Text: Fred Lewis Pattee, “Edgar Allan Poe,” The Development of the American Short Story, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1923, pp. 115-144

[page 115:]

I

The chief literary contemporary of Hawthorne in America, his earliest adequate critic, and his most able colleague in the development of the short-story form, was Edgar Allan Poe. The two began their literary career at almost the same moment, they contributed to the same periodicals, they worked in the same atmosphere of romanticism — the wild German Mährchen world which had been dignified by Scott and sentimentalized by Byron and Bulwer and Disraeli, and both were destined permanently to enrich that shortened form of fiction which circumstances had placed in their hands: yet in spite of all this the two men were as absolutely unlike as North and South.

Hawthorne fundamentally and unalterably was a New-Englander. As completely as even Poe was he a romanticist and a worshiper of beauty, and yet so redolent was he of his native region that he could make of romanticism a thing accepted by even the straitest sect of the Brahmins, and do it, moreover, in the form of short fiction. Never was he able to forget that everything, even art, must have its moral connotations. To him, sensitive with inherited conscience and trained from childhood to peer beneath the surfaces of life, into the sources of action,; into the recesses of the heart, a tale was a problem in the mathematics of human living, with its a and b and x and its inevitable resultant.

From this point of view no man could have been farther away than Poe. He was anti-Puritanical, anti-New England and all its content. His inheritance and training had been the direct opposite of Hawthorne's. He was nomadic, restless, temperamental — it was in his blood. His grandfather, born in Ireland, became a general in the American Revolutionary War, and later settled in Baltimore; his father, when not yet of age, had thrown down his law books, joined an itinerant company of actors, and had married the sprightly little variety artist of the troupe, an English [page 116:] girl of theatrical antecedents, born in mid-ocean, educated from infancy on the stage, and with her had lived the excited, unnatural life of the nomadic actor.

Before their child Edgar was old enough to remember them, both of his parents were dead, leaving him nothing save a miniature of the young mother, an elfish thing — it “accompanied the poet through all his wanderings” — the original, one might easily believe, of his Ligeias and Eleonoras and Ulalumes, a creature to haunt the boy's imagination, petite, elfin-eyed, exquisite as the nymphs she delighted to impersonate on the stage and as guiltless of soul. Nothing else of mother influence or of home sentiment ever seems to have touched the boy. From the first he was anchored to nothing and grounded in nothing save the intellectual. The Allan family, which made him a part of their household — austere, Scotch, materialistic — understood him little and gave him not at all the training that should have been his. During the years from six to eleven, the peculiarly impressionable years, he was transplanted to England and placed in a school, first in London, then in Stoke Newington, a plucking up of whatever of roots may have formed in his early Virginia environment. Then for five years, or until be was sixteen, he was in a Richmond school, a select establishment, preparing for college. A year in the University of Virginia, brilliant in scholarly results, but unfortunate in all others, served still further to unsettle his soul. Gambling debts exceeding two thousand dollars are seldom looked upon with complacency by the fathers or even the foster fathers of freshmen. Mr. Allan withdrew him and sought to induct him into a business career.

One might laugh, were it not pathetic, at the blindness of the well-meaning old merchant into whose staid household had come this surprising elf child to upset it. The boy disappeared. Shortly afterward in Boston appeared a thin volume Tamerlane and Other Poems. By a Bostonian, and its author, by what impulse we can only conjecture, possibly in emulation of his favorite poet, Coleridge, celebrated the event as a soldier regularly enlisted in the United States army. A military life of two years followed, at every point blameless, until Mr. Allan, learning in some way of his whereabouts, secured for him an honorable discharge and a cadetship at West Point. If he was to be a soldier he should enter the army as a gentleman. Again a burst of poetry — Al Aaraaf, [page 117:] Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, by Edgar A. Poe, issued at Baltimore in his twentieth year.

He was at West Point a year and a half. At first his record was creditable and even distinctive. Then had come the remarriage of Mr. Allan — Poe's foster mother had died early in 1829 — and the full realization on the part of Poe that he was no longer a rich man's sole heir, but a dependent who might at any time be cut off with nothing. A little later he was to realize his worst fears: trained in all the tastes and instincts of a gentleman he was to be left, like an English second son, penniless without trade or profession, and, moreover, with an aristocratic pride that made manual toil impossible. How deeply this cut into his life appears from a letter he wrote several years later, after the death of his foster father:

The army as a profession lost whatever charm it had ever had for him. Without money, as Poe himself later explained it, there was little hope for a worthy military career, and deliberately he disobeyed orders, absented himself from classes, and neglected duties until in March, 1831, he was dropped from the academy rolls. Again he celebrated his new freedom with a volume of poetry — Poems by Edgar A. Poe, bearing, like the Lyrical Ballads of a generation before, a preface that defined and explained and defended his poetical canons.

He was twenty-two, practically the same age as Hawthorne, when he left Bowdoin, and, like him, he also retired into a seclusion almost total. For nearly three years little is known of his life. The most probable conjecture is that he lived at Baltimore with his father's sister, Mrs. Clemm, and that, like Hawthorne again, he gave himself over to reading and study and literary creation. He worked, we know, at a drama entitled Politian, and he wrote tales, some of which he may have published early, even as did Hawthorne, anonymously and in obscure papers. He once noted, for instance, that the “MS. Found in a Bottle” had been first published in 1831, two years before it won the prize that was to make him known. [page 118:]

The first tale, however, concerning which we have positive data is his “Metzengerstein,” which appeared anonymously in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier in January, 1832. Four other tales, also anonymous — “Duc de L’ Omelette,” “A Tale of Jerusalem,”’ “Loss of Breath,” and “Bon-Bon” — appeared in the same paper during the year. That the Courier in 1831 had offered a prize of $100 for the best story submitted before December 1, a prize awarded Miss Delia S. Bacon, of the State of New York, author of The Tales of the Puritan, etc., for her story, “Love's Martyr,” a story printed the week before “Metzengerstein,” and that the publishers had announced that all stories submitted were to become the property of the paper, perhaps accounts for the publication of the five tales.(1)

We can be more positive concerning Poe's next publication. In the summer of 1833 the Baltimore Saturday Visiter offered a prize of fifty dollars for the best tale submitted, and this prize Poe won, his “MS. Found in a Bottle” being selected as the best of the six tales he had put in competition under the general heading Tales of the Folio Club. The tale duly appeared in The Visiter, October 19, 1833. Just a week later the paper announced that a volume of tales to be entitled The Folio Club was “being put to press.” The announcement is worth reproducing:

One week later, November 2, the announcement was withdrawn. Mr. Poe had decided to bring out the book in Philadelphia.(2) The book was not published. After holding the manuscript [page 119:] apparently for a year, Carey & Lea finally refused it, adducing as their reason that “ small books of detached tales, however well written, seldom yield a sum sufficient to enable the bookseller to purchase a copyright.”

