characteristic, that is to say, are greatly helped by the fact. The stories in which he figures gain greatly from M. Dupin, who has a pedantic and censorious temperament, though his differentiation is as inferior to that of his successor, M. Lecocq, as the meagre and mathematical medium in which he exists is to the varied and entertaining field of activity, full of character and crowded with incident, that Gaboriau furnished for the latter-though without reaching eminence as a "world-author" in the process. "The Fall of the House of Usher" gains greatly from the characters therein, though these are merely sketches for the reader's imagination to fill out. One thinks of "Wuthering Heights" and of the place in literature that would have been assigned to Emily Brontë by Poe admirers, had she had the good fortune to be born an American. "The Pit and the Pendulum," one of the best of the tales, it seems to me, owes much to its exceptional "psychology" as an imaginative study of real torture to which ingenuity gives real point instead of merely displaying itself as ingenuity. It is helped, too, I think, by being localized in real time and space; by the fact that there was such an institution as the Inquisition, and that the victim's rescuers had an actual and the correct nationality, though I fear these considerations would seem philistine indeed to the true Poe worshipper. Furthermore, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" forfeits a large part of its interest the moment it appears that the murderer is an ape and not a human malefactor. Ce n'est que ça, one feels like exclaiming and repeating even when William Wilson's double dissolves into his conscience, though of course allegorically that is the point of the story, as well as being very cleverly, very ingeniously, managed. Finally one of the tales "The System of Dr. Tarr and Dr. Fether"-has an exceptional interest because it is an intelligent, though it does not pretend to be a profound, study of a phase of mind and character under certain conditions and in a certain environment, executed with a wholly unaccustomed lightness of touch and an aspect of gaiety. The scene, however, it will be remembered, is a maison de santé and the personages are its inmates. And nothing is more characteristic of Poe's perversity than that his most normal fiction should be the representation

of the abnormal. The abnormal was es sential to him, and he only varied his practice of achieving it in his treatment by securing it in his material. Taken with the whim of depicting human nature, he could at least select its deflected types. Even here, however, his interest is clearly in treating his material in a rather ghastly vein of contrasting and contra-indicated bouffe. He cares nothing for his "types," and his real success, such as it is, is incidental.

Similarly with his pre-occupation with crime—almost an obsession with him. He is never concerned with sin, which is too integrally human an element of life to interest him. Crime, on the contrary, is in comparison of an artificial nature, and of however frequent, still of exceptional occurrence. Undoubtedly it furnishes apposite material to the novelist of character as well as to the portraitist of manners, and is a personal as well as a social factor in human life. But this aspect of it Poe, whose criminals are only criminals, completely ignores. He uses it not naturalistically but conventionally. It is his conventional machinery for his story. Like Mme. Tussaud and Mrs. Jarley, he finds in it the readiest instrument of his most cherished effects. And so far as he "psychologizes" it, he increases its inherent artificiality by treating it with morbid imaginativeness, endeavoring after his favorite method to give the illusion of reality to its abnormal repellency and not at all concerned about demonstrating its real character. Here he is measurably successful in such a tale as "The Imp of the Perverse," where he utilizes the well-known tendency of the criminal to confess, and totally fails in such absurdity as "The Black Cat," a story that could hardly have "thrilled" Ichabod Crane; but one illustrates his lack of human feeling as well as the other. And of almost all the stories into which the element of humanity enters perforce, it may be said, finally, that the residuum is not so much worth while as to earn neglect of his shortcomings in a respect normally vital to the kind of thing he is doing. In a word, the "Poe" in his stories could only be moving and effective if this element were present also.

For the only thing that can give any significance, any vital interest, any value, in brief, to the weird and the fantastic

themselves, is to anchor them somehow in some human relationship as Hoffmann does. Otherwise they are simply phenomena that appeal strictly to the nerves. Poe's treatment of them negatives their sole sanction. "He can thrill you as no one else can," says one of his admirers. As to that there are several things to be said. In the first place it depends a good deal on who you are, whether you are "thrilled" or not. In the next place how are you "thrilled"? As you are by the knocking at the door in Macbeth, or as you are by a bad dream or a gruesome sight in actual life? Thirdly, are you thus affected because the story is thrilling, or because, as I have already noted, your own imagination is set at work as to how you would be affected by experiencing what you are reading of "The Premature Burial," for example-forgetful of the fact that personal application, than which nothing is more common, notoriously vitiates any objective judgment? Finally of what value after all is gooseflesh as a guide to correct estimates in art? Is this hyper-æsthetic reaction a trustworthy measure of real æsthetic merit? To ask these questions is of course to answer them. But even accepting this effect on the nerves as evidence of Poe's power, even of his unique power-for I think no other writer ever essayed it so baldly-its essential insignificance must be admitted, because it is wholly divorced from any element of interest outside of itself. Instead of itself being an element in a composition as with Hoffmann, Poe's weirdness is the whole thing. An occasional discord has its uses in a work of harmony, but the scrannel shriek of a locomotive performs no function but that of irritation, though it may "thrill" or even deafen a listener. It is certainly more important to be moved than to be moved pleasantly, but to be moved to no purpose, to be agitated aimlessly in no direction, is an unsatisfactory experience.

It is needless to specify instances among Poe's tales that illustrate this exclusive appeal to the nerves. It would be difficult to find any among those of the weird class that do not. Besides in them it was his theory, his "scheme," to create this precise effect and no other. The particularly crass one of "Berenice," however, shows his method in particular relief. It is that product of his "genius" in which a mad

man recounts his fascination by the beautiful teeth of his mistress, and his exhumation of her remains for the purpose of extracting them as a last exercise of his faculties before losing them completely. Poe sometimes went too far, and did so in this instance, naively admits one of his earlier editors! As if it mattered where along that line one stopped. The partly ridiculous, partly repulsive, wholly inept quality of the performance is stamped as such at the start. The serious workmanship only emphasizes the fact that the personages are lay figures, the motif insane, the story incredible. As a ship-shape and coherent account of incoherent horror, it may contain a "thrill" for the predisposed, but it is fully as fitted to evoke a smile as a shudder, and there is obviously no standard by which to admeasure this sort of thing except that of technical execution. Any reader of "Berenice" not a neurasthenic must inevitably ask, "What of it?" Having no import it has no importance.

V

"BERENICE" epitomizes very well Poe's lack of substance and the insignificance of the fantastic element in his work which this lack of substance involves. It also illustrates the aridity of his imagination. Imagination is, in the view of most of his admirers, probably, his most striking, his most salient, possession. But it is darkening counsel to stop with this mere ascription, as if imagination were an invariable rather than a protean faculty. Poe's imagination was of a peculiarly personal kind. It intensified his divining powers, but never extended his range of thought. It was thoroughly, integrally, analytic. His "Tales of Conscience," as they have been called, deal mechanically so far as they do not deal conventionally with conscience. There is no largely imaginative treatment of it. They summarize phenomena deduced from remorse and fear as forces and, confined to crime as they are, involve little imaginative psychology. His imaginings are largely inventive, and important as the imagination is to the inventor, the tendency to invention is apt to imply an inferior order of it. The poets are sadly lacking in the inventive faculty.

It is essentially logical, concatenated, mechanical. It has no spiritual and no sensuous side. Poe's inventiveness is his chief mental trait and his imagination was its servant. He is perhaps at his best in "The Gold Bug"-to Poe's partisans a miracle of imaginative invention, but only to his partisans anything else. His spiritual side is illustrated by his "Ligeias," "Eleonoras" and "Morellas"-which measured by a serious standard are scarcely more than morbid moonings. The ingenuity of his one spiritual tale, "William Wilson," is far more in evidence than its imaginativeness. It is an extremely artistic piece of workmanship and shows what Poe's art could do in the service of truth instead of mystification. But only up to the point when you perceive it is mystification after all. Curiously, then the effect deliquesces when its meaning appearswith the entrance of avowed allegory. The whole thing becomes insubstantial because his imagination is unequal to conducting his fine conception to its conclusion without destroying his illusion. His sensuousness is distinctly rudimentary, all glitter and tinsel, ebony and silver. His consecration to beauty seems a little ironical in the light of his too frequent conception of it. Witness "The Assignation," with its "mingled and conflicting perfumes, reeking up from strange convolute censers, together with multitudinous flaring and flickering tongues of emerald and violet fire," its "thousand reflections from curtains which rolled from their cornices like cataracts of molten silver," its "beams of natural glory" which "mingled at length fitfully with the artificial light and lay weltering in subdued masses upon a carpet of rich, liquidlooking cloth of Chili gold"—all of which "richesse de café," as Balzac would call it, suggests the sale's catalogue of a courtesan, raisonné by a Semitic hand; or at least Thackeray caricaturing Disraeli and Bulwer combined those twin sources of Poe's style according to his latest editors, who however must have been thinking only of its extravagances, as his style in general is admirable.

