Text: Burton R. Pollin, “The Motto of ‘Eleonora’; Its Source and Significance,” Discoveries in Poe, 1970, pp. 38-53 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 38:]

3

THE MOTTO OF POE'S “ELEONORA”: ITS SOURCE AND SIGNIFICANCE

LATE IN 1841, in The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present for 1842, Edgar Allan Poe published the story “Eleonora,” one of his most admired prose pieces.(1) Scarcely an adverse criticism of this arabesque allegory can be found. The terms of the eulogies serve to point out the essential nature of the tale and also suggest the problem of explicating Poe's interpretation of the motto which he added to the story when it was reprinted with revisions in his Broadway Journal of 1845.(2) The epigraph, “Sub conservatione formae specificae salva anima,” was borrowed from Victor Hugo, who had drawn upon Henri Sauval; Sauval had acknowledged his use of Raimon Lull, thirteenth-century philosopher. Arthur Hobson Quinn, Poe's foremost biographer, terms “Eleonora” “one of his finest stories ... an arabesque masterpiece,” and “the idealized, the spiritualized version of the theme of spiritual integrity, made concrete by its association with the death of a beautiful woman.”(3) It is generally agreed that Virginia Poe's latent tuberculosis, become overt in January, 1842, in an attack which threw Poe into a frenzy of desperation, was the chief stimulus for the writing of the tale, which has the simplest of plots. Pyrros, as the narrator is called in the first version of the story, tells about the growth of love between himself and Eleonora, both living with her mother in the remote Valley of the Many-Colored Grass by the River of Silence. After they recognize their love for each other, the [page 39:] river gushes with sounds of delight, multicolored birds come to the valley, the flowers become ruddier, and the sky grows brilliant through a mystically descending cloud of crimson and gold. But when Eleonora sickens and dies, after receiving a vow of his eternal fidelity, the valley returns to silence and drabness. Pyrros leaves for a city and weds Ermengarde.(4) Thereupon, Eleonora as a spirit visits him once to indicate her forgiveness.

George E. Woodberry stresses the “myth” quality of the piece, “pictorial like a medieval legend,” and declares that “symbolism has seldom been more simple and pure, more imaginative, childlike, and direct ... than in this unreal scene.”(5) Marie Bonaparte finds it a “perfect symbolic description of the sentimental retirement in which Poe lived with Virginia and her mother in their little world of three” despite what she alone calls a “repellent” landscape.(6) A perceptive editor of a recent collection of Poe's work, Eric W. Carlson, aptly says: “As Poe's most poetic, arabesque fantasy, this tale weaves a complex and rich pattern of symbolic images within its larger allegorical frame.” With even more praise Hardin Craig declares: “In the perfect plot of ‘Eleonora’ Poe worked for a balance between elements of ideal beauty for the achievement of what might be called poetic satisfaction.”(7) It would appear that such widespread admiration warrants an attempt to cast light upon whatever is problematical or obscure in its symbology or its epigraph.

The first problem is the source and meaning of the quotation used as the motto: “Sub conservatione formae specificae salva anima, Raymond Lully.”(8) There is no question about the person referred to in Poe's ascription, “Raymond Lully.” The “Doctor Illuminatus” (1235-1315), born Ramon Lull or Llull in Palma, Majorca, saw the spiritual light after a career as soldier and noble roisterer, then devoted himself to converting the Moslems, engaged in controversy chiefly in Paris and Montpellier with the Averroes-followers, and was finally stoned to death at Bugia (or Bougie) in Algeria. His works [page 40:] numbered almost three hundred in Latin, Catalan, and Arabic, and presented a once celebrated system for the “acquisition of knowledge with the solution of all possible problems by a systematic manipulation of certain fundamental notions derived from the Aristotelian categories.”(9) Scholars do not now accept the works on alchemy once attributed to him; yet it is in a context of alchemy in Victor Hugo's novel and in his source, Henri Sauval, that we find the passage which Poe borrowed.(10) Lull is discussed under “Ramon Lully” in two English-language encyclopedias which Poe knew well.(11) Very apt for Poe's tale was the motto concerning form and soul. My examination of authentic texts of Lull for insight into the contemporary usage of certain crucial words in the motto may throw some light upon the meaning of the sentence and hence of Poe's tale.(12)

