Text: Ruth Leigh Hudson, “Chapter IV.I,” Poe's Craftsmanship in the Short Story, dissertation, 1935, pp. 346-366 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 346:]

It must be understood, of course, that in discussion some of Poe's tales under the heading of burlesques and others as examples of the grotesque, I have no intention of using these terms to indicate distinct classifications of his work. We must recognize, to begin with, that some of the most perfect examples of his grotesque stories have been discussed as burlesques, and that burlesque intent may also be found in several of the tales reserved for consideration as specimens of his excursions into the grotesque. Burlesque has reference to the purpose with which a story was created; grotesque describes the manner in which one has been executed. The preceding chapter aimed to group together in the category of literary burlesques such of Poe's early tales as seemed. to have direct connection with the contemporary fashions of creating travesties of literary styles) figures, and customs. Certain other stories appear to illustrate clearly his attempts to fall in line with other literary vogues — specifically that of deliberately [page 347:] creating an effect by means of exaggeration and that of creating for the purpose of humor creatures from beyond the realm of nature.

Both classes, or more accurately groups, of tales illustrate, for the most part, Poe in the comic vein. It is generally agreed among critics that nothing in literature is so elusive, so baffling in analysis, as the comic element. This difficulty is partly due to a lack of agreement as to that constitutes humor, but even more largely to the fact that humor is a relative thing; the perception of the comic in literature is very unstable, varying not only with times and peoples, but with individuals. We have seen that even in his own day Poe's comic intent was misunderstood and misinterpreted, and that among critics of the present generation there is a wide divergence of opinion as to whether some of his apparently serious tales were created seriously or in a spirit of outdoing the weirdness and horror of the types which they imitated. From one point of view, however, his humorous stories can be studied more successfully than is ordinarily the case with a literary figure simply because his comedy is so stereotyped, so fixed in the [page 348:] mold of the exaggerated, that it is almost always easily recognizable.

If we except those tales about which there is doubt as to the intent with which they were written, then we may say that Poe virtually never created anything in which the humor can be termed gentle; his was the laughter of the mind and not of the heart. In other words, it was usually not .the spirit of humor — “laughing at him you love without loving him less” — which moved him, but the Comic Spirit described by Meredith: “a slim feasting smile” lurked in the corners of his half-closed lips and sometimes broke into laughter that was a sardonic grin. Or it expressed itself as boisterousness over acute nonsense. Sometimes, too, his comic spirit was like a laugh wrung from agony — the hysteria that broke out in the midst of terror. Such was the chameleon nature of one manifestation of Poe's humor, his grotesquerie, which upon occasion projected itself like a death's head grinning down upon revelry or again colored with delightful drollery his high spirited tales.

In considering his burlesques, we had a view of Poe in the humorous mood which expressed itself in the form of satire. It happened that one of his [page 349:] favorite methods of satirizing, ridiculing, or rendering a thing ludicrous, lay in exaggeration it to the point of grotesquerie. Sometimes he used this manner to render physical suffering absurd: the ghastly struggles of Lack O’Breath on the gallows and his gruesome wanderings in a mausoleum, and Miss Zenobia's “interesting” sensations while she lost her head under a giant clock hand are of this type. Again he resorted to this manner in order to distort ugliness into such shapes that it lost its repulsiveness, as in “Four-Beasts-in-One,” “King Pest,” and perhaps “Lion-izing.” At times he made use of this style with less ironic intent when he wished simply to create human drolleries, such as the odd figures of Bon-Bon and the burghers of Vondervotteimittiss, or to present consciously and naturally preternatural creatures, as in “Hans Pfaall” and “The Angel of the Odd,” for example, and in those tales in which the devil makes his appearance. In his preference for that particular brand of humor Poe was fortunate enough to be in harmony with a fashion, or enthusiasm, in the literature of his time. [page 350:]

In the criticism of the 1830's the word “grotesque” apparently conveyed a special meaning. It was used to designate that quality in literature which formed a definite portion of the Romantic profession of faith — a belief in the artistic necessity for ugliness, buffoonery, exaggeration — that which went beyond the natural — as a contrast with beauty, harmony, and restraint. It has been necessary in the preceding chapters to mention some of the utterances of critics upon the vogue for the grotesque in literature and their apparent recognition of it as a distinct field of literary art. In connection with “King Pest” I quoted a review of Vivian Grey, which explained somewhat elaborately the grotesque as differentiated from the purely humorous and as a deviation from nature for the sake of achieving a purposes or a moral.(1) It will be remembered that Scott in reviewing the works of Hoffmann, alluded to his “supernatural grotesque” and compared it with the arabesque in painting.(2) A reviewer of Hood's works described the grotesque as [page 351:] “but going a few steps beyond nature in the apposition” of certain, fantastic creations of the imagination.(3) This doctrine of an artistic grotesque had its clearest, most trenchant statement in France, perhaps because there where classicism had its firmest hold, an explicit declaration of the new type of Romanticism was most necessary. In 1827 Victor Hugo published his Cromwell with a Preface which attracted so much attention that it eclipsed the play itself. A striking part of this Preface deals with the grotesque and its legitimate sphere in art:

