honored. If I were turned from my house to-morrow, hundreds would be
proud to shelter me. Poor people would go out and pass the night in
the streets with their children, if I merely hinted that I wished to
be alone. And I find you up, wandering homeless, and picking farthings
off dead women by the wayside! I fear no man and nothing; I have
seen you tremble and lose countenance at a word. I wait God’s summons
contentedly in my own house, or, if it please the king to call me out
again, upon the field of battle. You look for the gallows; a rough,
swift death, without hope or honor. Is there no difference between
these two?”
112. “As far as to the moon,” Villon acquiesced. “But if I had been
born Lord of Brisetout, and you had been the poor scholar Francis,
would the difference have been any the less? Should I not have been
warming my knees at this charcoal pan, and would not you have been
groping for farthings in the snow? Should not I have been the soldier
and you the thief?”
113. “A thief?” cried the old man. “I a thief! If you understood your
words you would repent them.”
114. Villon turned out his hands with a gesture of inimitable
impudence. “If your lordship had done me the honor to follow my
argument!” he said.
115. “I do you too much honor in submitting to your presence,” said
the knight. “Learn to curb your tongue when you speak with old and
honorable men, or some one hastier than I may reprove you in a sharper
fashion.” And he rose and paced the lower end of the apartment,
struggling with anger and antipathy. Villon surreptitiously refilled
his cup, and settled himself more comfortably in the chair, crossing
his knees and leaning his head upon one hand and the elbow against the
back of the chair. He was now replete and warm, and he was in nowise
frightened for his host, having gauged him as justly as was possible
between two such different characters. The night was far spent, and in
a very comfortable fashion after all; and he felt morally certain of a
safe departure on the morrow.
116. “Tell me one thing,” said the old man, pausing in his walk. “Are
you really a thief?”
117. “I claim the sacred rights of hospitality,” returned the poet. “My
lord, I am.”
118. “You are very young,” the knight continued.
119. “I should never have been so old,” replied Villon, showing his
fingers, “if I had not helped myself with these ten talents. They have
been my nursing mothers and my nursing fathers.”
120. “You may still repent and change.”
121. “I repent daily,” said the poet. “There are few people more given
to repentance than poor Francis. As for change, let somebody change my
circumstances. A man must continue to eat, if it were only that he may
continue to repent.”
122. “The change must begin in the heart,” returned the old man
solemnly.
123. “My dear lord,” answered Villon, “do you really fancy that I
steal for pleasure? I hate stealing, like any other piece of work or
of danger. My teeth chatter when I see a gallows. But I must eat, I
must drink, I must mix in society of some sort. What the devil! Man
is not a solitary animal--_Cui Deus fœminam tradit_. Make me king’s
pantler--make me abbot of St. Denis; make me bailly of the Patatrac;
and then I shall be changed indeed. But as long as you leave me the
poor scholar Francis Villon, without a farthing, why, of course, I
remain the same.”
124. “The grace of God is all-powerful.”
125. “I should be a heretic to question it,” said Francis. “It has
made you lord of Brisetout and bailly of the Patatrac; it has given
me nothing but the quick wits under my hat and these ten toes upon my
hands. May I help myself to wine? I thank you respectfully. By God’s
grace, you have a very superior vintage.”
126. The lord of Brisetout walked to and fro with his hands behind
his back. Perhaps he was not yet quite settled in his mind about the
parallel between thieves and soldiers; perhaps Villon had interested
him by some cross-thread of sympathy; perhaps his wits were simply
muddled by so much unfamiliar reasoning; but whatever the cause, he
somehow yearned to convert the young man to a better way of thinking,
and could not make up his mind to drive him forth again into the
street.
127. “There is something more than I can understand in this,” he said
at length. “Your mouth is full of subtleties, and the devil has led you
very far astray; but the devil is only a very weak spirit before God’s
truth, and all his subtleties vanish at a word of true honor, like
darkness at morning. Listen to me once more. I learned long ago that a
gentleman should live chivalrously and lovingly to God, and the king,
and his lady; and though I have seen many strange things done, I have
still striven to command my ways upon that rule. It is not only written
in all noble histories, but in every man’s heart, if he will take care
to read. You speak of food and wine, and I know very well that hunger
is a difficult trial to endure; but you do not speak of other wants;
you say nothing of honor, of faith to God and other men, of courtesy,
of love without reproach. It may be that I am not very wise--and yet
I am--but you seem to me like one who has lost his way and made a
great error in life. You are attending to the little wants, and you
have totally forgotten the great and only real ones, like a man who
should be doctoring toothache on the Judgment Day. For such things as
honor and love and faith are not only nobler than food and drink, but
indeed I think we desire them more, and suffer more sharply for their
absence. I speak to you as I think you will most easily understand me.