In any case such writing is not sensuous but scenic. And Poe had no more the sensuous than the sensual strain. The sensual as commonly understood does not exist for him, apparently, as it is apt not to in per

sons of his variety of nervous organization, and his writings it is to be pointed out have this signal negative merit. But he perhaps pays for it in some degree by an extraordinary aridity in the whole sensuous sphere. When he enters this he is either perfectly insignificant or else his taste deserts him. He is too insincere to succeed in it. His nature requires the element of the artificial which distinguishes the scenic. His genius was certainly a striking one, and if he was a charlatan he certainly had a genius for charlatanry. He revelled in the specious. The vivid aspect of reality he gave to his creations is due to his skill in its use, for he never felt reality and was impervious to its appeal as the true constitution of the universe moral and material. What he desired was to be striking. He says so in so many words in one of his disingenuous (or merely perverse, who knows?) argumentations, contending that any one can be original if he will. And his usual means of accomplishing it was by giving through speciousness the semblance of reality to the unreal and incredible. He relied on this far more than even on his scenic imagination, though his scenic imagination gave him great power of vivid material realization; his landscapes are landscapes are stereoscopic. The scenic, however, demands scale. With Poe the scale is too small. His stage is lilliputian. He is so fond of the limelight in itself that he floods his picture with it. But for the proper play of this illuminant more time and space are needed than his cabinet canvas contains. His imagination is not rich enough to engender extension, endue it with continuity, and crowd it with action. His action is always meagre, and, one may say, deduced from, rather than largely illustrative of, his idea. Or else it is conventional, as in the "Adventures of A. Gordon Pym," which is the acme of stereotyped "adventure," imitating "Robinson Crusoe" even to its religious outgivings with grotesquely mechanical effect.

On the other hand, he was full of ideas. If he lacked the visualizing moral power of the image-making faculty, if his action and incidents are meagre and gain their aspect of reality through a specious art of presentation rather than by the actual incarnation of artistic vision, what eminently he did not lack was fertility in intellectual conception. Sixty-eight stories, whatever their average

quality, are a good many. His picture might be vague but it never lacked subject. He cannot be said to have lived in the world of ideas, in the accepted sense of the phrase, for he had but a smattering acquaintance with its established consensus. Predeterminedly original, however, he created his own. Artist as he was he was nevertheless far more predisposed to the abstract than the concrete except in the purely material sphere; he began with principle and proceeded to phenomena, in irreproachably deductive fashion. Analytical as he was he conducted his analysis deductively; he had a passion for ratiocination, but he argues synthetically. His conclusion is always his own point of departure -artistically withheld till the climax is reached in the verification of hypothesis. This is the difference between M. Dupin and Zadig, for example. He was tremenHe was tremendously concerned with theory, a circumstance that gives point to his criticism and coherence to his tales, however it may devitalize his poetry. His mind was highly speculative, inquiring, even inquisitional. He had a prodigious interest in problems, puzzles, rebuses-an interest that to those who do not share it is apt to seem inept. He was in a way a conjurer in literature. He delighted in mystification-which is as much as to say he had no other interest in mystery. His aim was to mystify-one impossible to the mystic. He was less of a mystic than any writer who has ever dealt with the mysterious. He had vastly more affinity with Cagliostro than with Hoffmann from whom-inexplicably-he is so often said to derive. Without the vanity he had the conceit and enjoyed the complacence of the prestidigitator.

In his early studies mathematics and in his later reading science in general attracted him most genuinely. With all his gift for language it interested him mainly as syntax, and his knowledge of languages was as superficial as his care for letters. His French for example-which is not infrequent is what he would call in another impudently ignorant, and has circumvented his latest editors who, nevertheless, speak of having taken the liberty of rectifying his text in this respect. He may be said, indeed, to have indulged his mathematical turn in his philosophy of life—or whatever may serve to pass for such with him; of

course, as such he had no philosophy of life. His interest in ideas did not extend to moral ones, of which he had none. The whole world of morals was a terra incognita to him-not at all the same thing as saying, which is also true, that he had no morals. Coleridge, for example, has been said to have had none, but he was immensely concerned with their philosophy. Poe's personal egotism, accentuated by his indulgences, freed him from a sense of personal responsibility no doubt, but the singular thing about him as a writer is that man's moral nature made no appeal to his imagination. Morbid psychology, to be sure, was a part of his material, but he used it almost altogether as a means, mainly mechanical, to the production of a dramatic effect. And even here his general ideas have not the scope and freedom they have in the purely intellectual sphere, but have the succinct quality that marks the "notation" of phenomena. So that even his determination to the abnormal does not in the unfamiliar moral sphere remark any law of general import-except such common-places as the tendency of the criminal to confession already noted. And of course, as regards morals in the extended sense, he had, about man's habits and customs, around which the imagination of the normal literary artist plays perpetually, no ideas at all, either general or otherwise.