The book refused by the Philadelphia firm contained sixteen tales: the six offered for The Visiter prize, the five previously published by The Saturday Courier, and in addition “ Berenice/ ‘ “Morella,” “Hans Pfaal,” “King Pest,” and “Shadow — a Parable.” From The Visiter announcement of October, 1833, it may fairly be inferred that all of these sixteen tales, save perhaps “Hans Pfaal,” had been written before the time of the contest, and that at least some of them had received a cold reception at the hands of editors and publishers and even readers.

The next period in Poe's life is connected with the Southern Literary Messenger of Richmond. Through the influence of Kennedy he became a contributor, and, after July, 1835, the editor, of this periodical, and in a few months by the brilliancy of his work he placed it among the most successful of American magazines. He wrote during the period of his editorship little save criticism, but he printed in its pages the greater number of the Folio Club Tales and several of his earlier poems. Suddenly in January, 1837, he left Richmond for no reason that has adequately been explained, and settled in New York City induced possibly by the promises of the editor of the New York Review, a journal that soon became one of the victims of the panic year. For several months he worked upon his novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which Harper and Brothers brought out in July, 1838, and then some time during the summer he moved to Philadelphia, where he remained for six years.

The rest of Poe's life may be passed over rapidly. He was a magazinist, flitting from magazine to magazine, now as editor, now as contributing assistant, now as hack writer and literary adventurer. It must not be forgotten that during the entire period of his literary life he dreamed of founding a magazine of his own, one in which he could be free to lift to his own level the standard of American poetry and prose, in which he might review fearlessly the books of his period, and in which he might work out to completeness his system of literary criticism. Often for months at a time he was just at the point of launching his Penn Magazine or his Stylus, often even reaching the stage where he had [page 120:] already a list of subscribers, but always the project fell through at the last moment for want of funds. “ The effect upon American literature, especially upon its fiction and its criticism, had Poe been financially supported and been enabled to have realized to the full his dream, can only be conjectured. As it was, he was compelled to live the life of a Grub Street magazinist, doing to a large extent not what he would, but what he must. Discouraged, cursed by hope deferred, maligned and belittled, neglected even when he had put forth some of the most distinctive work of his period, he never once turned his back upon literature. Unlike all the rest of his literary contemporaries, he earned never a dollar in his life save with his pen.

The Philadelphia period was undoubtedly the golden era of his genius, especially in the field of prose. Here he wrote the most of those distinctive tales that are now to be found in books of selections. Only a part of the time was he actually connected with any magazine. For a year beginning July, 1839, he was assistant editor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine; for another year, from April, 1841, he was editor of Graham ‘s Magazine, at its period of highest influence; and he seems in 1843 to have had some connection with the weekly Saturday Museum.

During the rest of his life, from April, 1844, he was a resident of New York City. In the autumn of that year he became a subeditor of Willis's Evening Mirror; in February of the following year he was made co-editor with C. F. Briggs of the weekly Broadway Journal; and, in October of the same year, he became its editor and proprietor. The paper died, however, the following January, Poe's finances being in such a condition that failure was inevitable. In 1845 appeared his poem, “The Raven,” the first piece of his work to gain universal recognition. But disaster was upon him; his child wife, whom he idolized, died amid surroundings of utter poverty, and Poe himself fell into an illness that for weeks held him near to death. Never again was he to be fully himself. In November, 1845, he wrote Duyckinck: “I really believe that I have been mad — but indeed I have had abundant reason to be so.” The rest of the story it is needless to tell. He died wretched and alone in Baltimore, October 7, 1849.

II

Poe's first period as a short-story writer produced the sixteen Tales of the Folio Club, all of them probably written during the [page 121:] penumbral years between 1831 and 1835. Possibly some were of earlier date. He wrote tales, we know, while in the University of Virginia and read them to his classmates, and he may have written them while at West Point, but so far as we know none have survived. The sixteen tales represent all that is known of his early fiction. There is a gap of years between them and the next group, for, during the Messenger period, he wrote only criticism; the stories that appeared in nearly every issue of the magazine were all drawn from the earlier collection. In the case of Hawthorne we have Fanshawe, we have self-revealing paragraphs concerning his obscure years, and after 1835 we have notebooks, but for a study of Poe's ‘prentice years we have only these tales, and of these we know only the probable sequence of first publication, certainly not the order in which they were written.

Kennedy, the literary godfather of Poe, writing him February 9, 1836, concerning the eight tales already published in the Messenger: “Berenice,” “Morella,” “Lionizing,” “The Visionary,” “Bon-Bon,” “Loss of Breath,” “The MS. Found in a Bottle,” and “Metzengerstein” — characterized them as “bizarreries.” His first impressions of the tales, gained in the atmosphere of the time and in full knowledge of the fiction then being produced, has peculiar value. He wrote Poe:

Poe replied that he had intended the tales to be satires:

Almost at the same moment, March 3, 1836, Paulding was writing to White, the proprietor of the Messenger, explaining that [page 122:] the publishing house of the Harpers had declined to bring out the tales, first, because they already had appeared in the Messenger, and therefore would be “no novelty,” but

The Harpers, however, agreed that if Mr. Poe would “ lower himself a little to the ordinary comprehension of the generality,” they would be glad to publish his work. Paulding thereupon offered this advice:

It would seem, therefore, that Poe by his own confession and in the judgment of those of his contemporaries best fitted to speak upon the matter considered these early tales, including even “Berenice” and “Morella,” as satires upon the philosophical vagaries of the time and upon the extravagances of current prose romance.

To Poe, in this earlier period, literature was poetry, and poetry with him was “not a pursuit, but a passion.” If he must live by his pen, as fate had decreed, he must write prose, and marketable prose in 1831 meant short stories for the annuals and the lady's books. The quality of this commodity in the period when Poe began his work we have seen. Irving a decade before had spoken of wild tales of the German type as even then “the commonplace of the day.” By 1830 they had grown wilder and had invaded even a periodical as staid as Blackwood's. That Poe was a reader of the Blackwood's of this period we have plenty of [page 123:] evidence. He read William Mudford's “The Iron Shroud” in the January, 1831, number, and later made use of its idea and atmosphere for “The Pit and the Pendulum. “ In one of his later critiques he showed familiarity with the gruesome series entitled “Passages From the Diary of a Late Physician.” The nature of these tales one may learn from their titles: “ The Murder Hole,” “The Murderer's Last Night,” “The Dance of Death. From the German,” “The Pandour and His Princess. A Hungarian Sketch,” and “The Bracelets. A Sketch From the German.”