It will be noted that Hugo made a distinction between the two-fold functions of the grotesque in creating, on the one hand, the deformed and horrible, and, on the other, the comic and buffoon. Poe's expression of this manner took both manifestations. Outside of the strange and mystical, that which seemed to appeal most strongly to his imagination was this very realm of distortion and exaggeration. It colored deeply some of his serious tales, lifted their tone to the apotheosis of horror. The strange unnaturalness of the colossal ship and its unearthly crew in “MS. Found in a Bottle,” the appalling figure of the ape in “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the hideous apparition of Death in “The Masque of the Red Death,” the hysterical laughter of Fortunato in “The Cask of Amontillado,” the dwarfish ferocity of Hop-Frog and the ironical masquerade of the king and his courtiers — all belong to the type, “le1aid,” which, according to Hugo, has a thousand forms. [page 353:]

For this use of the grotesque Poe had ample precedent. Some of the purest examples of it in the literature of the time were colored with a tinge of what Hoffmann called “mind-disturbing terror” or dealt frankly with the great shadowy, land of horrors which surround humanity. Hoffmann himself set the example for his many imitators and disciples by painting one of the most unrestrained combinations of grotesquerie ever conceived by human brain. He had originally labelled his wild imaginative vagaries “Fantasie-stücke, in Callot's Manier,” and the name of the romancer and the painter became inseparably linked as exponents of the most libertine fantasy. Since the word “Fantasy” did not quite suggest to the French and British minds the wild exaggeration of the Hoffmann-Callôt manner, it was frequently designated by the “grotesque.” Poe knew at least what was implied in the manner and he knew also of the connection between the two names, for he referred upon one occasion presumably to the works of Hoffmann as those of the [page 354:] ‘Lorrninean-Callot.”(5) There is no better example of Hoffmann's grotesque to be found than in his tale, “Der Goldne Topf,” translated by Carlyle in his specimens of German romance, with which Poe was in all likelihood familiar.(6) The student Anselmus, the chief [page 355:] character in the story, lived in the midst of the wildest nightmare of human beings masquerading, upon occasions, as kites, screech-owls, salamanders, and green serpents. Among other terrifying experiences, he survived that of being; confined like a veritable bottle demon in a glass jar and eventually married his beautiful little green snake, Serpentina.

An interesting example of some of the imitations of this particular manner which found their way into the magazines of the period is a sketch called “The Sphinx. An Extravaganza. Etched in the manner of Callôt,” which appeared in Blackwood's.(7) Though labelled as an imitation of Callôt, the tale is obviously modelled upon Hoffmann's “Der Goldne Topf.” A student bought a walking stick with sphinx; head upon it from a mysterious old witch-woman. Almost immediately he fought himself involved in a series of adventures which apparently resulted from his ownership of the stick. He met a lovely countess who was the counterpart of his sphinx. Together they wandered through her picture gallery, and gazed upon the wild1y fantastic conceptions of Callôt and other [page 356:] artists with uncontrolled imaginations. In her library he picked up a volume which proved to be Hoffmann's “Golden Vase.’ He traced in it the resemblance of his own case to that of the student Anselmus. “Surely,” he said, “that student must be my double, and he, or I, or both of us, are phantasms in the manner of Callôt.” He fled from the castle or the countess because he did not want to become merely a fixture in a fantastic dream. But he met her again and accompanied her to another magnificent castle. There the wildest kind of masquerade was in progress.

At the end of the hall Arnold saw the master of the revels disguised as Mephistopheles:

The revelry grew to wild proportions and became terrible with its nightmarish company of “grotesque and waltzing phantoms.” A gust of wind and a sudden flood overwhelmed the hall. The student felt himself drowning. Suddenly he awoke; he had etched his phantasmagoria in a dream.

