This distinction can best be seen in examples; thus Maupassant's Vain Beauty is a short story, and A Piece of String by the same author is a tale. There is a difference in the extent of the narratives, and there is a differ ence in the value of the respective incidents upon which the narratives are based. A Piece of String could not be ex panded by " complications and diversities of many episodes and details " without attributing to the incident " an import ance which, socially and historically, it does not possess." But the incident in Vain Beauty might be expanded without investing it with an undue importance. It is curious that M. Bruneti^re (whose notes on the NOUVELLE I have been quoting), does not make a distinction between the short story and the tale. His notes apply to the tale rather than to the short story. Yet though the substance of the tale is amongst " peculiarities or variations of passion," it is not the less effective on this account. It is the most ancient of compositions, the most wide-spread, the most immediately interesting; through its brevity it can be made the most perfect of prose forms. Edgar Allan Poe was well aware of the high place that the tale must always hold in literature, and his intimate knowledge of exceptional things, together with his sense of form and language, have enabled him to produce some of the world's best tales— The Cask of Amontillado, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Gold Bug, William Wilson, Ligeia. In The Murders in the Rut Morgu*

and in The Gold Bug, Poe brought a new and fascinating method into the narrative—a method which has been re-discovered in our own day and used with much public success. The Cask of A montillado, The Pit and the Pendulum, and Ligeia are so rounded and so perfect that they offer no crevice for the critical knife. William Wilson is perhaps the least impeccable of these tales; one notices a certain staginess here—a theatricality that flaunts out in the speech of the last encounter. " Scoundrel," I said, in a voice husky with rage ..." Scoundrel, impostor, accursed villain! You shall not— you shall not dog me unto death! Follow me, or I will stab you where you stand." The theatricality in this speech is but the excess of a quality shown abundantly in William Wilson —the quality of drama tisation. All the speeches carry across the footlights and all the situations are visualised as if for the stage. But the situa tions and speeches in William Wilson are not the most notice able instance of Poe's faculty for dramatisation. There is that memorable scene which prepares the reader for the tragic return of the Lady Madeline in The Fall of the House of Usher. This scene is conceived as a dramatist would conceive it. The reading of the romance, the stressing of the passages which correspond with the unseen drama is a device well known to the dramatist. Poe has the dramatist's faculty for projecting situations and he has also the faculty of anticipating difficul ties that are peculiar to the dramatic action. Several instances of this could be given from the tales that follow—instances of that suspended or retrospective action which is more necessary in a play than in a narrative. The theatre would, I am con vinced, have given full scope for Poe's genius. He could not have reached it through his poetic talent, but he could have reached it through the invention which he has shown hi The Cask of Amontillado. Poe could have done perfectly a form of work which perhaps he had no models for at the time—the " thrill " of the French vaudeville. It is a matter for regret that he did not come into contact with the theatre; for, with his delight hi novelty, with his wonderful ingenuity, he could have added many devices to the dramatist's stock. But his spirit has not been quite shut out from the theatre. Surely the dramatist of the Plays for Marionettes owes a good deal to The House of Usher, with its elaborate atmosphere, and its remote and agonising situations.

In considering the drama of The Fall of the House of Usher, we are brought into contact with Poe's dominant idea. Part

of this idea is expressed explicitly in his favourite tale, Ligeia. Ligeia belongs to that group of studies of which Eleanor a is the most charming, Berenice the most repulsive, and Moretta the least noteworthy. Ligeia is less a tale than a prose poem; it is a reverie, a meditation upon that mystical sentence of Joseph Glanville's—" And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigour ? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness.