of Poe, of proscribing Mr. Trent's history of American literature from the school library on the ground, not that the author had treated Poe badly, but that he had treated him at all: 'School children, according to my correspondent, ought not to know that such a life as Poe's was ever lived.' This is almost as perverse as the case of the prince whom Eckermann reports as saying that if he had been the Deity he would have left the world uncreated rather than create a world that should contain Schiller's 'Robbers.'

In so far as Poe's attack is directed against the philistine type of moralist who thrives in America, it is so obviously sound that it need not detain us here. The assumption that the artist is to regard himself as a moral physician administering pills (whether plain or sugar-coated) is none the less ridiculous because it has occasionally been made by nobleminded persons; and it is doubly ridiculous when the materia medica is not morality itself but a temporary moral code - is grounded, not in the nature of man, but in more or less arbitrary and shifting social relations. It is unquestionably true that art has a moral result, and that man's struggle to clarify his moral values is carried on within the domain of fine art as well as outside of it; yet at the same time within its domain art has its own purpose, and that purpose is not moral but æsthetic. No amount of moral excellence alone will constitute a composition a work of art, and on the other hand it may have a quite negligible moral content and yet be a work of art. If it does not give pleasure, it is not art; if it does give pleasure, it is.

Had Poe stopped here - had he contented himself with showing that the artist must not aim at morality and that the critic must not identify artistic and moral values - he would have performed an inestimable service to American letters. But in his impetuous attack on the moralists, he sometimes overstated his doctrine and thus invited an effective counter-attack. The apostles of art for art's sake have

so often made their gospel odious through their own art, and have so often discredited themselves by their criticism of art - by their preference for the inferior - that we have grown suspicious of any one who uses their expressions. The poet, says Poe, can have no more noble purpose than 'this poem which is a poem and nothing more— this poem written solely for the poem's sake.' Blind and mad, he says a moment later, is he who would 'reconcile the obstinate oils and waters of Poetry and Truth.' These would seem to be farreaching ideas, involving, to use Poe's favorite word, heresies of the first magnitude. Yet they really do not. For, viewed strictly and philosophically, a 'poem for the poem's sake' is surely meaningless; and viewed loosely and practically, as Poe doubtless used it, it is commonplace -it asserts only that a poem is a poem, not something else. As for the oils and waters, Poe is plainly at the mercy of his metaphor, which not only enables him to express his meaning to drive home his distinction between the moral and the æsthetic - but forces him to suggest more than he means. As the context indicates, he is insisting only that there is a sharp difference in 'modes of inculcation' between Truth and Poetry, the intellect aiming at perspicuity, precision, terseness, dispassionateness, while poetry aims at the 'exact converse' of these qualities (though here again, to secure force, Poe overstates his point). In the spirit and method of their endeavor, Truth, or the didactic in its full sense, and Poetry, the handmaiden of taste, are indeed, as Poe asserts, as nearly opposite as possible, are as unrelated as oil and water. But Poe does not say and does not mean, as he is often understood to say and mean, that Truth and Poetry in all respects manifest this elemental alienation, that they are in all respects mutually incompatible.

For, in the first place, they unite in their subject-matter. The poetic and the moral, while very different in spirit and method, are alike in that they both concern themselves with

man's moral nature. 'We would not be misunderstood,' Poe with good reason reminds his reader; for he is entirely willing to admit that Poetry, the handmaiden of taste, 'is not forbidden to moralize in her own fashion. She is not forbid‣ den to depict but to reason and preach, of virtue. As, of this latter, conscience recognizes the obligation, so intellect teaches the expediency, while taste contents herself with displaying the beauty: waging war with vice merely on the ground of its inconsistency with fitness, harmony, proportion -in a word with rò κaλóv.' Too often the reader of Poe remembers 'the radical and chasmal difference' between truth and poetry, the 'obstinate oils and waters,' and forgets that at the same time, as Poe dimly perceived, they have an intimate relation, that in a very real sense truth, beauty, and goodness are one. Thus, according to Mr. Brownell, Poe's theory is that 'poetry has absolutely nothing to do with truth (to which he had an intellectual repugnance), that it is concerned solely with beauty (which he does not define, but assumes, in opposition to more conventional opinion from Plato to Keats, to be absolutely divorced from truth).' On the contrary, it is clear that Poe accepted, if he did not really understand, the 'conventional opinion':

Beauty is truth, truth beauty.