Poe's use of the grotesque as an adjunct to horror is splendidly illustrated in his own masquerade scene in “The Masque of the Red Death.” But he ended his tale with no tame, dreamlike explanation, the company “acknowledged the presence of the Red. Death” itself. That Poe was making conscious use of the grotesque element is evident from his description of the masqueraders:

Into this assembly of phantasms stalked a figure which “out-Heroded Herod.”

In chapter II I alluded briefly to Poe's use of the “death-at-the-feast” motif as an “engine of effect” in his horror stories. It was of course in line with this element of grotesquerie, the ugly, the incongruous, which played a part in Romantic Literature. Apparently the best-known example of this tendency to mix revelry with the horrors of death and the plague was Paul Lacroix's “La Danse Macabre,”(8) to which allusion was made by critics who wished to call attention to the physical horrors in recent French literature; it was one of the fantastic stories satirized in 1833 by Gautier's “The Bowl of Punch.” From comments upon the tale, I judge that it was an excellent example of the story “which covers its delineations [page 359:] with hues of blood, spreads around us the loathsome atmosphere of the charnel house, and the pest-house.”(9) Perhaps Lacroix's “The Dance of Death” was the inspiration for the scene in Ainsworth's Old St. Paul's in which Rochester and his merry crew enacted a similar “Dance of Death” in the vaults of St. Paul's church during the height of the London plague in 1665.(10) Professor Campbell called attention several years ago to the resemblance between Poe's incident in “The Masque of the Red Death” and Ainsworth's account.(11) He has also recently noted that Poe may have been indebted to N. P. Willis's description, in the New York Mirror for June 2, 1832, of a masked ball which he attended in Paris, at which there were dances called the ‘cholera waltz and the “cholera galopade” and also a masked figure impersonating the “Choler itself.”(12) [page 360:]

Poe himself drew in his story between the revelry at the ball of Prince Prospero and a similiar scene in Hugo's “Hernani,” the excessive Romanticism of which set Paris wild upon the occasion of it its performance in 1830. There is no representation of the plague in Hugo's drama, but it illustrates perfectly the “death-at-the-feast” theme. It is a tale of Spanish intrigue and love in the early sixteenth century. In the fifth act, at the feast and masque celebrating the marriage of Donna Sol and Hernani, a black domino appeared to cast ominous gloom over the general merriment. At the end of the evening when some courtiers commented upon the “entertainment superlative,” one Don Henriquez pointed out that there had been “one black ball” at the celebration of the wedding:

At that moment the “Black Mask” traversed the terrace slowly without speaking or noticing others. Those who attempted to stop him recoiled from his flaming [page 361:] eyes and sepulchral tone when at length he answered the questions of the roisterers. To their “nous viens-tu de l’enfer?” he replied, “Je n’en pas, j’y vais.” When the music had died away and Hernani and Donna Sol were at last alone upon the terrace, the mysterious sound of a horn broke the stillness of the night and froze Hernani's blood with horror. It was, he told Sol, “the tiger howling for his prey.” The Black Mask appeared before the lovers, it was old Don Ruy, the rejected financé of Donna Sol, claiming the sworn oath of Hernani to do his bidding. Don Ruy demanded that Hernani drink the cup of poison which he proffered. Together Hernani and Donna Sol drank the fatal potion and died in a last embrace. Maddened by the enormity of his own act, Don Ruy “expired in the arms” or his victims.

But of all the terrible representations of grotesqueness for the purpose of enhancing horror, none was painted with more abandon of imagination than Hugo sketched in his youthful conception of the monster-demon, Hans of Iceland. From beginning to end, the novel by that title is a welter of blood and nightmarish fiendishness. Hans was a dwarfish figure, with powerful limbs, huge hands ending in claws, flaming eyes, a tiger's face, a wild beast's teeth, [page 362:] discordant bellowing voice; he existed only for murder and rapine. His great moment of exultation came when he decoyed a group of rebels into a mountain ravine and betrayed them to a band of soldiers in order that the combatant might slay each other while he looked on and added to the carnage.

With this as a specimen of what cou1d be done in using grotesquerie in conjunction with horror, it is not difficult see how Poe came to conceive the [page 363:] scene of the dwarf Hop-Frog's malevolent revenge: grating his teeth and screaming shrilly, the maddened creature clambered up the chain above his entrapped victims, disguished [[disguised]] as ourang-outangs, and with his flambeau converted the eight flax-covered figures into a living torch.

