saw the sun or mistook flashy meteors for the supreme luminary, while they judged in accordance with petty provincial instincts instead of sovereign reason, Poe held clearly before himself a lofty vision of the critical activity and pursued its dictates with a devotion that shows his possession of a passion for criticism as well as for poetry. Although he could be impatient, disdainful, and even as brutal as the Scotch reviewers whom he censured, he did not deserve the charge that he had the polemical rather than the critical temper. He had ground for his boast that in ten years' time he did not write a single critique either wholly destructive or wholly laudatory, or state a single opinion of importance without supporting it with some show of reason. He developed a theory of literary principles and applied it without shrinking from the fatigue of thought. Rejecting the essay form of the British reviews as an evasion of the critical task, he read his books carefully, analyzed them patiently, and generalized deliberately, despite the pressure of poverty and such temperamental handicaps as few writers in any age have labored against. For polemics as such he had little enough taste; but he guarded his literary principles with passion and had the reformer's zeal in seeking to make them prevail.

Poe derived his principles of criticism from his own conception of art, which may be studied indifferently in his creative or in his critical work: it is implicit in the one, explicit in the other. Frequently it is held as a reproach as a mark of limitation that his creation and his criticism are substantially the same. This may be regarded, however, as a great merit, not merely because it attests to his honesty, his fidelity to principle, but more especially because, as Poe himself says, it is the only proper relation of theory and practice - of that theory of literature which regulates the critical activity and that practice of literature which is the embodiment of theory. As an English critic of our own day puts it, literature is the consciousness of life and criticism is the con

sciousness of literature. An artist may, of course, be deficient
in the critical faculty ('Poets are by no means, necessarily,
judges of poetry,' says Poe); but when he possesses the crit-
ical faculty, his theory and practice will tend to coincide. It
would assuredly be absurd if they conflicted, if, for exam-
ple, Poe's poetic principle and poetic creation clashed with
each other, or his conception of the tale were antagonistic
to his own tales.1 Nevertheless, one must add, as Poe him-
self failed to add, that in any artist who falls short of the
ideal artist practically, therefore, in any artist who has
ever lived
theory should include more than practice, the
artist as critic should perceive more than he can himself
carry out. (As critic, he must allow for modes of excellence
that are denied himself, and his achievement in criticism will
depend largely on the degree of clearness with which he per-
ceives these excellences. It is precisely in this respect, as we
shall see, that the criticism of Poe was most deficient. Just
as the primary weakness of his art was want of range, so the
primary weakness of his criticism was want of range. He was
right in making his theory and practice harmonious; he was
wrong in allowing them absolutely to coincide.

Holding that poets are not necessarily judges of poetry, Poe also holds that critics, on the contrary, are necessarily poets; they must have, he means, 'the poetic sentiment, if not the poetic power— the "vision," if not the "faculty divine." It was one of the signal results of the Romantic Movement of the early nineteenth century that it established firmly this

1 The unity of Poe's creation and his criticism and of both with his life has been studied by J. W. Krutch, in Edgar Allan Poe, 1926, in the uncertain light of the 'new psychology.' Endeavoring to discover 'the relationship which exists between psychology and æsthetics,' Mr. Krutch in the end concedes that 'the present state of knowledge is not such as to enable any one satisfactorily to determine that relationship.' This being so, I cannot but think that the literary critic should indefinitely continue to prefer what Mr. Krutch terms 'the level of art' to 'the level of psychology.' Even if the day of a securely scientific psychology of art should ever arrive, the literary critic will still find artistic results far more important than psychological causes.

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relation of the critical and poetical natures, and Poe played an important part in establishing it in America. He asserts that 'to appreciate thoroughly the work of what we call genius, is to possess all the genius by which the work was produced' all the genius but not, he adds, the constructive ability. Had he been a disciple of Goethe, he would have accepted the dictum,

Du gleichst dem Geist den du begreifst,

but though in some sort a disciple of Schlegel, he could not accept the assertion that 'Genius... is taste in its highest activity,' an assertion that has become central in the 'expressionist' criticism of our day. It apparently never occurred to him that he might have performed the entire critical function when he had entered by sympathy into the mind of genius and occupied the genial point of view: for Poe this was the indispensable preliminary and condition of sound criticism, but criticism itself was the later process of comparison with other examples of literature and with the ideal example, ending in the formulation of deduction and judgment. It is one of the leading distinctions of Poe's theory of criticism that it gave full weight at the same time to the element of sympathy and the element of judgment.

