even if he be unconscious of it. Thus Mr. Stevenson often denies his own assertion, and, discovering-to borrow Charles Lamb's illuminating phrase 'a right line in obliquity,' disproves that 'the end of all art is to please.' Let our readers turn to the Essay from which we have quoted-' A Letter to a Young Gentleman who proposes to embrace the Career of Art'—and they will find examples of what we mean. They will find there also many manly and many sensible things— for Mr. Stevenson's art is manly, whatever he may say.

115

EDGAR ALLAN POE

THE first thing which strikes one strongly in reading Poe in the mass is the extraordinary number of new artifices originated by him-artifices which were almost at once imitated and made the common property of writers of novels and stories, but which had never before been used, or, at any rate, systematically developed. To no other man in the realms of romance has it been given to strike out so many new lines. Not only was his genius prolific in itself, but it had the power in a high degree of rendering others prolific.

It is worth while to set out in order some examples of the new forms originated by Poe. To begin with, he was the inventor of the detective novel,' which, in the hands of Wilkie Collins, Gaboriau, Du Boisgobey, and later Dr. Conan Doyle, has enchanted so many minds, and, as Mr. Andrew Lang sings, has sweetened many a weary mile of railway travel. 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue,' 'The Mystery of Marie Roget,' and the Purloined Letter' are perfect examples of the detective story. There is in them all that literary chessplaying which so delights us in Wilkie Collins, and in them too we may find the prototype, or rather architype, of the famous Sherlock Holmes. Poe's claim to have originated the novel of scientific imagination is

equally good. Jules Verne's happy knack of mixing up the most daring flights of imagination with large doses of popular science was first worked out by Poe, and with wonderful success, in 'The Adventure of One Hans Pfaall.' Here the method of narrative is exactly that adopted thirty years later in 'The Journey to the Centre of the Earth' or 'The Voyage of the Nautilus.'

Another form of modern romance which may be said to have been originated by Poe is the type of story which is half a tale of travel and adventure in savage lands and half a tale of the marvellous. Mr. Rider Haggard, in books like 'She' and 'Allan Quatermain,' is the most conspicuous user of this form, but there have, of course, been hundreds of others who, though less successfully, have written of strange and magical peoples in unknown lands. In the Narrative of A. Gordon Pym' we get just this mixture. The end of this romance indeed, to put the cart before the horse, reads exactly like a piece out of one of Mr. Haggard's books. Very possibly Mr. Haggard never read the book; but, even if he has not, it has affected him through the atmosphere of modern fiction. In the same way, consciously or unconsciously, Mr. Louis Stevenson was indebted to Poe for many of his most striking ideas. He did not, of course, plagiarise Poe any more than did Mr. Haggard, but cut many a graft from the fruitful stem of the American journalist. 'The Gold Bug,' with its memories of Kidd and his treasures, its Bishop's Hostel, and its map and cryptic directions, unquestionably suggested part of the machinery of 'Treasure Island,' though of course Mr. Stevenson infinitely improved what he borrowed.

Poe again originated what, for want of a better name, we must call the psychical story. 'William Wilson' is nothing like as good a story or as striking a piece of literature as the tale of Hyde and Jekyll, but its author's claim to have invented the method used by Mr. Stevenson is clear. Poe may, again, claim to have been before M. Zola or Flaubert in developing the realistic method. In nothing was he more skilful than in a minute and elaborate parade of detail, supported by a technical terminology exactly appropriate to the matter in hand, which gave an atmosphere of reality and of closeness to the object.

One might easily pile up other examples of the originating character of Poe's genius. He invented the romantic short story in which, though the hero and the other characters are modern men, they move in a dim world of crumbling castles and demoniac ladies, and hear, through magic casements opening on misty lakes, the thunders of the storm and the cries of the dying; while even above the roar of the tempest is heard the mutter of ancestral voices bewailing the ruin of their line. Such tales have been tried by many imitators in France and England; but in these strange, fantastic, and somewhat stagey horrors, Poe has always remained supreme. Those who have borrowed the light have never succeeded in making it burn the brighter, or, rather, with a more livid intensity of green and blue.

Lastly, in the matter of tales of pure horror, Poe was a pioneer. He first used, with anything like consciousness or success, the once effective but now somewhat threadbare artifice of suggesting a shame, a horror, a crime, too terrible, too awful for words. It must be

confessed that Poe was extremely successful in his suggestions of the nameless horror. By taking care to be very specific in his narration as regards everything in his description of the room or the scene except the thing he does not describe, he contrives to create an atmosphere of reality which greatly heightens the effect. The bungler makes all misty and vague. Poe narrows his vagueness down to the one point where he must be vague. Of course the nameless, indescribable horror is only a literary conjuring trick. Still, Poe does the trick with great ability.

Though we have not been able to go deep enough into the matter to show the total sum of the debt which modern fiction owes to Poe, we have said enough to show how extraordinarily prolific was his genius in the work of originating new forms and new ideas in the art of narrative. After the question, 'Whom did Poe influence?' comes the question, 'Who influenced Poe?' There are, of course, many traces in his work of his readings among the mystical German books of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and of our own writers during those periods. The problem we desire to solve, however, is not so much, 'whom did Poe borrow from?' as 'what greater writers of former times influenced him in style and thought?'

Our own opinion, though we give it with diffidence, is that De Quincey, Swift, and Defoe affected him more deeply than any others. It is impossible not to notice how constantly he falls into De Quincey's way of attacking the subject of his thought. There is the same parade of his forces, the same pompous marshalling of the terminology appropriate to the occasion.