Text: Robert D. Jacobs, “Art as Stimulus: The Single Effect,” Poe, Journalist and Critic, 1969, pp. 315-328 (This material is protected by copyright)

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XIII  •  Art as Stimulus: The Single Effect

 

POE's greatest diffculty [[difficulty]] in developing a theory of poetry arose, as we have seen, from his attempt to prove that a transcendental vision could be transmitted, at least in part, by an empirical method. He was not the only theorist who recognized the problem; it was central in the aesthetics of high romanticism, and it was solved, insofar as it can ever be solved, by critics like Coleridge who advocated a symbolistic technique which enabled the artist to transmit his intuitions of universals by showing the correspondences between things and thought. To Poe, however, if the object depicted retained its authenticity as a thing, the artist was trying to achieve truth by a representation of reality. Though Poe is often considered a symbolist, he employed symbolism in a very special sense. In “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” he had invoked analogy as a mode of cognition, but his analogies were drawn from the cosmos as a whole and not from particular objects. This is why Allen Tate, in a perceptive essay based partly on “The Colloquy,” described Poe as having an angelic instead of a symbolic imagination.(1) Poe used symbolism in the manner of a musician. Morse Peckham's description of the symphonic form of Berlioz would apply equally well to Poe's work: “The reappearance of the theme made it unmistakable that behind each ‘scene’ or movement was an individual who was organizing the material in order to symbolize his attitudes. It was not, like eighteenth-century music, saying: ‘This is love, this is nobility.’ Rather, it said, ‘This is the joy, this is the sorrow, this is the ecstasy of the same person.’ ”(2) Such a symbolic mode was the result of Poe's initial concept of poetry as music with an idea. Words were used for their affective and not their referential value. [page 316:]

Yet Poe was concerned with principle, with law, and when he counseled following nature, he meant first, observation of human nature and of the Great Design, and then the application of natural laws to human art. Not in the individual object but in the sweep of the planets about the sun, in the reciprocity of cause and effect as exhibited in the adaptation of a form of life to its surroundings, and in the periodicity of the seasons did he see the laws that could be applied to human art. An imitation of nature's variety, fecundity, vitality, and growth was alien to Poe's concept of art. To him aesthetic value was received by the poet as feeling, a feeling inspired by existing forms of beauty but not satisfied by them. Since ideal beauty was beyond life, the poet had to place minimal reliance upon sense perception. The feeling could be adequately symbolized only by the whole poem, just as the beauty of God's design could be realized only by an apprehension of the whole universe, not its minute particulars. Unlike Emerson, Poe could not see the universal in the particular. Phenomena described in a poem had to be transformed imaginatively into something not common to sense experience, something ideal. Not only symbols which retained their authenticity as objects but also similes and metaphors should be eliminated, because they referred to the actual, and Poe wished to stimulate the response he considered attendant only upon vision. The whole should stimulate the poetic feeling, and in order to stimulate strongly, the poem had to achieve a unity of emotional effect.

Although in poetry only aesthetic feeling could be rendered with propriety, Poe thought that prose had no such limitation. It could make use of a wide variety of effects. Prose, in Poe's opinion, had a lower purpose than poetry because it did not make its appeal exclusively to the soul; it was a more flexible instrument and could be used artistically to arouse a unified emotional effect. During the same fertile period in which Poe produced his review of Longfellow, he wrote his most significant theoretical statement about the short tale in the context of a review of the tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne.(3) [page 317:]

The concept of unified effect that Poe developed in his theory of poetry was applied with equal stringency to the short tale. The April number of Graham's contained a brief notice of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales,(4) which was perhaps composed during Virginia's illness. But just as he had done with Longfellow's Ballads, Poe announced that because of lack of space he would treat the subject more fully in a subsequent issue. This he did in the May number. Poe needed space because he wanted not merely to evaluate Hawthorne's stories, but to establish a rationale of the short tale by which an evaluation could be made. Just as he had validated the function of the critic and the purpose of poetry, now he intended to validate the short story as an authentic literary genre.

In this attempt Poe was able to reduce theory to practice more successfully than he had done in his review of Longfellow's poetry because he did not think it necessary to establish transcendent aesthetic value for the short tale. Prose, not appealing exclusively to the aesthetic sense, could evoke terror, passion, horror, mirth, or even stimulate the reason:

Poe tended to continue his theoretical arguments from review to review, and we can see that here he was reinforcing the claim that he had made for poetry in the review of Longfellow's Ballads. Poetry, in Poe's opinion, produced transport, or vision. Rhythm was indispensable because of its hypnagogic effect in detaching the senses from external reality and making the mind receptive to emotional stimuli. Of course one might argue that prose can do the same thing. Prose like that of Sir Thomas Browne can often be scanned, [page 318:] but Poe, in theory at least, considered highly rhythmic prose as merely inefficient poetry.(5) Rhythmic prose does not rhyme, and rhyme, with its repetition of sound, reinforces the hypnagogic effect of rhythm. Although he could write good blank verse himself, Poe was not overly fond of the form because it failed to use rhyme, one of the tools at the poet's command.

Poe's strategy in this review was to elaborate his concept of the unified effect, which he had touched on briefly in his review of Longfellow and in earlier reviews, and to apply it to the short tale. He based his concept upon empirical psychology, which served his purpose here as had the theoretical physiology of the brain in the review of Longfellow. Now he developed his famous doctrine of the single sitting, and he claimed that it applied equally to poetry and to fiction:

This quotation represents Poe at his most pragmatic, extracting rules for poetry from empirical psychology. The state of transport cannot be long maintained; hence a poem must be brief. On the other hand, if it is too brief, the hypnagogic effect of rhyme and rhythm is diminished, and the soul is not deeply moved. Poe accepted the Longinian concept of transport as the test of poetry, but, like Coleridge, he would not allow the title of poem to a composition which contained a series of striking lines or passages. It was the unified effect of the whole which counted, but the length of the whole had to be adjusted to what Poe considered to be the duration of ecstasy — arbitrarily about an hour.(6)

Poe had broached the subject of unity of effect as far back as 1836, but then he had used the requirement to attack Mrs. Sigourney's habit of prefixing an epigraph to her poems. He had previously indicated a distaste for long poems, but in his review of Moore's Alciphron, which was a long poem, his strategy had been to examine the poem for evidences of the fancy and the imagination and he had made no objection to its length. Now, however, the theoretical portion of his review was devoted to a discussion of unity of effect and the psychological need for such unity.

The rule of unified effect was in Poe's system applicable to all purely literary genres except the novel, and Poe had his doubts that the novel was really an art form. The reader had to be in a situation in which stimuli could operate without interruption, and for this the single sitting was necessary. To guard against disturbance, a reading time for the tale of no more than two hours was prescribed; this was Poe's estimate of the length of time a person could screen himself from “worldly interests” and give the tale his undivided attention.

How, we may ask, could Poe have been so naïve as to ignore the different reading rates of his projected audience and the differences [page 320:] in leisure time available for reading? Probably because in this review he was thinking in terms of a mass audience, and his purpose was to prescribe a desirable length for journalistic fiction. It is difficult to separate Poe the journalist from Poe the artist. He had a given medium, the monthly magazine, and his problem was to create an art form for this medium. He believed that reading would eventually be confined largely to magazines. The increasing complexity of life would create a public demand for short fiction. Poe had learned from his own experience that collections of short tales sold poorly, however publishable they might be in magazines. If, however, the tale could be established as an art form, it would be properly reviewed, and the critics, mediating between the author and the audience, would make the audience aware of the suitability of the form to their needs. Poe's concern about the reading time of a prose narrative represents journalistic expediency as well as practical psychology. Brevity in the tale was not as psychologically necessary as it was in the poem, but it was a sort of rule of thumb which would enable the tale-writer to make the greatest impression on his reader.

Since theory had to be reduced to practice, Poe next proceeded to explain how an author might evoke a unified response within the limits of two hours’ reading time.

We notice immediately that in this passage Poe speaks of both effect, which we might presume is the emotional effect, and idea, which could be construed as an appeal to the intellect. In Poe's theory the tale could appeal either to the emotions or to the reason, and emotion and thought had to reinforce each other to achieve a totality of effect. He considered the tale superior to the poem, not in the quality but in the range of experience it yielded to the reader. The tale, like his own detective stories, could combine horror and an exercise in deduction, or, if we take some of his own tales as examples, it could present philosophical ideas. Consequently, Poe concluded rightly, it would have more appeal to the “mass of mankind.” Critics who made disparaging comments against the “tales of effect” (horror, etc.) were simply mistaken, for these tales “were relished by every man of genius: although there were found many men of genius who condemned them without just ground.”

In his argument to establish the short tale as a serious art form, Poe's grounding in British empirical psychology served him better than it did in his attempt to methodize the poetic vision. The only source he ever acknowledged for his concept of totality of effect was Augustus William Schlegel, but it is not difficult to locate what he had learned from other writers on the subject. Kames, Blair, Alison, and Coleridge — not to mention the phrenologists — had served Poe in his development of a theory of poetry, but it was chiefly Karnes and Alison who stood behind his principle of unity of impression, the single effect of the short tale.

