The Tell-Tale Heart (1843).
Every one feels the force for this tale of this method of beginning; and to many story-readers of to-day it may seem obvious; but it was Poe, more than any one else, who taught us to begin so.
The idea of this innovation was negatively to reject what is from the point of view of narrative form extraneous; positively it was to make the narrative progress more direct. And the evident care to simplify the narrative mechanism for directness of effect is the clue to Poe’s advance in form, and his most instructive contribution to technic. This principle explains more fully his method of setting the scene. The harmonisation is secured mainly by suppression. The tale is stripped of every least incongruity. In real life emotion is disturbed, confused, perhaps thwarted; in art it cannot be interpreted without arbitrary simplification; in Poe’s art the simplification brooks no intrusive fact. We are kept in a dreamland that knows no disturbing sound. The emotion has no more friction to overcome than a body in a vacuum. For Poe’s directness is not the directness of spontaneity; it has nothing conversational or “natural”; it is the directness of calculation. So he had little occasion to improve his skill in dialogue. Dialogue is the artistic imitation of real life. He had little use for it. His best tales are typically conducted by monologue in the first person. What he desired, what he achieved, what his example taught, was reduction to a straight, predetermined course. Everything that might hinder this consistency were best away. So, as he reduced his scene to proper symbols, he reduced it also, in his typical tales, to one place. Change of place, lapse of time, are either excluded as by the law of the classical unities,[20] or, if they are admitted, are never evident enough to be remarked. What this meant as a lesson in form can be appreciated only by inspecting the heavy machinery that sank many good tales before him. What it means in ultimate import is the peculiar value and the peculiar limitation of the short story—in a word, its capacity as a literary form. The simplification that he set forth is the way to intensity; but perhaps Hawthorne saw that it might be the way to artificiality.
The history, then, of the short story—the feeling after the form, the final achievement, will yield the definition of the form. The practical process of defining by experiment compiles most surely the theoretical definition. And to complete this definition it is safe to scrutinise the art of Poe in still other aspects. His structure, appearing as harmonisation and as simplification, appears also as gradation. That the incidents of a tale should be arranged as progressive to a climax is an elementary narrative principle not so axiomatic in the practice, at least, of Poe’s time as to bind without the force of his example. Even his detective stories, in their ingenious suspense and their swift and steady mounting to climax, were a lesson in narrative. But this is the least of his skill. The emotional and spiritual effects that he sought as his artistic birthright could be achieved only by adjustments far more subtle. The progressive heightening of the style corresponds to a nice order of small details more and more significant up to the final intensity of revelation. Little suggestion is laid to suggestion until the great hypnotist has us in the mood to hear and feel what he will. It is a minute process, and it is unhurried; but it is not too slow to be accomplished within what before him would have seemed incredible brevity. The grading of everything to scale and perspective, that the little whole may be as complete, as satisfying, as any larger whole—nay, that any larger treatment may seem, for the time of comparison, too broad and coarse,—this is Poe’s finer architecture. But for him we should hardly have guessed what might be done in fifteen pages; but for him we should not know so clearly that the art of fifteen pages is not the art of a hundred and fifty.
Berenice casts a shadow first from the fatal library, chamber of doubtful lore, of death, of birth, of pre-natal recollection “like a shadow—vague, variable, indefinite, unsteady; and like a shadow, too, in the impossibility of my getting rid of it while the sunlight of my reason shall exist.” The last words deepen the shadow. Then the “boyhood in books” turns vision into reality, reality into vision. Berenice flashes across the darkened stage, and pines, and falls into trances, “disturbing even the identity of her person.” While the light from her is thus turning to darkness, the visionary’s morbid attentiveness is warped toward a monomania of brooding over trivial single objects. For the sake of the past and visionary Berenice betrothed with horror to the decaying real Berenice, he is riveted in brooding upon her person—her emaciation—her face—her lips—her teeth. The teeth are his final curse. The rest is madness, realised too horribly, but with what final swiftness of force! No catalogue of details can convey the effect of this gradation of eight pages. Yet Berenice is Poe’s first and crudest elaboration. The same static art in the same year moves Morella more swiftly through finer and surer degrees to a perfectly modulated close in five pages. His next study, still of the same year, is in the grotesque. The freer and more active movement of King Pest shows his command of the kinetic short story of incident as well as of the static short story of intensifying emotion. By the next year he had contrived to unite in Metzengerstein the two processes, culminating intensity of feeling and culminating swiftness of action for a direct stroke of terror and retribution. By 1836 Poe knew his art; he had only to refine it. Continuing to apply his method of gradation in both modes, he gained his own peculiar triumphs in the static,—in a situation developed by exquisite gradation of such infinitesimal incidents as compose Berenice to an intense climax of emotional suggestion, rather than in a situation developed by gradation of events to a climax of action. But in both he disclosed the fine art of the short story in drawing down everything to a point.
For all this was comprehended in Poe’s conception of unity. All these points of technical skill are derived from what he showed to be the vital principle of the short story, its defining mark,—unity of impression through strict unity of form. “Totality of interest,” an idea caught from Schlegel, he laid down first as the principle of the short poem,[21] and then as the principle of the tale.[22] And what this theory of narrative should imply in practice is seen best in Poe. For Hawthorne, though he too achieves totality of interest, is not so surely a master of it precisely because he is not so sure of the technic. His symbolism is often unified, as it were, by logical summary; for Poe’s symbolism summary would be an impertinence. Poe’s harmonisation, not otherwise, perhaps, superior to Hawthorne’s, is more instructive as being more strictly the accord of every word with one constantly dominant impression. His simplification of narrative mechanism went in sheer technical skill beyond the skill of any previous writer in opening a direct course to a single revealing climax. His gradation, too, was a progressive heightening and a nice drawing to scale. All this means that he divined, realised, formulated the short story as a distinct form of art. Before him was the tale, which, though by chance it might attain self-consistency, was usually and typically incomplete, either a part or an outline sketch; from his brain was born the short story as a complete, finished, and self-sufficing whole.
III. A GLANCE AT DERIVATION
ANCIENT TALES, MEDIÆVAL TALES, THE MODERN FRENCH SHORT STORY
Milesian Tales.
The nice questions of literary derivation cannot be finally answered for the tale, any more than for other literary forms, without large citation and analysis in particular. But, pending fuller discussion, a general survey of the typical late Greek, late Latin, and mediæval forms is full of suggestion. Stories being primarily for pleasure and the pleasures of decadent Greece being largely carnal, it can give no long amazement to find that the tales popular along the Mediterranean of the Seleucids and the Ptolemies were erotic and often frankly obscene. Known as Milesian[23] tales, doubtless from the bad eminence of some collection in the Ionian city of pleasure, they set a fashion for those Roman studies in the naturally and the unnaturally sexual of which the Satyricon[24] of Petronius may stand as a type. The famous tale of the Matron of Ephesus, which has more consistency than most of this collection, reveals at once how far such pieces went in narrative form. Clearly a capital plot for a short story, it is just as clearly not a short story, but only a plot. It is as it were a narrative sketch or study, like the scenario for a play. And in this it is like many other tales of its class. The rest, the majority, are simply anecdote.[25] They are such stories as men of free life and free speech have in all ages told after dinner. That is their character of subject; that is their capacity of form. Speaking broadly, then, the short tales of antiquity are never short stories in our modern sense. They are either anecdote or scenario.
Daphnis and Chloe, Aucassin and Nicolette.