Text: Ruth Leigh Hudson, “Chapter II.III,” Poe's Craftsmanship in the Short Story, dissertation, 1935, pp. 155-196 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 155:]

Of such a nature were the English novels and tales which Poe found popular in his day. In spite of the increasing vogue for the historical romance and the novel of fashionable life, the tale of horror held its place undisturbed.

But a new type of horror — one which stepped more casually across the borderline of the supernatural and dabbled more freely in the secrets of dark and tortured souls — had become the vein. It was said to be of German manufacture, at least among critics it passed under the label of “Germanism.” There is every indication in the critical discussions of the period that the reading public — British, American, and European — knew quite as well what was implied in the charge of Germanism in fiction as we today understand perfectly, without reference to any particular story, the epithet, “novel of the soil.”

Almost from the beginning of his career as fictionist, Poe was accused of Germanism. In the March issue of the Southern Literary Messenger, 1835, Poe's “Berenice” was published with an editorial comment: “Whilst we confess there is too much German horror [page 156:] in his subject, there can be but one opinion as to the force and elegance of his style.”(62) It has already been noted in this discussion that, in his letter to Editor White in 1835, Poe defended his choice of subject-matter in “Berenice” by calling attention to similar tales in the magazines of the time: he partially agreed with White that he had “sinned egregiously” in allowing his story to venture to such extremes. His acquaintance of Messenger days, James E. Heath, wrote him regard to “The Fall of the House of Usher”: “I think it among the best of your compositions of that class which I have seen.” White, Heath added, believed that the story would “not only occupy more space than he can conveniently spare ... but that the subject-matter is not such as could be acceptable to the majority of his readers.” He quoted White as doubting “whether the readers of the Messenger have such relish for tales of the German School although written with great power and ability.” Heath himself doubted “very much whether tales of the wild, improbable and terrible class can ever be permanently [page 157:] popular in this country.”(63) It will be remembered that Poe denied in his Preface of 1840 this charge of Germanism, but offered in vindication of the general tone of his stories the opinion that “Germanism is the ‘vein’ for the time being.” As Heath's letter reached Poe at about the time that he was composing his Preface, he may have been referring to Heath and White as the “one or two critics” who “had, in all friendliness,” taxed him with Germanism. Poe declared that a scholar would recognize that, “with a single exception,” none of his tales bore the distinctive features of Germanic pseudo-horror.(64) He asserted further that he had employed legitimately a legitimate [page 158:] terror of the soul.

Later critics have disagreed markedly as to the question of Poe's indebtedness to, or familiarity with, the German romancers. Professor Palmer Cobb concludes that Poe owed a considerable debt to Hoffmann and others for his manner and method. (65) Professor Woodberry holds that “in the arabesque tales, the contemporary romance, then specially [[especially]] noticeable in the English reviews, shows distinctly as a moulding element in his intellectual environment.”(66) The French critic, Barine, believed that Poe owed his technique to the German romanticists and in particular to Theodore Hoffmann.(67) Professor Pattee is of opinion that “the burden of proof lies heavily upon any critic who would maintain that Poe was wrong” in his denial of Germanism, and concludes that “If any of Poe's tales contain Germanism, it came not from Germany, but from the grotesque English reflections of the German school found in Walpole and Monk Lewis and their late followers.”(68) Most of those who have [page 159:] studied carefully the material of Poe's alleged borrowings have concluded that he owed his knowledge of German literature perhaps exclusively to English translations and reviews rather than to a first-hand reading, Professor Pattee believes that “it is safe to make the assertion that he knew German literature only in translation. “ Another critic declares that he owed his familiarity with German materials wholly to such aids and that he “never read more than three pages of consecutive German prose, if indeed he read that number.”(69) Professor Campbell thinks that in every likelihood, his first-hand acquaintance with German was small.”(70)

Three possible avenues were open to Poe in seeking familiarity with what constituted the essence of the much-discussed German romance. The first, direct reading of the German works themselves, we may dismiss as improbable, not only because of the weight of opinion against his probable knowledge of the language, but because of the rarity of German books in America in the thirties.(71) The other two methods [page 160:] of becoming acquainted with German materials — reading reviews and criticism of German writers and German productions and reading the stories themselves in translation — merit more thorough examination. Poe could certainly have learned much of German literature simply by reading the critiques which appeared from time to time in the periodicals of the day.

