and by combining them creates something new. This will be beautiful according to the thoroughness of the harmony and the richness or force of the materials used. Fancy, on the other hand, relatively neglects the process of combination, and gives us, in addition to novelty, unexpectedness. Fantasy involves not only novelty and unexpectedness of combination, but also a positive avoidance of proportion, and, while the novelty gives pleasure, the incoherence gives pain. Humor goes a step beyond, seeking incongruous or antagonistic elements, and, doing so palpably, gives pleasure humor being 'a merry effort of Truth to shake from her that which is no property of hers.'

Imagination, so distinguished, is the instrument by which the poet creates visions of harmony. His visions satisfy the soul because of their harmony, and satisfy in proportion as they give order to rich materials. When the imagination is most vigorous and is employed in its highest tasks, earthly passion quite melts away and is replaced with a divine serenity- the lofty ardor, perhaps, of the angel Israfel. Then come to his song 'the golden, easeful, crowning moments' (in the phrase of another critic), when the poet seems indeed to dwell where Israfel hath dwelt, in a skiey region where are none of the conflicts of our world of sweets and sours, where all is harmony, order a harmony, an order, so rich in content, so intense with force, that it is one with Lecstasy.

The two conceptions of the imagination, though as Poe leaves them they seem to clash, are not incompatible. Had he brought them together, he might have said that the principle of harmony or order is a divine principle, and that consequently every step toward a complete harmony is in so far a step toward supernal harmony. By means of imagination, the poet creates a harmony; but his harmony does not satisfy him beyond it he glimpses, again by means of the imagination, a more ethereal harmony which he cannot express but

which he can indicate through suggestion, an under-current of meaning, an ideal 'tone' or echo. Thus he brings us to the gates of the supernal not only by his creation of a high harmony, but also in the language of Coleridge - by 'spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world around the forms, incidents, and situations' that constitute this harmony.

In this conception of the workings of imagination there is much that may be accepted without hesitation, at least by those of the ideal persuasion. But if it is regarded in the light of Poe's own practice as the unity of Poe's criticism and his creation gives us a right to regard it - it will be found to contain implications that reveal its inadequacy. Poe understood well enough the advantages of intensity, both as relating to 'the force of the matters combined' and to the unifying energy that shaped them into harmony; but he did not understand the differences of quality in the matters combined he wanted what he himself terms 'the facility of discovering combinable novelties worth combining.' Wonderful as was his power of expressing forcibly the order that he created in each of his best tales, wonderful as was his power of achieving harmony in each of his best poems, so that, in tale and poem alike, every word counted toward the production of an intense effect, we cannot avoid feeling that in his tales the order is aimless and that in his poems the harmony is premature. Only too well did he describe, in one of his tales, his own use of the imagination in prose fiction: 'Imagination,' he wrote, 'feeling herself for once unshackled, roamed at will among the ever-changing wonders of a shadowy and unstable land.' If his intensity holds us as we read, it does not hold us afterward: we have scarcely turned the last page of the tale when the order begins to appear arbitrary and fanciful, the illusion of unreality rather than the illusion of a higher reality. And in his poems yield ourselves as we may to the spell of harmoniously combined im

ages and of haunting music -we cannot escape, in retrospect, the feeling that their exquisite harmony is fragile, bodiless, premature.

Our dissatisfaction with the quality of Poe's ideality is in large measure owing to his adoption of the romantic doctrine of the indefinite, which appears in his first preface and persists thereafter as a major law of his criticism. He apparently derived it—like so much else—from Coleridge, who in his lectures on the drama distinguished, as Schlegel had done before him, between the ancients and the moderns by asserting that the Greeks idolized the finite, which may be expressed by definite forms or thoughts, and the moderns revere the infinite, which demands an indefinite vehicle. It is a pretty contrast, and an unsound one, as pretty contrasts are liable to be; but Poe accepted it in his literal way and applied it with his customary deliberate directness.

