that pleasure, not truth, is the end or object of poetry, and yet a pleasure limited by the demands of truth; whereas Wordsworth bluntly says, 'Its object is truth,' and then goes on to argue that man has no knowledge save what has been acquired by pleasure and exists in him by pleasure, and so leads up to the memorable assertion that 'Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science' - an assertion that Poe gives no sign of having understood.

The dependence of art upon truth for the quality of the pleasure that it evokes is thus conceded alike in the classicism of Aristotle and in the romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Classicist and romanticist may have viewed 'truth' and 'philosophy' variously (there is a wide difference between the Stagyrite law-giver and the Devonshire critic whose 'towering intellect' abashed Poe), but Aristotle and Coleridge, Aristotle and Wordsworth, are in fundamental accord as to the need in art of a vital fusion of truth and beauty, knowledge and pleasure. It is not they, but Poe, who displayed 'singular assurance.'

This is equivalent to saying that Poe showed the same weakness in his criticism that he showed in his creative work. Unmoral and unphilosophical in his poems and tales because he was himself unmoral and unphilosophical, he was unable to attain in his criticism a larger vision of the principles of art than he could himself exemplify. It has already been remarked that his creation and his criticism should harmonize but not coincide. If his criticism was to be more than an exposition of his own artistic practice and a measuring of others by himself, he must possess the power of enlarging his guiding principles of seeing the sun- of seeing, at all events, more than himself and his kind. His own art he saw, indeed, with extraordinary vividness: he could even caricature himself, as in "The Philosophy of Composition.' And his kind Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson (or a part

of Tennyson) - these are the sole poets, he writes in a letter to Lowell - he valued only as they fulfilled his own predilections as a poet. It was not the fine, if tame, humanity of Tennyson that he had in mind when he hazarded the opinion, in his most important essay on the nature of poetry, that Tennyson was the noblest poet that ever lived. It is possible that he had a more conventional respect for Shakspere, Milton, the Bible, and other classics of his own literature than he was willing to display; apparently he had no respect at all for the art of the Athenian dramatists. Ancient classicism 'the glory that was Greece' - was in the main closed to him; the same is true of modern realism, that of the eighteenth century and of his own day in Europe; he had within his view little more than romanticism, and romanticism of a highly limited type. That he saw in full light, and analyzed searchingly. If his own type of art had been central rather than eccentric, what a critic he would have been! But it was palpably absurd to apply to all authors, both contemporary and past, the yardstick of the Poesque brief lyric and brief tale. His principles were inflexible because, save in the process of formulating them, his mind was essentially unphilosophic. In this sense, he was as unintellectual as he was unmoral.

Whatever glimpses he may have had, then, of the intimate relation of truth and beauty, of truth and pleasure, however he may have at times assumed their organic fusion in the work of art, Poe habitually disregarded the romantic doctrine of the union of opposites that lay ready to his hand, and in effect proclaimed the radical alienation of truth and pleasure in art. He banished truth from art, and, turning to the other member of the ancient marriage, sought to give a totally satisfying content to pleasure. His first canon becomes simply 'The end of art is pleasure,' and all the rest of his creed is an amplification of this canon.

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It was perhaps to be expected that, having banished truth, Poe would conceive of pleasure in a purely quantitative sense. Since truth has commonly been assumed to be the determinant of the quality of pleasure the highest pleasure, that is, being possible only when the work of art conforms to the laws of man's mind and heart-it would be natural to suppose that Poe, having divorced truth from art, would elaborate a philosophy of pleasure in terms of quantity alone. But not so; though he was emphatic in his insistence on quantity, he was if anything more emphatic, as we shall see, in his insistence on quality.

Turning first to his discussion of quantitative pleasure, we come upon two of his most characteristic doctrines, applicable to poem and tale alike: the doctrines of unity and brevity. Unity is primary, in Poe's view, and brevity secondary; unity the proposition, brevity the corollary.