Carlyle translated German stories and for several years wrote sympathetic articles for both the Edinburgh Review and Fraser's on German writers. He was accepted generally as the foremost German scholar in Great Britain. It is true that Poe eventually came to feel such great contempt for Carlyle and his “rant and cant” that he could write, “I have not the slightest faith in Carlyle. In ten years — possibly in five — he will be remembered only as a butt for sarcasm.”(72) But in the early thirties he would no doubt have deferred to the general opinion in regard to Carlyle's German scholarship and have read interestedly, and profitably, whatever the great enthusiast for German literature wrote on the subject. A young amateur could have picked up many suggestions of [page 161:] subject-matter and method in the German romance from Carlyle's pungent critiques. Of Richter, for example, he wrote of his “grotesque, tumultuous pleasantry,” of “his delight with all that is beautiful, and tender, and mysteriously sublime in the fate or history of man,” of “his wild wayward dreams, allegories, and shadowy imaginings”; and he concluded: “That his manner of writing is singular, nay, in fact, a wild, complicated arabesque, no one can deny.”(73) In the preface to his German Romance, Carlyle divided German novels according to their modes into six distinct classes in somewhat the same fashion employed by Poe in analyzing the tale current in 1835.(74) It is in this connection that he described the work of Hoffmann as belonging “to a strange sort (the Fantasy-piece) of which he himself was the originator, and which its sedulous cultivation, by minds more willing than able, bids fair, in no great length of time, to explode.”(75) [page 162:]

Blackwood's Magazine ran for some time a series of articles called “Horae Germanicae,” which discussed in detail the leading literary figures of Germany.(76) Besides this series it published from time to time long reviews of translations of both German poetry and prose. In 1827 another series, called “Gallery of German Classics,” ran for a few month. The New Monthly published a series of “Specimens of German Genius,” fragmentary selections from the leading German writers translated by Mrs. Austin.(77) Around 1829-30 practically all the British periodicals were devoting lengthy reviews to Taylor's History of German Poetry, a translation and survey. In America the North American Review had between 1829 and 1831 six different articles on German literature. Then there were frequent reviews of German tales being translated into English. A significant review of Tieck's stories in Fraser's in 1831 spoke with especial praise of [page 163:] the German story and lauded particularly the manner of its construction.(78) Another reviewer discussed, in connection with Hoffmann, the legitimacy of the horrible in poetry and romance:

Allusion has been made already to the article by Scott in the Foreign Quarterly Review, “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition; and particularly on the Works of Ernest Theodore Hoffmann,” as a possible source of Poe's familiarity with the [page 164:] “fantasy-pieces” of Hoffmann.(80) Scott discussed first the nature of German fantastic writing and then took up the work of Hoffmann in particular. As I intimated in the previous reference to this article, it is my opinion that Scott did not make the German writer's work sound sufficiently attractive to lead Poe to a direct imitation of his themes and styles or to an identification of his own manner with the fantastic of the German romances. Scott added, however, that “modern authors are looking for new means ... to cut new walks and avenues through the enchanted wood, and to revive, if possible, by some means or other, the fading impression of its horrors,” and he called attention to the fact that all particular types in time become obsolete and are caricatured and satirized. His reference to the attempts of modern authors to find new means “to revive ... the fading impression of its horrors” may have had some influence in prompting Poe, if he read the article, to devise stories with more basis in reality — to look for what he termed, in his Preface of 1840, the legitimate terror of the soul.(81) [page 165:] The allusion to caricatures and satires, by Scott, could very well have served to strengthen in the young experimentor's mind the impression made by the numerous “quizzes” of current magazines and have induced his own travesties, if such they are, in the “Tales of the Folio Club.” But I hesitate to agree that Scott's article inspired Poe with any desire to emulate the “bizarreries” of Hoffmann.

Still with so much being written of Germanism, it would have been surprising if the young tale-writer — ambitious for popular favor and with a natural taste for the morbid — had not set himself the task of finding out in one way and another just what the term implied. But there was too much adverse criticism of Germanism in the air for Poe to imitate its manner without reservations. Certainly he nowhere spoke warmly of the German manner. Indeed his critical comments tended toward the unfavorable in other instances than his Preface. At an early period he praised Fouqué's “Undine” unreservedly;(82) later, however, in reviewing Fouqué's “Thiodolf the Icelander” [page 166:] and “Aslauga's Knight,” he expressed the opinion that this book could never have been popular out of Germany” because of its “baldness.” German criticism, he thought, was undeveloped and unsettled because the Germans had not emerged from their first literary epoch. He preferred, Voltaire to Goethe and Macaulay to Schlegel.(83) An opinion of Hegel's he called “jargon,” and he riddled an epigram of Nevalis as an absurdity.(84)

In one of his earliest stories, “MS. Found in a Bottle,” Poe portrayed his character as delighting, beyond all things, in the study of the German morality, “not from any ill-advised admiration of their eloquent madness, but from the ease with which my habits of rigid thought enabled me to detect their falsities.” in the tale of “Morella” he depicted the narrator as declaring that Morella “placed before me a number of those mystical writings which are usually considered the mere dross of the early German literature. These, for that reason I could not imagine, [page 167:] were her favorite and constant study, and ... in process of time became my own.” In time these studies absorbed completely the two people and led, according to the narrator, to the morbid traits in their characters which brought ultimate tragedy. It is hardly fair, of course, to read autobiographical interpretations into the opinions of fictitious figures, but it is legitimate, I believe, to suggest that Poe could scarcely have written thus of a literature if he himself were a disciple of It.(85) [page 168:]