In brief, his lack of moral imagination accounts for the vacuity of his writings. A writer's product is characterized in great part by what he lacks as well as by what he possesses, by his defects as well as by his qualities. It is no reproach to a theological writer to be ignorant of the fine arts unless he refers to them. The theory of criticism, however, which holds that the excellences of performance are alone worth attention, that it is, unlike a rope, to be judged only by its strongest part, and that the function of criticism is really the judicial dispensing of rewards of merit, is unsatisfactory and provincial. The whole work is there calling for critical account, and, except in the matter of emphasis and accent, its sins both of commission and omission are germane to critical consideration. In practice the other theory leads to notorious confusion and-as Americans at least must be constantly reminded-the distinction between

good and bad is obscured by mechanically ascribing to a failure the characteristics of a performer's successes. At all events it is pertinently illuminating to find a writer of tales, criticism and poetry deficient in the philosophy of life, letters and feeling, not only because this at once ranks his product, and measures its value, but on account of the light it throws on his productive faculty itself-his imagination. It is a just reproach to Hawthorne that he suffered the genius that produced "The Scarlet Letter" to produce little or nothing else comparable with it. But the case is quite different with Poe, because tales, criticism, and poetry of real value cannot be written or can only occasionally be written with Poe's equipment. The wonder is not that he did not succeed oftener, but that he succeeded at all, as assuredly he did in his own way one can hardly say his own genre, since he had no congeners.

It is a mistake to try to classify him. He is a very strictly sui generis. So appalling an egoist could hardly fail to be. For that reason he seems to me more personal than original, as I began by saying, since being extremely idiosyncratic, he nevertheless originated nothing in the sense of markedly and permanently modifying the preceding or the prevalent in his field of activity; of course in a restricted sense eccentricity is originality. No more superficial association was ever made than in relating him to Hoffmann, in whom the weird and the fantastic are always in close and generally in affectionate companionship with sentiment and humor. "Where form dominates," says Balzac, "sentiment disappears," and in the temperament of the technician humor has as little place as sentiment. Notoriously Poe had none of either. He was an artist with a controlling bent toward artifice, exaggeratedly theoretic, convinced that the beautiful is the strange and the sad the poetic, and exercising his imagination through every expedient of ingenious invention, to the end of producing effects of strangeness to the point of abnormality and of sadness to the point of horror. Compact of neurotic sensationalism and saturated with the specious, Poe's "thrilling" tales taken in the mass illustrate the most detestable misuse of imaginative powers within the limits of serious literature, and only fall within these

limits by the intellectual vigor which oftenest they argue rather than evince. "It's a weary feast," says Thackeray, "that banquet of wit where no love is." And Poe's banquet is as bereft of wit as it is destitute of love.

VI

He

IF even his imagination was thus limited it was perhaps partly because the field of its exercise was naturally limited by his lack of culture. He had no culture properly so called. He applied the schoolmaster's rod to others with the gusto of pretentiousness, but discipline is precisely and par excellence what he lacked himself. is the notablest example to be found among men of letters of a writer living exclusively in the realm of the intellect without developing or enriching his own. His first work is as good as his last. He read much but without purpose. In this single respect his editors have perhaps done him somewhat less than justice in saying: "His sources were, at first, books of which Disraeli's 'Curiosities of Literature' is a type, and in science some elementary works; generally he seems to have read books only for review, as they came under his notice at random, but he paid much attention to the magazines, home and foreign, throughout his life." Desultory as his reading was, it was not indolent and hap-hazard. Devoid of sentiment, he eschewed "trash." And without any spirit of suite, or any persistent amassing of knowledge, still less with any ordered and philosophic acquisition, his purely intellectual organization led him into the realm of learning, where he was distinctly at home without, however, possessing the moral purpose to benefit by his stay. He satisfied his curiosity, following an indubitable natural bent, without engaging his responsibility or really increasing his knowledge. There is no such absurd fatras in literature as the absurd "Eureka." He found his practical account in these excursions. All was grist that came to his mill. Just as he read the current product for journalistic ends, he pursued in literature out-of-the-way paths in search of the odd and the unfamiliar with a similar motive-at least with a similar result. What he found there served to decorate his own writing with the un