The American echoes of the school we have studied. Godey's and its tribe became increasingly full of mélanges of sensation and horror — flamboyant with adjectives and tremulous with sentimentality. That Poe was aware of this literature and its vogue, and that it ran counter to all his conceptions of literary art is evident to all who read him. To his “Loss of Breath” travesty in the Messenger he gave the subtitle “a la Blackwood,” and at a later period he wrote “How to Write a Blackwood Article” and to it he appended a burlesque beyond which travesty may not go.

It is but fair to Poe to believe that only a few of these tales chorded with his own highest literary ideals. Three of his early sketches undoubtedly he wrote upon the highest planes he knew: “Silence — a Fable,” “Shadow — a Parable,” and “Assignation.” It is the prose that has beauty in its soul, prose that is near to poetry in its elevation of style. That Poe was embittered by his failure to market this really remarkable type of work is not improbable and that he thereupon launched out into travesty and satire and banter there can be no question.

The literary prototype of the man was Daniel Defoe. There are similarities in the two almost startling: the same journalistic instinct, the same sardonic humor, the same love for hoaxing the reading public, the same genius for seizing upon the latest discovery or scientific inference and pressing it to its conclusion, and the same mastery of verisimilitude by the use of minute details. “Hans Pfaal” and “Arthur Gordon Pym,” “The Balloon Hoax” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” “The Journal of Julius Rodman” and “Von Kempelen and His Discovery,” read as if from the pen of the author of Robinson Crusoe and The Apparition of Mrs. Veal. A letter written by Poe to Duyckinck as late as March, 1849, throws light upon Poe's habit of mind at this point: [page 124:]

If you have looked over the Von Kempelen article which I left with your brother you will have fully perceived its drift. I meant it as a kind of “exercise” or experiment, in the plausible or verisimilar style. Of course there is not one word of truth in it from beginning to end. I thought that such a style, applied to the gold excitement, could not fail of effect. My sincere opinion is that nine out of ten (even among the best informed) will believe the quiz (provided the design does not leak out before publication) and that this, acting as a sudden, although, of course, a very temporary, check to the gold fever, it will create a stir to some purpose. . . .

I believe the quiz is the first deliberate literary attempt of the kind on record. In the story of Mrs. Veal, we are permitted, now and then, to perceive a tone of banter. In Robinson Crusoe the design was far more to please, or excite, than to deceive by verisimilitude, in which particular merely, Sir Edward Seaward's narrative is the more skillful book. In my “Valdemar Case” (which was credited by many) I had not the slightest idea that any person should credit it as anything more than a “Magazine paper” — but here the whole strength is laid out in verisimilitude.

No one can read the Folio Club tales straight through without feeling that Poe wrote the most of them in the hoaxing spirit — ”half banter, half satire.” The public was reveling in the Blackwood's type of tale steeped in “Germanism and gloom”; the metaphysical cult, especially in New England, was discussing Swedenborgian mysticism and metempsychosis, and the various intricacies of the German mysticism: he would write tales that would out-Herod Herod. In “Loss of Breath” he presses the popular manner to its extreme; Peter Schlemihl lost his shadow, Undine lived without a soul, HaufFs Dutch Michael did very well without a heart, Faust and Tom Walker disposed of their souk — he would tell of the man who lost his breath. His hero is maimed, mangled, crushed, hanged, buried alive, but, being without breath, it is impossible for him to breathe his last breath. Consigned to the tomb, he industriously opens all the coffins, sets in view their contents, finds in one of them his lost breath, and, taking possession of it, is rescued, none the worse for his adventures. Satire can go no further.

It is to be doubted if “Metzengerstein” is to be taken with complete seriousness, fine as are some of its art effects. For the second printing of it in 1836 Poe added the subtitle, “A Tale in Imitation of the German.” The horse in the tapestry that comes ferociously to life, and the final destruction of the castle with the fiery ascension of the beast, are both of Otranto texture, and the metempsychosis motif is a fling at the subtleties of German [page 125:] philosophy. It is not hard to believe that even “Berenice” and “Morella” have in them much of banter and satire. Poe was trying his ‘ prentice hand. German mysticism and the marvels of psychology were vaguely understood among the generality of readers: he would, in Defoe fashion, make use of the interest in them for tales that would arouse wonder and even amazement, just as later he did it with mesmerism for the “M. Valdemar” tale.

How much German Poe actually knew is open to question, but in French he had been carefully trained, and he had read enough of it to catch to perfection the French lightness and finesse. Kennedy, writing him in September, 1835, advised him to devote himself to the writing of “ farces after the manner of the French vaudevilles.” Undoubtedly he had been reading “The Duc de l’Omelette,” “Bon-Bon,” and “A Tale of Jerusalem”; all of them French after the Disraeli manner.

To study these early travesties and youthful exercises is to discover the genesis of certain elements in Poe's art. In all of them invariably there is unity of tone, there is freshness and novelty of treatment, and there is a carefully prepared denouement. “The Duc de l’Omelette” is essentialy [[esentially]] French in its art. The “Duc,” who has “died of an ortolan,” has fallen, in the approved manner of the time, into the hands of Mephistopheles, but he proves superior to his Majesty in finesse and beats him in a game of cards for his soul, flinging down the winning trump with a smartly turned epigram. Nothing could be more French in style and feeling. In “Bon-Bon” his Majesty discourses wittily with his victim, recounts with gusto parallel cases — ”Quintus Flaccus — dear Quinty! as I called him when he sung a seculare for my amusement, while I toasted him in pure good humor, on a fork” — and finally works him to a neatly turned climax in the crackling, epigrammatic, French-paragraph style.

Everywhere it is the work of an artist who plans and proportions and who shapes all to the culmination. Such a craftsman naturally will be out of sympathy with the clumsy work of those about him, with the crude color-splashing and overdone effects and straggling proportions of the lady's book fiction everywhere so popular. His contempt he expressed with unusual bitterness at the beginning of his Messenger editorship, the first chance he had had to take a public stand. The novel Norman Leslie he dubbed “the most inestimable piece of balderdash with which the common sense of [page 126:] the good people of America was ever so openly or so villainously insulted.” The plot is a “ monstrous web of absurdity and incongruity.”’ “The characters have no character.” They are, “one and all, vapidity itself.” “All the good ladies and gentlemen are demigods and demigoddesses, and all the bad are — the d — 1.” “As regards Mr. Fay's style, it is unworthy of a schoolboy — he has been a-Willising so long as to have forgotten his vernacular language.”

It was an attack upon far more than Theodore S. Fay, its author, and on far more than the New York Mirror, of which Fay was an editor, it was a blow at the whole lady's book school of the mid-century. Norman Leslie was a type not only of the fashionable novel of the time, but of the Willis variety of the short story. The attack was none too severe. He had begun with the rapier, but the age that enjoyed Willis and Godey's could understand only the bludgeon.