The words of the quotation were not read by Poe in any medieval writing but unquestionably in Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris. Poe evidently began reading Notre-Dame early in 1842, for it was in the February, 1842 issue of Graham's Magazine, in his review of the poem Wakondah and his review of Barnaby Rudge, that he first praised Hugo's novel, directly and by implication. Therefore, Poe had no opportunity to include the motto in any of the six 1841 printings of “Eleonora,” indeed not until his own 1845 republication.(13) It is a coincidence that in the same month that Poe added the motto to his reprint of “Eleonora,” he made his only other allusion to the name “Raymond Lully.” This was in the first of the “Fifty Suggestions” that he published in two installments in Graham's Magazine of May and June, 1845. In this paragraph, packed with scraps of erudition about the physical properties of color, “blue-stocking” women, and Gargantua, Poe's climactic sentence is “Your ‘blue,’ when we come to talk of stockings, is black in issimo — ‘nigrum nigrius nigro — like the matter from which Raymond Lully first manufactured his alcohol” (Harrison, 14.170). Now this was, in fact, manufactured by Poe out of the obiter dicta of Stanley, a novel published in 1838 by [page 41:] Horace Binney Wallace under the pseudonym William Landor. Two widely separated passages from Stanley are drawn upon here, the first a reference to Bulwer Lytton, who, “to use a happy phrase of Walpole, always writes in issimo,” and the second, a reference to a man who “is like the substance from which Raymond Lully first made alcohol, ‘nigrum nigrius nigro,’ ... ” In actual fact, Lully's name is generally connected not with alcohol but with nitric acid, which he prepared by a new process and called eau forte.(14) Poe's inclusion of the entry perhaps indicates his assumption of Lully's background in alchemy, and it may explain his readiness to add the Lully quotation to “Eleonora,” which has an aura of the supernatural.

To return to Notre-Dame — the new motto confirms the impression that Poe was again dipping into the book, for in the March 15, 1845 issue of the Broadway Journal his reference to the “Romain qui sauve sa patrie” also comes from Hugo.(15) Later, in his Broadway Journal reprint, October 4, 1845, of “The Island of the Fay,” he substitutes for the original poem, “To Science,” a motto in Latin derived from Hugo's novel, although said merely to be from Servius. The Lull passage in fact occurs in the chapter immediately following the one containing the Servius motto and is in the same chapter as the reference to the patriotic Roman. The Archdeacon of the cathedral, Claude Frollo, has descended to the street with one of the officials of the ecclesiastical court, Maitre Jacques Charmolue. In order to draw him away from his tower room in which Jehan, Frollo's younger brother, has been hiding, he has suggested that they examine the sculpture over one of the portals of the cathedral. Jehan follows and overhears them:

Poe was, in fact, paying close attention to this section of the novel, perhaps because of his deep interest in the subject matter of necromancy and alchemy, as shown in “Ligeia” and also in his late story “Von Kempelen and His Discovery” (April, 1849).(17) There are resemblances between “Ligeia” and “Eleonora,” chiefly on the score of metempsychosis.

Hugo had probably not read the passage in Lull, for his erudition was almost as largely borrowed and splendidly displayed as was Poe's.(18) It is doubtful that he intended to deceive his readers since in his text he names as sources Du Breul, Pierre Mathieu, Jean de Troyes, Commynes and, twice, Sauval.(19) The Lull passage, as it first appeared in Sauval, is interesting because it enables us to observe Hugo's deft revision of material transplanted into his own work:

Unfortunately Sauval does not identify the source of the Lull sentence, so that we cannot examine the whole context. Could we do so, we might be helped a bit in ascertaining what meaning Poe ascribed to the quotation, especially since the terms forma and anima have highly specialized meanings in scholastic philosophy. The word specifica is not classical Latin at all and is susceptible to such varied interpretations as “characteristic,” “definite,” or “specific” in the sense of “constituting or falling into a named category.” Another possible meaning is “exerting a distinctive influence,” as in the medical use of a specific. These are, of course, modern uses as well. In medieval Latin the word had these implications and, in addition, [page 43:] a highly individual meaning of “pulchra” or 13eautiful.”(21) In conjunction with forma this is possibly quite significant.

