It will be seen that Poe is thus the first to em phasize the value of a unified impression, and to point out that this unity should be not only a matter of plot, but of atmosphere and, generally speaking, of the point of view. As to preserving a single point of view, Conrad has since shown that the rule need not be absolute. The essential requisite is that the total effect of the story shall be a unit. Poe's opening paragraphs usually give us the key to his mood, and prepare us for what is to follow. No other writers except Chekhov and Henry James begin a story so carefully by suggesting the theme.

It is, on the whole, a weakness of Poe that his elaborately calculated artifice is not concealed. We are frequently conscious of his mechanics, and this does not always make for ease. In his best stories, however, he has mastered Defoe's art of precision and verisimilitude in which every stroke tells and there is a fine economy of line. Each clause brings us nearer to the climax on which his emphasis depends, and the interest, instead of being dispersed in detail, is directed toward a single cumulative effect.

Poe's taste is not impeccable. He is frequently rococo and sometimes vulgar. His deficient sense

of humor sometimes leads him astray, and we encounter provincial mannerisms in his prose. Thus he accentuates a statement by italicizing words, or occasionally by a loose cumulative series of tawdry phrases. These faults are the defects of his quality, however, and do not consistently detract from the value of his art.

That value may be summed up as the result of consummate craftsmanship, great logical lucidity, and a gift of imaginative revery. The craftsman's instinct is due to the desire of a tortured man to resolve into peaceful unity by art the incessant and consuming flame of the conflict between his soul and his mind. One recalls Captain Ahab's pursuit of his enemy, Moby Dick, the Great White Whale. This epic story symbolizes the adventure not only of Poe, but of every sincere American artist during the past century. The ship of the great Odyssey was sinking, and the lashing of the stricken whale destroyed his dauntless destroyers in the swirling vortex of a seething sea. "But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the de

stroying billows they almost touched;-at that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the maintruck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that ethereal thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his deathgasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to Hell till she had dragged a living part of Heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it. Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago."

99 1

Such was the unconquerable end of Poe. How long must the battle of the American artist continue against such odds?

1 Moby Dick, Chapter CXXXV.

CHAPTER V

THE MIDDLE YEARS

THE ten years which followed the death of Poe revealed no new writers of the short story who call for notice here. In 1858, however, Fitz-James O'Brien (1828-1862) attracted wide attention by his publication of a remarkable story called The Diamond Lens. It was hailed at once as the work of Poe's legitimate literary successor, and was followed by a series of brilliant imaginative tales. Many of these must be recovered from old files of Harper's Magazine, Harper's Weekly, The Atlantic Monthly, and Putnam's Magazine. William Winter edited in 1881 a selection from these stories, together with a memoir and some of O'Brien's verse, and the stories were reissued in 1885, but have long been out of print. Let us have by all means a new collection of his best work, to set beside the long wanted reprints of William Austin and Herman Melville, and let it include The Diamond Lens, The Wondersmith, The Lost Room, and What was it?, as well as Milly

Dove, The Dragon Fang, and as many other stories as possible.

O'Brien was born somewhere in County Limerick, Ireland, probably in 1828. We know that he had been wealthy, and that he was educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He was a spendthrift who wasted his fortune gaily, and came to America in 1852 to seek another, bringing with him to New York something of the air of Moore and Lever. He led a Bohemian existence in New York until the outbreak of the Civil War, writing verse and plays and criticism as well as short stories with his prolific pen, and appears to have had more than a slight resemblance to the rollicking stage Irishman of English tradition. When Fort Sumter was fired upon, he was among the first to volunteer as a soldier on the Union side, and he fell fighting in a skirmish at Cumberland, Virginia, in 1862.

Had he not been lost to American literature in his thirty-second year, he might have surpassed Bret Harte, though he would hardly have equalled either Hawthorne or Poe, whose tradition he so successfully carried on. His present obscurity, like that of Ambrose Bierce whor. he superficially resembles is unaccountable. His literary work, apart from his stories, is negligible, and some of