Modern Language Studies

Poe's Landscape of the Soul: Association Theory and "The Fall of the House of Usher"Author(s): Barton Levi St. ArmandSource: Modern Language Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Autumn, 1977), pp. 32-41Published by: Modern Language StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3194363Accessed: 29/10/2010 03:39

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Poe's Landscape of the Soul: Association Theory and "The Fall of the House of Usher"

Barton Levi St. Armand

In a short and succinct tale of topographical horror entitled "The Children of the Pool," the modern British master of weird fiction, Arthur Machen, concludes his narration on a scientific note when he writes that: "I was reading a few days ago, in a review of a grave book on psychology, the following very striking sentences:"

The things which we distinguish as qualities or values are inherent in the real environment to make the configuration that they do make with our sensory response to them. There is such a thing as a "sad" landscape, even when we who look at it are feeling jovial; and if we think it is "sad" only because we attribute to it something derived from our own past as- sociations with sadness, Professor Koffka gives us good reason to regard the view as superficial. That is not imputing human attributes to what are described as "demand characters" in the environment, but giving proper recognition to the other end of a nexus, of which only one end is organised in our own mind.'

The grave book on psychology, as Machen later admits, is Kurt Koffka's monumental Principles of Gestalt Psychology (1935), which counters a purely behavioral or physioiogical view of reality by an attempt to establish the existence of the Ego as a viable entity, as part of a kinetic environmental field. The Ego is admittedly the "hero" of Koffka's study, and he condemns modern texts which "give you to understand that psy- chology has nothing to do with the Ego or the Self, that the Self has to dis- appear from psychology as completely as. the soul."2 In attempting to es- tablish the power of the Ego and to define the "boundary membrane" which holds the Ego together and separates it from the rest of the field, Koffka raises the problem of landscape. He argues that our emotions are not purely subjective responses but, rather, belong to parts of the en- vironmental field as well as to our Ego. These emotions are not purely Ego-related, not completely subjective, since "we may see a gloomy land- scape, even when we ourselves are perfectly cheerful; may not a poplar look proud, a young birch shy, and has not Wordsworth immortalized the glee of the daffodils! Traditional psychology will retort: it is you who have projected these feelings into those objects of nature; you cannot seriously uphold that a landscape is really sad, that the daffodils are really gleeful. You endow these objects with your own emotions by the process called empathy" (p. 326). In a somewhat scholastic fashion, Koffka goes on to demolish this revival of the pathetic fallacy by pointing out that the con- cept of empathy itself is not directly verifiable since it assumes the subjec-

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tivity of the emotions and so cannot enter into a psychological discussion as a viable postulate. To Koffka, "Sadness and glee, and the other charac- teristics we have employed, apply in these descriptions primarily to the behavioural objects, and not to the geographical ones." That, in some cases, the emotions may therefore be carried by behavioral objects as well as the Self leads to a further demonstration that "they may enter other units in the field as well as that unit which we call the Ego" (p. 327). Q.E.D.: the Ego exists, and landscapes can be sad.

Luckily, Machen himself seems not to have delved too deeply into Koffka's magnlum opus and Gestalt psychology's tortuous rhetoric, for he confesses that "Psychology is, I am sure, a difficult and subtle science, which, perhaps naturally, must be expressed in subtle and difficult lan- guage" (p. 334). He merely gathers from the review that "the profound Professor Koffka . .. insists that the 'sadness' which we attribute to a par- ticular landscape is really and efficiently in the landscape and not merely in ourselves; and consequently that the landscape can affect us and pro- duce results in us, in precisely the same manner as drugs and meat and drink affect us in their several ways" (p. 335). Machen then adds the sig- nificant aside that "Poe, who knew many secrets, knew this, and taught that landscape gardening was as truly a fine art as poetry or painting; since it availed to communicate the mysteries to the human spirit."

It is precisely these mysteries, the mysteries of Poe's landscape of the soul, which I should briefly like to explore here. To do so properly, however, I must reexamine the ancient academic debate which lies be- hind Professor Koffka's Principles of Gestalt Psychology, a debate which, while varying in its terminology down through the ages, remains fixed in its essential polarities and principles. For this is the debate over the rela- tion between the ideal and the real, soul and body, spirit and matter, noumenon and phenomenon. Emily Dickinson brought the discussion sharply down to earth when in 1862 she wrote, somewhat facetiously,

To hear an Oriole sing May be a common thing- Or only a divine

It is not of the Bird Who sings the same, unheard, As unto Crowd-

The Fashion of the Ear Attireth that it hear in Dun, or fair-

So whether it be Rune, Or whether it be none Is of within.

The "Tune is in the Tree-" The Skeptic-showeth me- "No Sir! In Thee!" (J 526)3

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Here, Dickinson comes down squarely on the side of subjectivity, of the Ego, of individual vision. The Self is sovereign in its selfhood; there exists for her no ambiguity about environmental field or behavioral ob- jects. The experience of the oriole's song is common or divine solely ac- cording to the mood of the auditor; the inner completely triumphs over the outer; the I is all. Dickinson found support for her bumptious Romantic egoism in Emerson, who wrote in his 1836 "Nature" that "Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population."4 Yet, what of the confusion of the anonymous narrator of "The Fall of the House of Usher," who is presumably laboring under no calamity, has lost by death no dear friend, experiences sensations neither common nor divine but en- ters the environmental field of Poe's tale as a kind of Lockean tabula rasa? Why, then, should the landscape of Usher impart its ineffably sad mood to him, unless in reality the landscape itself is sad or feels sad?

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of coun- try, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was-lbut, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable

gloom pervaded m!i spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unre- lieved b) any of that half-pleasurable, 1)ecause poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural ilmages of the desolate or terrible.5

The narrator's puzzlement, I would suggest, can only be fully un- derstood in the light of late eighteenth-centurv theories of perception-of vision, if you will-which were presented in terms very much like those of that behaviorism which Professor Koffka attelmpted to fight on its own

ground in his Principles of Gestalt P.sychology. These theories of vision can be grouped under the general heading of the philosophy of As- sociationism, a mode of thought which took its impetus fiom Lockean

empiricism and which was refined by such theorists as David Hartley, Ar- chibald Alison, and Dugald Stewart.6 As Wylie Sy pher writes in a chapter entitled "Psychological Picturesque: Association and Reverie" in his suggestive study Rococo to Cubism in Art and Literatfure: In its early phases this psychology is mechanistic nearly behavioristic; butt it was changed by Coleridge and the romantics to an 'organic' theory of imagina- tion, a power to envision another higher order of reality; or even to create it, as in a dream."7 Briefly and somewhat crudely put, the gist of As- sociationist theory (if'we keep at hand our exemlplum of the "sad" land-

scape) predicates that we feel sad when viewing the landscape because the landscape is a stimulus which triggers a definite response, a response not automatic but subtly cumulative. Our initial sensation is like a needle dipped into a chemical solution, the human mem(ory, about which certain

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particles of experience or trains of images cluster and crystallize. The complex, kaleidoscopic relationships and associations between and among these clusters or trains of thought then produce that reverie which results in sadness itself. The clusters have both personal and general characteris- tics, and reverie involves the particular pleasures of private recollection as well as an overall emotional appreciation for larger aesthetic categories such as the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque. These larger categories are, in turn, determined by a received tradition of historical and cultural associations; and the deeper one's knowledge of such culti- vated associations, the more pleasurable, stimulating, and tasteful be- come one's emotional responses. As Archibald Alison writes in what Sypher calls "the most influential book on associationist aesthetic," his Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (first published in 1790):

. . .when we feel either the beautx or stlulimit\ of natural scenery-the gay lustre of a morning in spring, or the mild radiance of a summer eve-

ning, the savage majesty of a wvintry storm, or the wild magnificence of a

tempestuous ocean-we are conscious of a variety of images in our

minds, verv different from those which the objects themselves can pre- sent to the eve. Trains of pleasing or of solemn thought arise spontane- ously within our minds: our hearts swell with emotions, of which the ob-

jects before us seem to afford no adequate cause; and we are never so mluch satiated with delight, as when, in recalling our attention, we are unable to trace either the progress or the connexion of those thoughts, which have passed with so mllch rapidity through our imagination.8

If we take Alison's associationist theory as a guide to the emotions

experienced by the narrator of "The Fall of the House of Usher," we are able in some degree to understand his perplexity. For the narrator's anal-

ysis of those "trains of thought" stimulated by his sight of the configura- tion of Usher's landscape leads neither to delight nor to reverie nor to

proper aesthetic responses like the sublime, the beautiful, or the pic- turesque. It leads only to an all-engulfing sadness:

I looked upon tle scene i)efobre me-upoi the mere house, and the sim- ple landscape featu-res of' tle domaiin-uilpo the bleak walls-upon the vacant eve-like windows-tupon a f'ew rank sedges-and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees-with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation miolre properly than to the after- dream of' the reveller upoll opilum-the bitter lapse into every-day life-the hidleous dropping off of thle veil. There was an iciness, a sink-

ing, a sickeilng of the heart--an umnredeemed dreariness of thought wxhich no goadin of' tie imagination could torture into aught of the sub- lime. (p. 224)

The landscape has produced an effect, and the narrator, a con- firmed rationalist, cannot account fl r this effect, given the commonsense basis of association theory. The respon se-overwhelming melancholy-is totally disproportioned to the stimulus-the "mere house" and its admit-

tedly simple, empty, blank environment. He might feel such precipitous

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despair if confronted with the mighty ruins of the temple at Karnak or the desoluation of the Roman campagna, but his inability to follow out or un- tangle the present gloomy train of his thought paradoxically causes him to retreat to an even more limited behavioral approach:

What was it-I paused to think-what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I re- flected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down-but with a shudder even more thrilling than before-upon the remodelled and in- verted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the va- cant and eye-like windows. (p. 224)

An extremely important psychological experiment has taken place at this point.9 Associationism, the eighteenth-century version of be- havioral psychology, has been weighed in the balance and found wanting. The power of the landscape does not simply reside in the combination or association of its separate elements, arranged in a certain pattern or manner, which produces a corresponding resonance in the mind of its be- holder: it resides in the landscape itself. The landscape is sad; its very essence is of melancholy and dolor and dread, for Usher's domain possesses a soul and not merely a self. 10 By inverting the elements of the landscape in the reflecting pool of the tarn, the narrator had hoped to rearrange the entire gestalt, so to speak, of his environmental field and his Ego-relations to it. But the experiment fails, since his melancholy only grows more acute when seen through this strange glass, darkly. Unlike those Roman- tics mentioned by Sypher who used associationism as a means of crossing the bridge from empiricism to transcendentalism, Poe's narrator is being shaped by the imagination of the landscape rather than exercising the shaping power of his own imagination. As his remarks about the opium addict indicate, he fears the dream and the vision in the dream, yet he is being drawn inextricably into a world as fantastic as that in Coleridge's opium-inspired "Kubla Kahn." The transition is from the world of com- monsense perception to the realm of the visionary, from the natural to the supernatural, from faith in the real to a superstition of the unreal:

I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish experiment- that of looking down within the tarn-had been to deepen the first singu- lar impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition-for why should I not so term it?- served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis. And it

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might have been for this reason only, that, when I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy-a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I but mention it to show the vivid force of the sensations which oppressed me. I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity-an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn-a pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, slug- gish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued. (p. 225-226)