Forma had a host of meanings, of which I should allude only to a few, in the order given by Du Cange (3.563): the first, “figura or imago,” namely, “copy or likeness”; the fifth, “phantasma or imago apparens,” namely, “apparition”; the sixth, “habitus, ornatus,” that is, “dress, costume, equipage.” Even conservation offers its difficulties, being translated by Guyard by the equivalent French term “conservation” or, in English, “preservation” (p. 326), whereas Du Cange's closest word, “conservator,” is drawn from juridical terminology to yield a meaning more consonant with “protection” than “pres-ervation.”(22) Anima might appear to keep its classical meaning of “the vital principle or life,” being sometimes equivalent to “animus,” or the “rational soul of man, the mind.”(23) However, we might also consider the medieval shift in meaning to “that which possesses the life,” or simply “homo” as Du Cange and others indicate (for example, D’Arnis, p. 158). The word forma meant not simply its modern equivalent of “shape,” but it also meant “visage, physiognomy” about 1312, close to Lull's date of writing (Du Cange, 3.565); this is also a classical meaning, and it might have its implications for the interpretation both in “Lull” and in Poe.

With respect to these possibilities, passages in the works of the philosopher Ramon Lull which are of the general period of the motto throw a small amount of light on our object of inquiry. In his Liber de Praedicatione, in the section “De Anima Rationalis” he declares: “Anima rationalis est substan-tiva spiritualis, creata, coniuncta. Et habet tres potentias, scilicet: Intellectum, memoriam, et voluntatem.” Equally pertinent is another passage: “Anima naturaliter est maior quam corpus, eo quia ex nobilioribus et altioribus principiis est constituta quam corpus.” Here it would seem that anima represents “life” or “living principle” within the man or his soul in the sense of “rational soul,” almost like “judgment.” Two other words, mooted above, occur in a passage from the same work. [page 44:]

Lull asks: “De Elementiva, per regulas deducta. De Quo? 1. Per primam speciem regulae de Deo quaeritur: Elementativa de quo est. Et respondendum est, quod est de se ipsa, eo quia forma specifica est et species generalis tamquam essentia; et suum concretum sive esse est elementatum.”(24) I am inclined to think that forma specifica may be used by Lull in the sense of characteristic shape or individuality. In slight confirmation, I cite a passage from another of Lull's works, his Liber Prov-erbiorum: “De Forma,” no. 13: “In prima et generali Forma sunt seminatae individuae Formae, quae expectant naturalia agentia.”(25) The matter remains vague, however, and it is with the utmost uncertainty that I suggest that the sentence in Lull might be translated as “In the preservation of its characteristic form, each soul is inviolable or intact.” I believe that there is no doubt about its referring to the same entity in both parts of the sentence, but I am not sure that Poe understood it thus.

Let us now examine a few of the translations of the sentence offered before deciding upon Poe's probable interpretation. In the Hugo text, Guyard gives us: “Sous la conservation de la forme specifique, l’ame est intacte,” that is, “Through the preservation of its specific form, the soul is (kept) whole or untouched.” This is not very helpful, in itself. Alterton and Craig offer: “The safety of the soul lies in the preservation of the specific form.”(26) This evades, for one thing, determining the ownership of the “soul” and the “form” through the use of personal pronouns. Following closely upon this definition is Eric W. Carlson's: “In the preservation of its specific form lies the safety of the spirit of life.”(27) Finally, with a somewhat changed emphasis is Professor Mabbott's “Under the protection of a specific form, the soul is safe.”(28)

There is a slight verification of Professor Mabbott's interpretation of “protection” in my discovery of a marginal note translating the motto in the 1845 Broadway Journal reprint of “Eleonora” (1.322).(29) The writing is that of Poe's fiancee, Mrs. Whitman (“H. W.”), probably inscribed in October, 1848. “Eleonora” starts five lines from the bottom of the second column, [page 45:] and the following sentence of translation is written in the space directly under the text: “Under the conservation / protection of specific forms the soul is safe.” The index page at the front of the first volume of the two-volume set bears the notation, “Given to S. H. W. by E. A. P. October 1848,” in Mrs. Whitman's writing. I assume that this item, like several others, reflects Poe's conversations with the attractive Providence widow, whom he was courting. Hence the translation, however faulty, may show a little of Poe's interpretation of the motto of a story which was particularly interesting to Mrs. Whitman. Obviously Poe would not make a mistake about the singular number of formae specificae, which she renders in the plural, but the presence of “protection” directly after the closely related “conservation” for conservation makes me believe that Poe preferred this and, therefore, the idea of “under” for sub.