Lord Karnes had stated, “Emotions that are opposite or extremely dissimilar, never combine or unite: the mind cannot simultaneously take on opposite tones.”(7) Therefore, if one wanted to create a strong impression, he should be careful not to promote confused reactions. He should preserve the “harmony of emotions.” Alison gave this requirement of emotional harmony still greater emphasis, making it a first principle of composition and its recognition a criterion of taste: “In all the Fine Arts, that Composition is most excellent, in which the different parts most fully unite in the production [page 322:] of one unmingled Emotion, and that Taste the most perfect, where the perception of this relation of objects, in point of expression, is most delicate and precise.”(8) Alison stated the requirement much more strictly than did Poe's acknowledged source, Schlegel, who had called only for a unity of interest in the drama. Poe reflected Alison's emphasis when he wrote “that in almost all classes of composition, the unity of effect or impression is a point of greatest importance.” Hence it should not be too surprising that when four years later Poe published his “The Philosophy of Composition,” illustrating the practical application of his literary principles, he claimed that after deciding upon the proper length of his poem (invoking his doctrine of the single sitting) his second consideration was the choice of the effect to be rendered. “The Philosophy of Composition” will be discussed in a later chapter; it contains little that Poe had not already advanced in his reviews of Longfellow and of Hawthorne — the limitation of the poem to beauty, the doctrine of the single sitting, and the necessity of a single emotional effect. In this context it is appropriate to say only that the mechanical mode of composition described in “The Philosophy of Composition” was a logical development in the light of Poe's effort to shape art for the needs of a mass audience while at the same time retaining its appeal for the elite. Alison had said that even a man of ordinary taste would recognize confusion in expression, whereas a man of refined taste would be able to recognize the most delicate shades of relatedness.

The question immediately arises, were Poe and Alison discussing the same kind of unity? Is Poe's “single effect” equivalent to the “single emotion” of Alison, or is it the “totality of interest” of Schlegel? An examination of the terms themselves will not provide an answer, but an interpretation of the presuppositions that lie behind the terms will be helpful. Schlegel's unity is organic unity, “the idea of life” which is intuited from the perception of a living thing. Hence in a drama, the requisite unity is not merely formal relatedness of parts to a whole but a “joint impression” on the mind which is productive of a felt or intuited unity.(9) It is the unity [page 323:] of the manifold, the impression of life in all of its relatedness held within a single organic form. The work of art, then, is a microcosm in reference to the biosphere.

Alison's unity of impression, however, derives from an organization of congruent associations. The mixture of elements which Schlegel admired in Shakespeare was deplored by the Scottish critic. Alison assumed that each object had its characteristic expression; that is, each object was productive of a simple emotion in the mind of the observer through the process of association. A complex of simple, congruent emotions constituted the emotion of taste, which could be described in terms of beauty or sublimity. Incongruous or conflicting expressions should not be joined in a composition, or the unity of idea (feeling and thought) would be lost. Accordingly, the artist must combine elements that produce an un-mingled response. If beauty is the object, then elements that express beauty must be combined. If sublimity is the object, then elements which express sublimity must be chosen. In Poe's terminology, when the effect is chosen in advance, all elements must combine to produce that effect.

It is obvious that Poe's “single effect” is more nearly Alison's “unmingled emotion” than it is Schlegel's (and Coleridge's) unity of the manifold which is recognized in the intuition of “life.” All Poe added to Alison was the doctrine of the single sitting. Not even the undercurrent of meaning, a requirement which Poe attributed to Schlegelian aesthetics, was absent from Alison, for Alison conceived of the associative activity of the imagination as always adding something to the objects of perception which the objects themselves did not express. “Our minds, instead of being governed by the character of external objects, are enabled to bestow upon them a character which does not belong to them; and even with the rudest, or the most common appearances of Nature, to connect feelings of a nobler or a more interesting kind than any that the mere influences of matter can ever convey.”(10) With Alison as with Poe, it was for the suggestion of something “more pure and more perfect” beyond that art was valuable, and this suggestion [page 324:] was managed not by the coalescence of the diverse but by the elimination of the incongruent.