In his study of the influence of Hoffmann upon Poe, Professor Cobb found definite resemblances existing between the works of the two. He suggested that Poe's plan of the Folio Club owed its origin to Hoffmann's well-known series of tales told by the brethren of the Serapion Club. Professor Cobb linked Poe's “The Assignation” with Hoffmann's “Doge and Dogaressa,” “Wilson Wilson” with “Elixiere des Teufels,” “The Oval Portrait” with “Die Jesuitkirche in G———,” “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” with “Der Magnetiseur, “and “The Fall of the House of Usher” with “Das Majorat.” It has been suggested that from his reading of reviews of Hoffmann, Poe might have gleaned the materials for at least two of these alleged borrowings, that of “William Wilson” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

The Blackwood's reviewer of Hoffmann's “The Devil's Elixir” emphasized especially the peculiar nature of Hoffmann's theme in this romance. He declared that “there is one particular idea on which this author, when in his horrible vein, is chiefly delighted to expatiate. This is the idea of what he calls, in his own language, a doppelganger; that is to say, of a man's being haunted by the visitation of [page 169:] another self — a double of his own personal appearance.”(86). The author of the review asserted that the idea of a double was old in folklore but the Germans, particularly Hoffmann and de la Fouqué, had treated it better than other writers. The reviewer of Gillies's German Stories cited as a frequent theme of “German phantasmagoria” the Doppelganger, or cases of double identity.”(87) Bulwer's treatment of the double idea, as we have seen, in “Monos and Daimmos” did not include physical similarity but dealt merely with the conception of an ever-present, shadowy second person. The author of “Strange Letter of a Lunatic” in Fraser's,(88) however, based his tale upon the perplexing involvements which resulted from a diabolic imposition of a physically identical second self upon the narrator of the story. Since Poe's “William Wilson” resembles Hoffmann's “Elixiere des Teufels” only in this general theme of double identity, his indebtedness, in this case, is not easily established. There is much more of the improbable, the supernaturally inhuman, in the story of Hoffmann's than is found in Poe. [page 170:]

Certain details of Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher” bear a resemblance to portions of Hoffmann's “‘Das Majorat,” which were quoted by Scott in his review of Hoffmann. It has been thought that he derived from this extract the idea of a family's becoming extinct with the catastrophe of the story, the detail of the crack in the Usher mansion, and the final dissolution and disappearance of the building into the dark tarn surrounding it. In the first and second sections of this chapter, I have pointed out that the extinction of a family was a favorite theme in English fiction, and that Poe might have picked it up almost anywhere in his reading. The crack in the Usher mansion does not resemble at all, in my opinion, the chasm created by the falling away of a part of the castle in “Das Majorat,” and in the latter story the building merely goes to ruins and does not collapse suddenly into a lake. Put the conception of a building's disappearance into a body of water was a favorite one in German tales.

It might be well to emphasize, therefore, at this point that resemblance to Hoffmann's work in Poe or in any other writer may mean nothing more than resemblance to the whole German school whether in [page 171:] Germany, England, France, or America. Every new writer of terrible or strange stories was haled [[hailed]] as an imitator of the best known German romancer simply because he had used certain definite and easily recognizable tricks in connection with his stories, which earmarked his work. His material and method became so widely used and so completely naturalized by others that it is difficult to find a theme or a treatment in his stories not likewise present in some following of the German manner. It became an axiom of magazine criticism to point out the similarity between some newly appearing writer and Hoffmann. It is, therefore, entirely possible that Poe might have used definite Hoffmann “tricks” and theme without having read a tale by Hoffmann, though it is probable that the frequency of current allusions to Hoffmann's stories would have induced him to seek the out. The French critic Barine claimed, according to Professor Cobb,(89) that Poe had his Hoffmann at his finger tips. This charge is due, I think, to Poe's use of certain devices of plot employed not only by Hoffmann but by the who1e group of tale-writers who were his disciples. In his preface to German Romance Carlyle referred, as [page 172:] I pointed out above, to this “sedulous cultivation” of Hoffmann's manner “by minds more willing than able.”

There were a number of collections of German tales in English translation to which Poe might easily have had access, and from which he could have learned what was implied in Germanism. Among such collections the most frequently alluded to were R. P. Gillies’e German Stories in three volumes, published by Blackwood in 1826, Thomas Roscoe's The German Novelists, published in London in 1828, Carlyle's German Romance, in two volumes, in 1827, and Richard Holcraft's Tales of Humour and Romance, Selected from Popular German Writers, published in New York in 1829. In tracing Poe's possible familiarity with certain German writers and tales through the medium of translation, I shall refer principally to these four collections.