Another marginal notation relating to “Eleonora,” also in the hand of Sarah Helen Whitman,(30) makes especially relevant her desire to fathom the meaning of the motto and of the whole fable. A month after Poe included “Eleonora” in the issue of May 24, 1845, he reprinted, on June 24, his tale “Morella,” which had first appeared in the April, 1835 Messenger. Probably after receiving the celebrated love letter of October 1, 1848, from Poe, Mrs. Whitman, reflecting ideas in his letter and in conversations with him, inserted a series of names in one continuous string on the left-hand margin (1.388):

Poe had implied to Mrs. Whitman that his early and enduring partiality for various forms of the name Helen, including “Eleonora,” revealed their basic “soul-love” for each other. The notes at the side of the tale show that Helen Whitman was probably trying to place an early tale into this onomastic penumbra through the “ella” portion of the name “Morella.” The insertion of “Ellen” in the annotation suggests just this.(31) Helen [page 46:] Whitman, we know, was inordinately proud of Poe's use of forms of her name, as in the first “To Helen,” supposedly addressed to “Helen” (that is, Jane Stith) Stanard in 1831, a Poe assertion which others have disputed;(32) “Lenore,” the name given the earlier “A Paean” when it was revised for Lowell's Pioneer of February, 1843; the Lenore of the 1845 poem “The Raven”; and finally the second “To Helen” of 1848. Indeed, after Poe's death, Mrs. Whitman commented: “I believe that the spirit of her who bore this beloved name, has always hovered around him, and that it was in some way through her influence that he was drawn to me.”(33) Notice here Mrs. Whitman's concept of “Helen-Eleonora” as hovering over the protected poet, just as in the tale itself.

Poe himself, in his celebrated October, 1848 letter, provided Mrs. Whitman with this idea as well as with other themes that bear on my interpretation of “Eleonora.” A few of the background circumstances are needed.(34) Mrs. Whitman had sent Poe a valentine poem to be read February 14, 1848, at a New York party. The verses, entitled “The Raven,” were published in Willis's Home Journal, March 18, 1848, through the good offices of Miss Lynch and Mrs. Osgood. After mailing his first “To Helen” verses to Mrs. Whitman, Poe sent her his new “To Helen” in June, 1848 (publishing it in November). Allusions to these events are made in Poe's long, passionate letter of October, which I here excerpt:

Here are many details that link Poe's courtship of Helen with his ideas in “Eleonora” and also with her interest in the story itself at the time of Poe's gift of the two volumes. It is noteworthy that Poe addresses Mrs. Whitman in phrases seemingly derived from the pages of “Eleonora” itself. The tale could have been identified only with Virginia, but Poe is here proclaiming the statuesque Helen Whitman as his “preordained soul-love.”(36) Certainly the “spiritual influences” and the ageless soul contrasted with “carnate life” might be drawn directly from “Eleonora.” In the exaggerated tone Poe reveals the contrived and histrionic nature of his courtship, as in his reference to growing “blind” before the “voluptuous lustre” of her eyes — in reality, her best feature. Poe eulogized them in the second “To Helen”:

Poe has, of course, done much better than this in his “Eros-inspired” poetry, but Mrs. Whitman was delighted,(37) especially since Poe included a reference to her eyes in the margin of his Broadway Journal reprint of “Ligeia,” September 27, 1845, just before this ardent letter: “The poem which I sent you contained all the events of a dream which occurred to me soon after I knew you. Ligeia was also suggested by a dream — observe the eyes in both tale and poem.”(38)

Since “Ligeia,” one of his most cherished stories,(39) dates from 1838, it is clear that Mrs. Whitman's “orbs” may have had a deep-seated power of attraction for Poe; “early and late” he lavished his powers on heroines with these “twin” charms, usually with more success than the “Cheshire Cat grin” effect in the second poem entitled “To Helen.”(40) Certainly, “Eleo-nora” originally made its palingenetic point through the description of the eyes, “gateway to the soul,” before Poe abridged these passages in order to turn the theme from the path taken by “Morella” and “Ligeia.” Poe expressed his essential dissatisfaction with this aspect of “Eleonora” in a published, although uncollected, source. In Graham's Magazine for November, 1841 (19.249-250) Poe reviews The Gift: A Christmas and New-Year's Present for 1842 as “superior to any yet published” and, after listing several of its items, says, “We ourselves have one which is not ended so well as it might be — a good subject spoiled by hurry in the handling.” Accordingly, for the 1845 Broadway Journal, he revised the final section.