Are you not while careful to fill your belly, disregarding another
appetite in your heart, which spoils the pleasure of your life and
keeps you continually wretched?”
128. Villon was sensibly nettled under all this sermonizing. “You think
I have no sense of honor!” he cried. “I’m poor enough, God knows! It’s
hard to see rich people with their gloves, and you blowing in your
hands. An empty belly is a bitter thing, although you speak so lightly
of it. If you had had as many as I, perhaps you would change your tune.
Any way, I’m a thief--make the most of that--but I’m not a devil from
hell, God strike me dead. I would have you to know I’ve an honor of my
own, as good as yours, though I don’t prate about it all day long, as
if it was a God’s miracle to have any. It seems quite natural to me; I
keep it in its box till it’s wanted. Why, now, look you here, how long
have I been in this room with you? Did you not tell me you were alone
in the house? Look at your gold plate! You’re strong, if you like, but
you’re old and unarmed, and I have my knife. What did I want but a jerk
of the elbow and here would have been you with the cold steel in your
bowels, and there would have been me, linking in the streets, with an
armful of golden cups! Did you suppose I hadn’t wit enough to see that?
And I scorned the action. There are your damned goblets as safe as in a
church, there are you with your heart ticking as good as new, and here
am I, ready to go out again as poor as I came in, with my one white
that you threw in my teeth! And you think I have no sense of honor--God
strike me dead!”
129. The old man stretched out his right arm. “I will tell you what you
are,” he said. “You are a rogue, my man, an impudent and black-hearted
rogue and vagabond. I have passed an hour with you. Oh! believe me, I
feel myself disgraced! And you have eaten and drunk at my table. But
now I am sick at your presence; the day has come, and the night-bird
should be off to his roost. Will you go before, or after?”
130. “Which you please,” returned the poet, rising. “I believe you to
be strictly honorable.” He thoughtfully emptied his cup. “I wish I
could add you were intelligent,” he went on, knocking on his head with
his knuckles. “Age! age! the brains stiff and rheumatic.”
131. The old man preceded him from a point of self-respect; Villon
followed, whistling, with his thumbs in his girdle.
132. “God pity you!” said the lord of Brisetout at the door.
133. “Good-bye, papa,” returned Villon, with a yawn. “Many thanks for
the cold mutton.”
134. The door closed behind him. The dawn was breaking over the white
roofs. A chill, uncomfortable morning ushered in the day. Villon stood
and heartily stretched himself in the middle of the road.
135. “A very dull old gentleman,” he thought. “I wonder what his
goblets may be worth.”
SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS FOR STUDY
1. Briefly write out the plot of the story.
2. Which incidents are essential to the story (plot incidents)?
3. Which incidents could be altered without vitally changing the story
(developing incidents)? For a discussion of these types of incidents
see the present author’s _Writing the Short-Story_, pp. 174-181.
4. Show how one such change could be made.
5. Does the external (visible or bodily) action stand out as clearly as
the internal (invisible or soul) action?
6. (a) Is the story probable? (b) Usual? (c) Convincing?--That is, does
it seem real?
7. What are its strongest points, to you?
8. Criticise its weak points, if any.
9. Can you suggest any improvements?
10. (a) Do you know any stories similar in theme? (b) If so, which is
the better story, to you, and why?
11. Briefly write out the plots of three stories of action or
adventure, taken from any book or magazine.
12. Compare one of them with one of these two stories.
TEN REPRESENTATIVE STORIES OF ACTION AND ADVENTURE
“After He was Dead,” Melville Davisson Post. _Atlantic Monthly_,
April, 1911.
“The Attack on the Mill,” Émile Zola. Translated in _Great Short
Stories_.
“The Taking of the Redoubt,” Prosper Mérimée. Translated in
_Short-Story Masterpieces_.
“The Man Who Would be King,” Rudyard Kipling. In _The Phantom
Rickshaw_ (and other stories).
“The Sire de Malétroit’s Door,” Robert Louis Stevenson. In _New
Arabian Nights_.
“The Diamond Lens,” Fitz-James O’Brien. In _Short Story Classics,
American_.
“The Young Man in a Hurry,” Robert W. Chambers. _Harper’s
Magazine_, Aug., 1903.
“A Fight for the Tsarina,” Maurus Jókai. Translated in
_Masterpieces of Fiction_.