The atmosphere which the narrator feels is emanating from the

landscape of Usher makes that landscape not only a simple configuration of natural objects but, rather a true Self, an Ego, a thing that is alive and which breathes. The landscape is sad, and the narrator, rather than im-

parting his own sadness to it or conjuring up trains of sad thoughts and clusters of sad images as a response to its demand characters, empathizes with that sadness, in a way he can neither fathom nor explain away. Thus, the landscape of Usher is not merely a simulacrum of the narrator's

psychic state-a landscape of the soul; it is a landscape with feelings of its own-a landscape with a soul. This is that "other end of the nexus" men- tioned fleetingly in the review of Professor Koffka's Principles of Gestalt Psychology quoted by Arthur Machen. To early Romantics like Wordsworth, there was a spirit in the wood, and sounding cataracts haunted like a passion. Yet, for Wordsworth, associationism remained a two-way path, a means of revelatory transcendance as well as a means of strategic retreat toward a pleasing recollection in tranquillity. For late, even unwilling, Romantics like Poe and Emily Dickinson, who were seized by the landscape unaware, the bridges of rationality and the se- cure, commonsense world it created collapsed completely once they had crossed into the borderland of the visionary'. As Machen writes, "if there is a landscape of sadness, there is certainly also a landscape of a horror of darkness and evil," for this is but the natural corollaiy to a theory which assumes that nature possesses a spirit as well as a Self, that it is, in some measure, conscious and alive. Poe's narrator, a rationalist to the end, re- fuses to accept the full conclusions of his failed experiment in as- sociationism because such acceptance would ally him directly with Roderick Usher, who believes in the sentience of all things.11 More par- ticularly, Roderick believes that this sentience is fulfilled in the special gestalt expressed by the arrangement of the stones of his house, "in the method of collocation of these stones-in the order of their arrangement" (p. 232). Roderick accepts as evidence of this sentience "the graduate yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and house" (p. 233) but Roderick is, of course-and has to be, if the narrator is to retain his own Scottish Commnon-Sense sanity-a madman. Poe's narrator dismisses his own "strange fancy" about the peculiar, local-color character of the atmosphere of the House of Usher, "Shaking off fiom his spirit" what "must have been a dream" (p. 226). Emily Dickinson, who at last joined Roderick in believing that "much madness is divinest sense,"

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sought a different means of coping with the uncanny realm of visionary experience. Accepting the "mystery all insoluble" of the sentient land- scape,12 in 1876 she enclosed a cryptic note to T.W. Higginson stating that "Nature is a Haunted House-but Art-a House that tries to be Haunted."13 Higginson's sanity was above reproach; perhaps this is only one of many reasons why her preceptor, a few months later, was tempted to call her "my partially cracked poetess at Amherst."14

Brown University

FOOTNOTES

1. Arthur Machen, "The Children of the Pool," in Tales of Horror and the Supernatural, ed. by Philip Van Doren Stern (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), p. 334.

2. Kurt Koffka, Principles of Gestalt Psychology (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1935), p. 319.

3. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1960), p. 257.

4. R.W. Emerson, "Nature," in Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. by Reginald L. Cook (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), p. 6.

5. E.A. Poe, "The Fall of the House of Usher," in Introduction to Poe: A Thema- tic Reader, ed. by Eric W. Carlson (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1967), pp. 223-224.

6. A check of Burton R. Pollin's Dictionary of Names and Titles in Poe's Col- lected Works (New York: Da Capo Press, 1968) for the names of leading As- sociationists and members of the Scottish Common-Sense school yields little but incidental or passing mentions of such figures as Dugald Stewart and Abraham Tucker, while Hartley and Alison do not appear at all. There is, however, a significant reference to the school in Poe's famous "Exordium," published in Graham's Magazine for January of 1842. In this New Year's man- ifesto, in which Poe attempts to establish literary criticism as a science, de- ploring both the uncritical nativism of American book reviewers and the foreign tendency to convert true criticism into "diffuse" essays, "dogmatising pamphlets," and "vague generalization" (what today might be called the "review-essay"), he writes:

And what need we say of the Germans?-what of Winckelmann, of Novalis, of Schelling, of Goethe, of Augustus William, and of Fred- erick Schlegel?-that their magnificent critiques raisonnees differ from those of Kames, of Johnson, and of Blair, in principle not at all, (for the principles of these artists will not fail until Nature herself expires,) but solely in their more careful elaboration, their greater thoroughness, their more profound analysis and application of the principles themselves. (Complete Works [Virginia Edition], ed. by James A. Harrison [New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1902], Vol. XI, p. 5)

That Poe would link the names of the leading lights of the influential modern German school to such important Common-Sense advocates as Henry Home, Lord Kames (allthor of Elemlents of Criticisml [1762]) and Hugh Blair (author of Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres [1783]) seems to indicate that he

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possessed more than a superficial knowledge of eighteenth-century British critical theory and more than an ordinary admiration for it (see Margeret Al- terton, Origins of Poe's Critical Theory [Iowa City: University of Iowa Humanistic Studies, Vol. II, #3, 1925], p. 74, N. 20). She also suggests that Poe "may have caught added suggestions for coupling beauty with disease" from Alison's Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste and notes that Ali- son was frequently reviewed in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (p. 24). Al- terton points as well to Poe's probable familiarity with the works of Dugald Stewart (p. 99). Robert D. Jacobs, in his Poe: Journalist and Critic (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), calls the influence of the Scottish Common-Sense School on Pde "covert, representing as it does a body of opinion that was taken for granted" (p. 21). "Nevertheless," he as- serts, "the influence is there, and it furnished Poe with some of his basic ar- guments about the nature of the human mind and, in turn, about the origin and effect of aesthetic feeling." Taking this as a first premise, Jacobs includes detailed discussions of the probable influence of Stewart, Kames, Blair, and Alison on Poe's most important critical writings (see especially Chapters 1, 2, 12, and 13). For important surveys of the general influence of Scottish Common-Sense philosophy on American thought, see William Charvat's chapter on "Scottish Sources," in The Origins of American Critical Thought: 1810-1835 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1936), pp. 27-28, and Terence Martin, The Instructed Vision: Scottish Common Sense Philoso- phy and the Origins of American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961).

7. Wylie Sypher, Rococo to Cubism in Art and Literature (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), p. 92. For other relevant discussions of Association theory, see Walter Jackson Bate's chapter on "The Growth of Individualism: The Premise of the Association of Ideas," in From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946), pp. 93-128, and Donald A. Ringe's "Introduction," to The Pictorial Mode: Space and Time in the Art of Bryant, Irving and Cooper (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1971), pp. 1-15. Ringe notes that "the influ- ence of such men as Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, and Archibald Alison was all-pervasive throughout [the early nineteenth centurn] and strongly affected both the thought and the style of the first generation of American romantic artists." Of Alison in particular, he writes, "the influence of his ideas is ev- erywhere apparent in the prose and verse of the period" (p. 3).

8. Archibald Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (Hartford, Conn.: George Goodwin & Sons, 1821), p. 18.

9. In an intriguing and important essay entitled "Poe and the Gothic," in Papers on Poe: Essays in Honor of John Ward Ostrom, ed. by Richard P. Veler (Springfield, Ohio: Chantry Music Press, Inc., 1972), Clark Griffith has touched upon the internalization of Gothic conventions which occurs in Poe's tales. He discusses the Lockean base of eighteenth-century British Gothic and describes the reaction of the narrator at the beginning of "The Fall of the House of Usher" when he examines the landscape from the "new perspec- tive" of the tarn. Griffith holds that "nothing happens" as a result of this change because, ultimately, the Ushers (and, by implication, the landscape) are totally "products of the narrator's psyche . . . a working out of his own, dark, tabooed, and otherwise inexpressible desires" (p. 24). My contention is that, precisely because nothing happens (save for an acceleration of the narrator's sensations of terror and gloom), the rest of the tale is a dramatic struggle between eighteenth-century Common-Sense theory and

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nineteenth-century, Romantic, visionary speculation, which the narrator re- sists up to and beyond Usher's "catastrophe" (i.e., in the telling of the tale it- self). Griffith goes on to say that "every subsequent event in 'Usher' is pre- pared for by an opening tableau in which the power to terrorize could not be blotted from the landscape, because it had actually been brought into the landscape by the mind of the narrator" (pp. 24-25). The other possibility, explored in this paper, is that the landscape itself contains the power to ter- rorize the narrator's psyche.

