Text: Ruth Leigh Hudson, “Chapter II.IV,” Poe's Craftsmanship in the Short Story, dissertation, 1935, pp. 197-220 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 197:]

Various articles in French journals and translations marked the advent in France of an interest in Hoffmann and German stories of the Hoffmann type around 1828. The French attitude, however, was prevalently one of reaction against the overdone supernatural element and in favor of the so-called merveilleux naturel.(111) The stories of Hoffmann which dealt with an explainable experience of horror, as “Das Majorat,” were especially praised. A writer for le Globe, August 2, 1828, commented thus:

M. Marsan believes that the peculiar achievement and popularity of Gérard de Nerval's stories in the early 1830's lay in his preference for throwing, “en conclusion, une lumière rassurante sur ces noirs récits.” “Il est rare,” he writes, “en effet, que les dernières lignes n’expliquent pas de façon naturelle les aventures faites pour secouer les nerfs. Un rêve, une hallucination, une dose d’opium: tout s’eclaire, et c’est le triomphe du fantastique naturel.”(113)

A reviewer, writing of “Recent French Literature” in 1832,(114) explained the convulsive quality recently apparent in French writing as deriving from Germany. He wrote of the poetry:

Upon the recent fiction he commented thus:

The reviewer expressed the opinion, however, that in spite of its faults this literature possessed “great variety, intense force, and a perfect command of those means of effect ... which are perhaps the best instruments for making an impression on minds which the strong excitement of the times has rendered callous to slighter emotions.” He pointed out “two names in particular, out of the crowd of writers of the convulsive school, as deserving peculiar attention, Balzac and Janin.” Balzac he termed “A French Hoffmann, a master of the fantastic and the horrible, dealing, however, with a more daring phantasmagoria than the German, not losing himself or turning the brain of his readers by a labyrinth of mazy images, born of the mingled fumes of French tobacco and the nervous excitement of dissipation, but bringing his fantastic world into direct bearing upon the actual, making it, in fact, only an embodied and palpable representation of the good and evil principles which divide the mixed nature of man.” Balzac's Contes [page 200:] Bruns he said, resembled Cazotte's “series of frightful grotesques dancing before the eyes of the spectator” or Irving's Dance of the Furniture in his “The Bold Dragoon.” He described Guzlan's “Morgue” as availing itself of “the horrible, and even the physically disgusting, as an engine of effect.”

In a continuation of this review under the title of “Present State of French Literature” in January of the following year, the writer emphasized again the “taste for physical horrors which, at present, characterizes the literature of France; which covers its delineations with hues of blood, spreads around us the loathesome atmosphere of the charnel house, and the pesthouse.” He asserted that Balzac, Janin, and Sue were “the chiefs of the epileptic and anatomical school.”(115)

I have detailed at some length the comments of the reviewer in the Foreign Quarterly because there is some evidence that Poe himself read the review and thus became acquainted somewhat with the methods and subject-matter of his contemporaries in France. In a review of Simms's The Partisan, [page 201:] written for the Messenger in January, 1836, he criticized the “villainously bad taste” exhibited by Simms in his descriptions of “shockingly horrible” atrocities. Of Simms's lapses Poe declared “the most reprehensible are to be found in a love for that mere physique of the horrible which has obtained for some Parisian novelists the title of the ‘French convulsives.’”(116) If Poe derived his epithet, “French convulsives,” from this review, then it is of a significance that he might have learned there of Balzac's “more daring phantasmagoria,” which grew out of the actual nature of man, and of “the horrible, and even the physically disgusting, as an engine of effect.”