Although Poe frequently made use of the grotesque as a phase of horror, he regarded it particularly as a means of heightening humor. He had early defined one of the popular types of magazine stories as that of the “ludicrous heightened into the arabesque.”(15) Although he used the term with great freedom in his tales and in his criticism, he did not often attempt to describe it critically. In a discussion of the works of Dickens, he expressed with some emphasis his belief that “a certain amount of exaggeration is essential in the proper depicting of truth itself,” and explained that “a properly artistical incongruity” is “the source of all mirth.”(16) He described Imagination as choosing for novel combination [page 364:] “from either beauty or deformity.”(17) One of the clearest statements of the grotesque he expressed as a description of the nature of Fantasy, which appears to have been, with him and many of his contemporaries, practically synonymous with the former.

In connection with a comment upon the humor of Thomas Hood he wrote:

The clearest statement of the nature and function of the grotesque in literature which Poe probably wrote was in the Broadway Journal in connection with a brief notice of Dickens's “The Chimes” and even here we can assign the notice only conjecturally to his pen.

It will be remembered, too, that “Poe sometimes used the word grotesque in his tales as if he were signalling to the readers his own intent and wished to establish in them the proper point of view. He alluded twice to the grotesque appearance of Antioch in “Four-Beast-in-One,” as if he meant that this appearance should have some bearing upon the tone of the tale. In the same fashion he emphasized the grotesquerie [page 366:] inherent in the house of Von Jung as if to account for the eccentric character and inclination to mystification of the Baron of his tale, “Mystification.” I have noted above, also, his peculiar introduction of the masquerade scene in “The Mask of the Red Death” with the sentence, “Be sure they were grotesque.”

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 350:]

1.  See chapter III, section III, and the reference to the review of “Continuation of Vivian Grey,” New Monthly, XIX, 308ff.

2.  “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition,” loc. cit., 76.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 351:]

3.  Westminster Review, XXXI (April, 1838), 119ff.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 352:]

4.  Preface to Cromwell, OEuvres Complètes. Theatre — I, Paris, 1912, l6-9.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 354:]

5.  Review of Hyperion, Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, Oct., 1839, Works, X, 39. Poe probably derived his suggestion for an allusion to Callot in connection with Hoffman from Carlyle's statement that Hoffmann had followed the latter's manner in his “Fantasic-stücke” and from the foot-note which Carlyle added to his biographical sketch of Hoffmann, German Romance, II, 13: “Some of my readers may be required to be informed that Jacques Callôt was a Lorraine painter of the seventeenth century; a wild genius, whose Temptation of St. Anthony is said to exceed, in chaotic incoherence, that of Tenier's himself.” In Poe's day every one, apparently, knew the name of Hoffmann, and Poe may have wished to appear erudite by referring to a less well-known author of “fantasy-pieces.” It is possible that he did not remember that Callôt was a painter. In his “Notes on Poe's Reading,” University of Texas Studies in English, No. 7, 1925, 175ff., Professor CampbelI suggests that by “Lorrainean Callot,” Poe probably meant Hoffmann. It is obvious, however, that Callot (1593-1635) could not have illustrated a volume for Hoffmann (1776-1622), as has been suggested.

6.  German Romance, II, 23ff. See the discussion in chapter II, section III, of Poe's probably familiarity with these volumes.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 355:]

7.  XXIII (Oct., 1828), 441ff.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 358:]

8.  La Danse Macabre, historie fantastique du quinzième siècle, Brussels, 1832. I have been unable to locate a copy of this tale and am relying upon contemporary allusions to it.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 359:]

9.  “The Present State of French Literature,” Foreign Quarterly Review, XI (Jan., 1833), 194.

10.  Book II, chapter III.

11.  See his reference, The Mind of Poe, 171, and note 2, in which he cites his former article in Transactions Philological Association for 1907, p. xxxi.

12.  Ibid., 171, note 2.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 360:]

13.  Victor Hugo, Hernani. Edited by John E. Matzke, D. C. Heath, Boston, 1891, 141ff.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 362:]

14.  Hans d’Island was first published in 1823. I have used the edition of 1841, Paris.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 363:]

15.  In his letter to White, April 30, 1835, cited by Napier Wilt, “Poe's attitude toward His Tales,” loc. cit.

16.  Graham's Magazine, May, 1841. Works, X, 152-3.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 364:]

17.  “N. P. Willis,” Broadway Journal, Jan. 12, 1845. Works, XII, 38.

18.  Ibid., XII, 40.

19.  Broadway Journal, August 9, 1845. Works, XII, 216.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 365:]

20.  Feb. 1, 1845, I, 67. This brief sketch appeared among the critical notices for the week.