10. As T.O. Mabbott has written ("H.P. Lovecraft: An Appreciation," in Mar- ginalia, by H. P. Lovecraft, collected by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei [Sauk City, Wise.: Arkham House, 1944], p. 339), it was the American fan- tasist H.P. Lovecraft who first noted (in his study Supernatural Horror in Literature [1927]) that Poe's tale "displays an abnormally linked trinity of entities at the end of a long and isolated family history-a brother, his twin sister, and their incredibly ancient house all sharing a single soul and meeting one common dissolution at the same moment" (Supernatural Horror in Lit- erature, intro. by E.F. Bleler [New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1973], p. 58). It is my contention that Lovecraft's statement should be extended to in- clude the landscape of Usher as well.

11. In his sketch, "The Island of the Fay" (1841), Poe writes of"the happiness ex-

perienced in the contemplation of natural scenery" and presents the following full-fledged testament to the sentience of the landscape:

To me, at least, the presence-not of human life only-but of life in any other form than that of the green things which grow upon the soil and are voiceless-is a stain upon the landscape-is at war with the genius of the scene. I love, indeed, to regard the dark valleys, and the gray rocks, and the waters that silently smile, and the forests that sigh in uneasy slumbers, and the proud watchful mountains that look down upon all-I love to regard these as them- selves but the colossal members of one vast and sentient whole-a whole whose form (that of the sphere) is the most perfect and most inclusive of all; whose path is among associate planets; whose meek handmaiden is the moon; whose mediate sovereign is the sun; whose life is eternity; whose thought is that of a God; whose enjoy- ment is knowledge; whose destinies are lost in immensity; whose

cognizance of ourselves is akin with our own cognizance of the animalculae which infest the brain-a being which we, in conse- quence, regard as purely inanimate and material, much in the same manner as these animalculae must thus regard us. (Introduction to Poe, p. 160)

In the introduction to The Short Fiction of Edgar Allen Poe: An Annotated Edition (ed. by Stuart and Susan Levine [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1976]), Stuart Levine writes that "To an occultist, the world is alive, sacred, and an organic whole" (p. xx), while he cites "The Island of the Fay" as a tale in which "The occult world-view is extremely explicit" (p. 3). From this perspective, the drama of"The Fall of the House of Usher" is the narrator's refusal to become an occultist or one of what Levine calls "visionaries, or, if you will, occult saints" (p. 3). 12. See, for example, poem J 627, where Dickinson speaks of:

The eager look-on Landscapes- As if they just repressed

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Some Secret-that was pushing Like Chariiots-il the Vest

13. The Letters of E mlily Dickinson, ed. hv Tlhoma,s H. Johnson and Theodora \Vard (Cambl)ridge, Nass.: Harllard University Press, 1970), Vol. II, p. 554.

14. Jay Leyda, The Ycar,s land Hours of Emlill Dickin.so (Haidein, Conn.: Ar- chon Books, 1970), p. 263.

LES LETTRES QUEBECOISES Les Lettres Quebecoises is a unique "Revue de l'actualite lit-

teraire," appearing four times per year. Editorial correspondence: Prof. Adrien Therio, Les Editions Jumonville, C.P. 1840, Station B, Montreal, Quebec.

STANFORD FRENCH REVIEW Devoted to the field of French Studies, the Stanford French Re-

view publishes essays dealing with literature in its varied cultural con- texts: literature and the other arts; literature and thought, history, philol- ogy; contacts and relationships between learned and popular cultures as well as relationships between French and other cultural traditions. Edito- rial correspondence: Professor Marc Bertrand, Department of French, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. 94305.

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