Had Tales of the Folio Club been published, as Poe did his best that they should be, in 1833 or even in 1836, they would have been, by their author's intention at least, a book primarily humorous, a book surprising in its originality and variety, brilliant in its workmanship, a book of carefully wrought hoaxes, of burlesques and imitations, and, in addition to these lighter elements, a book containing two or three serious pieces that are near to poetry, as, for example, the sketch, “Silence.” Its soul would have been critical and intellectual rather than spontaneous, deliberate rather than emotional.

III

Almost the first critical comment ever published on Poe's tales connected them with “Germanism.” To “Berenice” in the March, 1835, issue of the Messenger, Mr. White, the editor, added the note: “Whilst we confess that we think there is too much German horror in his subject, there can be but one opinion as to the force and elegance of his style.” Four years later, after the appearance of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” James E. Heath wrote Poe:

In the preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1839), Poe denied the German influence. He had been charged, he declared “with Germanism and gloom,” but,

The title of his book was against him, as was his allusion to his tales as “Fantasy-pieces,” a Hoffman term, and yet the burden of proof lies heavily upon any critic who would maintain that Poe was wrong in his statement.(1)

That he had more than a slight acquaintance with the German language is doubtful, so doubtful, indeed, that it is safe to make the assertion that he knew German literature only in translation. This by no means would mean ignorance of the literature. There were, even in the early ‘thirties, translations of the work of most of the German romanticists. By 1826, for instance, at least five of Hoffman's books had been done into English. Scott had reviewed Hoffman at length in the Foreign Quarterly Review in 1827; a collection of Tales From the German had appeared in 1829; and isolated tales like “The Lost Reflection,” Boston Athenæum, 1826, “The Fair Eckbert,” New England Magazine, 1832, and “The Sandman,” Godey's, 1834, were appearing in the magazines.(2) [page 128:]

As to the extent with which Poe was acquainted with such translations it is not easy to determine. He was for a year in contact with a leading German specialist in the University of Virginia, and could not have failed to be aware of his enthusiastic studies and translations, but there is no evidence that he was at all influenced by the man. His early title, “ Tales of the Folio Club,” may have been suggested by the “Serapionsbriider,” but there is little else of Hoffman's book in the collection. The title might just as reasonably have been suggested by Dr. Watkins's Baltimore book of tales of the Delphian Club. The source of all his German allusions and quotations may be located in the current magazines of his time. As an editor he had access to the most of the periodicals of his day, both American and foreign, and it is probable that nearly all of his reading after his editorial career began was confined to this literary area. Instead of being thoroughly acquainted with the German writers, therefore, he may have gathered his knowledge from such careful reviews as that on German literature in The American Monthly Magazine (1833), or the review of Heine's “Die Romantische Schule,” in The North American Review (1834), or the review of Heine's “ The Present State of German Literature” in The American Monthly Magazine (1836).

If any of Poe's tales contains Germanism, it came not from Germany, but from the grotesque English reflections of the German school found in Walpole and Monk Lewis and their later followers. “The MS. Found in a Bottle” derives from “The Ancient Mariner;” the superman tales like “Morella” and “Ligeia,” derive from Byron and Disraeli. Poe's master, however, in this early period was Bulwer-Lytton, and back of Bulwer was Gil Bias. From this school of fiction writers he learned the secrets of vaults and dungeons, of bizarre luxury and magnificence of setting, and of those shadowy high-born heroes and heroines who are found only in the dreams of adolescence. “The Assignation,” for instance, owes nothing to Hoffman's “Doge and Dogaressa” — there is scarcely a point of similarity: whatever debt it owes is to the Bulwer of the Pelham period. Note a passage like this from the Godey's Lady's Book version of the tale, January, 1834, a passage, with others like it, carefully edited out in later years:

That Poe was acquainted with the work of the brothers Schlegel, as would appear from frequent quotations, accounts perhaps for some of his standards in criticism and his knowledge of some of the German writers. He charged Hawthorne with imitation of Tieck's manner with the air of one who himself knew Tieck's manner. His allusions to Hoffman in his criticism bear the stamp of knowledge. In 1836, in a review of the novel Conti the Discarded, he analyzes one of Hoffman's peculiar innovations:

In 1839 he reviewed at length and with unqualified commendation Fouque's Undine, and in another review he called Longfellow's Hyperion a mixture of ingredients, among them “one or two of the Phantasy Pieces of the Lorrainean Callot.” There are unmistakable traces of Hoffman's “Das Marjorat” in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and there is a trace of the Hoffman style in several others of the tales. So far we may go with certainty: the rest is conjecture.

That Hoffman and Poe were kindred souls unquestionably is true. Both were abnormally sensitive, neurotic, subject to doppelganger illusions, as in Poe's “William Wilson” and “Ulalume,” and both at last were near to insanity. Hoffman's pathetic entry in his diary, “Why, in sleeping and waking, do I, in my thoughts, dwell upon the subject of insanity? The outpouring of [page 130:] the wild ideas that arise in my mind may perhaps operate like the breathing of a vein,” might have been as well a notation by the author of “The Haunted Palace.” Hoffman might have posed as the original of Usher in Poe's weird tale, and Poe might have been one of the unique four that formed the Serapion Club. Both worked with the same temperament, with the same materials in the same atmosphere of romance, Hoffman with lawless creative genius, Poe with a deliberate art that in its field is well-nigh perfect.

IV

Poe was made a romanticist by his times; fundamentally he was not romantic: he was scientific. He was turned to the short story of the Germanized grotesque and arabesque type by necessity: circumstances demanded it. He had tried to enter the field of literature by way of poetry, issuing three books of verse before he was twenty-two. Driven to produce literary wares that would sell, he turned to sketches and tales to be submitted for cash prizes, but with no conviction that he was producing serious work. It had been his ideal to enter the profession with dignity by means of books. Kennedy in a letter to White, dated April, 1835, noted that Poe was basing his expectations upon a book that had been for a year in the hands of a Philadelphia publisher, but that he had advised the young man to turn all his powers into the magazines. “He is very clever with his pen — classical and scholarlike. He wants experience and direction. . . . I told him to write something for every number of your magazine. . . . He is at work upon a tragedy, but I have turned him to drudging upon whatever may make money.”

