The first as well as the ultimate aim in the creation of any work of art is to produce one definite effect upon the mind and feelings of the reader or observer. In literary art the first word and every word must help produce this effect. The central idea of the composition must be chosen to secure the effect desired; each incident in the working of the plan, the tone of the writing, and even each word itself, must contribute to the one end of creating a single mental impression to accomplish this totality of effect. As applied specifically to poetry, this description of Poe's philosophy of technique in art must be considered in relation to his definition of poetry. "We would define in brief," he says, "the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Beyond the limits of Beauty its province does not extend. Its sole arbiter is taste. With the Intellectual or with the Conscience it has only collateral relations. It has no dependence, unless incidentally, upon either Duty or Truth." He finds the art of poetry to spring from what he terms the Faculty of Ideality, "which is the sentiment of Poesy. This sentiment is the sense of the beautiful, of the sublime, and of the mystical." The word mystical as here used is, he says, "applied to that class of compositions in which there lies beneath the transparent upper current of meaning an under or suggestive one. What we vaguely term the moral of any sentiment is its mystic or secondary expression. It has the vast force of an accompaniment in music. This vivifies the air, that spiritualizes the fanciful conception and lifts it into the ideal."

The phrase by which Poe expresses the central idea in his conception of the philosophy of art, he words sometimes "the totality of effect", sometimes "the totality of interest". It has been much misunderstood. Poe does not mean the unity of design or plot, or mere construction of any sort. Singleness of idea, simplicity of design, and, in the story, directness and unity of plot, are means of attaining totality of effect, but they are not the end itself. It is the mind of the reader upon which he is working, not the texture and fabric of the thought expression. Poe was intensely interested in hypnotic problems: the method of his composition bore a close analogy to the method of the mesmerist. As the mesmerist uses a bright cut glass to focus the vision of

his subject in order to produce a mental state desired, so Poe worked with the objective material of his art to secure a subjective effect. The effect desired might be an exquisite sense of beauty, of a peculiar phase of fear, or horror, or even disgust; the incidents of the poem or tale, the atmosphere and tone, the words, were the bright jewel, the passes of the hands; the mesmerist's means of superinducing the mental condition which is his aim. By every process of verbal art, by choice of words, by the manner of his phrasing, in verse by the metrical devices used, by the tone or atmosphere, by the incidents or details of the composition, by the central idea of the main theme, by the mystic suggestiveness, as he termed it, of an underlying meaning; in short by all the objective means at his command, he produced a single impression upon the imagination of his readers. Poe tested art by the power to awaken in the mind competent to perceive it the same feeling or conception that the artist had conceived. Today we should say that Poe sought to create a definite psychological state upon the consciousness of his readers. To that end every other consideration was subordinate. We have seen psychology called as a science to the aid of the law, of labor conciliators, of medicine, of religious workers, and of the army. Poe, in a day before psychology had become a real science, was applying it practically to the methods of art and art criticism. It is scarcely strange that the time-keepers of his day were disturbed by the thirteenth stroke from their belfry.

In the writing of fiction usually there are thought to be four points of beginning from which an author may start to gather the material of his story. He may have in mind a plot in the form of a succession of incidents, or in the secret of the outcome of the plot. He may have the personality of a character or a group of characters and, as Turgenieff once said, being certain that they will do something interesting, weave his plot out of their relations. Or he may, as Stevenson did in composing his Merry Men, start with a setting or an atmosphere and draw from that suggestions that define themselves into the incidents of a story. Finally he may choose some truth of life, some principle of action, which he would enforce or exemplify, as George Eliot exemplified the power of a child's love to humanize

an old man in Silas Marner, and so deliberately seek a plot that will lend itself effectively to this philosophical or moral end. It will be noted that in all four of these methods of composition it is with the objective that the artist starts. It is the material of composition that fixes his plans and determines his methods. He weaves his design as the tapestry weaver guides his threads or the carpet maker works his pattern. His sense of unity is satisfied if the parts are properly subordinated to the whole, if a common plan of design and relationship gives an organic totality of structure to the finished object. It is the unity of the object itself that is sought and presumably the assumption is that the impression upon the artistic mind must be similarly one, or "unique", in effect.