Just as Poe defended the tone of his tales in the collection of 1840 by saying that he had deliberately cultivated the “vein” of the time, Gérard de Nerval and Jules Janin offered. In extenuation of their fantastic stories that they were the craze and the mode of their own time. In a sketch on the “Fantastique” in 1831, de Nerval wrote that the works of [page 202:] Janin, Hoffmann, Hugh [[Hugo]], Eugène Sue, and “the bibliophile Jacobs” (Paul Lacroix) all justified him in saying that the mode of the moment was the fantastic in literature, just as the music of Rossini and Paganini, the popular architecture, the politics of the time, even the fashions in food were indicative of this craze. He himself had adopted it, he said, because of its popularity and because he also found it p1easing.(117) in his preface to his Contes fantastiques Janin defended his choice of title by appealing to the taste of the hour. One must her to this sovereign mistress, he declared, if one wished to obtain a smile from her.

Since Ba1zac's stories were frequently referred to by reviewers as displaying the fantastic and horrible so much in vogue at the time, it may be helpful to examine some of them briefly. Most of his shorter tales, or contes, date from the early 1830's, but it is difficult to find them in the form in which he wrote them originally. He was an even more sedulous reviser than Poe himself and frequently rejected almost entirely his first published draft of a story; for that reason, the versions which have come down to us may not represent entirely the tone of the fantastic which contemporary revievers recognized in them. His earliest tales, those contained in the rarely read OEuvres de Jeunesse, are, according to George Saintsbury, “couched for the most part in a kind of Radoliffian or Monk-Lewsian vein — perhaps studied more directly from Maturin.”(119) But even the stories which he permitted to be included in the Édition Définitive are sufficiently bizarre to merit the epithet, fantastic. “Le Grand Breteche,” perhaps best known to American readers from having been included [page 204:] in many of our collections of modern short stories, dates from 1832. It is a story of revenge and murder so much in the tone of “The Cask of Amontillado” that it has often been suggested, as already mentioned in this discussion, as a possible source of the latter. Briefly, the plot is concerned with a husband's revenge upon an unfaithful wife and her lover by walling the lover up in her closet where he was left to die while the woman helplessly listened to his agonies. After the death of the husband and wife, the house was ordered to be kept closed for a period of many years.

Perhaps the most horrible of Balzac's tales is “L’Elixière de longue vie,” published originally in the Revue de Paris, October, 1830.(120) According to Balzac's own statement, he was indebted for the idea of his story to a German tale read many years before his own was written in an obscure German annual. One Don Juan Belvidero was interrupted in the midst of a princely banquet and debauch by the news that his aged father was dying. The son had long secretly wished for his father's death in order that he might satisfy [page 205:] his smallest desires by squandering his father's accumulated wealth, though the father had in life denied him nothing. When Don Juan reached his father's side, Don Bartholomeo enjoined him with his dying breath to carry out a secretly imposed task. He, Don Bartholomeo, had discovered, in his profound studies, the elixir of long life. As soon as he was dead, Don Juan was to anoint his body completely with the contents of a certain phial and life would return, renewed and vigorous. After life was extinct in his father's body, Don Juan waited several hours before testing the power of the elixir and only then he resorted to it because of his curiosity. He determined to moisten only one eye. Immediately the eye opened and gleamed at him with angry intelligence. Horrified, the son forced it out with a cloth. Don Juan afterwards became a figure conspicuous first for his dissoluteness and then for his piety. At sixty he married a young wife who bore him a son, and he grew old cautiously, taking every possible means to bind his wife and son to him by ties of affection and by a carefully elaborated financial system that made the living Don Juan more valuable than the dead. At length [page 206:] he became conscious of the approach of death. He called his son Phillipe to him and told him that the pope had given him a phial of holy water to be used for consecrating his body after death. The son must perform for him this last rite, anointing first his head, then his body and limbs; he was not to be astonished at anything he might see; and above all he was to hold fast to the phial. The son dutifully performed his father's injunction; he had just finished anointing the head when he felt an arm about his shoulder — it was that of his father. The terrified lad dropped the phial. Those who came in answer to his cries beheld the fearful sight of a youthful, living head with angry eyes upon the decrepit, dead body. Don Juan's previous piety led his spiritual confessor to believe that this strange occurrence must be a sign of God's desire for his canonization. Accordingly, this rite was to be solemnized before burial in a neighboring convent. In the midst of the most sacred hymns, horrid curses burst from the living head of the corpse. The church was thrown into confusion. In the neat of it, the living head reached out and sank its teeth into the scalp of the officiating churchman. [page 207:]