Poe as a writer of tales undoubtedly was created by the magazines, and the magazine movement to a large extent had been brought about by copyright conditions. “The want of an International Copy-Right Law,” Poe wrote in the seventh number of the Broadway Journal, “by rendering it nearly impossible to obtain anything from the booksellers in the way of remuneration for literary labor, has had the effect of forcing many of our best writers into the service of the Magazines and Reviews.” His own literary life had opened just at the moment when the magazine in America had become a dominating force, and he found himself swept along irresistibly by the current of it. In New England, as [page 131:] proved by the case of Willis, the advent of the lighter types of literature provided by the magazines, was looked upon with concern, but Poe, well outside of the conservative area, was quick to feel the momentum and meaning of the new movement. By 1840 he could declare that “the whole tendency of the age is magazine-ward”; but the period of the quarterly reviews which discussed “only topics caviar to the many” was over: “In a word, their ponderosity is quite out of keeping with the rush of the age. We now demand the light artillery of the intellect; we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused — in place of the verbose, the detached, the voluminous, the inaccessible.”

More than once he expressed himself that an era had come that forced men “upon the curt, the condensed, the well-digested, in place of the voluminous — in a word, upon journalism in lieu of dissertation.”

In a letter to Professor Anthon, June, 1844, Poe had written that “before quitting the Messenger” he had had a vision of the supreme possibilities of the American magazine and had determined to found one himself after his own ideals: I perceived that the country, from its very constitution, could not fail of affording in a few years a larger proportionate amount of readers than any upon earth.

It was in this letter that Poe described himself as one who had written no books, but had been “so far a magazinist . . . a mere magazinist.” It is evident that he considered the magazine article in a class by itself. Of his “M. Valdemar” hoax he had written, “I had not the slightest idea that any person should credit it as anything more than a ‘Magazine-paper.’” The object of such a paper was to entertain, to hold the attention of a reader pleasantly for a limited period. It must be of a quality that would attract instantly, and its first requisite, therefore, must be novelty. “What the public seek in a Magazine,” Poe wrote in 1849, “is what they cannot elsewhere procure.” This point he had emphasized as early as 1836 in his “Peter Snook”: “How rarely are we struck with an American magazine article, as with an absolute novelty — how frequently the foreign articles so affect us. . . . We are lamentably deficient not only in invention proper, but what is more strictly Art.”

Next to novelty he sought variety: “Variety has been one of my chief ends,” Poe wrote to Anthon. Again and again he iterated this canon of “diversity and variety.” Of tales, he declared, “there is a vast variety of kinds and, in degree of value, these kinds vary — but each kind is equally good of its kind. . . . I do not consider any one of my stories better than another.” Defoe-like, he would touch his reader ever at the point of his greatest curiosity, giving him always something new, something fitted skillfully into the newnesses of the time. As a result the tales of Poe are marvelous in their diversity: the work of few men is so difficult to classify.

The third requisite that Poe required of the magazine paper was Art. The tale of the German type, the work even of Hoffman and Tieck, was clumsy and lumbering, diffuse, and often disjointed, but with Poe constructive art was a prime requisite. Once the province of the magazine article was understood, the need of constructive art was obvious, but, curiously enough, few who had used the form had perceived this. To Poe all that was not “curt, and condensed, and well digested” was unfitted for magazine publication, and yet the magazines everywhere were full of such work:

It is, however, in the composition of that class of Magazine papers which come properly under the head of Tales, that we evince the most remarkable deficiency in skill. If we except first Mr. Hawthorne — [page 133:] secondly, Mr. Simms — thirdly Mr. Willis, — and fourthly, one or two others, whom we may as well put mentally together without naming them — there is not even a respectably skillful tale-writer on this side the Atlantic. We have seen, to be sure, many well-constructed stories — individual specimens — the work of American Magazinists; but these specimens have invariably appeared to be happy accidents of construction; their authors, in subsequent tales, having always evinced an incapacity to construct.

Margaret Fuller in 1846 had had much the same opinion:

Poe would supply this obvious lack: he would bring Art to the Magazine-paper. To him Art was a deliberate thing. The tale writer should write not from his emotions or from his inspirations, but coldly and deliberately from his intellect. A tale should be made as an architect plans a building. First, the purpose of the structure should be determined : the merit of the tale, to use Poe's own terms, lies in its “ being perfectly adapted to its purposes.”

As early as 1836, while still editor of the Messenger, Poe had discovered that the novel and the short story are essentially different art forms: “Unity of effect, a quality not easily appre?ciated or indeed comprehended by the ordinary mind, and a desideratum difficult of attainment even by those who can conceive it — is indispensable in the ‘ brief article’” — he was reviewing the short sketches of Dickens — ”and not so in the common novel.” The novel, he declared, “from the length of the narrative, can- not be taken in at one view of the reader,” and therefore always fails as a whole. If it is admired at all, it “is admired for its detached passages, without reference to the work as a whole.”

Poe, therefore, had discovered the principle of the short story through his study of poetry, his theories concerning which he had first formulated in 1831 for the third edition of his poems. He had discovered that the tale is akin in its art to the ballad, the requirements of which he had set forth in his review of Longfellow's poems. Of the ballad he had written, “its effect will depend in a great measure upon the perfection of its finish, upon the nice adaptation of its constituent parts, and especially upon what is rightly termed by Schlegel the unity and totality of interest.” He defined poetry always in terms of lyricism, of emotionalism, and the emotional unit necessarily is short. The tale, he now discovered, was also dependent upon emotion, a lyrical unit, a single stroke of impressionism, the record of a moment of tension.

Having made this discovery, the rest was easy. His experience as an editor, working always in terms of space, seeking always the maximum of effect with the minimum of material, helped him to formulate his art to completeness. By 1842 he was ready to formulate his canons of the short story into something like a system. His universally quoted review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales should be given at length in every study of the American short story. It is the leading document in the history of the form:

V

The tale proper, in our opinion, affords unquestionably the fairest field for the exercise of the loftiest talent, which can be afforded by the [page 135:] wide domains of mere prose. Were we bidden to say how the highest genius could be most advantageously employed for the best display of its own powers, we should answer, without hesitation — in the composition of a rimed poem, not to exceed in length what might be perused in an hour. Within this limit alone can the highest order of true poetry exist. We need only here say, upon this topic, that, in almost all classes of composition, the unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance. It is clear, moreover, that this unity cannot be thoroughly preserved in productions whose perusal cannot be completed at one sitting. We may continue the reading of a prose composition, from the very nature of prose itself, much longer than we can persevere, to any good purpose, in the perusal of a poem. This latter, if truly fulfilling the demands of the poetic sentiment, induces an exaltation of the soul which cannot be long sustained. All high excitements are necessarily transient. Thus a long poem is a paradox. And, without unity of impression, the deepest effects cannot be brought about. Epics were the offspring of an imperfect sense of Art, and their reign is no more. A poem too brief may produce a vivid, but never an intense or enduring impression. Without a certain continuity of effort — without a certain duration or repetition of purpose — the soul is never deeply moved. There must be the dropping of the water on the rock. De Beranger has wrought brilliant things — pungent and spirit-stirring — but, like all immassive bodies, they lack momentum, and thus fail to satisfy Poetic Sentiment. They sparkle and excite, but, from want of continuity, fail deeply to impress. Extreme brevity will degenerate into epigrammatism; but the sin of extreme length is even more unpardonable. In medio tutissimus ibis.