I have indicated that the incident of a building's disappearing, usually into a lake, as the climax of a tragedy, seems to have been common in German tradition. Three of the popular tales retold by Gottschalck end translated by Thomas Roscoe make use of this device. “The Monastery” opened with a description of “a smell lake situated in a lonely spot amid a tract of old meadow land,” with “something in [page 173:] its whole aspect too mournful and deserted to engage the eye of the traveller.” Tradition said that “its waters have never been fathomed by the oldest fisherman.” Many centuries ago a convent for none stood upon the spot. One night the sisterhood refused Shelter to a mendicant who implored it. A tempest arose; the old man touched the convent with his staff, and the stately monastery sank into a great gulf. “Sulphurous flames burst forth out of the deep, and the cavity was filled with water.”(90) “Ritter Bodo” is the story of a wicked and dissipated knight who sought new victims for his lust among the beautiful peasant girls in the neighborhood of his castle. A maiden seized by him happened to be under the protection of a kindly necromancer. The knight had scarcely carried the girl away to his stronghold when a loud clap of thunder resounded through every room of the castle, the “earth trembled and shook more and more, till the mountain beneath opened and engulfed the whole stately edifice, amidst a deep and hideous din.”(91) [page 174:]

The tittle tale called by Gottschalck “The Miraculous Fish”(92) has in it so much of the Poe quality displayed in “Metzengerstein,” acknowledged by its author as in the German manner, that it should be examined with more care. It is concerned with the career of a young lord, heir to a long and noble family rho ran a wild course of dissipation and crime until punishment overtook him end his castle disappeared.

His conduct became more dissolute with the passage of time and culminated in an attack, made by him and his boon-companions, upon a neighboring convent. The nuns were ravaged, and Herman bore his prize to his castle. Conscience of a sort led him the next day [page 175:] to send his victim back to the cloister, and a letter came to him by his messenger informing him that the nun he had wronged was his own sister who had been placed many years before in the convent. He tried unsuccessfully to drown his regrets under more dissipation. At length in order to tempt his appetite, his cook prepared a strange white fish which had just been caught in the river nearby. His eating of this fish threw him into great torment, mental and physical. A messenger brought word that his sister had died the preceding evening as a result of his treatment. He tried to persuade his servants to kill him, but they refused. His attendants believed him mad because he pursued wildly the animals in his courtyard and wept bitterly when they fled from him. What the servants did not know was that the count had, by eating of the fish, acquired the power of understanding the speech of the animals. They were reproaching him for his crimes and predicting his approaching punishment. A favorite cock advised him that he could save himself by flight if he went unattended.

Of course this tale is embellished with all the wild superstitions and extravagance of the popular fancy, but it undoubtedly contains much of the general atmosphere and manner of Poe's early story; a wildly dissipated young count of a noble line and immense possessions, a period of acute mental suffering, a suggestion of metempsychosis (the sister transformed into the miraculous fish), and an overwhelming catastrophe to the count and his castle. If we assume for the moment, as Poe would say, that he had read the story of Count Isang, then his treatment of the episode illustrates very well his early power of discrimination and effective treatment of the supernatural in such a ray that it could be acceptable in a more cultured [page 177:] age. Certainly his use of the building's dissolution into a lake illustrates this: he conceived the lake as existing previous to the disappearance of the House of Usher and not, as in the German tradition, rising out of the gulf into which the building sank, and he rendered possible and probable the subsequent ruin of the building by explaining that a crack had already indicated the encroachment of decay.

Another traditional German tale, retold by Eberhart and included in the collection of Roscoe, deals with the theme of metempsychosis in extravagant manner.(93) In this story, “Treachery Its Own Betrayer,” a young dervise in the service of the king, used his power to restore a dead body to life in order to effect the migration of his own spirit into the body of the king, while the king was forced to occupy the body of an animal. The king, in turn, tricked the dervise and killed him in the body of a pet nightingale.

It is hardly to be doubted, I think, that Poe had some familiarity with the work of the great German romanticist, Ludwig Tieck, whose name was mentioned more frequently, perhaps, in English critiques than [page 178:] that of any other German writer of fiction except Hoffmann. Just how early he gained this familiarity it is difficult to say. In the late forties he introduced the name of Tieck into one of his reviews of Hawthorne in the manner of one entitled to speak with authority of the German romancer. In comparing Hawthorne with Tieck he wrote:

The idea has been advanced also that, since Poe praised Hawthorne in an earlier review as original in all points, his criticism in 1847 was very likely based upon an acquaintance with Tieck at a time subsequent to the earlier review. But there are other things which, in my opinion, might as satisfactorily explain Poe's mortification of his original view. [page 179:] In the first place, he had grown excessively sensitive on the subject of any form of plagiarism, and this could undoubtedly have influenced his revision of the Hawthorne critique. Originality had taken precedence over all other traits as a basis for estimating genius. Then he had become jealous, perhaps, of his own preeminence in the short-story field and found it difficult to bestow unrestrained praise upon any rivals for his, laurels. By 1847 he appears to have forgotten any suggestions which he himself might have at one time taken from other writers and delighted in pointing out evidences of any lapse from on which he could detect in others. At all events, it seems likely that Poe had at least a slight acquaintance with Tieck's work even during his early literary period, for selections, from Tieck were included by Gillies, Roscoe, and Carlyle in their specimens from the German. Passages from Tieck were included also in Mrs. Austin's “Specimens of German Genius,” which ran for some time in the New Monthly.