The theme of the elixir of life was a favorite in the stories of terror in the early nineteenth century. Godwin had used it for his St. Leon but with less of the luridly terrible than marked later treatments. Bulwer made the search for the elixir an important factor in “A Strange Story,” and in Zanoni. A tale, no doubt based directly upon Balzac's and called “Life in Death,” appeared in the New Monthly in 1833.(121) It was headed with the note, “The groundwork of this tale will be recognized by the reader.” With only very slight variations, it is precisely the same story as “L’Elixière de longue Vie.” It is perhaps because of the impossible foundation of this theme upon wizardry, or diablerie, that Poe never attempted, to deal with it, popular as it appears to have been. There is just a hint of its influence in the reanimation of the body of Lady Rowena in “Ligeia.”

“La Peau de Chagrin,” published in August, 1831, has a Poesque young man in the charaoter of Raphael who came into possession of a mystic talisman in the form of a shagreen skin, just on the eve of suicide. The talisman had the power to grant its owner's every [page 208:] wish, but with each wish decreased perceptibly in size. The owner was destined to die when the talisman should be used up. The narrative recounts the struggle of Raphael, after he had indulged in a number of extravagant wishes, to order his life so that he should never have to feel a desire for anything. His greatest agony came when he fell in love and exiled himself from his lovely young wife in order that he might extinguish his newly awakened desires. Death overtook him as he returned to her in despair.

“La Recherche de l’Absolu,” 1834, in one of Balzac's most interesting attempts to portray “the hopeless tyranny of the fixed idea,” a theme which attracted him again and again. Balthasar Claes sacrificed his fortune, his good name, the life of his wife, and the security of his children in his attempt to discover in chemistry the property of the absolute. It is the kind of idea back of Poe's “The Oval Portrait,”(122) which also depicts an individual [page 209:] so completely absorbed in the pursuit of an ideal that he sacrificed his loved one in his passionate attempt to secure perfection. A closer parallel, however, to Poe's tale may be found in Balzac's “Le Chef d’;oeuvre inconnu,” which was published in L’Artiste for 1831(123) Young Poussin, a neophyte painter, and Porbus, an artist with a great reputations sought from old Frenhofer, the only pupil of the incomparable Mabuse, an opportunity to view his masterpiece. He had worked upon it for ten years and his “Catherine Lescault” had come alive under his hands; she was no longer a canvas, but a woman; no longer a creation, but a creature — “une femme avec laquelle je pleure, je ris, je cause, — je pense.” He could not bear to draw aside the veil and expose her to the gaze of strangers. He longed, however, to find among living women a model of flawless body in order that he might compare her with his masterpiece. Young Poussin, determined to see this masterpiece of one who had become to him Art incarnate, proposed tit his beautiful young mistress, Gillette, should [page 210:] pose for the old painter. She declared that if he forced her to this, it would kill her love for him and his for her. Ultimately, in spite of the protests of the old artist that he could not expose his beautiful “épouse” to their eyes and of Gillette's that she could not pose for Frenhofer, the agreement was effected. Poussin and Porbus found the canvas on which the artist declared a pulsing, living woman stood to be nothing but a foggy chaos of layers of point which the artist had put on again and again in his attempt to achieve his ideal. Only a bare foot — a living foot — emerging from one corner of the canvas, hinted at what the portrait had once been. But old Frenhofer saw only the woman of his dreams on the canvas before him:

Gillette crouched forgotten in the corner as her lover viewed the curious masterpiece; when he turned from it to her, she spurned him from her because of [page 211:] the sacrifice he had made of her on the altar of his art — “je serals infame de t’almer encore. ... Je crois que je te hais déjà.”

