We may note in this connection the peculiar nature of convincingly uncanny or eerie effects in literature. They are borderline effects, depending for their force on what is not said rather than what is said, on suggestion, insinuation and reserve rather than on whimsical elaboration. They require realism and rationality as their background and starting-point, precisely because they consist in the confounding of reason. But reason and realism must be there to be confounded. This point was made by Freud in one of his most interesting papers, The Uncanny (Das Unheimliche,1919). Using as his chief example a story (The Sandman) by Kleist’s near-contemporary E.T.A. Hoffmann, he attempts to interpret psychologically that type of experience or situation which we commonly describe as ‘uncanny’ and the literary effect that corresponds to it. Essentially, as he shows, an uncanny phenomenon is something quite ‘impossible’ which intrudes into the ‘real’ world of common sense: the recrudescence (or apparent recrudescence) of a primitive magical world which the adult rational consciousness has taught itself to repudiate. It is in this sense impossible, for instance, that the dead should still be alive, that one and the same person or thing should simultaneously be in two different places or should both exist and not exist. Thus, the strictly uncanny effect cannot be achieved in a work of literature which is wholly fantastic, such as a straightforward fairy-story; there must be a realistic background or frame of reference, the norms of which are at one point inexplicably breached by the re-emergence into it of the impossible, repudiated world. It follows that the ghost-story is the uncanny story par excellence. The Beggarwoman of Locarno is a ghost-story, a miniature masterpiece of the uncanny genre, wholly succeeding in the area in which Michael Kohlhaas has failed, and surpassing anything that had been or was to be achieved by Hoffmann or any of the other writers commonly classified as Romantics, not excepting The Sandman, which is itself an outstanding exception. If Michael Kohlhaas achieves dramatic effect by sheer cumulative power and urgent flow, The Beggarwoman of Locarno does so by brilliant concentration and organization. In one of his most penetrating essays in literary analysis, Emil Staiger has shown that this brief story is an integrated microcosm of interacting functional parts, an intellectual whole exactly similar in principle to one of Kleist’s long complex sentences with its multiplicity of subordinated, functionally interrelated elements. As at the level of grammatical structure, so at that of narrative composition, the organizing mind of the dramatist is reflected: what goes before prepares what is to come, what comes recalls what has gone before. Unobtrusively, without recourse to any conventional devices of atmospheric description, tension and suspense are generated, an explosive climax carefully prepared. Details are included for the significance they later take on: at the beginning of the story, for example, when the Marquis roughly tells the old beggarwoman to spare him the sight of her by crossing the room to lie down again behind the stove, the direction in which she is to move across the room is mentioned, implying apparently no more than an irritable gesture of the Marquis’s hand; and this, as we later discover, is the very direction in which her ghost will move, night after night, from one corner of the room to the other. But not only the mind of the dramatist is betokened by this story – it is also the Kleistian mind which incessantly seeks, like Kohlhaas, to impose a rational pattern on a world which in reality moves by a different dynamic. In this particular case the eeriness is increased by the fact that the Marquis, when he becomes aware of the haunting, nevertheless does not seem to remember the comparatively trivial incident of his inhospitable behaviour to the old woman who is now avenging herself so strangely. He does not identify the audible but invisible ghost, and his rational intellect, despite mounting evidence, refuses to acknowledge its incomprehensible reality. The climax comes when, at his third and final attempt to establish the truth, he is accompanied by his dog, a creature whose perceptions are not limited by human rational consciousness. As Staiger points out, Kleist highlights this dramatic turning-point by dropping the hypotactic sentence-structure and also by moving into the historic-present tense (this stylistic device cannot be satisfactorily reproduced in English). The dog, as soon as it hears the ghost, also sees it, and backs away from it in obvious terror, across the room, towards the corner in which the woman had died. The Marquis, though panic-stricken, still remains uncomprehending, but his reason gives way and he destroys both the house and himself. He is following the remorseless logic of an obsession, falling victim to a world which in an unaccountable way refuses to forget what his conscious mind refuses to remember. On this analysis there seems to be not only a particular subtlety in Kleist’s art, but also an especially close correlation between his art and his self-destructive psychological make-up.

In St Cecilia, as in The Beggarwoman of Locarno, his management of the ‘uncanny’ element is again very much more skilful than in Michael Kohlhaas. The irruption of the inexplicable into an otherwise explicable world is here again very far from seeming to be a mere whimsical and stylistically alien digression: instead, it is once more the precise centre and appalling pointe of the whole tale. St Cecilia or The Power of Music (to give it its full title) is described by the author as ‘a legend’: it tells of a miracle supposedly performed by St Cecilia, the patron saint of music and also of a Catholic convent which existed (in the story, though apparently not in historical fact) in Aachen in the sixteenth century. The convent is threatened with destruction by a mob of Protestant iconoclasts; the riot is planned to start during the solemn Mass on the day of Corpus Christi, and the ringleaders are four brothers who with numerous followers have mingled with the congregation at the service which the Abbess, despite knowledge of the danger, insists on holding. An ancient and impressive setting of the Mass by an unknown Italian composer is performed in circumstances which turn out later to have been very mysterious.