Were we called upon, however, to designate that class of composition which, next to such a poem as we have suggested, should best fulfill the demands of high genius — should offer it the most advantageous field of exertion — we should unhesitatingly speak of the prose tale, as Mr. Hawthorne has here exemplified it. We allude to the short prose narrative, requiring from a half-hour to one or two hours in its perusal. The ordinary novel is objectionable, from its length, for reasons already stated in substance. As it cannot be read at one sitting, it deprives itself, of course, of the immense force derivable from totality.(1) Worldly interests intervening during the pauses of perusal, modify, annul, or counteract, in a greater or less degree, the impressions of the book. 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 the fullness of his intention, be it what it may. During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at [page 136:] the writer's control. There are -no external or extrinsic influences — resulting from weariness or interruption.

A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents: but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect1 to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents — he then combines such effects as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect.(1) If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. 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 has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed; and this is an end unattainable by the novel. Undue brevity is just as exceptionable here as in the poem; but undue length is yet more to be avoided.

We have said that the tale has a point of superiority even over the poem. In fact, while the rhythm of this latter is an essential aid in the development of the poet's highest idea — the idea of the Beautiful — the artificialities of this rhythm are an inseparable bar to the development of all points of thought or expression which have their basis in Truth. But Truth is often, and in very great degree, the aim of the tale. Some of the finest tales are tales of ratiocination. Thus the field of this species of composition, if not in so elevated a region on the mountain of Mind, is a tableland of far vaster extent than the domain of the mere poem. Its products are never so rich, but infinitely more numerous, and more appreciable by the mass of mankind. The writer of the prose tale, in short, may bring to his theme a vast variety of modes or inflections of thought and expression — (the ratiocinative, for example, the sarcastic, or the humorous) which are not only antagonistical to the nature of the poem, but absolutely forbidden by one of its most peculiar and indispensable adjuncts; we allude, of course, to rhythm. It may be added here, par parenthèse, that the author who aims at the purely beautiful in a prose tale is laboring at great disadvantage. For Beauty can be better treated in the poem. Not so with terror, or passion, or horror, or a multitude of such other points. And here it will be seen how full of prejudice are the usual animadversions against those tales of effect, many fine examples of which were found in the earlier numbers of Blackwood. The impressions produced were wrought in a legitimate sphere of action, and [page 137:] constituted a legitimate although sometimes an exaggerated interest. 1 They were relished by every man of genius: although there were found many men of genius who condemned them without just ground. The true critic will but demand that the design intended be accomplished, to the fullest extent, by the means most advantageously applicable.

We have very few American tales of real merit — we may say, indeed, none with the exception of The Tales of a Traveler of Washington Irving, and these Twice-Told Tales of Mr. Hawthorne. Some of the pieces of Mr. John Neal abound in vigor and originality; but in general, his compositions of this class are excessively diffuse, extravagant, and indicative of an imperfect sentiment of Art. Articles at random are, now and then, met with in our periodicals which might be advantageously compared with the best effusions of the British Magazines; but upon the whole, we are far behind our progenitors in this department of literature.

Of Mr. Hawthorne's Tales we would say, emphatically, that they belong to the highest region of Art — an Art subservient to genius of a very lofty order. We had supposed, with good reason for so supposing, that he had been thrust into his present position by one of the impudent cliques which beset our literature, and whose pretentions it is our full purpose to expose at the earliest opportunity; but we have been more agreeably mistaken. We know of few compositions which the critic can more honestly commend than these Twice-Told Tales. As Americans, we feel proud of the book.

Mr. Hawthorne's distinctive trait is invention, creation, imagination, originality — a trait which, in the literature of fiction, is positively worth all the rest. But the nature of originality, so far as regards its manifestation in letters, is but imperfectly understood. The inventive or original mind as frequently displays itself in novelty of tone as in novelty of matter. Mr. Hawthorne is original at all points.

VI

In the domain of the short story Poe stands for intellect, science, deliberate art, “tales of effect.” In an early review of his work in Blackwood's a, review written in the atmosphere of Poe's own day, there is this discerning word: “There is no passion in these tales, neither is there any attempt at dramatic dialogue. The bent of Mr. Poe's mind seems rather to have been toward reasoning than sentiment.” In an over-sentimental age, Poe worked coldly [page 138:] and without sentiment; in an age grotesque with perversions of romanticism, he worked without extravagance, and weighed and analyzed, and evolved an art that is classical in its chaste proportions. He organized romanticism and codified its laws.

His art is the embodiment of simplicity. The variety of his tales is surprising, yet all have one thing in common : each sets out to accomplish a single effect, and everything is centered upon this one purpose, even at the sacrifice of truth. Nowhere is there realism. The characters are not alive; they move not at all our sympathies; we never see such people in real life. Everything is foreseen, artificial, dramatically timed. The entombed Madeline appears at precisely the right moment; the death of Usher is followed instantly by the disappearance of the house of Usher into the “tarn.” The sole object of the writer was to create an impression upon his reader: every detail from the first sentence, which sets the pitch, to the final catastrophe, is added to accomplish this end. There is no attempt at localization, no attempt to portray actual human life and conditions, no hint whatever at a moral basis. In one of his letters he quoted with approval a reply of Monk Lewis, who, when asked why he had introduced black banditti into one of his plays when, in the country where the scene was laid, black people were quite unknown, made reply,

I introduced them because I truly anticipated that blacks would have more effect on my audience than whites — and if I had taken it into my head that, by making them sky-blue, the effect would have been greater, why sky-blue they should have been.

At many points to-day regarded as important in short-story technique Poe failed almost completely. His dialogue is bookish and unnatural; his dialect, whenever he attempts it, as in the case of the negro in “The Gold Bug,” lacks in verisimilitude; his characters are abstractions without flesh and blood; his accessories and backgrounds have nowhere the sense of actuality. Not one of his tales is essentially American in any respect. He was not seeking for realism. He had no sympathy with the group that was exploiting native scenes and legends as the material for a distinctively American literature. Art to him was independent of time and place; he had no sympathy with the fundamental elements of Hawthorne's tales — their allegory and their sermonic connotation. Art to him meant beauty and moments of impression; he had no [page 139:] sympathy with Irving and Longfellow — he had no reverence for the past and no tendency to sentiment. In America he stood peculiarly alone. As noted in the opening chapter, romanticism — Irving and all the disciples of Scott — is retrospective: it lives in the mellow atmosphere of a vanished golden age. Hawthorne, like all the Puritans, was introspective: he saw the world within and wrestled with problems of sin. Poe alone was circumspective: like the journalist, he worked ever in the vital present; he studied and he watched his reader, intent only upon impressing him for the brief moment that was his, upon holding him and thrilling him and compelling him with no thought of past or future.

And he worked ever in a world of his own creation in materials drawn from his reading and imagining rather than from his observation. For this world he himself made the laws, and as a result it is ruled not by law, but by coincidence. Everywhere artificiality. In his detective tales we follow not nature, but a sequence of events evolved from his teeming imagination. He is a conjuror marvelous in his art, displaying with dexterity a variety of effects quite amazing, but he is little more. He leaves nothing behind save a haunting memory of a moment of sensation; an impression that depresses rather than elevates the soul. In-constructive art he was superior to all his contemporaries, superior greatly to Hawthorne; but in all else he falls immeasurably below his Puritan contemporary.

His originality, a characteristic upon which he especially prided himself, proceeded from cold intellect rather than from any spontaneous improvisations of genius. His “Philosophy of Composition,” in which he tells how he built his poem, “The Raven,” just as an architect deliberately works out the plans for a house, undoubtedly has in it an element of truth. He thought out his art effects with calculating precision.

The method of his “tales of ratiocination,” a new genre in fiction, he evolved with deliberation. Nothing he wrote contains more of the real Poe than those well-known four tales, the parent stock from which have come all later detective stories — ”The Gold Bug,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Purloined Letter,” and the “Mystery of Marie Rogêt.”(1) His almost uncanny ability to decipher every variety of secret writing discloses [page 140:] his type of mind. He was a scientist, an analyzer, an observer of microscopically minute differences. The device of the somewhat obtuse helper who serves as a foil to the Master Mind, the method of deducing the cause from a hundred obscure clues all as perfectly obvious to the Master as they are obscure to the average observer, the stupidity of the police who handle the case in the stereotyped way, and the division of the tale into two parts, the one the tale proper, and the other the explanation as given by the great detective, have become the commonplaces of the modern detective story, yet all of these devices date from Poe's four tales.(1)

His material was much of it drawn from the regions of horror and sensation, but it was the manner of the time. He did not write the horrible because there was horror in his soul: he wrote simply material that he thought would best command the market of his day. He studied the tastes of his age with the methods and the instincts of a yellow journalist. Very recently a letter has been discovered which reveals clearly his point of view. It was written to T. W. White of the Southern Literary Messenger April 30, 1835, during the period before Poe assumed the editorship of the magazine:

It has been asserted often that Poe invented the American short story, that deliberately he manufactured a new genre and presented to the world for the first time a unique literary form. The assertion is wrong. The short story of the modern type had been evolving with definiteness for two decades. Irving had elaborated the legendary sketch and the tale of romantic incident; the Western group had brought prominently forth the romantic historical episode and at times had touched it with realism; Hawthorne had presented tales of intense moral situations and had added a symbolism all of his own; and Poe had added impressionism and “unity and totality of effect.” All this had been done in an atmosphere of romance that had made for unreality and sentiment and diffuseness and vagueness. But the age of extreme romance was passing and Poe was the first to perceive it. The annuals and the magazines that had sprung up in surprising numbers to supply the new demand for sketches and tales more and more were seeking for material that within the brief space at their command would yield the maximum of effect. Poe was the first to awake to the situation, the first consciously to avail himself of a short-story technique, the first to formulate this technique into a system. In other words, the world of the short story had been discovered: Poe was the first to make an accurate chart of the new regions and to demonstrate how this chart might best be used.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHRONOLOGY OF POE'S TALES

1. Metzengerstein [later, in Southern Literary Messenger, Metzengerstein, a Tale in Imitation of the German]. Philadelphia Saturday Courier, Jan., 1832.

2. Duc de l’Omelette. Philadelphia Saturday Courier, March, 1832.

3. A Tale of Jerusalem. Philadelphia Saturday Courier, June, 1832.

4. Loss of Breath [originally A Decided Loss]. Philadelphia Saturday Courier, Nov., 1832.

5. Bon-Bon [originally The Bargain Lost). Philadelphia Saturday Courier, Dec, 1832.

6. MS. Found in a Bottle. Baltimore Saturday Visiter, Oct., 1833.

7. The Assignation [originally The Visionary]. Godey's Lady's Book, Jan., 1834.

8. Berenice. Southern Literary Messenger, March, 1835.

9. Morella. Southern Literary Messenger, April, 1835. [page 142:]

10. Lionizing [also as Some Passages in the Life of a Lion]. Southern Literary Messenger, May, 1835.

11. The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaal. Southern Literary Messenger, June, 1835.

12. King Pest: A Tale Containing an Allegory. Southern Literary Messenger, Sept., 1835.

13. Shadow: a Parable [originally Shadow. A Fable]. Southern Literary Messenger, Sept., 1835.

14. Four Beasts in One: The Homo-Camelopard [Originally Epimanes]. Southern Literary Messenger, March, 1836.

15. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym [published only in part]. Southern Literary Messenger.

16. Silence — a Fable [originally Siope]. The Baltimore Book, 1839. (Of these sixteen, 6, 10, and 7 are known to have been in the Tales of the Folio Club manuscript submitted for the Visiter prize in 1833, and there is evidence that 14 and 16 were also of the number. According to the remembrance of Latrobe, one of the judges in the contest, the sixth tale was “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” but the evidence is by no means conclusive. These, together with the other ten above, with the exception of 15, doubtless made up the sixteen Tales of the Folio Club submitted to Carey & Lea early in 1834.)

17. Mystification [originally Von Jung, the Mystific]. American Monthly Magazine, June, 1837.

18. Ligeia. American Museum, Sept., 1838.

19. How to Write a Blackwood Article [originally The Psyche Zenobia]. American Museum, Nov., 1838.

20. A Predicament [originally The Scythe of Time]. American Museum, Nov., 1838.

21. The Devil in the Belfry. Philadelphia Saturday Chronicle, May, 1839.

22. The Man That Was Used Up. Burton's Gentleman ‘s Magazine, Aug., 1839.

23. The Fall of the House of Usher. Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, Sept., 1839.

24. William Wilson. The Gift. 1840 [published before Sept, 17, 1839].

25. Conversation of Eiros and Charmion. Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, Dec, 1839.

26. Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling. 1840. (Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 1840, contained the twenty-six tales above with the exception of “Arthur Gordon Pym.”)

