The Tale of Terror Part 11

An innate reticence and shyness of temper held Hawthorne, as if by a spell, somewhat aloof from life, and no one realised more clearly than he the limitations that his detachment from humanity imposed upon his art.

Of _Twice-Told Tales_ he writes regretfully:

"They have the pale tint of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade... Instead of pa.s.sion there is sentiment and even in what purport to be pictures of actual life we have allegory, not always so warmly dressed in its habiliments of flesh and blood as to be taken into the reader's mind without a s.h.i.+ver. Whether from lack of power or an inconquerable reserve, the author's touches have often an effect of tameness. The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the suns.h.i.+ne, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages";

and in his _Notebook_ (1840) he confesses:

"I used to think I could imagine all the pa.s.sions, all feelings and states of the heart and mind, but how little did I know! Indeed we are but shadows, we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest shadow of a dream--till the heart be touched."

Whether he is threading the labyrinths of his imagination or watching the human shadows come and go, Hawthorne lingers longer in the shadow than in the suns.h.i.+ne. He was not a man of morose and gloomy temper, disenchanted with life and driven by distress or thwarted pa.s.sion to brood in solitude. An irresistible, inexplicable impulse drives him towards the sombre and the gloomy. The delicacy and wistful charm of the words in which Hawthorne criticises his own work and character reveal how impossible it would have been for him to force his wayward genius. His imagination hovers with curious persistence round eerie, fantastic themes:

"An old looking-gla.s.s. Somebody finds out the secret of making all the images reflected in it pa.s.s again across its surface"--a hint skilfully introduced into the history of old Esther Dudley in _The Legends of the Province House_, or:

"A dreadful secret to be communicated to several persons of various character--grave or gay--and they all to become insane, according to their characters, by the influence of the secret"

--an idea modified and adapted in _The Marble Faun_. "An ice-cold hand--which people ever afterwards remember when once they have grasped it"--is bestowed on the Wandering Jew, the owner of the marvellous _Virtuoso's Collection_, whose treasures include the blood-encrusted pen with which Dr. Faustus signed away his salvation, Peter Schlemihl's shadow, the elixir of life, and the philosopher's stone. The form of a vampire, who apparently never took shape on paper, flitted through the twilight of Hawthorne's imagination:

"Stories to be told of a certain person's appearance in public, of his having been seen in various situations, and his making visits in private circles; but finally on looking for this person, to come upon his old grave and mossy tombstone."

With so many alluring suggestions floating shadowwise across his mind, it is not wonderful that Hawthorne should have been fascinated by the dream of a human life prolonged far beyond the usual span--a dream, which, if realised, would have enabled him to capture in words more of those "shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses."

Although among the sketches collected in _Twice-Told Tales_ (vol.

i. 1837, vol. ii. 1842) some are painted in gay and lively hues, the prevailing tone of the book is sad and mournful. The light-hearted philosophy of the wanderers in _The Seven Vagabonds_, the pretty, brightly coloured vignettes in _Little Annie's Rambles_, the quiet cheerfulness of _Sunday at Home_ or _The Rill from the Town Pump_, only serve to throw into darker relief gloomy legends like that of _Ethan Brand_, the man who went in search of the Unpardonable Sin, or dreary stories like that of _Edward Fane's Rosebud_, or the ghostly _White Old Maid_.

One of the most carefully wrought sketches in _Twice-Told Tales_ is the weird story of _The Hollow of the Three Hills_. By means of a witch's spell, a lady hears the far-away voices of her aged parents--her mother querulous and tearful, her father calmly despondent--and amid the fearful mirth of a madhouse distinguishes the accents and footstep of the husband she has wronged. At last she listens to the death-knell tolled for the child she has left to die. The solemn rhythm of Hawthorne's skilfully ordered sentences is singularly haunting and impressive:

"The golden skirts of day were yet lingering upon the hills, but deep shades obscured the hollow and the pool, as if sombre night were rising thence to overspread the world. Again that evil woman began to weave her spell. Long did it proceed unanswered, till the knolling of a bell stole in among the intervals of her words, like a clang that had travelled far over valley and rising ground and was just ready to die in the air... Stronger it grew, and sadder, and deepened into the tone of a death-bell, knolling dolefully from some ivy-mantled tower, and bearing tidings of mortality and woe to the cottage, to the hall and to the solitary wayfarer that all might weep for the doom appointed in turn to them. Then came a measured tread, pa.s.sing slowly, slowly on as of mourners with a coffin, their garments trailing the ground so that the ear could measure the length of their melancholy array.

