Text: N. B. Fagin, “Chapter 05,” The Histrionic Mr. Poe, 1949, pp. 160-216 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 160:]

IF WITH POE the writing of poetry was a passion, the writing of short stories was definitely a purpose. He hungered for literary fame and he was convinced that poetry could achieve it; he also hungered for bread, and his tales sometimes procured it for him. In the end, they also helped him achieve fame. For it was his winning of the story prize with one of the Tales of the Folio Club that started him on his literary career. The poetry he had published until then had produced hardly more than a ripple. His “MS. Found in a Bottle/’ which he submitted in the contest sponsored by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter, brought him some much needed money, and, more important, introduced him to John Pendleton Kennedy through whom he secured his editorial position on the Southern Literary Messenger. His literary career was now really begun.

The exact number of stories which Poe wrote during his creative life is a matter of dispute. Perhaps when Professor Mabbott publishes his variorum edition we shall know the truth. In 1927 Killis Campbell stated categorically that” Poe published sixty-eight stories and sketches”[1] — excluding the two long narratives about Arthur Gordon Pym and Julius Rodman — and this was [page 161:] the number Professor Quinn included in his collection of Poe's Complete Poems and Stories published in 1946.[2] Very likely the actual number of such “tales” was well over seventy; but of these less than a third are known to the general reader, and only less than a dozen are of such wide fame as to warrant the inclusion of their author among the great story-tellers of the world. Yet there can be no question that it is by virtue of his contribution as a short story writer, no less than poet and critic, that Poe ranks as one of the great figures in literature. Certainly in the history of the American short story he occupies the honored position of pioneer, almost of founder; and just as certainly, unlike most literary pioneers, he is still being read. To cavil at the slightness of his best performance is to be unreasonable. One masterpiece enriches a whole generation, and Poe has left us more than one. If again, as is the case with his poetry, not all critics are willing to concede unreservedly that his best stories are masterpieces, it is because they are unwilling to concede that the narrative art can produce a variety of types, each possessing qualities and standards of excellence peculiar to its kind.

Poe's stories are very markedly of a certain type. They are — as he would have been the first to claim — unique. But they are not of a type to appeal to the modern reader or critic for whom fiction is either a criticism of life or a weapon in the struggle for a better form of society. Poe's abhorrence of the didactic, his dwelling in a story world of his own imagining, and his preoccupation with technique deprived him of any appeal for the naturalistically-minded, the sociologically-minded, or the salvation-minded. Thus Pattee complains that “Nowhere [in Poe's stories] is there realism. The characters [page 162:] are not alive; they move not at all our sympathies; we never see such people in real life. ...”[3] Bernard Smith deplores Poe's “approaches to the ivory-tower philosophy”[4]; and Brownell laments Poe's lack of “ideality “and religion.[5] These charges are not to the point. Poe's stories were not intended to be realistic,(1) to convey social significance, or to inspire ideality; nevertheless they exist, as a product of a particular kind of imagination and a no less particular kind of artistry.

2

By now every student of Poe or of the short story is familiar with his review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales which he published in Graham's Magazine for May, 1842. In a preliminary review published a month earlier, Poe deplored the dearth of short tales of high merit in American writing, “skilful compositions “that “could bear examination as works of art.” He inveighed against the existing superabundance of “twattle,” of “cut-and thrust blue-blazing melodramaticisms,” and pointed to Hawthorne as one of the few men of indisputable genius engaged in tale-writing. He promised to do him honor.[7]

In the fulfillment of his promise Poe not only did honor to Hawthorne and his two volumes of stories but he also enunciated principles of composition which were destined to influence the development of the American short story. If the application of these principles has resulted too often in imparting to our story a formula [page 163:] slickness, the blame cannot be laid upon Poe. Literary theories have a way of being misunderstood. We have but to think of the misinterpretation of Aristotle's exposition of Greek dramaturgic practices by the seventeenth century neo-classic critics; they accepted the rigidity of form, with its unities and proscription of the mixing of genres, as an immutable law of excellence rather than as an adaptation to the kind of stage for which they wrote. Poe's theory of the short story was also, in the main, an exposition of his own practices and a betrayal of his own limitations, but it has been accepted by many teachers and handbook writers as a body of rules underlying the writing of all short stories. Moreover, the course of development of American magazine fiction has favored Poe's theory. Our busy reader has found brevity and unity of effect — the two cardinal principles of Poe's theory — economical of his time and potent as a means of escape from practical preoccupations.

Everything that is significant in Poe's theory of the short story is contained in one comparatively short para graph in his review of Hawthorne's tales:

The intention of the narrative artist is clear: it is to achieve a certain preconceived effect. We may object to this intention; we may prefer that the artist “express” himself, convey a message, point up the significance of his material, or present a slice of life; we may prefer that he begin with a theme, a plot, or a character rather than a preconceived effect; but once we are willing to accept the premise that the production of a “unique “effect is a legitimate function of art — at least of a certain species of art — we must also acknowledge the validity of Poe's theory.

And once we acknowledge its validity the artistry of the resulting narrative will depend upon the skill of the writer. “Skill “has come to have an unfortunate connotation for the modern critic. It is almost as objectionable as the word “mechanical.” And yet without skill a story is lifeless; with it, it may not be the expression of genius, but it will at least possess craftsmanship. Poe's respect for craftsmanship was a healthy manifestation, at a time when few American story-tellers paid any attention to form, and his insistence that incidents — and everything else in the narrative — accommodate “thoughts” rather than the other way around was a valuable contribution to our developing short story.

For Poe then, the central problem was — as C. Alphonso Smith formulated it forty years ago[9] — “How may I produce the maximum of effect with the minimum of means?” What means he ultimately resorted to, and with what success, can be ascertained only by a careful reading and examination of the stories themselves. Here it is pertinent to call attention to the resemblance [page 165:] of the problem to the one which confronts every practitioner of an art, or rather a group of arts, generally considered different from that of fiction writing: the art or arts of the theatre. It is the production of effect in which every actor, director, stage designer, electrician, and costumer is engaged. And economy of means by which to produce this effect is a basic principle in the theatre. Everything on a stage, every word, movement, and gesture of the actor, every piece of decoration, furniture, or prop, must contribute to the creation of the preconceived effects in the minds of the actor and designer, and all these effects must blend into the final totality which the director has envisaged. Therefore every object, movement, word, and tone uttered — like every word and sentence in a story — must be purposeful and “tend to the outbringing “of the desired effect.

If the analogy does not at first glance seem to include Poe's principle of brevity, it nevertheless holds. For brevity, involving both a certain minimum and maxi mum duration, is imbedded in totality of effect. Every theatre man knows that the slightest digression or un necessary prolongation of a scene or moment on the stage is weakening if not ruinous to a performance. And surely a play in the theatre fulfills Poe's requirement that a story must be read at one sitting. Theatre audiences know better than any reader, sitting in the privacy of his room, “the immense force derivable from totality.”[10](2)

Poe's ideas on the short story were undoubtedly [page 166:] derived, to a considerable extent at least, from his contemplation of the processes underlying the creation of poetry, and especially lyric poetry. Yet his knowledge of dramatic practices and his native theatrical flair affected all of his theories and practices. The means he employed for bringing about the effects he preconceived for his stories were largely theatrical. His plots, whatever their nature or merits, were constructed with an eye to effectiveness as dramatic or melodramatic fables; his locales were for the most part so many stage settings; his characters were, in his own frequently employed designation, “dramatis personae”; his dialogue — weak as realistic transcription of idiomatic speech — was emotionally in tense and in its own peculiar way, if not actually stage worthy, at least “stagy”; and his devices for blending visual and auditory elements into exciting climaxes were deliberately theatrical. Whatever values one may find in Poe's stories — psychological, symbolical, autobiographical — one can hardly appreciate the effectiveness of his narratives without an awareness of their indebtedness to the arts of the theatre.

3

For Poe, as for Aristotle, plot was the basic element of a story. It was not theme, nor setting, nor characters, nor style — important as these other elements might be — but plot which contributed most to the achievement of the author's intention. Other writers might regard plot as “mere complexity of incident ”; for him it was “that from which no component atom can he displaced without ruin to the whole.”[11] Again and again he took contemporary fictioneers to task for failure to construct tight plots: John Neal, whom he otherwise praised as a [page 167:] novelist of genius, was remiss in construction, always beginning well but soon digressing and hurrying his climaxes[12]; even Dickens belonged to the class of author “totally deficient in constructiveness.”[13] Conversely, he admired those novelists — like Godwin and Bulwer (the latter with occasional reservations) — who were good constructors of plot. Godwin's confession that he wrote Caleb Williams backwards impressed him, although he had doubts about recommending this mode of composition to writers with less idiosyncratic minds than Godwin's. Bulwer's Pompeii appealed to him as an instance of “an admirably managed plot.”[14]

Especially in the short story — or what Poe called “the tale proper” — was “mere construction ... imperatively demanded.” For here “where there is no space for development of character or for great profusion and variety of incident” — as in the novel — defective plot could never escape observation. Yet apparently most American writers of tales, he observed, neglected this distinction, and began their stories without knowing how to end them; the results were generally disastrous: the endings of their stories appeared “to have forgotten their be ginnings.”[15] For himself, he had taken a hint from the Chinese, “who, in spite of building their houses downwards, have still sense enough to begin their books at the end.”[16] In a note which he contributed to The Opal in 1845, and from which I have already quoted his rigorous definition of plot, he disapproved of authors “who sit down to write with no fixed design “but trusted to inspiration instead. “Pen,” he went on, in the manner of a law-giver, “should never touch paper, until at [page 168:] least a well-digested general purpose be established.”(3) This rule he apparently prescribed for all writing. As applied specifically to fiction, this would involve consideration and arrangement of the dénouement “before writing the first word “of the story, “and no word,” he added, “should be then written which does not tend, or form a part of a sentence which tends to the development of the dénouement.”[18]

Such, briefly, were Poe's ideas on plot construction. The embodying of these ideas in his stories was quite another matter. That is one reason why only a handful of them can be classed as masterpieces. “The Fall of the House of Usher,” for one instance, shows clearly that before writing the first word he knew where he was going and what effect he intended to create. The narrator's careful and yet seemingly casual observation of the old building, with the crumbling condition of its individual stones and the fissure zig-zagging from the roof down the front wall, is obviously a “plant,” preparation for the ultimate collapse of the building at the end of the story. Poe may, of course, have written his tale backwards, and having described the crumbling and disappearance of Usher's house he may have gone back to the opening paragraphs to insert the necessary preparatory observations in order to motivate the catastrophe at the end. In either case, the craftsmanship is so remarkable that it has justified students of the most popular genre in American writing to agree with Bliss Perry that it was Poe who “showed that the art of short-story writing, [page 169:] like that of the drama, is largely the art of preparation.”[19]

There can be no doubt, for another instance, that in “The Cask of Amontillado,” he plotted carefully and skilfully. The very opening sentence — “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge” — gives us both the cause and outcome of the action planned. Moreover, it is an excellent exemplification of his own dictum that a good beginning must arrest attention and should contain, “at all risks — a few vivid sentences ... by way of the electric bell to the telegraph.”[20] The plausibility of every move is tightly, though unobtrusively, safeguarded. The victim must have no suspicion of the avenger's designs — “neither by word nor deed had I given Fortunato cause to doubt my good will he must be met casually — at a carnival; he must have a weak point — his pride in his connoisseurship in wine — through which he can be reached; allied to this weakness must come another, to induce him to follow Montressor — jealousy of a rival connoisseur; the carnival can also serve to explain why Montressor's home — a “palazzo” — is without attendants — their master had told them that he did not expect to return until morning; the trowel in the hands of the avenger the first hint of the nature of the revenge — must not betray the design too soon: it is passed off jocularly as a masonic sign. In spite of the use of the first person, the story is told with objective directness and rigid economy unusual for Poe; in many ways — toughness of texture, barrenness of style, obliqueness, irony — it anticipates the narrative method or Hemingway, especially the Hemingway of “The Killers.” [page 170:]

Large as is the contribution of the element of plot to the final effect produced by these Gothic stories, it is even larger in such a realistic fantasy as “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains.” The label” realistic fantasy “is no doubt strange but it seems adequate to describe a type of fiction which makes vivid a dream and suggests the possibility that it represents the recapitulation of a previous existence.(4) There is nothing unrealistic in the story of a man, an invalid fed on morphine, who falls asleep and has a fantastic dream. Nor — in the light of recent psychology, especially that of Carl Jung with his theory of the racial unconscious — is there anything wildly inventive in the suggestion that the dream is a reliving of events that transpired in a different part of the world forty-seven years before. What is fantastic is the inference that the hero, presumably still a young man, had actually personally experienced the events perceived in the dream and that his present existence is a reincarnation.

These psychological overtones are not, however, for the moment, under consideration.(5) The skill with which Poe unfolds the story is. The illness of the hero; his taking of “very large “doses of morphine each morning; the indefiniteness of his age — he “seemed young; the more definite advanced age of his doctor — “an old gentleman, perhaps seventy”; the doctor's interest in Mesmerism; the “magnetic relation “which existed between [page 171:] the doctor and his patient; the doctor's experiences in India, not revealed until almost the very end; and, finally, the announcement in a Charlottesville newspaper of the death of the hero, Mr. Bedlo — with the seemingly inadvertent omission of the final e and the narrator's conversation with the editor — these are all the touches of a master in the building up of a plot in which nothing is left unforshadowed, unmotivated, unprotected. The final stroke — the revelation that “Bedlo” is “Oldeb “(the hero of the exploits in the dream) conversed is a clear indication that it was Poe and not O. Henry who “invented “the twist at the end which has established itself as characteristic of so many modern American short stories. The ironic last sentence — “And the man tells me it is a typographical error” — is certainly more imaginative than O. Henry could have managed. It lifts the ending above mere trickery and sends us thoughtfully back to the story for investigation and speculation.

And yet Poe was not always, nor even often, so fortunate. His elaborate and subtle technique was at his service only intermittently. “The Premature Burial,” for instance, has neither the beginning nor the ending which could withstand the test of Poe's own standards of structure.(6)The plot is a loose series of incidents related only to the general theme. The first three para graphs would lead one to believe that he is reading a magazine article on the “terrific” experience of being buried alive. The “authenticated” instances which follow add but weakly to the atmosphere of fiction. [page 172:] The actual story does not begin until more than half the space allotted to this “tale “has been used up. Poe the critic had been right in calling most of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales essays rather than stories. Yet a little over two years later he himself published this short narrative which is hardly more than an essay containing a number of anecdotes illustrative of his subject.

Such lapses from his own theory of structure are numerous. His tendency toward lecturing, his over powering need to exhibit his scientific interests and knowledge, like his tendency toward declamation, often led him astray. He wastes a thousand words on his introduction to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” before telling us when and where he met Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, the mental giant so like Poe himself in temperament as to be almost his double. All this preliminary material is not uninteresting in itself, but only as a dissertation on the analytical faculty. For the purposes of the story which is to follow it is extraneous and rather discouraging, a mere tuning-up unnecessarily prolonged. And even after the remarkable detective is introduced we are not permitted to plunge into the murder story for perhaps another thousand words, but must be told in great detail of Dupin's wonderful deductive powers. Brander Matthews was a little overenthusiastic in pronouncing “The Murders” a story of the “most marvelous skill ... unsurpassed ... unapproachable...”[22]

In the third paragraph of “The Mystery of Marie Roget” Poe tells us that the depiction of the mental character of the Chevalier Dupin in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue “was his design. But his design undoubtedly also called for the construction of a story. [page 173:] This he carried out even less economically in the later story. “The Mystery of Marie Roget” begins with a superfluous first paragraph which is a windy discourse on the Calculus of Probabilities. Surely Poe the theoretician of craftsmanship knew that the second paragraph with its striking opening sentence, “The extraordinary details which I am now called upon to make public ...” was a logical and effective beginning, but Poe the exhibitor of great mental prowess could not forgo the opportunity to shine. Hence the story begins not with action, nor with a hint of action to come, but with generalizations on man's belief in the supernatural and coincidence, and on the application of mathematics — “the most rigidly exact in science” — to “the shadow and spirituality of the most intangible in speculation.” The plot, to the extent to which it is at all developed, is buried in lengthy analyses of Dupin's mental dexterity. Even such an admirer of Poe's ingenuity as Howard Haycraft is obliged to admit that he finds “The Mystery of Marie Roget “interesting only as an essay, as “an able if tedious exercise in reasoning. As a story,” he concludes, “it scarcely exists.”[23] It is pertinent to add that Poe does not stop when his story has ended but returns to his speculations on the workings of the Calculus of Probabilities, as though his preconceived design were really that of an essayist rather than story-teller.

I hope that I have not conveyed the impression that I would rule out either the beginning or the ending of a short story with generalization. Both Kipling and O. Henry — to name but two widely accepted practitioners of the craft — often begin with the statement of a theme or a bit of philosophy; these statements, however, are generally very brief; besides, neither considered himself [page 174:] an expert on the technique of story-writing and therefore entitled to prescribe for others the laws for guiding a plot to perfection. Poe's violations of his own loudly proclaimed principles of structure are important because they indicate that the psychological conflicts of the man frequently interfered with the efficient functioning of the creative artist and that if despite this interference, his stories remain memorable — and even a few of the structurally weak ones are not easily forgotten — it is because their power does not reside entirely in plot. This is equally true of his best stories — “The Fall of the blouse of Usher,” “Ligeia” (Poe's own favorite), “The Purloined Letter” (certainly the most economically constructed of his detective stories), “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

As a matter of fact, Poe's plots are in themselves not of first consequence, and offer no explanation for the effect of his stories. Most of them were derived from printed sources, mainly magazine and newspaper stories and articles, and were familiar to his readers.(7) Unlike his pedestalled Shakespeare he did not often subject the material he borrowed to any radical alteration, although it is not quite true, as Professor Napier Wilt claims, that he “did not take the trouble even to invent new situations.”[26] It is true that his tales of terror exploited the same Gothic predicaments, coincidences, and melodramatic resolutions which he himself satirized unmercifully in such pieces as “Loss of Breath “and “How to Write a Blackwood Article.” To be sure, his detective stories, or to use the more inclusive term — tales of [page 175:] ratiocination, are ingenious and were quite new in his day, but since Conan Doyle and “Ellery Queen “this type of fiction has acquired a breadth and variety which Poe's plots do not provide. His tales of imaginative science — “Hans Pfaall,” “The Balloon Hoax,” “Mesmeric Revelation,” “Von Kempelen and His Discovery,” — again a type of story in which he pioneered, are today more than matched in boldness of invention by the comparatively unknown writers appearing every month in the pseudo-science fiction magazines. His so-called “grotesques,” mostly attempts, with varying success, at humor, burlesque, or satire, are inconsequential and may be dismissed from any serious consideration of his contribution to the art of the short story.