Tieck's stories were hailed by a Fraser's reviewer in 1831 as models of dramatic concentration and [page 180:] unified development.(95) Certainly they have more finish and more dramatic concentration then those of Hoffmann, and though they deal frequently with fairy-tale material and bear allegorical interpretation, one feels that they are closer to life — to the legitimate terror of the soul. “The Runenberg,”(96) for example, is a sort of “doppelganger” tale. A young hunter was tempted by a stranger, who appeared “as if he had been an old acquaintance,” to penetrate the mysteries of the Runenberg. There, after strange, adventures in the forest, Christian found happiness and contentment in a little village beyond the mountains. But after the lapse of many years, the stranger reappeared to Christian, and brought to him the temptation of gold. The hunter was led eventually to complete abandonment and complete forgetfulness of his happy life in his greed for gold.

Tieck's “The Goblet” is the story of a youthful passion deflected, by accidental circumstances and magical intervention, from fruition. A young lover [page 181:] consulted, in a weird laboratory, a magician who conjured up a vision of his loved one a magic goblet of strange and beautiful workmanship. The vision vanished as he tried to touch it and it seemed to forebode the shattering of his real happiness. Many years later as an old man he revisited the scene of his youth in order to attend the bridal of a young friend he had met elsewhere and, for his room in the home of the groom, found himself assigned the very apartment of the wizard. He discovered that the sweetheart of his youth was the mother of his young friend; she had grown old in marriage and motherhood. They accepted then all that was left for them — friendship and memories of their youthful passion.(97)

His “Love Magic Some Centuries Ago”(98) relates the story of Emilius, “a young man of fortune, of an enthusiastic, irritable, and melancholy temperament.” Being rich and independent, he travelled for amusement and culture, and at the beginning of the story found himself in a celebrated city at the carnival season. He was too moody, however, to enjoy the festivities [page 182:] because he had become enamored of a mysterious young woman whom he had matched secretly in an apartment across the way. At the height of the carnival madness he stayed in his room and watched for his unknown beauty. Horrified, he witnessed some magic ceremonies in which the young woman allowed a little girl, whom Emilius had learned to be her protégé, to be sacrificed in horrible fashion by a hag-like old woman. This spectacle threw him into a long illness, and upon his recovery he remembered nothing of what had occurred. Later he met the young woman, fell in love with her again, and they were married, in the midst of the wedding revels, “the whole edifice, with its walks, and marble pillars, and flowery ornaments,” was suddenly lighted by a bright sunset glow, “as with streaks of blood.” in masks “resembling some phantasma or hideous dream.” the wedding guests moved gaily through the halls. The sight of a scarlet cloak worn by one of the revellers recalled to Emilius the carnival night of the previous year when his friend had visited him in that very cloak. His memory of the ghastly crime he had witnessed swept over him. He plunged a dagger into [page 183:] the bosom of his guilty young bride, and, in struggling with the old hag, who was one of his wife's attendants, fell with her over a lofty balustrade to death on the pavement below. The melancholy young man of the story, the atmosphere of impending tragedy in the midst of carnival merriment, the hidden crime, and the constant effort to suggest and preserve the tone of the strange and terrific are traits entirely akin to one of Poe's manners.

I have tried to show that Poe had a fair chance of forming an acquaintance with the general subject-matter of German romance through the medium of popular collections of German tales translated into English. It is possible that he may have known also some of the romances of novel-length which were appearing in English translation in the early nineteenth century. For example, Schiller's Geisterseher was apparently popular with English readers, for it was published in translation at several different times — in volume form in England in 1795, in 1800, and in 1831, an in New York in 1845. It was published serially in The Magnolia: or Southern Monthly, in 1841,(99) and a part [page 184:] of it was included in Roscoe's German Novelists in 1826. The title of the story was variously translated as “The Armenian” (1800), “The Apparitionist” (Roscoe and the edition of 1831), “The Ghost-Seer” (1795 and 1841), and “The Visionary” (1845). There are indications in several of Poe's stories that he may have been indebted for certain suggestions to Schiller's romance.

The plot of the Geisterseher is as follows: During the sojourn of a young German prince in Venice, he became involved with a mysterious figure, the Armenian, who displayed strange knowledge of the prince's private affairs. The prince for a time refused to believe the implication of supernatural agencies in the Armenian's powers, but a chain of circumstances involving a young Greek woman with whom he had fallen in love, proved too convincing for his doubts. He was made to believe that the girl, Theresa, had been poisoned, had died, and had been reanimated subsequently by the Armenian under the prince's own eyes. In the meanwhile apparitions appeared to the prince, revealing a knowledge of past occurrences and future happenings in such a way that he could no longer doubt that agencies beyond the mortal realm views intervening in his affairs. [page 185:]

He plunged into certain dubious studies of magic and into a life of profligacy. At length, torn by doubts and half-beliefs and driven from one uncertainty to another, he entered the Catholic church as a means of finding infallibility somewhere. Led on by the advice of a church official, he began a new course of erratic behavior. His actions brought in their wake a whole train of political complications in his principality, and his loyal courtiers became so bewildered that they resorted to disguise and amateur detective work in order to solve the mystery. The whole plot was subsequently unravelled by them. One secured possession of some secret writing; another found, by chance, the key to this writing; they read enough of the secret missive to learn something of the Armenian's schemes. When he was apprehended and thrown into prison, the whole diabolical plot was revealed. The prince was to have been used by a group of conspirators, including in their number some high officials of the Catholic church, as the key figure in their assumption of world power. The Armenian had been the chief agent for the group, and his machinations had been responsible for the series of misfortunes and involvements in which the prince had been entangled. [page 186:]

The Armenian died horribly in prison. When he realized that the whole plot had been exposed, he dashed himself against the iron lock of the door till the blood gushed from his head and uttered fearful imprecations:

The prince and Theresa died shortly after their tormentor's death. They had not met since her part in the plot had been revealed, but they had an assignation in death.