Before them went the priest reading the burial-service, while the leaves of his book were rustling in the breeze. And though no voice but his was heard to speak aloud, still here were revilings and anathemas whispered, but distinct, from women and from men... The sweeping sound of the funeral train faded away like a thin vapour and the wind that just before had seemed to shake the coffin-pall moaned sadly round the verge of the hollow between three hills."

In a later collection of Hawthorne's short stories, _Mosses from an Old Manse_, the grave and the gay, the terrific and the sportive, are once more intermingled. Side by side with a forlorn attempt at humorous allegory, Mrs. _Bullfrog_, we find the serious moral allegories of _The Birthmark_ and _The Bosom-Serpent_, the wild, mysterious forest-revels in _Goodman Brown_, and the evil, sinister beauty of _Dr. Rappacini's Daughter_, a modern rehandling of the ancient legend of the poison-maiden, who was perhaps the prototype of Oliver Wendell Holmes' heroine in _Elsie Venner_ (1861). The quiet grace and natural ease of Hawthorne's style lend even to his least ambitious tales a distinctive charm. If he chooses a slight and simple theme, his touch is deft and sure. _Dr. Heidegger's Experiment_, in which Hawthorne's delicate, whimsical fancy plays round the idea of the elixir of life, is almost like a series of miniature pictures, distinct and lifelike in form and colour, seen through the medium of an old-fas.h.i.+oned magic-lantern. Yet even in this fantastic trifle we can discern the feeling for words and the sense of proportion that characterise Hawthorne's longer works.

_The Scarlet Letter_ (1850) was originally intended to be one of several short stories, but Hawthorne was persuaded to expand it into a novel. He felt some misgivings as to the success of the work:

"Keeping so close to the point as the tale does, and diversified in no otherwise than by turning different sides of the same dark idea to the reader's eye, it will weary very many people and disgust some."

The plot bears a remarkable resemblance to that of Lockhart's striking novel, _Adam Blair_. The "dark idea" that fascinates Hawthorne is the psychological state of Hester Prynne and her lover, Arthur Dimmesdale, in the long years that follow their lawless pa.s.sion. Their love story hardly concerns him at all. The interest of the novel does not depend on the development of the plot. No attempt is made to complicate the story by concealing the ident.i.ty of Hester's lover or of her husband. The action takes place within the souls and minds of the characters, not in their outward circ.u.mstances. The central chapter of the book is named significantly: "The Interior of a Heart." The moral situation described in _The Scarlet Letter_ did not present itself to Hawthorne abstractly, but as a series of pictures. He habitually thought in images, and he brooded so long over his conceptions that his descriptions are almost as definite in outline and as vivid in colour as things actually seen. His pictures do not waver or fade elusively as the mind seeks to realise them. The prison door, studded with pikes, before which Hester Prynne first stands with the letter on her breast, the pillory where Dimmesdale keeps vigil at midnight, the forest-trees with pale, fitful gleams of suns.h.i.+ne glinting through their leaves, are so distinct that we almost put out our hands to touch them. Hawthorne's dream-imagery has the same convincing reality. The phantasmagoric visions which float through Hester's consciousness--the mirrored reflection of her own face in girlhood, her husband's thin, scholar-like visage, the grey houses of the cathedral city where she had spent her early years--are more real to her and to us than the blurred faces of the Puritans who throng the marketplace to gaze on her ignominy. Although the moral tone of the book is one of almost unrelieved gloom, the actual scenes are full of colour and light.

Pearl's scarlet frock with its fantastic embroideries, the magnificent velvet gown and white ruff of the old dame who rides off by night to the witch-revels in the forest, the group of Red Indians in their deer-skin robes and wampum belts of red and yellow ochre, the bronzed faces and gaudy attire of the Spanish pirates, all stand out in bold relief among the sober greys and browns of the Puritans. The tense, emotional atmosphere is heightened by the festive brightness of the outer world.