Decidedly, then, it is not the plots as such that can account for the effect of Poe's stories — when they are wholly or even partially successful. And yet plot cannot be dismissed lightly as a contributing factor. The mere selection of a particular plot by a writer, whatever its source, is in itself a disclosure of artistic inclination, temperament, bias, direction. The fact that Poe's range was a comparatively narrow one — most of his stories will be seen to revolve around crime or the terror of death — emphasizes the nature of his artistic bent. It is true that fashions in plot and mood may influence to some extent a writer depending upon his contributions to magazines for his daily bread. In the main, however, Poe's choice of material must be accepted as having been determined by the needs of his imagination. And these needs were perhaps more often artistic than psychological. In each plot he chose he saw possibilities for the kind of treatment, the unique craftsmanship, which his special talents could impose. The effect which we [page 176:] have come to denominate as “Poe-esque” — or what Kenneth Burke, referring specifically to the Poe story, calls “the one corrosive spell,”[27] — is a result of many elements. Plot is but one of them.

4

Setting, or locale and, more important, the atmosphere derived from locale, is another. Action must of course take place somewhere; it must have a habitation; and the two interact and complement each other. The striking thing about Poe's settings is that while they appear impressively vivid they at the same time remain indefinite. He manages to depict enough of the background to set the mood, but his details are selected for suggestiveness and ornamentation rather than realistic fidelity. It might be interesting to inquire into the sources of his settings but it is likely to prove no more enlightening than to inquire into the sources of his plots. Even when we know that he drew upon his memories of specific places — as in “The Gold Bug,” “William Wilson,” “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” and “Landor's Cottage” — the finished product obliterates any importance that might attach to the source. I feel about the sources of Poe's settings the way Professor Quinn feels about the sources of Poe's plots, and for the same reason: that it is “a critical stupidity” to speak of them at all, because “they are merely suggestions out of which a creative artist made something new.”[28] In reality, with place as such Poe was not at all concerned; what it could be made to contribute to his story was all that mattered. And he saw to it that his settings — castle, hall, landscape — should contribute atmosphere, mood, character revelation, and, above all, decoration. The settings of Poes [page 177:] stories — as Edward Shanks has observed — whether “good or bad, vivid or vague, were but so much dramatic decor for the action and the emotions”[29]

The opinions of Poe on matters theatrical — playwriting, acting, directing, staging, and lighting — are numerous and written down with supreme self-assurance. He not only criticized the plays of Mrs. Mowatt and Nathaniel Parker Willis; he almost rewrote them. He not only reviewed the productions he saw on Broadway during his brief tenure as dramatic critic; he indicated how they should and could have been directed. Unfortunately — or perhaps fortunately — he never was either a producer or an “angel.” But he could and did take full charge of the productions he created as short stories. Here he could indulge his imagination and use his superb skill in achieving the most nicely calculated effects. Here he could mount his pieces as extravagantly or as austerely as he felt impelled to do. Here he could turn down the lights, tint them, splash color, throw eerie shadows in corners and on the backdrop, strew exotic rugs on floors and hang exotic tapestries on walls, arrange the furniture, and black out the whole thing with one lightning stroke. Here, in short, he could practice the craft of a master scenic designer.

Poe's taste in design was not always fastidious. Generally his mind envisaged the grandiose, the bizarre, the extravagantly sweeping. And yet the finished picture, in spite of many details, remains subdued and indefinite. Both in their imaginative sweep and in their indefiniteness, as in their essential impracticality, Poe's stage designs inevitably remind the student of the modern theatre of the strangely disturbing work of Gordon Craig. Lee Simonson, an eminently practical designer [page 178:] himself, has clearly shown the impracticability of Craig's designs[30]; yet Harold Helvenston is only stating a fact when he asserts that Craig “has exerted a great emotional influence.”[31] Both of these things may be said with equal justice of Poe's sets for his fiction. In Poe's case, however, the impracticality of his sets does not much matter, since, highly theatrical as they are, they do not, after all, have to be assembled on a stage. The action of a Poe story takes place against a background so charged with emotional overtones that the background itself becomes part of the action; it is in fact, functionally, part of the story. The splendor which Poe loved found expression in the rich décor with which he mounted his tales. His scenery, as Hannay, his English editor, observed more than ninety years ago, “is everywhere magnificent.”[32]

The magnificence was, of course, romantic. This rather protean adjective means, as used here, that in architecture, for instance, Poe's taste required not only size and nobility, but also the admixture of decay as a concomitant, and guarantee, of antiquity. Margaret Kane, in an excellent article on this subject,[33] has argued convincingly that “Poe's Gothic architecture derives, however remotely, from the conventional stage-setting for the terror school of eighteenth century English novelists.” Another source — and probably a more creative one — was his own dim and therefore enlarged memories of the five years he had spent in England during his childhood. Still another possibility must not be excluded: the many books of travel and description, such as W. Howitt's Visits to Remarkable Places,(8) which were an expression of the romantic curiosity of the age. [page 179:]

But, again, neither the sources nor the extent of Poes knowledge of architecture need detain us here. His imagination required a particular kind of setting, exterior or interior, and he proceeded to “invent” it. He blended impressions and details he had retained of places he had actually seen, come upon in books and articles he had read, and in pictures he had looked at.(9) With these he felt free to combine purely “original” elements which only his mind could conceive. Since strangeness was, for him, an indispensable quality of beauty, we may be sure that his story settings would not be without that quality, whether the inciting source had it or not. Ellison's idea (in “The Domain of Arnheim”) of a landscape which should combine vastness and definitiveness, beauty, magnificence, and strangeness was, of course, also Poe's idea. The approach to Ellison's domain gave the visitor the feeling of being “enwrapt in an exquisite sense of the strange.” The swan-like canoe which bore him toward the gigantic gate (“or rather door of burnished gold, elaborately carved and fretted, and reflecting the direct rays of the now fast-sinking sun with an effulgence that seems to wreath the whole surrounding forest in flames”) was of ivory, “stained with Arabesque devices in vivid scarlet. ... On its ermined floor [reposed] a single feathery paddle of satin-wood [page 180:] but the canoe seemed to be self-propelled, creating by its gentle motion “soothing yet melancholy music.” When he finally catches a glimpse of the castle, he sees “a mass of semi-Gothic, semi-Saracenic architecture, ... glittering in the red sunlight with a hundred oriels, minarets, and pinnacles.”

To the visitor to Arnheim this structure seems the “phantom handiwork, conjointly, of the Sylphs, of the Fairies, of the Genii, and of the Gnomes to the visitor into Poe's realm it is the work of an ambitious theatre designer who had been let loose to indulge his exuberant fancy and told that costs were of no consequence, since a fabulously wealthy “angel “named Ellison would take care of all the bills. The entire domain is obviously Kubla Khanish, Arabian Nightish, Beckfordian, Wagnerian, and Max Reinhardtish (at his lushest and worst). The pendant piece to this vision, “Landor's Cottage,” is infinitely less extravagant, shadowing as it does the outlines of both Poe's own cottage at Fordham and the more imposing Massachusetts home of Mrs. Richmond, the adored “Annie.” But even into this idealized cottage Poe injects artificial decor which belongs more appropriately to a stage set.

Neither of these two brief works is a story in the true sense of the word. And it is in Poe's stories that his skill at constructing functional sets can be seen at its best. There are comparatively few exteriors, and these are mostly panoramic glimpses of approaches to castles, chateaux, mansions, and houses in which the action is scheduled to take place; they are, in fact, mere backdrops. Nevertheless the appropriateness of these exteriors is uncanny. The “lofty” Ducal Palace on the Canal in Venice, its black marble flagstones mirroring [page 181:] the “small, bare and silvery feet” of the Marchesa Aphrodite, is at once in splendid contrast to the solemn corniced prison of the Old Republic and complementary to the plot of The Assignation.” Also in contrast to the Ducal Palace is the Palazzo — “one of those huge structures of gloomy, yet fantastic pomp” — of the Marchesa's lover. The melancholy house of Usher, the mansion of gloom, with bleak walls, is a capital illustration of Stevenson's famous saying that “Certain places speak distinctly ... certain old houses demand to be haunted ...”; and so is the deserted “time-eaten and grotesque mansion” described in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The large, rambling Elizabethan house, in a misty-looking English village is an ideal setting for the unfolding of the schizophrenic character of William Wilson. The chateau in the Apennines, “one of those piles of commingled gloom and grandeur,” is a fitting place in which to come upon the painting, and the story, of “The Oval Portrait.” The castellated abbey, an extensive and magnificent structure girdled by a strong and lofty wall, is the inevitable rendezvous for the “Red Death.”

It is, however, in his interior scenes that Poe really extends himself. The main action is usually enacted in a remote tower or turret room or in a strange, highceilinged room in a distant part of the building. Access to these sequestered spots is by means of winding staircases and mysterious passages. The room itself is seldom normal in shape or dimension; it is vast, circular or pentagonal, full of nooks and niches, and lighted only in spots, so as to permit weird shadows to hide in corners and tremble on walls and vaulted ceiling. In spite of the vastness of the chamber, the action is generally concentrated [page 182:] in restricted sections, over a bed or an ottoman, a chair or a table, which is picked up by the flicker of a candle, the red glare of a torch or flambeau, or the dim waverings of a lamp, all in the manner of what we have come to call on the modern stage as “area lighting.”

The furnishings are carefully selected and arranged for their atmospheric value. Margaret Kane is wrong in assuming that Poe “apparently had difficulty or was not interested in visualizing what was suitable for the peculiar character of his rooms, since the furniture is described only in very general terms.” It is more likely that Poe's practice in this respect was deliberate. He knew the value of indefiniteness, or impressionistic suggestion, as against realistic photography. If the furniture in Usher's studio is described merely as “profuse, comfortless, antique and tattered,” it is because Poe was striving to create the effect of antiquity and decay, neglect and dissolution. If in the seven bizarre apartments in “The Masque of the Red Death “we find an undistinguished “profusion of golden ornaments ... scattered about” and in the turret-room in “Ligeia” a “few ottomans and golden candelabra, of Eastern figure,” it is because the designer is again striving to catch the spectator's eye — not with the details of individual pieces of furniture, details which on a stage are usually missed anyway, but with spots of color and glitter, in contrast to the spectral dimness of the sur rounding atmosphere.

In his essay on “The Philosophy of Furniture “Poe clearly reveals his taste in decoration. He disliked furniture arranged in straight lines or in curved lines “repeated into unpleasant uniformity.” In general, he preferred little furniture to too much, a minimum of [page 183:] drapery — “the proper quantum” — to a profusion. Carpets and rugs were essential; and so were certain colors and patterns. “Indeed, whether on carpets or curtains, or tapestry, or ottoman coverings, all upholstery of this nature should be rigidly Arabesque.” If he is not always consistent in his ideas or in his own practice in furnishing the rooms in his stories, we must allow for the difference in purpose. In his essay he was intent on attacking the bad taste of the American parvenu with whom costly clutter and flashiness passed for aristocratic elegance; in his stories his aim is to provide appropriate settings for Gothic characters and plots. The elegant simplicity and “repose” which he sought in his ideal room in real life could not possibly have served his purpose in furnishing the magnificent mansions and chateaux in which horrific deeds were to be performed.

Yet, undoubtedly, much of the taste he had acquired in the actual world he carried over into the imaginary world of his stories. He was fourteen years old when John Allan inherited a sizeable fortune and began buying costly furnishings, among them rich draperies and marble busts. “Here,” says one of Poe's biographers, “might be found the germ for some tastes displayed in after years, — his minute descriptions of draperies and of furniture.”[36] His use of draperies is especially interesting; it is constant and artistically subtle. They are as much a part of a Poe design as a dominating staircase has become a central part in a modern production of Hamlet since Leopold Jessner introduced his famous Treppe. They are far from being mere inert decoration; they are full of atmospheric color and even sound; they are dynamic. At the very outset of Poe's career as a story-teller, faded rich tapestry hangings [page 184:] “swing “gloomily on the walls in Metzengerstein castle. Two years later, in “The Assignation,” rich draperies “in every part of the room “tremble to the vibration of low, melancholy music. Thereafter curtains, tapestries, hangings continue to participate in most of the stories Poe was to write. In “Shadow” black draperies shut out the moon, “the lurid stars, and the peopleless streets.” In “Ligeia” the draperies are “gorgeous and fantastic”; the tapestry, of the richest cloth of gold, covers the floor, the ottomans, the ebony bed, and the window curtains; it is “spotted ... with arabesque figures, about a foot in diameter, ... in patterns of the most jetty black.” Black, or “sable,” are also the draperies the condemned man sees in “The Pit and the Pendulum.” In “The Oval Portrait” the narrators bed is enveloped in fringed curtains of black velvet. The draperies in the seven rooms of “The Masque of the Red Death “are of colors and shapes as fantastic — and perhaps symbolic — as the story itself. And one must not forget the “silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain” in “The Raven” — which, of course, is also a story. Nor must we overlook the fact that when Poe needed no color, he had the artistic restraint to withhold it. Thus when in “The Black Cat” the curtains of the narrator's bed catch fire, they are mentioned simply as “curtains,” without any hint as to their color or material. Poe knew how to use a “plot prop “without distracting the spectator's attention.

5

Color and lighting in Poe's stories are so important that they merit a section to themselves. Everyone knows that the primary purpose of light on the stage is visibility. [page 185:] An audience wants to see faces, gestures, and objects, and actors want to be seen. But the secondary purpose is no less important: it is to create a mood. The contribution of lighting to the final artistic and emotional effect produced by a play is immeasurably great. Such lighting, however, requires ingenuity, technical knowledge, taste, and imagination. The stage of Poe's stories offered him a remarkable opportunity for the employment of all these qualities, and he must have pondered deeply the psychology of color and light and the ways of blending them in such proportions and shadings as to produce the effects he desired. It is possible that sometimes the very architecture he adopted for a room — the shape and position of windows, for instance — was dictated by the opportunities it provided for ingenious lighting. At any rate, having adopted a type of architecture which suited his fancy he examined it carefully for appropriate lighting possibilities and, as with the architecture itself, let himself go.

Whatever one may think of the taste or fitness of the bridal chamber described in “Ligeia” one can hardly fail to be impressed by its theatrical effectiveness. Poe himself was aware that this time even his extravagance might be deemed excessive, for it is by way of subtle apology that he makes the narrator say: “I had become a bounden slave in the trammels of opium, and my labor and my orders had taken a coloring from my dreams.” But whether with or without the aid of opium, the set “he created is definitely a stage designer's dream:

The last touch is worthy of David Belasco's famous electrician Louis Hartmann, creator of the spectral bridge of light for the production of “The Return of Peter Grimm.”(10)

The immense window described here does not greatly differ from the two large windows, “reaching down to the floor,” which Poe insisted on having in his ideal room (“The Philosophy of Furniture”). Except that their panes would have to be of crimson-tinted glass. And this is precisely the kind of glass we find in the room he pictures for us in “The Assignation.” If in some stories he did not deem it feasible to incorporate this type of colored windowpane, he managed to supply the deficiency by means of artificial light from the wings. Thus “feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the trellised panes” into Usher's studio; there is the glare of ruddy light “thrown full by the flaming stables upon the windows of the apartment “in “Metzengerstein”; and since the windows in six of the [page 187:] seven rooms so vividly described in “The Masque of the Red Death are tinted the same colors as the rooms themselves, “in the corridors ... there stood, opposite to each window, a heavy tripod, bearing a brazier of fire that projected its rays through the tinted glass and so glaringly illumined the room.”

The purpose of such special lighting devices as the braziers of fire is, of course, to produce special effects. In this particular case Poe wished to induce “a multitude of gaudy and fantastic appearances.” In other cases the intricate lighting devices are simply part of the scenic decor, like the large chandelier in the grand saloon in Hop-Frog,” which depended by a chain from the center of the sky-light and was lowered or elevated by means of a counterbalance. But, Poe adds, “in order not to look unsightly, this latter passed outside the cupola and over the roof.” Both décor and the mechanics to achieve it are worked out in detail. In still other cases the type of lighting devised is determined by decor and function. Hence in “The Oval Portrait “we have a tall candelabrum with many candles; this can be moved from place to place so that the portrait hidden in the shadows can be made visible. In a story of less opulent color and mood, like “The Pit and the Pendulum,” a different type of illumination was necessary. Here the unhappy prisoner's vision falls upon the seven tall candles on the table. Their effect is psychological: they expressionistically assume the shapes of white slender angels, then change into spectres with heads of flame, before becoming once again mere candles throwing a dim light on an alien room. In a more completely psychological story like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” lighting becomes closely integrated with plot, a means of forwarding [page 188:] it; the creation of mood, important as it always is with Poe, is here subordinated to the demands of the action. The murderer enters the room of his sleeping victim carrying a lantern. He opens the tin fastening, “a very, very little crevice/’ and permits “a single dim ray, like the thread of a spider/’ to fall upon the face of the hated victim.

But whether for purposes of plot or pure decoration, or for the intensification of a mood or effect, Poe's lighting designs are carefully planned and executed; materials, shape, size, color, quantity and quality of light all is calculated, arranged, and blended into the scene and the story-line. The modern mechanisms by which illusion is created on the stage were unknown to him, but he did supremely well with the excellent mechanism he possessed — his imagination. His lights flamed, glared, writhed, sputtered, frightened, brooded, and moved, — or like the seven iron lamps in his grim prose poem “Shadow “they only burned “pallid and motionless.”

And they never burned without regard to the shadows they cast or the general color scheme they illuminated. Color is definitely part of Poe's wizardry. After a first superficial reading of a few of his stories, especially those in the category which he called the grotesque and arabesque, one somehow carries away an impression of profusion and opulence of color. Yet upon a closer acquaintance one finds that impression greatly altered. The stories are indeed colorful, and the colors are rich and striking, but they are generally confined to a few artistically significant spots. They attract the eye by their vividness, strangeness, and exoticism, and keep it away from the rest of the scene, where all is mysterious darkness. [page 189:]

As a matter of fact, black is the prevailing color in Poe. There is as yet no concordance of Poe's prose, but a study made by Wilson O. Clough of color words appearing in fifty-four of his stories yielded the grand total of 240 for “black,” “dark,” “ebony,” and “sable,” as against 152 for “red,” “crimson,” and “scarlet” and eighty-eight for “gold” and “yellow.”[38] It is true that next to black Poe used such color words as “white,” “pale,” “pallid,” “gray,” and “silver,” but these usually describe faces and clothing of characters and natural objects. Mr. Clough's conclusion is worth repeating: his three statistical tables reveal the preponderance of white and gray and confirm “the customary color associations with Poe's work as those of pallid figures against a black background, across which are shot occasional streamers of crimson and red.”[39]

6

The pallid figures are another element in the unique ness of a Poe story. Their lack of physical vividness is, in his special art, a source of strength rather than weakness. They are not memorable Active characters in themselves, but they exist as an inseparable part of the strange milieu which Poe has imagined for them. If he deprecated Bulwer's “actors “because they impressed him, like Spenser's knights, as “mere stalking horses for particular vices and virtues,”[40] shall we likewise condemn his own “actors” because they impress us as so many talking abstractions for particular moods and sensations?

