Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/262

242 triumph of the story was to inhere not in the individual artistry of its three elements but in the higher artistry that, in blending the trinity, should make it illustrative of and convergent upon an irresistible unity. "In the presence of every question, considered independently and by itself," says General Foch, "ask yourselves first, What is the objective?" It was precisely this question that Poe made central and controlling in the technique of the short story, and the history of the short story has ever since been divided into just two stages of development, before Poe and after.

To feel the full import of Poe's doctrine of convergence, think once more through the old traditional "laws" or "rules" of the drama, the epic, the novel, the essay, and especially the public address, anciently called the oration. Would not these forms be vitalized by the same fusing and re-creating process? Has there not grown up about each of them a corpus of rules that has become an end in itself? Confront them with the question, "What effect, what objective, what impassioned purpose, what vision and what visualized audience called you into being?" and the complacent answer would be, "None at all. We are conformists. We point backward to the canons of a long-perfected art, not forward to a merely projected effect." The time is coming when, even if the short story as a separate type of literature should perish, Poe's distinction will live in the energized life that it will have imparted to every form of human effort that seeks a definite and progressive goal. So far from making technique disproportionately controlling, Poe's