“The Window that Monsieur Forgot,” Mary Imlay Taylor. _The
Booklovers Magazine_, Jan., 1904.
“Blood o’ Innocence,” George W. Knapp. _Lippincott’s Magazine_,
Nov., 1907.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] AUTHOR’S NOTE.--Corporals were formerly the chief officers of the
Corsican communes after they had rebelled against their feudal lords.
To-day they still occasionally give the name to a man who--because of
his property, his relationships, and his business--commands a certain
influence, and a sort of effective magistracy over a parish or a
canton. The Corsicans divide themselves, after ancient custom, into
five castes: gentlemen (of whom some, _magnifiques_, are of higher
estate, and some of lower, _signori_), corporals, citizens, plebeians,
and foreigners.
[14] AUTHOR’S NOTE.--This word is synonymous with outlaw.
[15] AUTHOR’S NOTE.--_Voltigeurs_, that is, a body raised by the
government of late years which acts in conjunction with the police to
maintain order.
[16] AUTHOR’S NOTE.--The uniform of the _voltigeurs_ was at that period
brown, with a yellow collar.
[17] AUTHOR’S NOTE.--A leather belt which served the joint purpose of a
cartridge box and pocket for dispatches and orders.
[18] AUTHOR’S NOTE.--_Buon giorno, fratello_--the ordinary salutation
of the Corsicans.
II
STORIES OF MYSTERY AND FANTASY
_The Purloined Letter._--EDGAR ALLAN POE
_The Monkey’s Paw._--W. W. JACOBS
The fact is ... that, in the riddle story, the detective was an
after-thought, or, more accurately, a _deus ex machina_ to make
the story go. The riddle had to be unriddled; and who could do
it so naturally and readily as a detective? The detective, as
Poe saw him, was a means to this end; and it was only afterwards
that writers perceived his availability as a character. Lecoq
accordingly becomes a figure in fiction, and Sherlock, while he was
as yet a novelty, was nearly as attractive as the complications in
which he involved himself.--JULIAN HAWTHORNE, Introduction to _The
Lock and Key Library_.
The literature of ghosts is very ancient. In visions of the night,
and in the lurid vapors of mystic incantations, figures rise and
smile, or frown and disappear. The Witch of Endor murmurs her
spell, and “an old man cometh up, and he is covered with a mantle.”
Macbeth takes a bond of fate, and from Hecate’s caldron, after
the apparition of an armed head and that of a bloody child, “an
apparition of a child crowned, with a tree in his hand, rises.” The
wizard recounts to Lochiel his warning vision, and Lochiel departs
to his doom. There are stories of the Castle of Otranto and of The
Three Spaniards, and the infinite detail of “singular experiences,”
which make our conscious daily life the frontier and border-land of
an impinging world of mystery.--GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, Introduction
to _Modern Ghosts_.
STORIES OF MYSTERY AND FANTASY
Even more deeply seated and elemental than our love for the mysterious
is our passion for undertaking its solution. It is this, doubtless,
that challenges us to match our wits with the clever rogues of fiction,
and to pit our resources of detection against the forces seen and
unseen which play in tales of the weird, the mysterious, and the
unexplained.
Such stories readily fall into two classes, with as many sub-sorts as
the invention of man may compass--those which are soluble and those
which are not. Of the former, the detective story is the more common,
followed at no very great distance by the tale which seems to involve
the supernatural, but whose mystery transpires quite plainly in the
end. Of the latter are all those inexplicable wonder-fictions dealing
with shapes that haunt the dream-dusk, the whole shadow-land of wraiths
and spirits and presences and immaterialities which cross the borders
of experience at the call of fantasy. They are all the inheritance
of the credulous age in which romance was born, and few of us are
so engirded with the armor of stoicism that we cannot enjoy their
gathering goose-flesh and creeping spinal chill. Hawthorne and Poe and
Irving were masters here.
The processes of inductive reasoning by which Voltaire’s Zadig
reconstructed actual occurrences from trivial clues have developed into
modern detective stories of uncounted variety, in which the criminal is
hunted down by a professional sleuth. Then, too, the “clever amateur”
often takes a hand in the game, and even accident plays at times,
until there is no end to the possible combinations growing out of pure
reasoning employed to unravel the tangle.
Much the same processes are employed to discover the
pseudo-supernatural mystery, like Fitz-James O’Brien’s solved
ghost-story, “What Was It? A Mystery.” But when we enter the domain
of the unexplained, the story tends to become a study of fear and of
pure mystery, like Marion Crawford’s “The Upper Berth,” and “The Damned
Thing,” by Ambrose Bierce.
Poe was the great American originator of the detective story, and
to-day his “Purloined Letter,” reproduced here in full, “The Mystery of
Marie Rogêt,” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” are unsurpassed.
POE AND HIS WRITINGS
Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, January 19, 1809. His father, of
a good Maryland family, was an actor, and his mother an actress of
English extraction. Both parents dying before Edgar was three, he,
with his brother William and sister Rosalie, was left homeless in
Richmond, where each found a protector. Mrs. Allan adopted Edgar,
giving him his middle name, and bestowing at the same time every
opportunity that wealth could offer. He was sent to school at Stoke
Newington, England, attended a private school in Richmond, and entered
the University of Virginia, but remained there less than a year, for
his reckless and erratic temperament champed under the restraints of
routine. He was placed in Mr. Allan’s counting-room, but ran away to
enlist in the United States Army as “Edgar Allan Perry.” After the
death of Mrs. Allan, her husband secured Poe’s discharge from the army
and his appointment to West Point as a cadet, July 1, 1830; but after
six months Poe contrived to be dismissed. He had already published
his poems successfully, so he went to New York, in the early part of
1831, to begin his professional literary life. For four years--1833
to 1837--he wrote brilliantly for _The Southern Literary Messenger_,
in Baltimore. Then he went successively to New York and Philadelphia,
where he worked on various literary enterprises for six years. In 1844
he returned to New York, and became assistant to N. P. Willis, in whose
journal, _The Mirror_, “The Raven” appeared in 1845. Poe’s literary
reputation was now established both in America and abroad, most of his
masterpieces having been created during the turbulent years of his
wanderings. In 1835 he had been married to Virginia Clemm, his cousin,
and her early death in 1847 broke his spirit. His health had already
succumbed to his morbid temperament--which magnified every sorrow of
his chaotic career--and to the excesses of drugs and drink. He died
most unhappily, October 7, 1849, at the age of forty--a master spirit
pitifully wrecked before his prime.
Poe was a remarkable poet, essayist, critic, and short-story writer.
“The Raven,” “Lenore,” “Ulalume,” “The Bells,” “Annabel Lee,”
“Israfel,” and “To One in Paradise” are among his best poems. Probably
the greatest of his stories are, “MS. Found in A Bottle,” “The
Assignation,” “Ligeia,” “The Murders in The Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery
of Marie Rogêt,” “A Descent into The Maelstrom,” “The Masque of The Red
Death,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Gold Bug,” “The Black Cat,”
“The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” first
published in _Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine_, September, 1839--and “The
Purloined Letter,” first published in _The Gift_, an “annual,” in 1845.
Poe was the greatest conscious artist that American literature has
ever known. He not only looked backward upon his own work and, as
did Stevenson, clearly traced the operations of his mind in its
production, but he built up a structure of literary theory which has
been powerfully attacked, indeed, but whose walls remain substantially
whole to-day. To his constructive criticism of the short-story is
directly due its present advanced form, for while current practice
has widely departed from Poe’s morbid, gloomy, extravagant themes and
formal, abundant diction, his stories are still unsurpassed for vigor,
atmosphere, invention, and thrill, and his laws of composition are read
everywhere with the respect due authority.
Ah, dream too bright to last!
Ah, starry Hope, that didst arise
But to be overcast!
A voice from out the Future cries,
“Onward!”--but o’er the Past
(Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies,
Mute--motionless--aghast!
EDGAR ALLAN POE, _The Assignation_.
Had you lived a generation later, honor, wealth, applause, success
in Europe and at home, would all have been yours.--ANDREW LANG,
_Letters to Dead Authors_.
There are literary evolutionists who, in their whim of seeing in
every original writer a copy of some predecessor, have declared
that Hawthorne is derived from Tieck, and Poe from Hoffmann....
If the adjective American has any meaning at all, it qualifies
Poe and Hawthorne. They were American to the core. They both
revealed the curious sympathy with Oriental moods of thought
which is often an American characteristic. Poe, with his cold
logic and his mathematical analysis, and Hawthorne, with his
introspective conscience and his love of the subtle and the
invisible, are representative of phases of American character not
to be mistaken by any one who has given thought to the influence
of nationality.... Nothing better of its kind has ever been done
than the “Pit and the Pendulum,” or than the “Fall of the House
of Usher” (which has been compared aptly with Browning’s “Childe
Roland to the Dark Tower Came” for its power of suggesting
intellectual desolation). Nothing better of its kind has ever been
done than the “Gold Bug,” or than the “Purloined Letter,” or than
the “Murders in the Rue Morgue.”--BRANDER MATTHEWS, _The Philosophy
of the Short-story_.
