46 THE BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 



tion to their magnitude, Poe's tales have the magical and 

 elusive influence of imaginative suggestion. We are never 

 absolutely convinced of their reality, but we are entirely under 

 their spell. They withdraw us completely from the world of 

 reality by the skill with which the scenes are changed in the 

 Opera House at Bayreuth; one scene merging into another 

 so gradually that the spectator is transported from the sunlit 

 glade to the dusk)- grotto without the consciousness that his 

 senses are being deceived. Poe effects the transition into the 

 realm of fantasy by an art so rare and so beguiling that he 

 almost persuades us that we are dealing with realities and not 

 with abstractions. 



Egseus has no human warmth or passion; although, like 

 most of Poe's heroes, he is consumed with the desire of posses- 

 sion. Berenice is a veritable phantasm, and never for a 

 moment deceives us by the semblance of reality; her fate is 

 repulsive, for Poe's artistic feeling often failed to keep him 

 in the realm of pure suggestion in dealing with the horrible. 

 In the most perfect of the prose tales, The Fall of the House 

 of Usher, Ligcia, Eleanora, and The Masque of the Red 

 Death, the full force of Poe's marvellous accuracy and 

 vraisemblance of detail is felt by the imagination; but it must 

 be added that the failure to completely possess the mind of the 

 reader is due to no limitation in Poe's art; it is due to the 

 limitation of his material. fie went as far on the road to 

 complete illusion as his subject-matter permitted; but his 

 subject-matter was so largely made up of the morbid, the 

 abnormal, the phantasmal, that it can never seem other than 

 it was in its substance. In these tales, so full (if powerful 

 effects and charms wrought out of the potencies of sin, disease, 

 solitarv desolation, abnormal play of the senses, Poe's artistic 

 qualitv is supreme; in them, as in half a dozen poems, he 

 is one of the modern masters of technique; and their limita- 

 tions as works of art must be sought not in the skill but in 

 the soul of the workman. That limitation is found in the 

 fact that Poe deals with experience of a very narrow and 