When Poe listed his effects, it is clear that he was referring to the production of a single emotion, which might be admiration of the reasoning power of a detective, or “terror, or passion, or horror”; in his own tales, say “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the requirement of the single emotion was strictly observed. From the very first sentence to the last, the tale evokes a species of terror. Other effects are possible, of course, including “the sarcastic, or the humorous,” but what Alison called the unity of expression had to be preserved. Terror, for instance, does not combine well with humor, so there is no humor in “Usher”; and even in “Ligeia,” which could be interpreted as a story of passion, the passion is subordinate to the overall impression of psychic terror. Alison's theory predicted Poe's practice and serves us better than Schlegel's as an explanation of the single effect. That Poe was thinking chiefly in terms of sensation, or emotional effect, is evident from his admiration of the “tales of effect” in Blackwood's. Critics should not hold sensation stories in contempt, Poe argued. “The true critic will but demand that the design intended be accomplished, to the fullest extent, by the means most advantageously applicable.”

This statement admits no ambiguity. The critic does not demand a compelling insight into human nature. He does not demand thought, nor does he demand that a work of art possess the vitalistic quality revered by Schlegel; he demands only skill in execution, technical virtuosity. Like Alison, Poe thought taste was manifested in a delicate and precise perception of the relatedness of elements in producing an unmingled effect.

To those who require a work of art to do something other than move us, Poe's reductionism is alarming, for fiction loses all ethical and social value under the doctrine of the single effect. Yet as a prescription for technique, it has had astonishing success. Even in the twentieth century, some manuals on short story writing have quoted Poe approvingly. The prescription of the single effect requires the beginning writer to make an effort at a certain kind of unity, yet the pertinent question in this context has to do with how [page 325:] well Poe's rule serves the purpose of criticism. An examination of his comments on Hawthorne's tales will provide the answer.

2

Poe began by describing the emotional effect of Hawthorne's tales in general. It is that of “repose,” a feeling of tranquillity, but there is “a strong under-current of suggestion ... beneath the upper stream of the tranquil thesis.” The presence of this suggestiveness, as Poe had said in earlier reviews, indicates imagination, but Hawthorne's imagination was somewhat “repressed by fastidiousness of taste, by constitutional melancholy and by indolence.”(11) In other words, Hawthorne's temperament kept him from attempting the strong effects that Poe himself relished. This did not mean that Hawthorne was not a genius, and that his art did not serve his genius well. His “distinctive trait is invention, creation, imagination, originality — a trait which, in the literature of fiction, is positively worth all the rest.” Here, of course, Poe equated imagination with invention, or the power of making up new fables or images, as he had in his review of Longfellow, but he extended his concept of originality to include novelty of tone as well as novelty of matter. Hawthorne displayed originality both in his choice of materials and in his tone.

Of the individual tales, Poe had little to say. Of most of them he approved, but the superficiality of his concept of meaning was evident in his interpretation of “The Minister's Black Veil.” “The obvious meaning of this article will be found to smother its insinuated one. The moral put into the mouth of the dying minister will be supposed to convey the true import of the narrative; and that a crime of dark dye, (having reference to the ‘young lady’) has been committed, is a point which only minds congenial with that of the author will perceive.” Here one is compelled to say that if Hawthorne's tale is a crime story, only minds congenial with Edgar Poe's will perceive it. Remembering the review of Barnaby Rudge, [page 326:] we can see that Poe was looking for clues and that he considered Parson Hooper's declaration of a universal and hidden guilt only as a false lead. To Poe, the reported shudder of the “dead maiden” conveyed the true import of the tale,(12) even though Hawthorne was only using the familiar device of Irving to mitigate the supernatural by having the report come from a “superstitious old woman.” Poe was no descendant of the Puritans, and his mind was less congenial with Hawthorne's than he supposed. In fact, what Poe called the undercurrent of meaning was actually the kind of meaning a literalist would discover in looking for the minister's motivation in wearing the veil. Because the minister states the moral significance of his veil, Poe assumed that the imaginative artist, Hawthorne, could not possibly mean what he said; and he remained blind to Hawthorne's symbolic portrayal of universal guilt.

This same superficiality may be observed in Poe's comment about another tale: “ ‘The White Old Maid’ is objectionable, even more than ‘The Minister's Black Veil,’ on the score of its mysticism. Even with the thoughtful and analytic, there will be much trouble in penetrating its entire import.” In this passage Poe used the term “mystic” pejoratively, although in an earlier review he had used it in reference to the undercurrent of meaning which evidenced imagination. The only possible conclusion is that Poe demanded a fairly obvious meaning in the short tale, but one which was suggested, not stated. If it were stated, then it was a thesis, or the surface meaning. There should be no ambiguity, no unresolved potentialities of interpretation. The fable should bear the meaning, and suggestion should be limited to the manipulation of event and [page 327:] scene in terms of the single effect. Accordingly, we should not be surprised that Poe selected “The Wedding Knell,” “Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe,” and “Dr. Heidegger's Experiment” as Hawthorne's best tales, for these offer relatively little in the way of ambiguity. The aspect of Hawthorne's work that has been most interesting to modern critics was the most objectionable to Poe.