Inseparably associated with this doctrine of the indefinite, in Poe as in the romantics generally, is its corollary doctrine of the supremacy of music over all the other arts. It is in Music, perhaps, that the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles the creation of supernal Beauty. It may be, indeed, that here this sublime end is, now and then, attained in fact. We are often made to feel, with a shivering delight, that from an earthly harp are stricken notes which cannot have been unfamiliar to the angels.' This perfect harmony, this vision this very experience of supernal loveliness, music may attain because of its freedom from earthly things, its indefiniteness, its vagueness. Poe seems never to have suspected that music, instead of offering the purest spiritual experience, may often be merely a refuge for the dreamer from the realities of life, an evasion of life rather than a transcendence. Severing the art from the artist, he assumed that the art was divine, infinite, while the artist might be a plain mortal much like the rest of us. It did not occur to him

'Foenter Jakie off..

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that what he took to be the language of the angels might be the fevers of the flesh. He affirmed that a passionate poem was a contradiction, but not that a passionate musical composition was a contradiction - the composer's excitement he assumed to be of the soul. His test, so far as he applied any, was apparently quantitative: if the music invaded his whole being, stormed the citadel of sovereign reason, and made him yield in any ecstasy of passiveness, it was supernal. He exerted no effort to distinguish, as the Greeks had done, between music that is relaxing and music that is tonic. He did not urge a re-examination of musical experience in retrospect, a criticism of its effect, a determination of its quality. If it offered a ravishing harmony in place of the discords of actual life, he was satisfied without questioning the contents of that harmony, the elements of experience that were successfully shaped into unity. If it profoundly satisfied his desires, he did not ask what desires.

One infers that he agreed with the German romanticists, as did Pater, that all the arts constantly aspire to the condition of music: at least, he held this to be true of poetry. 'The vagueness of exaltation,' he wrote to Lowell, 'aroused by a sweet air (which should be strictly indefinite and never too strongly suggestive) is precisely what we should aim at in poetry' an assertion of which his own poems are an illustration, together with those poems of the ideal that he listed, most notably, perhaps, 'Christabel' and 'Kubla Khan.' Music, he believed, has powers of expression beyond words, of which poetry seeks to avail itself in being a rhythmical

1 'An art that came out of the old world two centuries ago with a few chants, love songs, and dances, that a century ago was still tied to the words of a mass or opera, or threading little dance movements together in a "suite," became, in the last century, this extraordinary debauch, in which the man who has never seen a battle, loved a woman, or worshipped a god may not only ideally, but through the response of his nerves and pulses to immediate rhythmical attack, enjoy the ghosts of struggle, rapture, and exaltation with a volume and intricacy, an anguish, a triumph, an irresponsibility unheard of.' (D. S. MacColl, Nineteenth Century Art.)

creation of beauty. In rhythm, the divine mathematics of music is organically united with the mental images that are the stuff of poetry rhythm, the basis of which is time, 'the inviolable principle of all music.' Verse he thought of as 'an inferior and less capable Music.' But at the same time-as in his conception of the poetic and the didactic-he provided for a mechanical, collateral relation of the two elements. He believed in the combination of the poem and the song, looking back regretfully to the age of bards and minnesingers, and approving Thomas Moore, who, 'singing his own songs, was, in the most legitimate manner, perfecting them as poems.' 1 He failed to observe that a true marriage of the two, rather than a mere combination, is impossible, for although sound may be wedded to image, it is not in the full sense musical sound, music being properly free of limiting images. When music ceases to be abstract, it is no longer fully music, as Poe well understood in his objections to 'programme music.'

In making music supreme among the arts, Poe, along with many other romanticists, may have been entirely right — the hierarchy of the arts, if there be such a thing, is anything but self-evident. Certainly it is plausible to assert that the expressiveness of music begins where the expressiveness of words leaves off, that the indefiniteness of pure sound offers the best sensuous medium for the externalization of spiritual experience. If this is so, music provides not only a maximum intensity of beauty, but also the highest kind of beauty, and through a synthesis of maximum quantity and highest quality attains a position foremost among the arts. Such, one may admit, is its power, potentially; but it does not follow that it actually exerts this power in such music as the world now possesses. In the ancient world, the art was in its infancy; in the Middle Ages, it was in its childhood, so that

1 Cf. Wordsworth in his list of the molds into which the materials of poetry may be cast: '3rdly, The Lyrical, containing the Hymn, the Ode, the Elegy, the Song, and the Ballad; in all which, for the production of their full effect, an accompaniment of music is indispensable.' (Preface to the poems of 1815.)