In his 'Marginalia' he asserts that 'the highest genius is but the loftiest moral nobility.' In his review of 'The Culprit Fay,' he objects that the Sylphid Queen is a fanciful compound of incongruous natural objects 'unaccompanied by any moral sentiment,' though his use of the word that he italicizes is not altogether clear. More significantly, in his review of Longfellow's 'Ballads,' while deprecating the poet's inveterate didacticism, he approves those poems in which, as he thinks, the moral element is rightly introduced because it is æsthetically treated: in 'The Wreck of the Hesperus,' for example, 'we have the beauty of childlike confidence and

V

innocence, with that of the father's stern courage and affection,' in 'The Skeleton in Armor,' 'we find the beauty of bold courage and self-confidence, of love and maiden devotion, of reckless adventure, and finally of life-contemning grief,' and in 'The Village Blacksmith,' 'we have the beauty of simplemindedness as a genuine thesis; and this thesis is inimitably handled until the concluding stanza, where the spirit of legitimate poesy is aggrieved in the pointed antithetical deduction of a moral from what has gone before.' Here is no ✓ absolute divorce, but a highly intimate relation between beauty and moral truth. In such passages Poe shows plainly that he is at least on the way to an adequate conception of the relation of art and morality. But other passages indicate that he has far to go before arriving at a full sense of the vital fusion of the two.

For, in the second place, he seeks to demonstrate the compatibility of poetry and morality by his doctrine of 'collateral relations.' Instead of moving toward a conception of their organic union, he was accustomed to regard them mechanically as lying side by side in a work of art, as 'collateral,' or as placed one above the other-Beauty above, as an uppercurrent, and the Didactic beneath, as an under-current. This mechanical distinction, however, really grants the whole case to the moralist, permitting him to exercise a moral purpose in a work of art so long as he succeeds in making his moral purpose subordinate, contributing collaterally, or as an undercurrent to the main theme, or, to use another expression that Poe favored, incidentally. This sophomoric conception of the relation of art and morality is unworthy of a critic who is in so many respects close to the central principles, and it may even suggest that, beneath the rebel against Puritanism, there was a moribund Puritan nature. Fighting 'tooth and nail' against the didactic, he yet concedes, altogether unnecessarily, that poetry is not forbidden to moralize 'in the right way' (surely, poetry ought never to affect a moral

purpose), and then habitually accepts, as the right way, a direct moral purpose which is made to seem casual or subordinate. The obstinate oils and waters have become the lion and the lamb. And Poe is finally reduced to the feeble argument that, the two elements being altogether capable of accord, the poet who would 'introduce didacticism' into his poem is accepting a superfluous handicap which he can overcome only by 'a feat of literary sleight of hand.' All of our high principles of the inviolable nature of poesy have vanished, and nothing remains but a question of ingenious technique a tour de force.

Thus Poe's theory of art and morality, which ever lay in the foreground of his mind, turns out to be a mass of ill-sorted and discordant ideas surprising in a critic of his ratiocinative powers. How shall we account for so fundamental a confusion? How did it happen that a critic who discoursed so pungently on the inalienable right of poetry to the pursuit of happiness and beauty betrayed his high cause by conceding the moral purpose so long as it was decently subordinated? Why did Poe, though moving in the direction of a sound view of art and morals, perceive this sound view so dimly, through such a veil of conflicting and irrelevant distinctions? Inherent in his recognition of a unity in subject-matter - inherent but never extracted and expressly stated is the recognition of a necessary fusion of the moral and the æsthetic in art as in life, from which it follows that a great art which is at the same time an immoral or unmoral art is impossible, that a weak or distorted conception of man's moral nature results in a mode of beauty correspondingly weak or distorted.1 Why does this view of art and morality, expressed with considerable distinctness by his guide Coleridge, remain merely latent in Poe?

The answer would seem to be plain: because Poe was him

1 Troilus and Criseyde, for example, 'is a great work of art, and as such, I believe, inevitably ethical.' (G. L. Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry, 144.)