poe, Hawthorne, O’Briend, Hall, Mrs. Kirkland and Longstreet illustrate in different ways, remained characteristic. Whether idealistic or realistic in their methods, they were pioneers in their close scrutiny of new form of life or in their imaginative reach into uncharted regions. To varying degrees they owe debts to the first great pioneer, Irving, but in any event they established upon firm foundations the literary form in which America retained so long its unquestioned supremacy.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 78:]

1 Campbell, Killis, “The Backgrounds of Poe,” in The Mind of Poe and Other Studies (Cambridge, 1933). See also the present writer's The Soul of America (Philadelphia, 1932).

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 79:]

2 “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition,” Foreign Quarterly Review, 1 (July, 1827), 60 — 98.

3 See Napier Wilt, “Poe's Attitude Toward his Tales: A New Document,” Modern Philology, XXV (August, 1927), 101-105.

4 “For the original forms see the reprints in Edgar Allan Poe and the Philadelphia Saturday Courier, edited by J. G. Varner (1933).

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 87:]

5 Lemonnier, L., “Edgar Poe et le Roman scientifique français,” La Grande Revue, XXXIV (August, 1930), 214-223.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 90:]

6 See Woodberry's Life, Vol. 1, pp. 191-193; and R. L. Rhea, University of Texas Studies in English, X (1930), 135-146.

7 For detailed comparisons of The Journal of Julius Rodman and its sources, see articles by P. P. Crawford and H. A. Turner; University of Texas Studies in English, XII (1932), 158-170, and X (1930), 147-157. See also Woodberry's Life.

8 Poe reviewed Twice Told Tales in Graham's Magazine, April-May, 1842. He revised this criticism, including Mosses from an Old Manse, for Godey's Lady's Book, November, 1847, from which the quotation is made.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 92:]

9 For the best résumé of the many articles in which the sources of Poe's stories have been treated see Killis Campbell, “The Origins of Poe,” in his The Mind of Poe and Other Studies (Cambridge, 1933).

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 93:]

10 Knickerbocker Magazine, VI (August, 1835), 142-144. Also in The Gift for 1835. Found conveniently in An Unwritten Drama of Lord Byron, edited by T. O. Mabbott (Metuchen, 1925)

11 Life, Vol. I, p. 232n. Woodberry, starting with Irving's suggestion that the idea was inspired by a play called the Embozada, identifies the original as El Purgatoriao de San Patricio, in which Un Hombre Embozado, or the muffled figure, is a character. There is no evidence that Poe saw the Spanish play.

12 See Palmer Cobb, The Influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann on the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe (Chapel Hill, 1908).

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 94:]

13 When “Metzengerstein” appeared first in The Saturday Courier, it had no subtitle. When it was reprinted in The Southern Literary Messenger, it was called “a tale in imitation of the German,” possibly to make it more attractive.

14 Blackwood's Magazine, X (November, 1821), 373-375.

15 New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, XXVIII (1830), 387-392.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 95:]

16 Woodberry: Life of Poe, Vol. II, p. 295.

17 1 (February, 1845), 71.

18 The Chronicles of Froissart, translated out of French by Sir John Bourchier, Lord Berners, Cap. CXXXVHI, Vol. VI, pp. 96-100, Ed. (London, 1903).

19 New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, XXVIII (1830), 491-496. By a curious chance, the story is signed “Px.”

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 101:]

20 F. L. Pattee, in American Literature Since 1870, p. 298, attributes this Oliver Hillhouse Prince.

Notes: While the title of the chapter is “Edgar Allan Poe and the Establishment of the Short Story,” the running page header reads “Poe and the Growth of the Short Story.”