Poe's characters may lack body as realistic transcriptions, but in the light of his own intention they are artistic creations nevertheless. In a marginal note he [page 190:] once differentiated between two kinds of original char acters in literature: those which present qualities known in real life but never before depicted and those which present qualities either unknown or known only hypothetically and “so skilfully adapted to the circumstances which surround them that our sense of fitness is not offended.” The second kind, Poe felt, belongs to a species of originality which “appertains to the loftier regions of the Ideal.”[41]

This is not very clear. Poe's concepts of originality and Ideality are vague and contradictory, and what he deemed effective characters in literature can only be judged from his stories, especially those which, like “Ligeia,” he considered successful. As a practicing reviewer he had ample opportunity to express his views on every phase of fiction, but he often wrote hastily and the views of the moment were later modified or rejected entirely. What conclusions, for instance, could we draw from his definition of the novel as “a picture of real life”? “The plot,” he adds, “may be involved, but it must not transcend probability. The agencies introduced must belong to real life.”[42] How much “real “life is there in his own short stories? How much of their action does not transcend probability? And to what extent are his characters “real “people?

The answer is not an easy one. There is a sort of abstract reality about the best of Poe's actors which serves his artistic purposes well. Poe seemingly did not go around studying people, jotting down details of appearance, behavior, and expression for later use. Edmund Clarence Stedman was undoubtedly right in concluding that character “did not seize” upon Poe's interest, “except when marked by traits which he felt to [page 191:] be his own.”[43] He was in nearly everything he wrote his own protagonist: he describes himself, reveals himself, proudly exhibits his own mental and emotional acuteness, his aristocratic and aesthetic sensibilities, his ideal steadfastness and actual vulnerability, and his pale, feverish dreams and fancies.(11) Woodberry believed that Poe's hero first came upon the stage in “Berenice” (1835), but there is much to suggest that he appeared even earlier; in fact, at the very beginning of Poe's story-writing career. His first published tale, “Metzengerstein” (1832), contains a hero who in many ways — orphaned youth, nobility, impetuosity, courage, propensity toward meditation, and strange obsessive attachment — anticipates all the protagonists of the stories which Poe was to write during his entire career.

Two years later, in “The Assignation,” we get an other “ill-fated and mysterious” young man. But this time we have detailed physical description: the hero is below medium in height; his figure is slender and symmetrical; his mouth and chin would grace a deity; his eyes are “singular, wild, full, liquid,” with shadows that vary from pure hazel to intense and brilliant jet; his hair is black and curly; his forehead is of unusual breadth; and his features are classically regular. Equally detailed is the description of the young man's mental and temperamental eccentricities: his eery laughter; his antic erudition; his knowledge and love of art; his habit of “intense continual thought ”; his nervousness to the point of trepidation; his poetic creativeness, expressing [page 192:] itself in the beautiful lines which Poe was later to publish separately under the title, “To One in Paradise”; and, finally, his death — a purposeful journey to the land of dreams. There can be no question that this hero is largely an embroidered projection of Poe himself.

Yet Woodberry's suggestion is true to the extent that in “Berenice “the self-delineation is bolder and clearer. The narrating “hero “avows that he loitered away his boyhood in books and dissipated his youth in reverie and that the realities of the world affected him only as visions. Berenice is his cousin with whom he grew up in his “paternal halls.” It is, of course, the same cousin who reappears six years later in “Eleonora.” In the earlier story the hero suffers from a strange malady, but Poe still hesitates to call it madness; he prefers to call it a monomania, a morbid irritability of the attentive faculties. In the later story he is bold enough to announce unequivocally, “I am mad.” Thus the pattern of the Poe hero grows, becomes enlarged, assumes definite form.

The fullest portrait was achieved before “Eleonora.” It is that of Roderick Usher (1839). Essentially we have the same hero from “Berenice,” only he has grown a little older and much sicker. Poe's descriptive vocabulary has in the meantime — while still retaining many of the old adjectives — grown richer. Usher has

He also suffers from “habitual trepidancy — an excessive nervous agitation” and is given to action alternately vivacious and sullen. His voice varies from a tremulous indecision to “that species of energetic concision — that abrupt, weighty, unhurried, and hollow-sounding enunciation — that leaden, self-balanced and perfectly modulated guttural utterance, which may be observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium, during the periods of his most intense excitement.”

The language strives to be exact and vivid, but, for Poes own day, it had the added significance derived from the then popular “science “of phrenology. Poe, who was interested in all science, had dipped into the numerous phrenological treatises with which the literary market was flooded and had appropriated many of its concepts and much of its vocabulary.[44] The writings of Gall, Combe, and Spurzheim were known to him; craniology with its division of the human head into areas in which the various faculties — Ideality, Causality, Constructiveness, Imagination, etc. — were supposed to reside impressed Poe. Individual temperament, aptitudes, and susceptibilities could be deduced from the shape, size and expression of features: forehead, eyes, nose, lips. Yet this special meaning which Poe apparently gave to his words must not blind us to their poetic coloring, descriptive aptness, suggestiveness, evocativeness of sensations, and power to help the story move.

If in “The Imp of the Perverse” Poe undertakes, as he announces in the first sentence, to add one more faculty, impulse, or propensity to the classifications of the phrenologists, he nevertheless manages to tell us, in [page 194:] the latter part, an interesting murder story. The murderer is physically almost non-existent but psychologically he emerges strikingly self-revealed. The impulse to confession, whether phrenologically or psychologically sound, achieves the purpose of a brilliant dénouement.

The range of Poe's characters is narrow. Even where, as in “Hop-Frog,” the hero is a crippled dwarfish court jester he still remains essentially the same suffering, ingenious, imaginative, sardonic protagonist of a macabre action. “We want characters,” cries the king,” characters, man — something novel — out of the way. We are wearied with this everlasting sameness.” But neither the jester nor Poe was capable of supplying variety; a man contemplating himself, spinning his creations out of himself, can only multiply his own likeness; masks can add lines, age, frozen grins, but they remain masks.

This narrowness of range is even more evident in Poe's women characters. The typical woman character in most of his stories is young, beautiful, noble, good, and wraith-like. Nearly always she suffers from a strange malady and comes to a sad end. If, like Berenice, she begins her story life “overflowing with energy,” she soon becomes ravaged by disease, so that even her beauty is marred. More usually, however, Poe is too skilful a story teller to try to encompass more than the last act in the life of his character.(12) As in “The Fall of the House [page 195:] of Usher,” everything but the climax and the dénouement has already happened before the rise of the curtain. The disease which has baffled Lady Madeline's physicians completes its course the very evening of the narrator's arrival. Antecedent action is introduced here and there with a few dexterous strokes worthy of Henrik Ibsen. Or, if it is the whole action — as in “The Oval Portrait — “it is confined to one final paragraph, a quotation from a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.

The sad end of Poe's heroines is, as in all tragedy, death. Those who have speculated on the psychological reason for his obsession with the death of a beautiful woman as a dominant theme in his tales and poems may be right in ascribing it to his early impressions of the death of his mother and, eleven years later, of Mrs. Stanard. They may be right, also, in adding, as a major factor, the long dying of Virginia. And, indeed, his heroines — the Berenices, Morellas, Ligeias, Eleonoras — bear many resemblances to the three women — perhaps even a fourth should be added: Mrs. Frances Allan — who died young, bequeathing to him a sense of desolation, impotent rebellion, and the haunting mystery of vanished loveliness. Yet Poe was always the conscious artist and his choice of this theme was ideally suited to his creative patterns. It is significant that, although we speak of his “heroines,” actually Poe never wrote a story in which a woman is the central character; all stories revolve around a man, a romantic hero, and the woman is presented only insofar as she impinges upon his consciousness and helps to solve his problem, his dilemma, or to inspire his philosophy, release his eloquence, create his mood.

The Marchesa Aphrodite, possessor of superhuman [page 196:] beauty, also bears in her countenance “that fitful stain of melancholy which will ever be found inseparable from the perfection of the beautiful.” It is the same stain which is imbedded in the lustre of Morella's eyes and is related to the “strangeness” without which Ligeia's beauty would perhaps not have been so exquisite. Ligeia is indeed the fullest development of Poe's ideal woman. She is tall, slender, yet majestic, with lovely but irregular features, with a lofty and pale forehead, a skin rivalling the purest ivory, glossy, ravenblack, luxuriant hair, a delicate nose, a sweet mouth with a short upper lip and a soft, voluptuous under lip, startlingly brilliant teeth, a radiant smile, and large black eyes under long jetty lashes. Her voice, like that of Morella — and like the reputed voice of their creator — is low, placid, distinct, musically eloquent, and magically modulated. Her movements are incomprehensibly light and elastic. And her erudition, again like that of her creator, is prodigious.