Poe, on the contrary, accepts none of these objective starting points. He sets up a fifth which, for all forms of composition except fiction, he declares is the only proper one. He finds it not in the material to be used, but in the subjective or mental effect to be produced. In fiction, though he recognizes the dénouement or outcome of the plot to be the starting point, he still holds the totality of effect to be the end toward which every art device must be trained to secure the desired psychological effect. "In fiction," he says, "the dénouement—in all other compositions, the intended effect—should be definitely considered and arranged, before writing the first word; and no word should be then written which does not tend, or form a part of a sentence which tends, to the development of the dénouement, or to the strengthening of the effect.'

Poe's theory may be shown more convincingly by further quotation from his 'writings, especially his critical reviews. He repeated it in various forms with essential consistency from his early twenties to the year of his death. It is developed most fully in his essay on The Philosophy of Composition. In that paper he illustrates it by analyzing The Raven and by describing the method of its composition. Some critics in view of Poe's known love of hoax have thrown doubt upon his account of a deliberate, carefully planned building up of a poem which they prefer to regard as "inspired." The description that Poe gives of the mental processes through which he passed in working out

the effects of The Raven is so normal that it was accepted by as true a judge as Edmund Clarence Stedman, who held that most poets are familiar with the process by which often a single line becomes the starting point from which backward and forward the poem is built up. Poe believed that the poet must carefully study the fundamental laws of his art and work out his poems with the same fastidious attention to detail that the painter or the sculptor uses. The most passionate article of his creed of criticism is that the poet is the artist and should always put his art above all considerations of ethical or argumentative purpose. "There is no greater mistake," he insists, "than the supposition that a true originality is a mere matter of impulse or inspiration. To originate, is carefully, patiently and understandingly to combine."

In Poe's two famous reviews of Hawthorne's Tales, he makes it clear that by totality of effect he means not unity of composition merely, but especially the converging psychological effect upon the audience. His first statement is: "Were we bidden to say how the highest genius could be most advantageously employed for its best display of its own powers, we should answer-without hesitation-in the composition of a rhymed poem, not to exceed in length what might be perused in an hour... In almost all classes of composition, the unity of effect or impression is a point of greatest importance." He elaborates this statement:

A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents—he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one preëstablished design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed.

There is a deliberate statement of his thesis in The Philosophy of Composition before he illustrates it with his own Raven:

I prefer commencing with a consideration of an effect... I say to myself, in the first place, "Of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?" Having chosen a novel, first, and then a vivid effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought by incident or tone-whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone-afterward looking about me (or rather within) for such combinations of event, or tone, as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect.

Note that he says effect; never plot, or whole, or poem, or tale. This is his mature statement of his philosophy of composition. As early as 1836, when he was twenty-seven, in a review of Mrs. Sigourney's poems, he had said:

The pleasure is unique in the proper acceptation of the term, the understanding is employed without difficulty in the contemplation of the picture as a whole and thus its effect will depend in a very great degree upon the perfection of its finish, upon the nice adaptation of its constituent parts, and especially upon what is rightly termed by Schlegel, "the unity or totality of interest".

Elsewhere he asserts that the poet "should limit his endeavors to the creation of novel moods of beauty, in form, in color, in sound, in sentiment, for over all this wide range has the poetry of words dominion.”

When the best of Poe's tales or poems are recalled, the sincerity of Poe's belief in the essentials of this creed of art is obvious. In The Masque of the Red Death, from the first sentence, "The 'Red Death' had long devastated the country," to the last one, "And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all," the converging to one psychological effect is overwhelming. So with The House of Usher, from the phrase, 'During the whole of a dull, dark and soundless day in the autumn of the year when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens," the tense atmosphere of dread, of fear through a feeling of desolation, gathers its weight of gloom until in the last sentence "the deep and dank tarn. . . . closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the House of Usher."

The feeling of ruthless revenge in The Cask of Amontillado is voiced with the first words: "The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could; but when he ventured upon insult I