Schiller's tale offers some interesting parallels in treatment and tone to Poe's “The Visionary.” It is noteworthy, incidentally, that “Geisterseher” was at [page 187:] first translated “Ghost-Seer” and “Apparitionist,” at least in the versions which have come to my attention, and not until later as “Visionary.” Poe changed the title of his tale from “The Visionary” to “The Assignation” only in his 1845 published text, though he indicated in emendations made about 1843 that he intended to call it by the latter title.(101) The 1845 American edition of Schiller's work bore the title, The Visionary, and there may have been earlier versions which I have not seen also entitled thus. It le possible that visionary was Poe's attempt to translate the too literal ghost-seer and that he changed the title of his own tale after the possibility arose of a connection's being made between his tale and that of Schiller's. This is a purely hypothetical explanation, of course, but it has always seemed to me that something in Poe's mind, some interpretation which he himself made of the character of his chief figure but did [[not]] convey clearly in the tale itself, was responsible for his calling him a visionary. [page 188:]

Aside from any significance in the titles, the stories have certain definite likenesses. Both narratives take place against a background of romance and intrigue in Venice. In both, the central character is young, scholarly, mysterious, and a foreigner — in Schiller's tale, a German, in Poe's, an Englishman. Each young man loved a woman of ethereal beauty under circumstances that it peril. Each tale ends with an assignation in death between the lovers. In Poe's tale the lovers chose death as a way of escape from the impassable barrier of Aphrodite's marriage to the Doge of Venice. In Schiller's, Theresa's deception of the prince had set up a barrier to their happy union. The prince was so worn out by his bitter experiences that death alone could bring relief, and Theresa was overcome by the knowledge of her unwilling complicity in the plot against the prince. From the brink of the grave, she wrote to him to be forgiveness and to expose the fraud; she asserted her undying love and her assurance of a junction of their souls in the next world. The prince received her letter warning him of her impending death while he sat beneath an oak he had chosen for his final resting-place. As he read the letter amidst loud peals of [page 189:] thunder, he cried, “I shall soon be with thee, oh, Theresa.” A flash of lightning struck the tree and left the prince lifeless. The two souls met in their final assignation.

There are other striking connections between the tales. In the course of the narrative in the Geisterseher numerous episodes having little to do with the main thread of the story are introduced. In one of these the young Marquise Civitella related a romantic episode in his own life.(102)

Civitella's window overlooked a garden and he as accustomed, after his friends left his apartment, to watch the day break upon this perfect scene. One morning about three o’clock he saw a gondola dart up to the bank and then perceived a man and roman in the garden. He watched them and when it grew lighter ran dazzled by the magic beauty of the woman, and no less surprised by the noble bearing of the man — “in the prime of life,” “of a noble stature,” and “with a strange spirit full of Godlike and noble thought resting upon his ample brow and showing itself in the piercing glance that shot from beneath his dark thick eyebrows.” “A degree of wildness in his eye seemed to announce an enthusiast, though his whole exterior character and deportment shared that he must have basked in the eye of the world.” The lovers walked and talked in the garden, the young man apparently struggling with great emotion and some secret distress. The two parted sadly. Civitella told himself the next day that the whole thing had been but a dream. “I saw a maiden, charming as a Houri, from my window, wandering with her lover through the garden bower ere the break of day.” Several days later he saw his lovely girl in the garden again, attended by an elderly women and a young child. A Carmelite [page 191:] monk from a neighboring convent appeared and gave her a paper. Later in the evening Civitella himself stole into the garden and chanced to find the note. Unable to read it at once, he copied. It, and returned the original to the garden just in time for the young woman to find it Then she came hurrying back to retrieve it. Civitella deciphered his purloined treasure, which he found to be in English. Its contents were so remarkable that he learned them by heart. The letter relating Civitellas episode breaks off at this point, and Schiller left this thread unfinished. For this reason, I suppose, he omitted the fragment from his later publication of the story.

In the story of Civitella himself in the suggestion of mismatched love and youth. A clandestine love affair is certainly implied in the meeting in the garden at dawn. The child and the whole mystery itself suggest that the girl is married, and the two lovers are forecasts, certainly, of the ‘visionary’ and his Aphrodite. It seems far-fetched, perhaps, to explain Poe's indebtedness to the involving both plots — the main thread of the Geisterseher and of the episode too. But the threads of the two [page 192:] volumes are so involved and confused that it would have been easy for another story-teller to feel a temptation to use Schiller's intriguing materials in a more compact and unified narrative.