The motto to “Eleonora” that he then provided helps to focus this point. Professor Mabbott saw no discrepancy between the theme and the motto, interpreted as “Under the protection of a specific form, the soul is safe.” For Poe's tale I am inclined to favor this construction, wherein anima seems to refer to the narrator and forma seems to refer to Eleonora, with her gentle kiss after death and her last words of forgiveness and of heavenly promise at the end. In that case, anima would mean either homo (man) or “the spirit or life of another” and it would not be impossible for farnia to be not [page 49:] merely “form” but also “beauty” as in classical Latin. The original version of the story would then be a more fully “realized” expansion of the motto, which, in effect, he added so late. I refer to two passages which describe Eleonora and Ermengarde in terms which seem to make them equivalent. After the sentence which begins paragraph seven in the Broadway Journal version, following “The loveliness of Eleonora was that of the Seraphim,” Poe originally described her tall, fragile stature and “the hues of her cheek,” obviously the disease tokens or hectic flush of phthisis. The deleted passage continues thus:

The passage dropped from the description of the second beloved, Ermengarde, in the thirteenth paragraph, follows after the corresponding “seraph Ermengarde” and includes many attributes parallel to those of Eleonora, such as “the blue depths of her meaning eyes,” and “the wavy flow of her auburn tresses” and the “fantastic grace of her step”; there is also “the identical transition from tears to smiles that I had wondered at in the long-lost Eleonora.” The only trace of the duality of spirit in both girls who, in their duality, also originally represented a “soul's identity,” is Poe's final sentence in the paragraph: “Oh divine was the angel Ermengarde! and as I looked down into the depths of her memorial eyes I thought only of them — and of her” (Harrison, 4.314 and 243).(41) In both versions two more paragraphs tell us that Eleonora's spirit [page 50:] comes through the night once to comfort him with the knowledge that in “taking to thy passionate heart her who is Ermen-garde, thou art absolved, for reasons which shall be made known to thee in Heaven, of thy vows unto Eleonora” (4.244).(42)

Let us assume then that formae specificae refers to the spirit of Eleonora, whose “familiar and sweet voice” speaks to him at the end, thereby mystically demonstrating the “form” of the soul even after death and its waiting for his soul, in its “post-life” form, to join hers in heaven. In that case, is it his continued condition of love, his “passionate heart,” which, even though directed toward another, makes him eligible to join her as a spiritual being in heaven? This “redemption by love” is a possible interpretation of the allegory.(43) In that event, the hovering of the spirit over him twice is no act of protection but merely of communication, and conservation may be judged to be “preservation,” whether in her own spiritual form or, less likely, through that of Ermengarde, the new-old love object.

I rather think that Poe wisely decided to suppress the dual nature of both girls, which helped to complete their identity but which detracted from the major theme. He also subordinated the idea of the transmigration of the soul, which he had treated frequently before. One of the earliest and best known of Poe's tales was “Morella” (1835) with its pointed reference to the “modified Palingenesia of the Pythagoreans,” serving as a motif of this tale of the mother who assumes the identity of her daughter at the latter's birth and her own death.(44) “Ligeia” (1838) uses more of the supernatural in the usurpation of the identity of the second wife by the spirit of the first — an enchantress. Other tales of Poe toyed with the idea or mentioned it. For example, in “Metzengerstein” (1936)