And yet who is this woman? Is she more than one of the tribe whom Bliss Perry once so aptly characterized as “Ghostly, low-voiced women, tall, emaciated by mortal illness, but with more than mortal beauty in their eyes”?[45] She and her sisters existed only in Poe's imagination and they now exist in his stories and poems. For variety they may differ in minor features or little ways: the tresses may be fair instead of dark, or intellectuality may be wanting, as in Eleonora. But essentially they are alike, all modelled on one image. The exceptions are singularly few and insignificant. Aside from dying and thus fulfilling their appointed rôle in the plot and in the thoughts of the hero, they have little substantiality or individuality. Often, like Poe's male [page 197:] characters, they too are projections of Poe himself, as he was or imagined himself to be. The fanciful suggestion of Joseph Wood Krutch that Poe could not describe real women because he could not love in a “normal “way must be discarded for lack of proof.(13)It is more likely that Poe created his lost Lenores because they suited his artistic purposes. Why not believe him that he did find the death of a beautiful woman a disturbing and poetic theme? Moreover, for this theme he had memories of several models; and as these “real “women receded in time they acquired in his memory the necessary vagueness, indefiniteness, opaqueness, ethereality which his creative temper required.

It is not necessary to go into the more “normal” characters Poe describes in his tales of ratiocination and his so-called humorous sketches. I have already remarked on the resemblances between Mr. Poe and the brainy M. Dupin.(14) The Dr. Watson in these stories is merely a point of view. A character like Madame Lalande, in “The Spectacles,” is too unbelievable to deserve serious comment. In short, only the “arabesque” actors and actresses are drawn with any distinction, and even to them the adverse judgment pronounced half a century ago by Lewis E. Gates applies: “Complex human characters, characters that are approximately true to the whole range of human motive and interest, Poe never gives us. He conceives of characters merely as means [page 198:] for securing his artificial effects on the nerves of his readers.”[48] All this is quite true and has been repeated by many scholars and critics. But it is not the whole truth.

7

If, then, it is not plot, nor setting, nor characters, nor dialogue(15) which makes a Poe short story, other qualities must be sought for. The elements already discussed suggest the answer. Each taken separately remains part of a figure and has little meaning until joined with the other parts, for it has been designed to blend into a larger whole. Poe did not write stories of character, of plot, or of place: all the usual designations break down in his case. He wrote stories which attempted to transcribe the totality of a mood or impression or feeling and to create within the reader the same totality of mood, impression, or feeling. Poe's great achievement was the creation and mastery of a method for capturing and evoking in others his special type of imaginative experience.

This achievement was possible for him because he was, first and foremost, a story-teller. Along with his acquired literary and critical sophistication he possessed the gift of the primitive bard who was always aware of his audience, of himself as the center of attention, and of the tale he was to unfold in such a way as to hold his auditors spell-bound. The primitive bard was, of course, a poet, and so was Poe. It is significant that so many of his poems tell stories and that so many of his [page 199:] stories can be classified as poems. Stedman regarded “‘Ligeia,’ ‘Usher,’ ‘Shadow,’ ‘Arnheim,’ and the like” as prose poems.[49] The opening of “The Raven” is clearly in the bardic tradition of story-telling:

Four lines, one periodic sentence, telling when, where, who, and beginning the action. An even better example is the opening of “Annabel Lee”: Once upon a time, in a kingdom by the sea, there lived. ... A story has been promised, has begun. We, the auditors, settle down to listen.

And what we hear is believable only because it is told in a voice which bears the tints of conviction. The tone is right. The tale itself may be strange, unearthly, full of darkness and terror, but the teller is believable: he has unmistakably been there himself; he has seen, heard, smelled, felt, experienced the things of which he tells. The tale may be unreal but the tone of verisimilitude cannot be denied. Most of his stories — all the memorable ones, at any rate — are told in the first person; they are strikingly like recitations, like dramatic monologues:

Not only is a tone of reality, something analogous to what we have learned to denominate as “reportage,” struck in these first sentences, but also a distinctive melody. Poe's prose has subtle rhythms; it has the quality which he himself often praised in others, the quality of repose. Yet when smoothly flowing sentence is added to sentence and paragraph to paragraph, the undercurrent of emotion comes through with a terrific impact. Poe's melody is a compound of many elements: structure — variety of sentence length and order; color — darks and shades with flashes of light; distinctive adjectives and adverbs — “singular,” “soundless,” “dreary, “oppressively alliteration and assonance — “during ... dull, dark ... day,” “low,” “alone”; and unobtrusive [page 201:] repetition and oblique emphasis of crucial words and phrases. The final effect is certainly unique.

But the effect is achieved not alone by means of a distinctive prose. Everything — plot, characters and their names, setting and atmosphere, “props “and sounds — blends into this prose. If a character such as Usher is to possess a favorite book it must be the Mad Trist by Sir Launcelot Canning. The invention is made real by the narrator's casual assumption that his auditors are, of course, familiar with the volume: “I had arrived at that well-known portion of the story where Ethelred. ...” This casual assumption of familiarity with a famous book is repeated in the next sentence: “Here, it will be remembered, the words of the narrative run thus.” This is both ingenious and disarming. Similarly, if Ligeia is to compose a poem it must be “The Conqueror Worm,” no less. Her shriek upon hearing the recitation of these verses is one that we can share: “O God! O Divine Father! — shall these things be undeviatingly so? — shall this Conqueror be not once conquered?” A futile and therefore stupid exclamation but one which mortal man, in his spasms of rebellion, has indulged in from time immemorial.

The moments when Poe's audience participates most fully in the action are carefully prepared for. The timing of an event or apparition is superbly calculated. It is precisely when the narrator arrives at the passage in the mythical volume “where Ethelred . . proceeds to make an entrance by force “that the terrifying climax occurs. The passage, couched in a cleverly simulated archaic diction and style, begins:

It is precisely then that the narrator's ears become aware of “the very cracking and ripping sound which Sir Launcelot had so particularly described” echoed some where in a remote part of the mansion. Poe knows, however, with the instinct of a good showman as well as a good bard, that the time has not yet come to bring on the climax. This is but the first ominous sound of preparation; it must be repeated, varied, magnified until it, too, becomes a character in the action, the fearful Unknown, Fate.(17) For the present it is best to cast doubts upon its actuality by such parenthetical remarks as “(although I at once concluded that my excited fancy had deceived me) “and by describing the harmonizing storm which rages outside the mansion.

The narrator proceeds with the tale of Ethelred until he comes, in the very next paragraph, to the slaying of a prodigious fiery dragon. And now the harsh, horrid shriek with which the dragon dies is echoed by a “harsh, protracted, and most unusual screaming or grating sound” somewhere in the house. This time both the narrator and his auditors are certain that the sound is real. And once more the story of the doughty knight is resumed. Ethelred approaches the wall of the castle in [page 203:] order to fetch the brazen shield when that object falls down at his feet upon the silver floor, with a mighty great and terrible ringing sound.” Immediately there is a distinct, hollow, metallic, and clangorous, yet apparently muffled reverberation.” The narrator leaps to his feet. The climax of his tale is approaching; it is to be enacted: the preparation has been completed. He turns to Roderick Usher. Does he hear the morbid assault of sounds? The answer comes in a “low, hurried, and gibbering murmur.” Yes; how could he not hear it? These are the sounds of his sister trying to free herself from her coffin: she is still alive. She has freed herself! Even now her footsteps can be heard approaching. The “heavy and horrible beating of her heart “penetrates the door. Usher, too, springs to his feet. “I tell you,” he shrieks, “that she now stands without the door.” And the two men stand with their backs to the audience, as it were, watching with horrible fascination the “huge antique panels “slowly throwing back “their ponderous and ebony jaws” and disclosing the “lofty and en shrouded figure of the Lady Madeline of Usher.”

Melodrama? Grand Guignol stuff? Perhaps. But how vividly and completely realized, and how superbly staged! No wonder John Macy found himself reluctantly admitting that “Even if [Poe's] tales of horror no longer give us the creeps, they will always give to any one who cares about writing, that shiver of pleasure which comes when we watch a dexterous craftsman at work.”[50]

Powerfully as “The Fall of the House of Usher” illustrates Poe's use of sound effects, the device merits further attention. His ear was remarkably sensitive and his skill in manipulating a variety of sounds — variety [page 204:] in tone, quality, volume, range — at moments when their effect would be most telling was uncanny. Seldom, if ever, are his sounds mere additions to the plot, adventitious theatrical enrichment; usually, they are so well integrated with the plot that they are, or seem to be, an inseparable part of it, a dramatic means of unfolding it. The ironic jingling of bells which marks the end of “The Cask of Amontillado “is as perfect a curtain as could be devised. It is the inevitable touch which conveys the whole spirit of the piece. Just as the whole point of “The Devil in the Belfry “depends upon the behavior of the bells in the steeple. This story is, however, one of the Poe's lighter performances, and any effect he intended to create is hardly impressive.

For the full force of Poe's use of sound we must re turn to his psychological stories of guilt and terror. The monologuist in “The Tell-Tale Heart” is so acute of hearing that he claims having heard all things in heaven and earth — and many things in hell. With this figurative emphasis as preparation, we are willing to believe that he managed to open his victim's door eight mid nights in succession without causing the hinges to creak; that on the last night he heard the old man's “slight” groan of mortal terror and the “low, dull, quick” beating of his heart, which soon increased to a “hellish tattoo” and filled the silence of the room until the murderer began to fear the sound would be heard by a neighbor; that after he had dismembered the body and washed off all blood stains he heard a bell strike the hour of four and, at the same moment, a knocking at the street door; and that he finally betrayed himself to the three police officers because he was certain that they too must hear the steady “low, dull, quick sound — [page 205:] much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton” — the incessant beating of the dead man's heart.