Certain phases of the material have bearing on other stories by Poe. The description of the decomposition, while alive, of the Armenian, offers an interesting parallel to the same kind of thing in “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” Poe needed of course no specific source for his loathsome details; such descriptions seem to have been common property in the literature of the time. Miss Alterton has pointed out the resemblance between Poe's tale and certain parts of a Blackwood's review of Medical Jurisprudence called “Hints to Jurymen.”(103) Bulwer described graphically the horrors of decomposition in his tales, “Manuscript Found in a Madhouse” and “The Tale of Kosem Kesamin.” The nun in Lewis's The Monk endured tortures more terrible than her horrible imprisonment in the dungeon of the monastery when she [page 193:] saw the worms feeding upon the body of her child and found them coiling around her own fingers.(104) Mrs. Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho has much of its suspense and mystery centered in a strange picture or statue behind a black veil. It is eventually discovered to be a waxen effigy of a human being in the most loathsome stages of decay. But in spite of the indications of the frequent occurrence of such descriptions, none which I have read so closely suggests Poe's manner as that of the Geisterseher.

Another obviously stock’ situation of Schiller's story may have furnished Poe with a suggestion. One evening while the prince was engrossed in a highly imaginative book, he heard strange voices which seemed to fit too well with the incidents of the story he was reading; he saw also some startling apparitions which seemed to grow out of the material of his reading. Although these experiences were verified by an attendant who was present, the prince himself explained that their imaginations had been stimulated by the weirdness of their own reading and that they had only fancied the sounds and sights. This incident [page 194:] is paralleled in “The Fall of the House of Usher” on the evening when Usher and his friend were reading a wild romance and were startled to find the passages in the book accompanied by eerie noises which suited perfectly the events in the narrative. This seems not to have been an uncommon device, however, in tales of the time, as a similar experience befell the narrator of Hoffmann's “Das Majorat” as he read one evening Schiller's Geisterseher. In The Mysteries of Udolpho Ludovico experienced the same kind of strange coincidence between sounds and passages in a Provençal romance of knighthood which he was reading.(105)

Perhaps most significant of all the possible influences which Schiller's romance may have exercised upon Poe is the method he used. In telling his story; a complete account of the unhappy prince's misfortunes is given in the first part of the narrative. Then the explanation of the solution of the plot, by means of the reading of secret documents and the confession of the Armenian, is made in the final chapters of the tale. The reader is as much bewildered as the prince and his attendants by the apparently supernatural occurrences of the first part of the story. This is, [page 195:] of course, the kind of method employed by Poe in the 1840's when he hit upon a seemingly new way of narrating his “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” “The Gold Bug,” and “The Purloined Letter.”(106) There is, however, no master mind, no Dupin, in Schiller's account; the detective work is carried on amateurishly and fumblingly.

Of great interest also in interpreting the possible significance of the Geisterseher in relation to Poe's tales is the fact that Schiller had attempted to write not the customary German tale of supernatural horror, but one which would be an exposé of such tales. It had been mistaken, however, for the usual story of romantic terrors, and Schiller, according to Roscoe's introduction to his translation of the tale, had been greatly disappointed with the reputation acquired by his experiment.(107) A reviewer writing for the London Magazine made the same statement in regard to Schiller's purpose and his disappointment with the [page 196:] result. He declared that Schiller wrote the story as a means of exposing the notorious Count Cagliostro, who was just then in Paris harrowing the souls the curious and by various thaumaturgic feats, such as raising the dead from the grave. Schiller attempted, according to the reviewer, to exemplify the dangers to acute and sensitive minds of such working on the latent germ of superstition, only to find his views misinterpreted and his purpose mistaken as that of producing only “an accumulation of horrors in the Radcliffe fashion.”(108)

It has been asserted that Poe attempted even in his, early tales to give a natural explanation for his vagaries of terror.(109) Certainly comments of reviewers for the most part implied that the British and American mind would find more satisfaction in a terror that arose from natural causes — a terror of the soul as Poe termed it — rather than in terror resulting solely from supernatural agencies. This tendency was in line with the thing Schiller had in mind to do in his Geisterseher as early as 1789.(110)

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 156:]

62.  I (March, 1835), 367.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 157:]

63.  Letters, 47f. Heath to Poe, Sept. 12, 1839. [[Heath's]] expression in this letter of distaste for Germanism is consistent with his earlier attitude as editor of the Messenger before Poe became connected with it. In the issue of the magazine for Feb., 1835, under the department, “to Correspondents and Contributors,” it was stated by Heath, then acting as editor, that the contributions of one “Fra Diavolo” were offensive. “We have, in fact, no sort or taste for German ‘diabierie,’ which, in our judgment, sins against good taste, as well as against good morals.” See the issue of the Messenger, I (Feb., 1835), 324.

64.  This exception probably refers to “Metzengenstein,” which Poe acknowledged by the tag, “A Tale in Imitation of the German.”