The conception of gloomy terror which impregnates “The House of
Usher” is as complete as the idea of medieval chivalry underlying
_Ivanhoe_.... To be sure, the terror in his stories, so he said in
his preface to the _Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque_, was
“not of Germany, but of the soul....” Yet one can readily believe
that his Roderick in “The House of Usher,” who pored over books
which had the “character of phantasm,” Morella, who was interested
in the transcendentalism of Schelling and Fichte, Ægæus, whom “the
realities of the world affected--as visions,” are all identical
with the Young Poe when he freed his mind and later his fancy in
the fields where Novalis sought the blue flower and all the German
romanticists wandered.... To say that Poe was a creature of German
influence would be absurd. To say that German thought and fancy
were sympathetic to his genius, would be putting it too mildly.
Between these extremes the truth must lie.--H. S. CANBY, _The Short
Story in English_.
FURTHER REFERENCES FOR READING ON POE
_Prose Writers of America_, Rufus W. Griswold (1870); _Short Studies
of American Authors_, Thomas W. Higginson (1880); _Letters to Dead
Authors_, Andrew Lang (1886); _Criticisms on Contemporary Thought_,
Richard H. Hutton (1894); _American Lands and Letters_, Donald G.
Mitchell (1897-99); _Life of Edgar Allan Poe_, R. H. Stoddard (1899);
_Poe and Some of His Critics_, C. W. Hubner (1906); _Life of Edgar
Allan Poe, Personal and Literary_, George E. Woodberry (1909); _Edgar
Allan Poe, A Critical Study_, Arthur Ransome (1910).
THE PURLOINED LETTER
Nil sapientiae odiosius acumina nimio.--_Seneca._
(Nothing is more odious to wisdom than too great acumen.)
BY EDGAR ALLAN POE
[Sidenote: FORMAL INTRODUCTION.]
[Sidenote: Dupin appears as the detective in Poe’s other mystery
stories, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and “The Mystery of Marie
Rogêt.”]
[Sidenote: _Au troisième_--third flight, or fourth floor.]
[Sidenote: Compare this story with Sardou’s “A Scrap of Paper.”]
[Sidenote: G---- also appears in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.”]
At Paris, just after dark one gusty evening in the autumn of 18--, I
was enjoying the twofold luxury of meditation and a meerschaum, in
company with my friend C. Auguste Dupin, in his little back library,
or book closet, _au troisième, No. 33 Rue Dunôt, Faubourg St.
Germain_. For one hour at least we had maintained a profound silence;
while each, to any casual observer, might have seemed intently and
exclusively occupied with the curling eddies of smoke that oppressed
the atmosphere of the chamber. For myself, however, I was mentally
discussing certain topics which had formed matter for conversation
between us at an earlier period of the evening; I mean the affair of
the Rue Morgue, and the mystery attending the murder of Marie Rogêt. I
looked upon it, therefore, as something of a coincidence, when the door
of our apartment was thrown open and admitted our old acquaintance,
Monsieur G----, the Prefect of the Parisian police.
[Sidenote: Careless English.]
2. We gave him a hearty welcome; for there was nearly half as much
of the entertaining as of the contemptible about the man, and we had
not seen him for several years. We had been sitting in the dark, and
Dupin now arose for the purpose of lighting a lamp, but sat down again,
without doing so, upon G----'s saying that he had called to consult
us, or rather to ask the opinion of my friend, about some official
business which had occasioned a great deal of trouble.
3. “If it is any point requiring reflection,” observed Dupin, as he
forbore to enkindle the wick, “we shall examine it to better purpose
in the dark.”
[Sidenote: Later writers of detective stories follow Poe’s lead in
showing contempt for police officials.]
4. “That is another of your odd notions,” said the Prefect, who had a
fashion of calling everything “odd” that was beyond his comprehension,
and thus lived amid an absolute legion of “oddities.”
5. “Very true,” said Dupin, as he supplied his visitor with a pipe, and
rolled towards him a comfortable chair.
6. “And what is the difficulty now?” I asked. “Nothing more in the
assassination way, I hope?”
7. “Oh, no; nothing of that nature. The fact is, the business is _very_
simple, indeed, and I make no doubt that we can manage it sufficiently
well ourselves; but then I thought Dupin would like to hear the details
of it, because it is so excessively _odd_.”