In Poe's story the lover forgot his bride while he was absorbed in his effort to get the perfect hue; he literally painted the life from her body onto the canvas. If he knew Balzac's tale, he may have taken his theme from old Frenhofer's words, “Ces contours sont les formes meme d’une jeune fille — saisi la couleur, le vif.” In “Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu” Frenhofer dreamed that he made his canvas live, but he had really extinguished its life under his passionate yearning for perfection; young Poussin sacrificed the love of his sweetheart to his desire to see the ultimate in art. I am not sure that I should have had the temerity to point out this elusive similarity which seemed to me to exist between the two tales if I had not chanced to read George Saintsbury's casual comment upon “Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu” “Everybody knows the compliment which a distinguished American writer has paid it by attempting a paraphrase [page 212:] of its original.”(124) I know of no other American story which bears a resemblance to Balzac's tale; this allusion must have been intended, I think, to suggest “The Oval Portrait’ as the paraphrase. I am certain, however, that Saintsbury was mistaken when he asserted that ‘Everybody knows the compliment.”

The youthful work of Théophile Gautier also showed, a kinship with the German manner of tale-writing. The best example of his fantastic stories, is, I believe, “La Morte Amoureuse,” an account of the strange love of his youth related by one monk to another.(125) in his youth, he said, he had been totally devoted to his religious meditations and had dedicated himself to the priesthood without ever having known anything of women or love. At the consecration services his eye chanced to fall upon a [page 213:] young women near him. In the midst of the very service which bound him to the church, he became completely absorbed in his fascination for her. As he left the church, she sent a message to him inviting a meeting. Almost at once, however, he was installed. In charge of a distant pastorate, but even there he dreamed of Clarimonde and believed that somehow he was watched by her. One night a strange, copper-colored man came for him and took him on a demoniacal ride to give absolution to a dying roman. They came to a stately house in which everything had an air of the remote, the mysterious. The servants told them that the woman had died; the priest felt a premonition of evil, of something which concerned him closely. He knew somehow that it was Clarimonde who lay dead. As he mused upon the strange chance which had led him finally to Clarimonde at just the moment when he had lost her eternally, a sigh escaped him. It seemed as if there were an answering sigh in the room behind him. As he turned, his eyes came to rest upon the bed of death with its red damask curtains embossed with large flowers and looped back with golden tassels. For the first time he gazed upon the lovely shrouded form of the dead roman. Slowly he uncovered her face [page 214:] and contemplated her beauty. Either an illusion or the reflection of a lamp led him to believe that the blood began pulsing anew in her motionless body. At length he could not refrain from kissing her. Instantly she breathed faintly, put her arms around his neck, and spoke. But a fierce gust of wind blew through the room and seemed to bear Clarimonde's soul away through the open window.

He could never remember afterwards how he left her or returned to his home. Shortly after the events of this night, there began for him a series of strange adventures. One night Clarimonde called for him, and they began their wedding journey. By night he was a dashing young noble mingling freely in scenes of revelry and debauchery in Italy and loving Clarimonde. By day he was again the priest. This thing went on until he could no longer distinguish which of the two lives was real and which a dream. Clarimonde seemed wasting away in the life that she had with him. By accident he discovered one day, when she thought him asleep, that she was a vampire and required blood for life; she had been feeding secretly and sparingly upon his. His love for her made him conceal his knowledge [page 215:] and allow himself to become her willing victim. In the meantime his priestly mentor, the Abbe Serapion, determined to rid him of his obsession. He conducted him to the tomb of the real Clarimonde, — notorious courtesan, and in a ghastly night scene, exhumed her body. It was fair and fresh and untouched by corruption; but when the priest sprinkled it with holy water, it crumbled rapidly to decay.