Poe spoke of the belief in metempsychosis prevailing in Hungary, as a prelude to his story of the reincarnated, avenging horse (Harrison, 2.185). Burton's Magazine of December, 1839, presented his “Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” [page 51:] two souls who have been liberated from earth by an all-consuming comet. This theme, of souls conversing in heaven, is continued in the 1841 “Colloquy of Monos and Una.” In 1884 Poe includes a significant statement in “The Premature Burial”: “The boundaries which divide Life from Death, are at best shadowy and vague. ... The silver cord was not for ever loosed, nor the golden bowl irreparably broken. But where, meantime, was the soul” (Harrison, 5.256)? This strongly suggests the beginning of his poem “Lenore” of 1843: “Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever! / Let the bell toll! — a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river” (7.53). In June, 1845, in the Democratic Review, Poe published another in his series of “conversations of spirits,” this being “The Power of Words,” in which Oinos and Agathos, spirits “new-fledged with immortality” — although it seems to be three centuries since their death — discuss divine creativity; it seems to emanate from divine thought but with a hint of passion (6.139-144). In a sense, this tale is a continuation of the 1844 “Mesmeric Revelation” dialogue between Vankirk, the mesmerized and moribund consumptive, and the author “P” concerning the power of God's thought to create “new individualities” and the “painful metamorphosis” of death, which enables the “inner form” of the body to be perceptible to the spirit world (5.241-254).

Certainly Poe had always shown considerable interest in the ways and forms of spirits. Since his most definite treatments of the theme of palingenesis tended to be extremely sinister, we can understand his effort to reduce this element in “Eleonora,” which preserves a rather idyllic tone even after the first girl's death. In his revision he may have moved his theme further away from the probable meaning of the motto from “Lull.” Yet, Eleonora's spirit still preserves its essential form, that of an angelic being, who causes Pyrros to hear the swinging “of the censers of the angels” and smell “streams of a holy perfume.” Since she had the “loveliness” of the “seraphim” when alive, the “anima” must indeed be hers. If, however, we [page 52:] think of “love” as revealing or expressing a universally “seraphic form,” then there is less difficulty in seeing in the “seraph Ermengarde” the “preservation” or “conservation” of the soul of Eleonora. Years before, in one of the “Pinakidia” items of the Messenger, August, 1836, Poe had written: “Josephus, with Saint Paul and others, supposed man to be compounded of body, soul, and spirit. The distinction between soul and spirit is an essential point in ancient philosophy” (Harrison, 14.55-56). Poe may now be simply implying that Eleonora's spirit becomes a liberated soul, after death, ready for communion with another soul.

In this respect there is one small item of change in the tale which is tucked into the notes of Harrison. I refer to Poe's giving the narrator the name Pyrros, which is totally omitted in 1845. In the second paragraph there are still retained phrases which relate to the skepticism or pyrrhonism suggested by the name, Pyrros:

This has a correspondence also to the “glimpses of eternity” and the learning of “the wisdom which is of good” and “the mere knowledge which is of evil” in paragraph one. Despite the difference of spelling, Pyrrho of Elis may have been intended by Poe in the fact also that the narrator learned his ultimate wisdom in an Eastern city, the adjective “Eastern” being dropped from the final version along with the narrator's name.(45) Pyrrho (c. 360-270 B.C.) went to the East in the train of Alexander and studied in India under the Gymnosophists and in Persia under the Magi.(46) According to one brief account, his basic principles were those of “acatalepsia” or the impossibility of knowing things in their own nature, [page 53:] intellectual suspense or “epoche,” equilibrium or “arrepsia,” and noncommittal silence or “aphasia” — all of which would desirably lead to the attitude of imperturbability or “ataraxia.”(47) By chance there is something of this in Hardin Craig's stress upon the tale as a presentation of the “balance of the elements of ideal beauty” and “a balanced equality as the root of all beauty,” although he ignores the initial name given to the hero and believes that the passages on the duality of spirit — melancholy and mirth and smiles and tears — were dropped in order to produce a superior “indefiniteness.”(48)

It must be admitted that the word “indefiniteness” must be applied to any theories eventuating from a discussion of Poe's conception of Lull's motto. We know that his Latin was adequate to handle any variation of which we might conceive.(49) We can be quite definite about the aptness of the borrowing, which leads us directly to the central issues of the idyll — the return and forgiveness of the loving and love-lorn man by the spirit of the beautiful mate (no marriage to Eleonora is recorded in the tale). As with the splendidly apposite lines from Béranger's “Le Rufus,” added to the reprinted “Fall of the House of Usher (see chap. iv) the epigraph of “Eleonora” shows Poe's genius for associating with finished tales mottoes that seem to be leit motifs. This gift for summation and for insight into essentials sometimes served him brilliantly as critic and as observer of trends in the arts. To Victor Hugo, to Henri Sauval, to Ramon Lull, and above all to Edgar Allan Poe the reader owes the pleasure of a fruitful and provocative motto for a poignant tale.