Only slightly less firmly integrated with the plot, and more theatrically effective, is the gigantic ebony clock in the black chamber in “The Masque of the Red Death. Any stage director would be immeasurably grateful for such clear, specific, and stimulating directions as the following passage contains:

Poe knew well the electrifying effect of sudden silence in the midst of revelry, revelry staged as escape from intolerable fear. His silences are as eloquent as those of Chekhov, except that the emotional lava with which Poe's silences are charged is different. “For a moment, all is still, and all is silent save the voice of the clock. The dreams are stiff-frozen as they stand.” And the voice, too, reaches a climax, at midnight, when it rings [page 206:] out twelve strokes, and the revellers become aware of the presence of an uninvited masque in their midst, a masque hiding the face of Death.

One of the means by which Poe achieves his effects is contrast. His silences are eloquent because they alternate with sound. His lighting is spectacular and mood creating because it is arranged in little islands, focuses, surrounded by shadows. His colors are intense because they are glowing spots in the midst of darkness or no color. The gentleness of the narrator in “The Black Cat” — his tenderness of heart, his love of animals — is in violent contrast with the sudden eruption of his latent sadism. That this use of contrast is deliberate cannot be doubted. Poe plays upon our senses, and he does it so effectively because he knew so well the dramatic value of sudden interruption, cessation, or diversion of sound or light; as well as he knew the value of pause and modulation in his own voice when he “entertained,” debated, lectured, recited, or “conversed.”

He was himself the source, the reservoir, and the object of his sensuous effects. The almost preternatural keenness of one sense or another avowed by his heroes was characteristic of Poe himself. He revelled in the rich scenery and splendid properties he imagined. He delighted in the touch of silk, velvet, brocade, and damask. He was thrilled, soothed, and saddened by music.(18) And the vividness with which he transcribes [page 207:] his sensory experiences contributes powerfully to the response his stories evoke. It is one of the elements with which he weaves the artistic and emotional pattern he envisages as the finished story.

In the end, we must come back to the art of pattern weaving as Poe's strongest point. His plots may be melo dramatic, his characters may lack roundness and their dialogue may be monotonic, his decor, lighting, timing, and other devices may be theatrical, but they blend perfectly into a style which is absorbing, individual, unique. His was indeed the sort of mind that Gordon Craig wished for in the theatre: “a single directing mind that can give a production artistic unity.”[52] It is not any single part that is outstanding or even distinguished but the synchronization or — better still — the orchestration. His stories are frequently dramatic productions in which Poe displays his craftsmanship as bard, playwright, stage designer, electrician, actor, elocutionist, and, above all, director. This display has at times worried his critics, such as Edward J. O’Brien who felt that Poe would have been stronger had he more successfully concealed his elaborately calculated artifice.[53] Had Poe been able to read this opinion he would have agreed with it. “It is the curse of a certain order of mind,” he once wrote, “that it can never rest satisfied with the consciousness of its ability to do a thing. Still less is it content with doing it. It must both know and show how it was done.”[54]

And yet even this weakness has proved, in the century that has elapsed since his death, a source of strength to others. Craftsmen everywhere have derived added joy [page 208:] in reading Poe's stories from catching a glimpse at times of his superb methodology. There have always been “poets’ poets “and “writers’ writers Poe has been one of the few exceptional creative artists who have been able to impart joy to other writers and to hold the general reader as well. Philip Rahv, in his introduction to a recently published collection of The Short Novels of Tolstoy[55] speaks with respect of “the conception of writing as of something calculated and constructed — a conception first formulated explicitly by Edgar Allan Poe.” But Poe did more than formulate a conception; he embodied it in stories which testify to the artistic validity of the conception. “Art,” said Henry James with quiet enthusiasm, after he had seen Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, “is a legerdemain.” James and Poe were poles apart as men and writers, but each proved, in his own way, that artistic discipline is a living principle.

8

To leave this study of Poe's short stories with the impression that all the values they contain are his method and his masterly use of it would amount to a blanket approval of the criticism that has been levelled against him for being a literary craftsman and nothing else. The substance of most of this criticism is, I believe, fairly expressed in the following passage by Lewis E. Gates:

Since much of this is true, it would be folly to attempt a defense of Poe. Besides, Poe has spoken for himself; we but need to recall his statement in the “Poetic Principle “that “there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified — more supremely noble” — than a “poem written solely for the poem's sake.[57] I feel certain that Poe would enter no objection to our substituting “story “for “poem.” If he chose to write stories solely for the stories’ sake, there is little point in implying that his “infinitely inventive intellect,” his adroitness in planning and devising, his “endless ingenuity” — in other words, the marked qualities which prove his talent for his chosen task — were somehow against him.

It has been my aim in these pages to emphasize the kinship of Poe's art with the arts of the theatre. That kinship impresses me as lending strength to his work, and accounts for much of its effectiveness. The best tales of Poe are masterpieces of theatrical contrivance, but it would be critical blindness not to note that they contain other levels of significance. The theatre itself, tight little world of make-believe that it is, in which everything is planned and arranged and nicely balanced, operates on more than one level. It always makes room [page 210:] for the display of the incalculable and indefinable human personality. Poes stories, like the world of the theatre, bear this animating spirit; they are permeated with this subtle infusion.

In providing him with opportunities for displaying himself, these carefully contrived fictions managed to reflect many facets of a complex personality. Here along with his showmanship, his histrionic skill and gusto, are also serious betrayals of thoughts, reflections, desires, aspirations, and objective observation. One cannot quarrel with Professor Floyd Stovall's words that “Poe was absorbed in himself, in analyzing his mind and soul and in worshiping them with incense and exotic offerings,”[58] but one can add that in staining the pages of his books with his moods and passions Poe also managed to give to the world a picture of his mind. And it is, indeed, an “incisive and curious mind,” full of vagaries and strange fancies, but also full of sensitive perceptions.

A more recent critic than Gates objects to Poe's theory of “a certain single or unique effect “because it seems “to define, if anything, an impossibly simple and crude story.”[59] As if the production of a single effect necessarily demands the exclusion of other values! Be cause Poe employed his disciplined artistry in imparting to his tales unity of tone and impression, does it follow that he had left behind him his keen intellect and his complex tangled personality, so that the materials with which he worked are bare of any implications, any significance for the student of ideas, character, or life in general? Ludwig Lewisohn credits him with at least moments of insight and praises him for defining originality in literature as the ability to bring out “the half formed, the reluctant, or the unexpressed fancies of [page 211:] mankind.”[60] That definition was easy for Poe and he probably enjoyed writing it, for it makes his own literary pages appear to be full of originality. And, in truth, besides managing to construct a number of absorbingly readable and stageworthy short fictions, he also managed to imbue them with psychological overtones which have stimulated the speculations of numerous professional and lay psychologists.

Poe's contribution to our understanding of the mind, especially in its less “normal” manifestations, is not easy to estimate. In recent years it has been his mis fortune to attract the attention of many psychoanalysts. He seems to be an ideal subject upon whom they can hang their theories. Undoubtedly much of what they have written about him and his work has an air of plausibility, but it is safe to say nevertheless that most of their deductions and inductions are pure fantasy. Just as lack of evidence did not stop Mr. Krutch from ascribing sexual impotence to Poe, so lack of evidence has not deterred psychoanalytically-minded interpreters of his work from drawing inferences that, at least to the uninitiated, seem absurd.

Thus in an article entitled, “A Psycho-Analytical Study of Edgar Allan Poe,”[61] Lorine Pruette indulges in a whole series of speculations regarding the hidden meaning of his stories.(19) Some of Miss Pruette's observations appear to be merely too positive and too sweeping but otherwise unobjectionable. Such, for example, is her comment that Poe's women

What, however, can be said for her elaborate reading of sex symbolism into Poe's use of color and lights? There are no “ifs,” “perhapses,” “maybe's” in Miss Pruette's vocabulary. She notes that in “Ligeia “there are three colors: gold, black, and red, and concludes that they symbolize death and sex. She notes the intricate lighting fixture Poe designed for his heroine's chamber; it, too or rather “the serpent-like flames “it creates — represents sex. Her summary of sex symbols includes

Miss Pruette is, of course, not the only worker in this colorful vineyard. On this very subject of the possible signification of Poe's use of color, Clement Wood, a poet gone psychoanalyst, picks one of Poe's flowers and writes learnedly of it:

For Miss Pruette, the seventh chamber, in “The Masque of the Red Death,” with its black draperies and scarlet panes, is a supreme example of the sex motif which, consciously or unconsciously, underlies much if not all of Poe's work. And the tired criminal in “The [page 213:] Tell-Tale Heart “wishing for the sweet rest of the grave is, with the authority of Jung and Silberer, really wishing to creep back into the mother's womb. Mr. Wood goes even beyond Miss Pruette in attributing to Poe an unconscious obsessive longing for his mother. “The sea imagery,” he informs us, “like the Descent into the Maelstrom,’ remotely hints at the mother; even in a mere adventure fantasy, Poe has himself drawn three times into the hideous womb of mother earth.”[63]

All this — and the numerous speculations of sadism and masochism and the death wish in Poe's work — is not, however, as reprehensible as Miss Pruette's acceptance of “rumors which still go the round of the clubs in Baltimore “that Poe was “definitely “syphilitic and her building upon them a pyramid of analysis of Poe's characteristics. It is in deploring the manner in which he has often been used to “prove “all sorts of theories that one is tempted to join his doting female biographers and exclaim “Poor Poe!”