Gautier's conception of a priest who lived a double life had its origin, no doubt, in the tradition of the criminal monk established by Ambrosio in Lewis's The Monk and carried on by Medardus in Hoffmann's Elixiere des Teufels and by Claude Frollo in Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris.(126) But the figure of Clarimonde is original — the beautiful, ardent woman, stronger in her passions and her powers than her lover, and the reanimation theme is handled with a subtlety that leaves the story mysterious and intangible. There is more than a faint resemblance in this phase of “La Morte Amourcuse” to Poe's “Ligeia,” a resemblance so elusive, however, that summary and quotations do not serve to convey it. Gautier's tale [page 216:] was published a year before Poe's; it is extremely doubtful that Poe knew it, at least before writing “Ligeia.”’ But both young writers fed upon the same kind of literary materials and chanced, perhaps, to react to their diets in somewhat similar fashion.

Several of de Nerval's tales might be cited as illustrations of Germanism naturalized in France. Since he dealt frequently with the theme of diablerie which he had learned from his German masters, however, his stories will be treated more fully in connection with Poe's devil characterizations. One of them, however, “Portrait du Diable,” will illustrate his manner of treating the bizarre in art.(127) Charles, who related the story, happened to meet one evening as he strolled through the streets a young painter whom he had known casually. They returned to Charles's rooms, and there Eugene told a tragic tale of love and disappointment. Beautiful Laura Wilkinson had jilted him when she learned that he had no inheritance. He wandered miserably over Europe and came to pause at last in Venice. He believed that [page 217:] he might somehow attract Laura's attention by a last interview with her. When it was completed, he had it hung in a public gallery and himself haunted the gallery in watch for Laura, who, he learned, was in the same city. When at length she did chance to visit the gallery, she ignored him with haughty coldness. Maddened and in despair, he became for a moment violently insane. Then he came to himself, two policeman had him by the arms, and the picture lay torn to bits at his feet. Sometime later Eugene heard the story of a mysterious picture in Venice. The painter had lost his reason before finishing it, and the Church had seized the picture and hidden it in a dark cavern. Since that time two hundred years had elapsed. Eugene located the picture in a ruined church frequented by vagabonds and beggers [[beggars]]. He mingled with them and learned the location of the cave. During the night he sought it. After a difficult descent into the cavern, the “Fiancée du Diable” fixed her regard on him — it was a portrait of Laura! Ever since that time his thoughts had been constantly occupied with that picture. He told Charles that he never hoped for repose again. [page 218:]

Some days later he was found dead with an empty laudanum bottle beside him.(128) The probable influence of the French stories upon the work of Poe will become more evident when we come to a consideration of his burlesque and grotesque creations. We have no way of knowing what French journals or books came into Poe's hands.(129) That he read French with ease and admired French writers we do know, however. It would not have been difficult for him to discover from reviews the type [page 219:] of stories which his French contemporaries were creating in the 1830's, even if he had little opportunity to read the current French literature at first-hand. The important conclusion to make from an examination of such material and the same le equally true of the English and German tales — is, in my opinion, that the horrible, the “fantastique” as the French called it, had not gone out with the go-called Gothic novel of the eighteenth century; it was still the mode of the moment. Poe sought above all things, to catch in his stories the popular fancy in order to sell them. As Professor Pattee says, he studied as assiduously as a yellow journalist the material he found in print and patterned his own fiction after it.