The light of Hawthorne's imagination is directed mainly on three characters--Hester, Arthur, and the elf-like child Pearl, the living symbol of their union. Further in the background lurks the malignant figure of Roger Chillingworth, contriving his fiendish scheme of vengeance, "violating in cold blood the sanct.i.ty of a human heart." The blaze of the Scarlet Letter compels us by a strange magnetic power to follow Hester Prynne wherever she goes, but her suffering is less acute and her character less intricate than her lover's. She bears the outward badge of shame, but after "wandering without a clue in the dark labyrinth of mind," wins a dull respite from anguish as she glides "like a grey and sober shadow" over the threshold of those who are visited by sorrow. At the last, when Dimmesdale's spirit is "so shattered and subdued that it could hardly hold itself erect," Hester has still energy to plan and to act. His character is more twisted and tortuous than hers, and to understand him we must visit him apart. The sensitive nature that can endure physical pain but shrinks piteously from moral torture, the capacity for deep and pa.s.sionate feeling, the strange blending of pride and abject self-loathing, of cowardice and resolve, are portrayed with extraordinary skill. The different strands of his character are "intertwined in an inextricable knot." His is a living soul, complicated and varying in its moods, but ever pursued by a sense of sin. By one of Hawthorne's swift, uncanny flashes of insight, as Dimmesdale goes home after the forest-meeting, we hear nothing of the wild beatings of hope and dreary revulsions to despair, but only of foul, grotesque temptations that a.s.sail him, just as earlier--on the pillory--it is the grim humour and not the frightful shame of the situation that strikes him, when by an odd trick of his imagination he suddenly pictures a "whole tribe of decorous personages starting into view with the disorder of a nightmare in their aspects," to look upon their minister.

Hawthorne's delineation of character and motive is as scrupulously accurate and scientific as G.o.dwin's, but there is none of G.o.dwin's inhumanity in his att.i.tude. His complete understanding of human weakness makes pity superfluous and undignified. He p.r.o.nounces no judgment and offers no plea for mercy. His instinct is to present the story as it appeared through the eyes of those who enacted the drama or who witnessed it. Stern and inexorable as one of his own witch-judging ancestors, Hawthorne foils the lovers' plan of escape across the sea, lets the minister die as soon as he has made the revelation that gives him his one moment of victory, and in the conclusion brings Hester back to take up her long-forsaken symbol of shame.

Pearl alone Hawthorne sets free, the spell which bound her human sympathies broken by the kiss she bestows on her guilty father.

There are few pa.s.sionate outbursts of feeling, save when Hester momentarily unlocks her heart in the forest--and even here Hawthorne's language is extraordinarily restrained:

"'What we did had a consecration of its own. We felt it so! We said so to each other. Hast thou forgotten it?'

'Hush, Hester!' said Arthur Dimmesdale, rising from the ground. 'No; I have not forgotten.'"

Or again, after Dimmesdale has confessed that he has neither strength nor courage left him to venture into the world: "'Thou shalt not go alone!' answered she, in a deep whisper. Then all was spoken."

In _The House of the Seven Gables_ (1851), as in _The Scarlet Letter_, Hawthorne again presents his scenes in the light of a single, pervading idea, this time an ancestral curse, symbolised by the portrait of Colonel Pyncheon, who condemned an innocent man for witchcraft.

"To the thoughtful man there will be no tinge of superst.i.tion in what we figuratively express, by affirming that the ghost of a dead progenitor--perhaps as a portion of his own punishment--is often doomed to become the Evil Genius of his family."

Hawthorne wins his effect by presenting the idea to our minds from different points of view, until we are obsessed by the curse that broods heavily over the old house. Even the aristocratic breed of fowls, of "queer, rusty, withered aspect," are an emblem of the decay of the Pyncheon family. The people are apt to be merged into the dense shadows that lurk in the gloomy pa.s.sages, but when the sun s.h.i.+nes on them they stand out with arresting distinctness. The heroic figure of Hepzibah Pyncheon, a little ridiculous and a little forbidding of aspect, but cheris.h.i.+ng through weary years a pa.s.sionate devotion to her brother, is described with a gentle blending of humour and pathos. Clifford Pyncheon--the sybarite made for happiness and hideously cheated of his destiny--is delineated with curious insight and sympathy.

