Mr. Cobb points out in detail the similarities between Poe's stories of dual personality and the German use of the theme as found in Fouqué, Novalis, and Hoffmann, particularly the last. Hoffmann's exaggerated use of this idea is to be explained on the ground that he was obsessed by the thought that his double was haunting him, and he, like Maupassant under similar conditions of mind, wrote of supernaturalism associated with madness. Hoffmann uses the theme of double personality.[39] In Poe's _William Wilson_ the other self is the embodiment of good, a sort of incarnate conscience, as in Stevenson's Markheim, while Hoffmann's _Elixiere_ represents the evil. Poe has here reversed the idea. In Hoffmann's _Magnetiseur_ we find the treatment of hypnotism and metempsychosis and the dream-supernaturalism in the same combination that Poe uses.[40] Hoffmann[41] and Poe[42] relate the story of a supernatural portrait, where the wife-model dies as the sacrifice to the painting. [39] In the _Doppelgänger_, _Kater Murr_, and _Elixiere des Teufels_. [40] In his _Tale of the Ragged Mountains_. [41] In _Die Jesuit-kirche in G._ [42] In _The Oval Portrait_. Both Hoffmann and Poe use the grotesquerie of supernaturalism, the fantastic element of horror that adds to the effect of the ghostly. Even the generic titles are almost identical.[43] But in spite of these similarities in theme and in grouping, there is no basis for a charge that Poe owes a stylistic debt to Hoffmann. In his manner he is original and individual. He uses his themes with much greater art, with more dramatic and powerful effect than his German contemporary. Though he employs fewer of the crude machineries of the supernatural, his ghostly tales are more unearthly than Hoffmann's. His horrors have a more awful effect because he is an incomparably greater artist. He knows the economy of thrills as few have done. His is the genius of compression, of suggestion. His dream elements, for instance, though Hoffmann uses the dream to as great extent as Poe--are more poignant, more unbearable. [43] Compare Poe's definition of his type as phantasy pieces with Hoffmann's title Phantasie Stücke. The cult of horror in German literature, as evidenced in the work of Hoffmann, Kleist, Tieck, Arnim, Fouqué, Chamisso, had an influence on English and American literature of supernaturalism in general. The grotesque diablerie, the use of dream elements, magnetism, metempsychosis, ghosts, the elixir of life--which theme appears to have a literary elixir of life--are reflected to a certain degree in the English ghostly tales of the generation following the Gothic romance.