Poe's generalizations about Hawthorne are more defensible. The monotony of tone, “a tone of melancholy and mysticism,” should have been avoided. There should have been more variety of subject matter, because Hawthorne was too great an artist to limit himself to only one kind of appeal. In his own tales Poe attempted to achieve variety by appealing to the imagination, to the reason, and to the sense of humor; so to him Hawthorne's lack of versatility was censurable. Even though Poe listed these defects, he accorded the New England writer a high place as an artist and apologized that the limitations of space had prevented him from paying the “full tribute of commendation” that Hawthorne deserved.

Unfortunately, this same lack of space prevented Poe from explicating Hawthorne's tales in full. This in turn bars us from evaluating the quality of his insight. His general remarks about Hawthorne have stood the test of time, but his examination of particular tales is disappointing. We would grant today that Hawthorne had imaginative power and purity of style, that he sometimes succeeded in making every word count, but we would be likely to admit, as Hawthorne did himself, that his range was narrow. We would be less disposed than Poe to find fault with Hawthorne's obscurity and ambiguity, but today we are prepared to recognize and approve of complexities that Poe's theory could not assimilate. And we should remember that even so astute a critic as Henry James objected to the “superficial symbolism” of The Scarlet Letter and found that the characters functioned primarily as representatives of a “single state of mind.” Poe, of course, was not proceeding from a basis of realism as was James, but he recognized at least one of Hawthorne's limitations, the tendency toward allegory which prevented a thorough incorporation of meaning into the symbolic texture of his narratives. Hawthorne was prone to tell us the import of [page 328:] his symbols, although his telling, as Poe perceived, did not exhaust the possibilities of interpretation.

That the requirement of the single effect has minimal value as a critical principle is obvious.(13) Focusing as Poe did upon technique, he was unprepared to explore ambiguities or paradoxes. If they existed at all, they were technical flaws. The principle of the single effect demanded that the theme or idea of a tale be as open to the comprehension of a reader as a painting is open to visual perception. In this review, as in his previous reviews of Undine and Alciphron, Poe showed uneasiness when confronted with the problem of symbolic import. The management of symbols could not be adequately prescribed in his simplistic formulae; and although lie allowed the tale to express truth, he evidently meant by truth an illustration of the reasoning process, or a way of arriving at the truth. Both tale and poem are fictions. They have value in their stimulative capacity but little cognitive value. Although his own tales reveal psychic terror, Poe failed to recognize that Hawthorne's greatest achievement was his exploration of the human psyche under conditions of guilt. He saw Hawthorne only as a master of tone and a manipulator of effects, unfortunately restricted by his temperament to a tone of melancholy and mysticism and an effect of tranquillity.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 315:]

1.  “The Angelic Imagination,” in The Forlorn Demon, 56-78.

2.  Peckham, Beyond the Tragic Vision, 203.

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3.  Works, XI, 104-13.

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4.  Ibid., 102-104.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 318:]

5.  It goes without saying that Poe was inconsistent. He wrote several “prose-poems.”

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 319:]

6.  It was the current romantic notion, more common in German than in British aesthetics, that art should produce an ecstasy that could not be long endured. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 89-90.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 321:]

7.  Elements of Criticism, 68.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 322:]

8.  Essays, 106.

9.  Schlegel, Lectures, 244.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 323:]

10.  Essays, 450.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 325:]

11.  About the only flaw that Poe customarily attributed to genius was a predisposition toward indolence!

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 326:]

12.  The minister, having donned his symbolic black veil, bends over to look into the face of an unnamed “dead maiden.” The veil hangs in such a way that the girl would have been able to see his face, if she had been alive. Hastily the minister pulls the veil back over his features, but a superstitious old woman claims to have seen the corpse shudder when the minister's face was disclosed. This event is the basis for Poe's interpretation, although it occurs early in the tale. Nothing else in the story supports the theory of crime except an exclamation from the minister of an adjoining parish who attends Father Hooper's deathbed.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 328:]

13.  There are a number of critical studies of Poe's theory of unity of effect which draw upon Schlegel and upon Poe's metaphysics for assistance in interpretation. Obviously my own interpretation confines Poe's principle within much narrower limits by treating it as a rule for composition or for judgment. For various other interpretations, see Kelly, “Poe's Theory of 34-44; Walter Blair, “Poe's Conception of Incident and Tone in Unity,” the Tale,” Modern Philology, XLI (1944), 228-40; and Moldenhauer, “Murder as a Fine Art,” 284-97.