So far as technique was concerned, the French tales displayed more skill, more concentration, more of the effect which Poe admired than the average English tale. The rational quality of the French mind asserted itself even in creations having to do with the fantastic. Often one does not know whether the author meant his incidents to be considered fanciful or real. Details are bewildering and hideous, but the effect of the purely fantastic is softened by constant reminders of reality. These tales are like [page 220:] Poe's in a certain respect: they deal with strange manias, visions, magnetism — often the result of disordered minds or of souls undergoing tremendous spiritual ordeals. If Poe had the good fortune to live ready access to it, he found a great deal that was congenial in the subject-matter and much that was helpful in technique in a reading of current French literature.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 197:]

111.  The Revue de Paris, founded in April, 1829, carried in its first issue a translation of Scott's article, “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition,” and succeeding issues contained translations of some of Hoffmann's tales. Ernest Renduel wrote a preface for n collection of Hoffmann's tales in translation, a project only partially executed, based upon the last paragraph of Scott's article which commented unfavorably upon the exaggerated horror of Hoffmann's fantastic stories. (Jules Marsan, introduction, Nouvelles and Fantaisies of Gérard de Nerval, vii.)

112.  Quoted by Jules Marsan, introduction, vii and viii.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 198:]

113.  Ibid., xx.

114.  Foreign Quarterly Review, IX (May, 1832), 345ff.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 200:]

115.  XI (Jan., 1833), 181ff.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 201:]

116.  Works, VIII, 156. Poe doubtless borrowed his phrase, “mere physique of the horrible,” from a letter which Judge Tucker wrote White in 1835. Tucker offered some criticisms upon Poe's tales and particularly upon “MS. Found in a Bottle” and used this same phrase, italics and all. See Woodberry, I, 151ff. Poe's review of The Partisan appeared a month or two after Tucker's letter was written.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 202:]

117.  Published in the Gastronome, May 8, 1831. OEuvres Completes de Gérard de Nerval, II, 131ff.

118.  Contes fantastiques et contes litteraires. 2 volumes. Brussels, 1832, I, 5.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 203:]

119.  Introduction to volume I of the Works of Balzac, Boston, 1901, p. xv.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 204:]

120.  The information about the original publication of Balzac's stories has been derived from Saintsbury's various introductions.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 207:]

121.  XXXVII (March, 1833), 297ff.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 208:]

122.  “The Oval Portrait” was originally called “Life in Death,” a name which may possibly have had its origin in the New Monthly story with the same title mentioned above. Both titles probably derived ultimately, and perhaps independently of one another, from Coleridge's “The Ancient Mariner.”

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 209:]

123.  I, 319ff; II, 7ff.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 212:]

124.  Introduction to “The Quest for the Absolute and Other Stories,” Boston, 1901, viii. Except for a considerable change in the conclusion, I do not find the original version in L’Artiste strikingly different from the definitive edition. Why Saintsbury suggested that the original might have inspired Poe's story I am unable to say unless he referred to the date of its original appearance as having made it possible for Poe to read the tale in the early form but not in the final version.

125.  Little French Masterpieces, edited by Alexander Jessup: Théophile Gautier, New York, 1907. “The Dead Leman,” 175ff.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 215:]

126.  For a discussion of the figure of the criminal monk in fiction, see Eino Railo, The Haunted Castle, chapter iv, 173ff.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 216:]

127.  Adventures Burlesques et Fantasques. Editions de la Banderole, Paris, 1923, 177ff. The story was originally published in La Presse, for Oct. 23, 1839.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 218:]

128.  Since de Nerval is known to have read the English journals, the original of this tale probably existed in the New Monthly story, “The Veiled Picture,” published in April, 1833. This latter story is very much like de Nerval's except that the evil nature of Laura is not suggested, nor is the last episode of the Hidden portrait included. It ends with the self-destruction of the young artist and his request that his picture of Laura be taken to her.

129.  Professor Howard Mumford Jones has shown that French books were freely imported into America in the last half of the eighteenth century and that there was a decided increase in interest in French materials toward the end of the century. See his two articles, “The Importation of French Literature in New York City, 1750-1800,” Studies in Philology, XXVIII (Royster Memorial Studies, 1931), 235ff., and “The Importation of French Books in Philadelphia, 1750-1800.” Modern Philology, XXXII (Nov., 1934), 157ff.