It is Judge Jaffery Pyncheon, with his "sultry" smile of "elaborate benevolence"--unrelenting and crafty as his infamous ancestor--who lends to _The House of Seven Gables_ the element of terror. Hour after hour, Hawthorne, with grim and bitter irony, mocks and taunts the dead body of the hypocritical judge until the ghostly pageantry of dead Pyncheons--including at last Judge Jaffery himself with the fatal crimson stain on his neckcloth--fades away with the oncoming of daylight.

Hawthorne's mind was richly stored with "wild chimney-corner legends," many of them no doubt gleaned from an old woman mentioned in one of his _Tales and Sketches_. He takes over the fantastic superst.i.tions in which his ancestors had believed, and uses them as the playthings of his fancy, picturing with malicious mirth the grey shadows of his stern, dark-browed forefathers sadly lamenting his lapse from grace and saying one to the other:

"A writer of story-books! What kind of a business in life, what manner of glorifying G.o.d, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler."

The story of Alice Pyncheon, the maiden under the dreadful power of a wizard, who, to wreak his revenge, compelled her to surrender her will to his and to do whatsoever he list, the legends of ghosts and spectres in the _Twice-Told Tales_, the allusions to the elixir of life in his _Notebooks_, the introduction of witches into _The Scarlet Letter_, of mesmerism into _The Blithedale Romance_, show how often Hawthorne was pre-occupied with the terrors of magic and of the invisible world. He handles the supernatural in a half-credulous, half-sportive spirit, neither affirming nor denying his belief.

One of his artful devices is wilfully to cast doubt upon his fancies, and so to pique us into the desire to be momentarily at least one of the foolish and imaginative.

After writing _The Blithedale Romance_, in which he embodied his experiences at Brook Farm, and his Italian romance, _Transformation, or The Marble Faun_, Hawthorne, when his health was failing, strove to find expression for the theme of immortality, which had always exercised a strange fascination upon him. In August, 1855, during his consulate in Liverpool, he visited Smith.e.l.l's Hall, near Bolton, and heard the legend of the b.l.o.o.d.y Footstep. He thought of uniting this story with that of the elixir of life, but ultimately decided to treat the story of the footstep in _Dr. Grimshawe's Secret_, of which only a fragment was written, and to embody the elixir idea in a separate work, _Septimius Felton_, of which two unfinished versions exist.

Septimius Felton, a young man living in Concord at the time of the war of the Revolution, tries to brew the potion of eternity by adding to a recipe, which his aunt has derived from the Indians, the flowers which spring from the grave of a man whom he has slain. In _Dr. Dolliver's Romance_, Hawthorne, so far as we may judge from the fragment which remains, seems to be working out an idea jotted down in his notebook several years earlier:

"A man arriving at the extreme point of old age grows young again at the same pace at which he had grown old, returning upon his path throughout the whole of life, and thus taking the reverse view of matters. Methinks it would give rise to some odd concatenations."

The story, which opens with a charming description of Dr.

Dolliver and his great-grandchild, Pansie, breaks off so abruptly that it is impossible to forecast the "odd concatenations" that had flashed through Hawthorne's mind.

Although Hawthorne is preoccupied continually with the thought of death, his outlook is melancholy, not morbid. He recoils fastidiously from the fleshly and loses himself in the spiritual.

He is concerned with mournful reflections, not frightful events.

It is the mystery of death, not its terror, that fascinates him.

Sensitive and susceptible himself, he never startles us with physical horrors. He does not search with curious ingenuity for recondite terrors. He was compelled as if by some wizard's strange power, to linger in earth's shadowed places; but the scenes that throng his memory are reflected in quiet, subdued tones. His pictures are never marred by harsh lines or crude colours.

While Hawthorne in his _Twice-Told Tales_ was toying pensively with spectral forms and "dark ideas," Edgar Allan Poe was penetrating intrepidly into trackless regions of terror. Where Hawthorne would have shrunk back, repelled and disgusted, Poe, wildly exhilarated by the antic.i.p.ation of a new and excruciating thrill, forced his way onwards. He sought untiringly for unusual situations, inordinately gloomy or terrible, and made them the starting point for excursions into abnormal psychology. Just as Hawthorne harps with plaintive insistence on the word "sombre,"