27. The Journal of Julius Rodman. Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, Jan., 1840. [page 143:]

28. The Business Man [originally Peter Pendulum, the Business Man]. Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, Feb., 1840.

29. The Man of the Crowd, Graham's Magazine, Dec, 1840.

30. The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Graham's Magazine, April, 1841.

31. A Descent into the Maelstrom. Graham's Magazine, May, 1841.

32. The Island of the Fay, Graham's Magazine, June, 1841.

33. The Colloquy of Monos and Una. Graham's Magazine, Aug., 1841.

34. Never Bet the Devil Your Head: A Tale with a Moral [originally Never Bet Your Head: A Moral Tale]. Graham's Magazine, Sept., 1841.

35. Eleonora. The Gift 1842 [out in Sept., 1841].

36. Three Sundays in a Week [originally A Succession of Sundays]. Saturday Evening Post, Nov. 1841.

37. The Oval Portrait [originally Life in Death]. Graham's Magazine, April, 1842.

38. The Masque of the Red Death, a Fantasy. Graham's Magazine, May, 1842.

39. The Landscape Garden, Snowden's Ladies’ Companion, Oct., 1842.

40. The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, a Sequel to the Murders in the Rue Morgue. Snowden's, Nov.-Dec, 1842; Feb., 1843.

41. The Pit and the Pendulum. The Gift, 1843.

42. The Tell-Tale Heart. Pioneer, Jan., 1843.

43. The Gold Bug, Dollar Newspaper, June, 1843.

44. The Black Cat. U. S. Saturday Post, Aug., 1843.

45. Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences [originally Raising the Wind, or, etc.]. Philadelphia Saturday Commercial, Oct., 1843.

46. The Elk [originally Morning on the Wissahickon]. The Opal, 1844.

47. The Spectacles. Dollar Newspaper, March, 1844.

48. A Tale of the Ragged Mountains. Godey's Lady's Book, April, 1844.

49. The Balloon Hoax. New York Sun, April, 1844.

50. The Premature Burial. Dollar Newspaper, July, 1844.

51. Mesmeric Revelation. Columbian Magazine, Aug., 1844.

52. The Oblong Box. Godey's, Sept., 1844.

53. The Angel of the Odd. Columbian Magazine, Oct., 1844.

54. Thou Art the Man. Godey's, Nov., 1844.

55. The Literary Life of Thingum-Bob, Esq. Southern Literary Messenger, Dec, 1844.

56. The Purloined Letter. The Gift, 1845. Tales. Edgar Allan Poe, 1845, in the following order: 43, 44, 51, 10, 23, 31, 33, 25, 30, 40, 56, 29. Of this edition of the tales Poe wrote: “The last selection of my tales was made from about seventy by one of our great little cliquists and claqueurs, Wiley aud Putnam's reader, [page 144:] Duyckinck. He has what he thinks a taste for ratiocination, and has accordingly made up the book mostly of analytic stories. But this is not representing my mind in its various phases — it is not giving me fair play.”

57. The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade. Godey's, Feb., 1845.

58. Some Words with a Mummy. American Whig Review, April, 1845.

59. The Power of Words. Democratic Review, June, 1845.

60. The Imp of the Perverse. Graham's Magazine, July, 1845.

61. The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether. Graham's Magazine, Nov., 1845.

62. The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar. American Whig Review, Dec, 1845.

63. The Sphynx. Arthur's Ladies’ Magazine, Jan., 1846.

64. The Cask of Amontillado, Godey's, Nov., 1846.

65. The Domain of Arnheim [Combined with 39]. Columbian Magazine, March, 1847.

66. Mellonta Tauta. Godey's, Feb., 1849.

67. Hop Frog. Flag of Our Union, March, 1849.

68. Von Kempelen and His Discovery, Flag of Our Union, April, 1849.

69. X-ing a Paragrab. Flag of Our Union, May, 1849.

70. Landor's Cottage. Flag of Our Union, June, 1849

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 118:]

1 These facts were first brought out by John C. French in his “Poe and the Saturday Evening [[Baltimore Saturday]] Visiter,” Modern Language Notes, May, 1918.

2 A few Notes on Poe's Early Years. Killis Campbell. The Dial, Feb. 17, 1916.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 127:]

1 German books were exceedingly rare in America during the ‘thirties. Edward Everett Hale has written: “As late as 1843 I could buy no German books, even in Pennsylvania, but Goethe and Schiller and the Lutheran hymn book.” — A New England Boyhood, xxiii.

2 For studies of Poe's German indebtedness see “Edgar Allan Poe und die deutsche Romantik,” Paul Wachtler, Leipzig, 1911; “Poe's Knowledge of German”: 1) Publications of the Modern Language Association, Vol. XIX, No. 1, by Gustav Gruener; 2) Modern Philology, Vol. II, 1904. “Influence of E. T. A. Hoffman on the Tales of E. A. Poe,” Palmer Cobb. Studies in Philology, Vol. Ill, 1908, published at the University of North Carolina by the Philology Club; “Die Romantische Bewegung in der Amerikanischer Literatur.” Walter Just. Berlin. 1910: “Poe and Hoffman,” Palmer Cobb, South Atlantic Quarterly, January, 1909.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 133:]

1 In an epic or a tragedy, the plot, which is an imitation of an action, must represent an action that is organically unified, the structural order of the incidents being such that transposing or removing any one of them will dislocate and disorganize the whole. Every part must be necessary, and in its place; for a thing whose presence or absence makes no perceptible difference is not an organic part of the whole. — ARISTOTLE'S The Art of Poetry.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 135:]

1 The concentrated effect is more delightful than one which is drawn out, and so diluted. Consider the result, for example, if one were to lengthen out Œdipus the King into the number of lines in the Iliad. — ARISTOTLE'S The Art of Poetry.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 136:]

1 The story should be constructed on dramatic principles: everything should turn about a single action, one that is whole, and is organically perfect — having a beginning, and a middle, and an end. — ARISTOTLE'S The Art of Poetry.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 137:]

1 The plot should be so constructed that, even without help from the eye one who simply hears the play recited must feel the chill of fear, and be stirred with pity, at what occurs. . . . But those who employ the means of the stage to produce what strikes us as being merely monstrous, without being terrible are absolute strangers to the art of tragedy. — ARISTOTLE'S The Art of Poetry.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 139:]

1 “Poe and the Detective Story.” Brander Matthews. Scribner's Magazine. September, 1907.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 140:]

1 It is worthy of note that Poe's peculiar method in his detective tales had been used by Schiller in his “The Ghost Seer,” and that a translation of this by Professor C. J. Hadermann, of Oxford, Georgia, appeared in The Magnolia or Southern Magazine, Savannah, in 1841, the year of Poe's “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”