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 158:]

65.  Op. cit., 11.

66.  Op. cit., I, 124.

67.  Cited by Professor Cobb in his study of Hoffmann's influence, p. 104.

68.  Op. cit., 127f.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 159:]

69.  Carl Schreiber, “Mr. Poe at His Conjurations Again,” Colophon, II May, 1930), lff.

70.  Op. cit., 9.

71.  Pattee, op. cit., 127, footnote 1.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 160:]

72.  “Marginalia,” S. L. M., Sept., 1849. Works, XVI, 99.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 161:]

73.  “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter,” Edinburg Review, 1827.

74.  Letter to White, April 30, 1835, cited by Napier Wilt, loc. cit.

75.  German Romance, I, Preface, x.

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

76.  These appeared irregularly from 1819 to 1828 in vo1umes VI, VII, VIII, IX, XI, XII, X000, XIV, XVI, XVII, ax, XXI, XXII, and XXIV. Poole's Reference Guide to Periodical Literature attributed these articles to H. P. Gillies. Miss M. Clive Hilyard, Lockhart's Literary Criticism (1931), 154, states that they were written by Lockhart.

77.  XXVIII (1830) 311, 444, 519; XXIX (1830) 34, 180.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 163:]

78.  This review will be discussed more fully in connection with Poe's formation of a theory of the story in chapter V.

79.  Review of Hoffmann's Devil's Elixir, in translation, Blackwood's, XVI (Jul;, 1824), 55f.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 164:]

80.  Section III, chapter I.

81.  In this connection see Miss Alterton's discussion of Poe's modification of the tales of terror in conformity, she believes, with a similar trend in the Blackwood's stories (Op. cit., chapter I, 14ff.).

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

82.  Review of “Undine,” Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, Sept., 1839. Works, X, 30ff.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 166:]

83.  “Marginalia,” Graham's, Dec., 1846. Works, XVI, 115f.

84.  Ibid. (June, 1849, and April, 1846), 164 and 98.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 167:]

85.  Palmer Cobb has made (op. cit., 23) what seems to me a strange interpretation of Poe's opinions. “Poe finds, he wrote, German criticism unsettled and professes to prefer Voltaire to Goethe. In other words, for that which is generally considered best in German literature he has no appreciation. That which is usually considered the ‘mere dross’ of German literature [Cobb had just quoted this statement in regard to the studies of the leading character in “Morella,” which he identifies with Poe himself] he describes as his ‘constant and favorite reading.’” in other words, Professor Cobb linked two statements, one from genuine criticism and a second from the mouth of a character in a tale, as Poe's description of his own tastes in literature. It is wholly unfair to accept Poe's characterization of the narrator in “Morella” as himself.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 169:]

86.  XVI (July, 1824), 55f.

87.  Blackwood's, XX (Dec., 1826), 844ff.

88.  II (Dec., 1830), 523ff.

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

89.  Op. cit., 11.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 173:]

90.  Roscoe, 214ff.

91.  Ibid., 222ff.

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

92.  Ibid., 228ff.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 177:]

93.  Ibid., 244ff.

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

94.  Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales,” Godey's Book, Nov., 1847. Works, XII, 144.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 180:]

95.  “Tales from Tieck,” Fraser's, IV (Nov., 1831), 460ff.

96.  Carlyle, German Romance, I, 340ff.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 181:]

97.  German Romance, I, 390ff.

98.  The German Novelists, 477ff.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 183:]

99.  Savannah. Volume III, numbers 1 to 12, translated by Professor C. J. Hadernan.

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

100.  The Armenian; or The Ghost Seer, London, 1800, 4 volumes, IV, 273.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 187:]

101.  See the discussion in section III, chapter I, of his proposed volume, Fantasy-Pieces [[Phantasy-Pieces]], as indicated in the copy of Tales of Grotesque and Arabesque owned by George Blumenthal.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 189:]

102.  This particular fragment was included in Schiller's original version of the story published in Thalia but was omitted from his volume version. It was omitted also in the translations of 1800 and 1831, but included in Roscoe's account and in the text of 1845. These latter two translations appear to have been made from the same original text in German; they are briefer than the others, and, do not include the continuation of the story by another hand than Schiller's. The 1845 edition, however, contains material not in Roscoe's version.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 192:]

103.  Margaret Alterton, op. cit., 19. “Hints to Jurymen” appeared in Blackwood's, III, 675.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 193:]

104.  The Monk, London, 1907, II, 36f.

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

105.  II, 222ff.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 195:]

106.  Professor Pattee also calls attention to this similarity in method in his discussion of the genesis of Poe's tales of ratiocination, op. cit., footnote, p. 127.

107.  Op. cit., 573.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 196:]

108.  “Schiller's Life and Writings,” London Magazine, IX (Jan., 1824), 52 ff.

109.  Alterton, op. cit., 15.

110.  Miss Alterton calls attention to several reviews in Blackwood's which made this point: “A Chapter on Goblins,” XIV, 641; “Horae Germanicae,” XIII, 3; Beck and Dunlap on Medical Jurisprudence, XVII, 352.