In the entire history of criticism since Aristotle, no one has insisted more constantly on the importance of unity than Poe the romanticist. Though he did not, like Aristotle and the great romantic critics Schlegel and Coleridge, establish its basis in another and larger doctrine, that of organic form, probably because his own art had a distinctly mechanical tendency, he perceived with exemplary clearness the service of unity in the production of æsthetic pleasure. He conceived of unity in both the classical and the romantic senses. With Aristotle, he demands the unity of plot or action, at least in all cases where plot forms a part of the contemplated interest. 'Plot is very imperfectly understood,' he writes, 'and has never been rightly defined. Many persons regard it as mere complexity of incident. In its most rigorous acceptation, it is that from which no component atom can be removed, and in which none of the component atoms can be displaced, without ruin to the whole.' Elsewhere, in his mechanical way, he likens it to a building, 'so dependently constructed, that to

change the position of a single brick is to overthrow the entire fabric.' This is indeed a rigorous definition, as he goes on to acknowledge in both passages; a good tale, a good drama, will sometimes be found to depart widely from this gospel of perfection. Yet the true artist will keep his eyes directed to 'that unattainable goal,' even though it is for God alone to construct the perfect plot. He, only, sees the whole as a perfect web of causes and results entirely adapted to each other; He, only, has vision free of confusion and irrelevancy. 'The plots of God are perfect. The Universe is a plot of God.' He is the master plot-maker, and the model of all true artists. We must not say of them, as we may say of mediocre tale-writers, that 'they seem to begin their stories without knowing how they are to end; and their ends, generally like so many governments of Trinculo -appear to have forgotten their beginnings.' Sound artists will take a hint from the Chinese, who 'begin their books at the end,' so that their plots may possess an 'indispensable air of consequence, or causation,' may have, as Poe says in the hoary phrasing of Aristotle, a beginning, middle, and end. Poe does not undervalue a good beginning 'At all risks, let there be a few vivid sentences imprimis' nor good 'points' in the development — but he holds that 'of all literary foibles the most fatal, perhaps, is that of defective climax.' Here, at the end, where all converges, is the height of interest; here is lost or achieved that pleasurable result which was the aim of the writer; here is the sum or degree of pleasure determined. It is true that Poe was aware of the architectonic or, as he terms it, sculptural aspect of unity of plot, the pleasure residing in 'totality of beauty'; but this, he points out, is a pleasure for the few and not for the many, and consequently his emphasis falls, not on this intrinsic æsthetic value of unity of plot but on the value of the intense conclusion which it renders possible. He offers no idealistic explanations of our deep satisfaction in architectonic form, though they might be found inhering in his sen

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tence 'The plots of God are perfect'; he associates unity of plot, not with the poem, in which the supernal aim demands a high quality of pleasure, but with the short tale, where the dominant consideration is intensity or quantity of pleasure.

This same end, quantity of pleasure, is subserved by the romantic unity of effect or impression, which Poe exemplified in his many tales of horror, terror, and the like, as he exemplified unity of plot in his tales of ratiocination. Just as in the tale of ratiocination the writer must foresee the dénouement, so in the tale of effect he must select in advance the particular effect to be produced; 'and no word should be then written which does not tend, or form a part of a sentence which tends to the development of the dénouement, or to the strengthening of the effect.' As means for the attainment of the effect, the writer may rely upon incidents or tone, or both. If the incidents are to predominate, they must have a logical relationship - unity of plot will then serve unity of effect. If the tone is to predominate, it must be a single tone — unity of tone will then serve unity of effect. Although Poe uses all these terms loosely at times, what seems to be his meaning may be indicated by saying that he would have regarded his 'Purloined Letter' as an example of unity of plot, his 'Murders in the Rue Morgue' as an example of unity of effect served by unity of plot, and his 'Masque of the Red Death' as an example of the unity of effect served by unity of tone. Himself a master of unity in every sense, he seems to have given most attention to the unity of tone-'tone, by means of which alone, an old subject, even when developed through hackneyed incidents, or thoughts, may be made to produce a fully original effect,' as he writes when discussing a form, the drama, in which tone is relatively neglected. What most impressed Coleridge in some early work of Wordsworth's was 'the original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations...'; this was what Poe sought to