The truth is that Poe's stories have a tremendous amount of symbolic and psychological significance. But his symbols were those of a poet whose native idiom was figurative language, whose mind habitually thought in rich imagery, at once luxurious, indefinite, and romantic. And his psychology was the inevitable reflection of a sharp intellect giving full artistic (and therefore subject to interpretation and misinterpretation) expression of his own observations, impulses, and contradictions. That his field of observation and exploration was largely limited to himself has deprived his work of range and variety but has subtilized and intensified the subjective segment of inner human experience upon which his mind focused. [page 214:]

There is more justice and understanding in the comments of a man like Dostoievsky, a literary artist and natural-born psychologist himself, who early perceived the real nature of Poe's contribution to our understanding of psychological phenomena. Poe, for Dostoievsky, was not really fantastic at all, in the sense in which Hoffmann — who in certain minor ways influenced Poe[64] was, but capricious and audacious.

Dostoievsky does not make the mistake of abstracting Poe's psychology from his work. Separated, it ceases to exist. Its reality depends upon its being imbedded in an imaginative setting. Even his “marvellous acumen and amazing realism” are qualities of his descriptive powers and are, presumably, generated or called to life in the process of creation. Aesthetic and psychological values in Poe do not exist independently. Stedman realized this when he called Poe an artist bent on psychological effect.[66]

We definitely can read a Poe story on more than one level, since it is certain that every artist creates on more than one level. Art like life carries many layers of meaning. A recent critic, George Snell, sees in “Ligeia “an allegory “for belief in the impossibility of finding a substitute for a first love, when that love is obsessive.” As an expression of the unconscious, Mr. Snell believes, the story anticipates Freud by nearly a century.[67] He sees in the “MS. Found in a Bottle” a parable of man's [page 215:] passage through life and in “William Wilson” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” two studies of the schizophrenic mind. All these readings are tributes to the richness of Poe. He yields meanings to those who seek them.

It is, however, doubtful that Poe had any consciousness of planting allegories or psychological riddles. He was drawn to certain paradoxes and “perversities” in human behavior and thought they might eventuate in effective fictions. If the result, as in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and in “The Black Cat,” was also an impressive revelation of the burden of a guilty conscience, it was merely incidental. Nothing was more distasteful to Poe than a didactic or “teaching” story. If in many stories he anticipated Freud or Jung or Lombroso,(20) that too was incidental. Robert Louis Stevenson considered “The Imp of the Perverse “an important contribution to morbid psychology.[68] So undoubtedly it was and is. But for a true understanding of Poe it is well for us to remember that his stories were by intention and hope meant to be works of art.

There cannot be the slightest doubt that “The Masque of the Red Death” describes the terror man has of impending death and that in his method of description Poe employed imaginative symbolism in word and object and incident. Yet M. H. Bobrova, the Russian scholar who in 1937, in a doctoral dissertation,[69] worked out in detail the resemblance of this story to a play has added a great deal to our comprehension and enjoyment of this remarkable work and of Poe's artistic intention. Miss Bobrova divides the play into a prologue (enacted in front of the curtain) and a number of scenes [page 216:] leading up to a climax in the confrontation between the Prince and Death. If we bear in mind that Poe himself called his story “The Masque of the Red Death” and that he was familiar with Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan masques, both the elaborate pageantry — unusual even for Poe — and the dramatic power of the piece become explicable as an artistic creation. Other levels of meaning — the unconscious betrayal of fear, possible hidden sex motifs, etc., — are of secondary importance.

Poe used psychological situations and symbolism to gain aesthetic effects. He worked in certain colors be cause they represented for him certain subjective associations and helped him to achieve certain desired effects. What color could have served him better than black for conjuring an atmosphere of dread and gloom, than purple or gold for representing opulence and magnificence, than scarlet and crimson for intensifying the illusion of bloody catastrophe?(21) The colors of the seven chambers in the “Masque” suggest to Professor Blair the allegorical signification of the seven ages of man who progresses “from the blue of the dawn of life to the black of its night.”[71] Did Poe mean to imply this signification? It would be interesting to know, but since we cannot — unless some new Poe material is discovered — we must accept the story as we accept a piece of music: in spite of program notes which would limit the meaning of what we hear, we generally let ourselves go and create our own meaning. But to make us let go and become creative the music must be good.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 162:]

1 Poe himself was clear and unequivocal on the subject of realism: “The defenders of this pitiable stuff uphold it on the ground of its truthfulness ... this truthfulness is the one overwhelming defect. ... In my view, if an artist must paint decayed cheeses, his merit will lie in their looking as little like decayed cheeses as possible.”[6]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 165:]

2 So do playwrights. Some modern practitioners of the craft have insisted that their plays must not be broken up by intermissions. One example is Philip Barry who indicated in the stage directions for Hotel Universe that “The action of the play is continuous.” And wisely, because the mood of his play is so tenuous that it might easily be dispelled by the mundane lite of a theatre lobby.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 168:]

3 That this was evidently Poe's own practice is indicated by the testimony of Mrs. Clemm, who is quoted by Eugene L. Didier as saying: “He never sat down to write until he had completely arranged the plot, the characters, and even the language. His habit was to walk up and down while thinking out his work.”[17]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 170:]

4 For an interpretation of this story as dealing with mesmerism rather than metempsychosis, see Sidney E. Lind, “Poe and Mesmerism,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, December, 1947.

5 Although it is worth noting that one excellent historian of the American short story as a form of literature credits Poe, as a psychological artist, with having anticipated and greatly surpassed James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson.[21]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 171:]

6 Reviewing a novel by Bulwer, Poe recalled a short tale by the same author which he considered very bad because, among other structural faults, “it had, properly speaking, neither beginning nor end.” — Graham's Magazine, June 1842.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 174:]

7 Two examples will suffice: “The Premature Burial “seems to have been suggested by a poem and an accompanying note published in the Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine for January, 1844,[24] and “The Man That Was Used Up “originated in the trial of a Captain Mann which was widely reported in the press during most of 1839, the year in which the story was published.[25]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 178:]

8 This book was reviewed by Poe in Graham's Magazine, March, 1841.[34]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 179:]

9 Van Wyck Brooks speculates on the possibility that the house of Usher might have been suggested by the ruinous old mouldering mansions in the Carolina woods.” — The World of Washington Irving, p. 347. If this be true, Poe's assimilation of the original “suggestion “was complete; for the “house “has also the unmistakable air of the castles of Horace Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, and William Godwin. The same comment on Poe's absorption of whatever source or sources he used applies to Henry Seidel Canby's statements that the “crude original “of “Landor's Cottage “was a Currier & Ives print and that the rooms Poe described in “The Philosophy of Furniture “can be found in the steel engravings of the Annuals.[35]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 186:]

10 Mr. Hartmann, too, had a “delicate “problem in lighting, since he was aware, he tells us, that three-fourths of the audience did not believe in supernatural manifestations. Mainly, like Poe, he sought to devise illumination which could keep any part of the scene in light or shadow.[37]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 191:]

11 “His presence pervades such tales as ‘The Pit and the Pendulum,’ ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ or ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ no less densely than it pervades his ‘William Wilson,’ his ‘Masque of the Red Death’ his ‘Ligeia’ and ‘The Haunted Palace.’” — Walter De La Mare, “A Revenant.”

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 194:]

12 The resemblance of the typical Poe story to a Greek tragedy is at times striking. The unities are approximated fairly closely. The cast of characters is generally kept down to a minimum. Except for the final dramatic moments, most of the “fable “is not enacted but reported by a participant, a ubiquitous eye-witness or — as in the case of the poisoning of the Marchesa di Mentoni — by a messenger. Much of the swiftness and power of the best of Poe's stories derive from this “Greek concentration.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 197:]

13 There is more validity in Roy P. Basler's hint of a confession of erotic love in Poe's description in the first paragraph of “Ligeia.”[46] I believe this hint, if followed up by a study of the other stories, and the poems as well, would yield interesting results.

14 Poe's confession to Philip Pendleton Cooke (“You are right about the hair-splitting of my French friend: — that is all done for effect.”) does not contradict this resemblance; it rather confirms it.[47]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 198:]

15 Dialogue has been treated in Chapter II. I have seen no reason for adding anything on this topic in connection with Poe's short stories. The weaknesses of the playwright are perhaps more glaring but they are essentially the same as the weaknesses of the story-teller.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 199:]

16 It is interesting to note the similarity of this opening, and a few of the others, to the beginnings found in many Old English story-poems like “The Seafarer.”

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 204:]

17 Compare with Eugene O’Neill's use of the beating tom-toms in Emperor Jones. A careful reading of the script will reveal that O’Neill wishes the sound to increase, diminish, recede or come closer at appropriate moments in the thought-monologue of the fleeing “Emperor.”

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 206, running to the bottom of page 207:]

18 And since his stories — excellent theatre as they are — were cast in the form of fiction, he did not need to forgo the advantages to be derived from transcribing olfactory sensations. “I believe,” he wrote in one of his Marginalia, “that odors have an altogether peculiar force, in affecting us through association; a force differing essentially from that of objects addressing the touch, the taste, the sight, or the hearing.”[51] He was a good enough “associationist “to record: “The senses were oppressed by mingled and conflicting perfumes, reeking up from strange convolute [page 207:] censers ...” (“The Assignation”). Or: “the tar or paint with which it [the oblong box] was lettered ... emitted a strong, disagreeable, and ... a peculiarly disgusting odor.”

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 211:]

19 The article is, of course, equally concerned with his poems, his critical writings, his life, and his unconscious.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 215:]

20 See his suggestion, in “Eleonora,” that madness and genius are related.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 216:]

21 And what could have suited his imagination better, for such a story as “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade,” than the invention of a blue rat, a sky-blue cow and a pink horse with green wings? The only inference Van Wyck Brooks wisely draws from these creations is that Poe anticipated certain modern painters.[70]