Poe again and again uses the epithet "novel." His tales are never, as Hawthorne's often are, pathetic. His instinct is always towards the dramatic. Sometimes he rises to tragic heights, sometimes he is merely melodramatic. He rejoices in theatrical effects, like the death-throes of William Wilson, the return of the lady Ligeia, or the entry, awaited with torturing suspense, of the "lofty" and enshrouded figure of the Lady Madeline of Usher. Like Hawthorne, Poe was fascinated by the thought of death, "the hemlock and the cypress overshadowed him night and day," but he describes death accompanied by its direst physical and mental agonies. Hawthorne broods over the idea of sin, but Poe probes curiously into the psychology of crime. The one is detached and remote, the other inhuman and pa.s.sionless. The contrast in style between Hawthorne and Poe reflects clearly their difference in temper. Hawthorne writes always with easy, finished perfection, choosing the right word unerringly, Poe experiments with language, painfully acquiring a conscious, studied form of expression which is often remarkably effective, but which almost invariably suggests a sense of artifice. In reading _The Scarlet Letter_ we do not think of the style; in reading _The Masque of the Red Death_ we are forcibly impressed by the skilful arrangement of words, the alternation of long and short sentences, the device of repet.i.tion and the deliberate choice of epithets. Hawthorne uses his own natural form of expression. Poe, with laborious art, fas.h.i.+ons an instrument admirably adapted to his purposes.

Poe's earliest published story, _A Ma.n.u.script Found in a Bottle_--the prize tale for the _Baltimore Sat.u.r.day Visitor_, 1833--proves that he soon recognised his peculiar vein of talent.

He straightway takes the tale of terror for his own. The experiences of a sailor, s.h.i.+pwrecked in the Simoom and hurled on the crest of a towering billow into a gigantic s.h.i.+p manned by a h.o.a.ry crew who glide uneasily to and fro "like the ghosts of buried centuries," forecast the more frightful horrors of _A Descent into the Maelstrom_ (1841). Poe's method in both stories is to induce belief by beginning with a circ.u.mstantial narrative of every-day events, and by proceeding to relate the most startling phenomena in the same calm, matter-of-fact manner. The whirling abyss of the Maelstrom in which the tiny boat is engulfed, and the sensations of the fishermen--awe, wonder, horror, curiosity, hope, alternating or intermingled--are described with the same quiet precision as the trivial preliminary adventures. The man's dreary expectation of incredulity seals our conviction of the truth of his story. In _The Ma.n.u.script Found in a Bottle_, too, we may trace the first suggestion of that idea which finds its most complete and memorable expression in _Ligeia_ (1837). The antique s.h.i.+p, with its preternaturally aged crew "doomed to hover continually upon the brink of eternity, without taking a final plunge into the abyss," is an early foreshadowing of the fulfilment of Joseph Glanvill's declaration so strikingly ill.u.s.trated in the return of Ligeia: "Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will." In _Ligeia_, Poe concentrates on this idea with singleness of purpose. He had striven to embody it in his earlier sketches, in _Morella_, where the beloved is reincarnated in the form of her own child, in the musical, artificial _Eleonora_ and in the gruesome _Berenice_. In _Ligeia_, at last, it finds its appropriate setting in the ebony bridal-chamber, hung with gold tapestries grotesquely embroidered with fearful shapes and constantly wafted to and fro, like those in one of the _Episodes of Vathek_. In _The Fall of the House of Usher_ he adapts the theme which he had approached in the sketch ent.i.tled _Premature Burial_, and unites with it a subtler conception, the sentience of the vegetable world. Like the guest of Roderick Usher, as we enter the house we fall immediately beneath the overmastering sway of its irredeemable, insufferable gloom. The melancholy building, Usher's wild musical improvisations, his vague but awful paintings, his mystical reading and his eerie verses with the last haunting stanza:

"And travellers now within that valley Through the red-litten windows, see Vast forms that move fantastically To a discordant melody; While, like a rapid, ghastly river, Through the pale door, A hideous throng rush out forever And laugh--but smile no more,"

are all in harmony with the fate that broods over the family of Usher. Poe's gift for avoiding all impressions alien to his effect lends to his tales extraordinary unity of tone and colour.

He leads up to his crisis with a gradual crescendo of emotion.