Now, what were in his mind the central principles upon which sound judgments might be based? They may be summed up in few words:

The end of art is pleasure, not truth. In order that pleasure may be intense, the work of art must have unity and brevity. In poetry, the proper means of arousing pleasure is the creation of beauty; not the beauty of concrete things alone, but also a higher beauty — supernal beauty. Music is an indispensable element in poetry, and is especially valuable in the poet's straining toward the supernal, since music comes nearer this goal than any other art. In the prose tale, on the other hand, the artist may seek to produce effects other than those

of poetry, — effects of horror, terror, passion, self in each case to a single effect.

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limiting him

This was Poe's artistic creed, exemplified in nearly all that he wrote: in his poetry, his tales, his essays on literary theory, and his criticism of literature-on nearly every page of his sixteen volumes. In its simplest form it can be stated, as I have stated it, in a few lines; but even when stated completely, it would remain brief. Poe was as direct and laconic, in his exposition of literary principles, as his master Coleridge was discursive and circumlocutory; so intent was he, indeed, on the avoidance of metaphysical fogs that he went to the other extreme and was satisfied with a rather barren formulism, to which he tended by nature. His phrases of greatest import -his formulæ recur again and again, without significant variation, from the 'Letter to B—' onwards, and too few of them receive their share of Poe's ratiocinative faculty. Sometimes whole passages are lifted from an earlier context and planted in a new one, without much regard for an organic accommodation, such accommodation as Matthew Arnold, for instance, usually effected when he quoted from his previous writing. Yet it seems clear that such transplantation, even when successful, implies weakness of thought- apparently it was so in the case of Arnold, whose formulæ and self-quotations are symptomatic of a relative sterility of ideas, and apparently it was so in the case of Poe, who at the beginning of his career in letters adopted a neat little set of guiding principles and seemingly never suspected that they might be inadequate. In the main, fortunately, they were admirable principles, and his fidelity to them gave his work as a whole singular consistency, definiteness, and impact, three qualities very dear to him. Temperamentally wasteful of emotional and intellectual energy, Poe nevertheless contrived to make the whole of his literary achievement march unmistakably in one direction, just as in the composition of a single tale he managed to make every word and

image move convergingly to a premeditated end or 'effect.' The result of such devotion to an artistic purpose was impressive. But it must not be allowed to obscure the fact that Poe's guiding principles of creation and criticism, admirable so far as they went, did not go far enough; that the failure of Poe to enlarge his controlling conception of art, while it helps to explain his striking achievement, also helps to explain why this achievement was not greater. !

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Let us begin our study of the artistic creed of Poe (perhaps the only creed he had) with an examination of his first canon: The end of art is pleasure, not truth. By truth he means both intellectual and moral truth, neither of which, he holds, is the legitimate aim of the artist.

Living, as it seemed to him, in a land of the philistinesin a puritanical, humanitarian, and materialistic environment hostile to the æsthetic vision of life-Poe was subject to charges of superficiality and eccentricity which his temperamental weaknesses rendered plausible, and apparently regarding the offensive as the soundest defensive strategy, he carried the war into the enemy's country, upholding the standards of Beauty and Pleasure as supreme in art (supreme, for that matter, in life itself) and attacking, with an effective use of light artillery, the 'heresy of the Didactic' so strongly intrenched in England and America. Both moralism as the end of art and realism as the end of art, however widely respected, he held to be heresies, somewhat as Milton regarded those who are heretics in the truth; and he fought them with fine energy — especially the moral heresy, in that day the more formidable of the two. The particular objects of his contempt were 'the moralists who keep themselves erect by the perpetual swallowing of pokers'; such moralists, one may imagine, as the principal of a school that Professor Trent tells us of, who was capable, a century after the birth