The climax, hideous and terrifying, relieves the intensity of our feelings, and once it is past Poe rapidly hastens to the only possible conclusion. The dreary house with its vacant, eye-like windows reflected at the outset in the dark, unruffled tarn, disappears for ever beneath its surface.

In _The Masque of the Red Death_ the imagery changes from moment to moment, each scene standing out clear in colour and sharp in outline; but from first to last the perspective of the whole is kept steadily in view. No part is disproportionate or inappropriate. The arresting overture describing the swift and sudden approach of the Red Death, the gay, thoughtless security of Prince Prospero and his guests within the barricaded abbey, the voluptuous masquerade held in a suite of seven rooms of seven hues, the disconcerting chime of the ebony clock that momentarily stills the grotesque figures of the dancers, prepare us for the dramatic climax, the entry of the audacious guest, the Red Death, and his struggle with Prince Prospero. The story closes as it began with the triumph of the Red Death. Poe achieves his powerful effect with rigid economy of effort. He does not add an unnecessary touch.

In _The Cask of Amontillado_--perhaps the most terrible and the most perfectly executed of all Poe's tales--the note of grim irony is sustained throughout. The jingling of the bells and the devilish profanity of the last three words--_Requiescat in pace_--add a final touch of horror to a revenge, devised and carried out with consummate artistry.

Poe, like Hawthorne, loved to peer curiously into the dim recesses of conscience. Hawthorne was concerned with the effect of remorse on character. Poe often exhibits a conscience possessed by the imp of the perverse, and displays no interest in the character of his victim. He chooses no ordinary crimes. He considers, without De Quincey's humour, murder as a fine art. In _The Black Cat_ the terrors are calculated with cold-blooded nicety. Every device is used to deepen the impression and to intensify the agony. In _The Tell-Tale Heart_, so unremitting is the suspense, as the murderer slowly inch by inch projects his head round the door in the darkness, that it is well-nigh intolerable. The close of the story, which errs on the side of the melodramatic, is less cunningly contrived than Poe's endings usually are. In _William Wilson_, Poe handles the subject of conscience in an allegorical form, a theme essayed by Bulwer Lytton in one of his sketches in _The Student, Monos and Daimonos_. He probably influenced Stevenson's _Dr. Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde_.

In _The Pit and the Pendulum_, Poe seems to start from the very border-line of the most hideous nightmare that the human mind can conceive, yet there is nothing hazy or indefinite in his a.n.a.lysis of the feelings of his victim. He speaks as one who has experienced the sensations himself, not as one who is making a wild surmise. To read is, indeed, to endure in some measure the torture of the prisoner; but our pain is alleviated not only by the realisation that we at least may win respite when we will, but by our appreciation of Poe's subtle technique. He notices the readiness of the mind, when racked unendurably, to concentrate on frivolous trifles--the exact shape and size of the dungeon; or the sound of the scythe cutting through cloth. Mental and physical agonies are interchanged with careful art.

Poe's constructive power fitted him admirably to write the detective story. In _The Mystery of M. Roget_ he adopts a dull plot without sufficient vigour and originality to rivet our attention, but _The Murders of the Rue Morgue_ secures our interest from beginning to end. As in the case of G.o.dwin's _Caleb Williams_, the end was conceived first and the plot was carefully woven backwards. No single thread is left loose. Dupin's methods of ratiocination are similar to those of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Poe never s.h.i.+rks a gory detail, but the train of reasoning not the imagery absorbs us in his detective stories. In his treasure story--_The Gold Bug_, which may have suggested Stevenson's _Treasure Island_--he compels our interest by the intricacy and elaboration of his problem.

The works of Mrs. Radcliffe, Lewis, and Maturin were not unknown to Poe, and he refers more than once to the halls of Vathek. From Gothic romance he may perhaps vivid that they make the senses ache. Like Maturin, he even resorts to italics to enforce his effect. He crashes down heavily on a chord which would resound at a touch. He is liable too to descend into vulgarity in his choice of phrases. His tales consequently gain in style in the translations of Baudelaire. But these aberrations occur mainly in his inferior work. In his most highly wrought stories, such as _Amontillado_, _The House of Usher_, or _The Masque of the Red Death_, the execution is flawless. In these, Poe never lost sight of the ideal, which, in his admirable review of Hawthorne's _Twice-Told Tales_ and _Mosses from an Old Manse_, he set before the writer of short stories: