that it is absurd as regards the practical result, the concrete poem. If the poetic sentiment or intuition is to be conveyed to others, the poet should possess in high degree the powers of causality, i.e., a perception of the causes needful to produce a desired effect. Similarly, Poe maintains that 'the truly imaginative mind is never otherwise than analytic,' a comment that brings into relation the two aspects of his own art; and again, that originality is not 'a mere matter of impulse or inspiration,' as the romantic spirit conceives it, but rather a matter of purposeful construction: "To originate, is carefully, patiently, and understandingly to combine.' Thus while the majority of our romanticists, including the greatest, have delighted in casting aspersions on man's logical faculty of which some of them have had, indeed, a quite aspersible quantity-Poe, having a large endowment of it and finding it very useful, was quite as friendly to it as to the 'mystic' and the 'ideal,' ulterior qualities that he could produce at will through his formulæ. It would not be fanciful to say that his whole view of art was mathematical. A certain result-x-unknown to the reader but predetermined by the artist was to be attained. For this result, a long series of causes was then devised. These were given an order and coherence depending on their nature. By division of the subject, by subtraction of the irrelevant elements, by enumeration of details patiently added to yield a sum or climax, by a multiplication of subordinate sums leading to the ultimate effect, the artist's logical powers could so arrange the data of the senses as to provoke in the reader that x, or sentiment or intuition, which was in the artist's consciousness at the beginning. Poe's interest in mathematics is, of course, well known; in many tales he employed it or discussed its nature, as in his literary criticism he used its terminology ('repetend' being a good example); and his absorption in problems and puzzles of all kinds, from cryptography to plagiarism, is notorious. The new genre that he brought into vogue, the de

tective story, was precisely the contribution to be expected of him. So far did he carry this exploitation of his logical faculty 'for its own sake,' as he might have said, so innocent was he of all serious endeavor to understand what he liked to term, with Goethe and Carlyle, the open secret of life, that the activity of his reason became aimless, irresponsible, and unmeaning.

For the rational principle in Poe, unaided by moral imagination, became the accomplice of the senses, or appetitive principle, and so enabled him to produce only an inferior range of harmonies - shuddering harmonies of the murky subconscious, and roseate harmonies of sensuous longing posing as spirituality. His vision oscillated not between the earthly and the supernal, but between the infernal and the Arcadian. Denying Bryant a rank with 'the spiritual Shelleys, or Coleridges, or Wordsworths, or with Keats, or even Tennyson, or Wilson,' on the ground that 'the objects in the moral or physical universe coming within the periphery of his vision' are too limited, Poe sets down as a critical canon this assertion: 'The relative extent of these peripheries of poetical vision must ever be a primary consideration in our classification of poets.' This is surely a sound canon, if properly understood; it explains why Chaucer, for example, great as he is, is not among the greatest his periphery is short. But Poe forgets that precisely what makes Chaucer great despite his restricted periphery, is his extraordinary truth and completeness of vision within his limits, and that the spiritual Shelleys (along with the Wilsons) are inferior to him because, with all their reach of vision, they are wanting in this truth and completeness. Reality, it would seem, whether the reality of concrete things or of the human spirit, is irrelevant in Poe's conception of art. If a man has but an ample reach of vision, an extensive periphery, if he can look over or even overlook- a vast number of objects in the physical or moral universe, and can express his vision, it

matters not that his picture is a fair mirage, fascinating in its fluid harmony, rather than an illusion of a higher reality that speaks to all of man's nature. In Shakspere, in Milton, 'even in Tennyson,' we feel that we are moving toward a superior truth and beauty, a unity perceived by them, not arbitrarily created. In them, as in Poe, reason is supreme; but it is reason aided by the senses and the will, as in Plato's figure of the charioteer and the two horses endeavoring to mount toward the heavens. Reason in Poe, wanting moral support, must rely upon but one of the horses, the rebellious one who is black, 'a large misshapen animal..., gray-eyed and bloodshot.' Seeking the celestial harmonies, he can make no progress thither the true 'awful Loveliness' is never in sight. The senses, goaded onward, bring him to a spurious loveliness, a beautiful limbo where the 'sweets' of life lie spread in an ordered profusion, or, more often, they plunge to a nether region where the 'sours' of life are made horribly perfect. 'The fact is,' as Poe himself tells us, 'that in efforts to soar above our nature, we invariably fall below it'—unless we rise, as the great have ever risen, in life itself and its reflection, literature, with the aid of the other winged horse, he whom Plato describes as white and as 'a lover of honor and modesty and temperance, and the follower of true glory.'

CHAPTER II

EMERSON

81

IN Poe, the concentration of brilliant powers to a definite end -to art for the sake of art gave to all his literary activity a compactness, a unity, a luminous exterior, that were wanting in the work of his chief critical contemporaries, Emerson and Lowell. The disparate interests of Lowell were never brought to a focus, a unity of purpose; none of them have the full weight of the man behind them. In Emerson, to be sure, there was an impressive inner harmony, of which everything that he did was a faithful expression -like rays from a shining light. Yet this light shone impartially on all things. Nature, science, history, art, ethics, metaphysics, religion, all were dear to him, all so absorbing that he could surrender none of them. He studied, in his transcendental way, the whole of life, and expressed himself as preacher, moralist, metaphysician, orator, poet, literary critic, summarizing the series with the term 'scholar,' understood in his own sense. If he was anything he was the scholar in his own sense; that is, he was nothing in particular, he was a man — a man thinking. He hated the division of labor, necessary as it seemed, renouncing his first choice of occupation, the ministry, and never assuming another. He would be free, free to live, free to express himself as the spirit chose; and his spirit was avid. In the end he achieved, according to Arnold's plausible verdict, the most important work in English prose of the nineteenth century. Yet it is hardly excessive to say that he was master of no subject, since he never thought anything out, and of no literary form, since nearly all his essays and poems are series of sentences rather than wholes.

Despite this lack of concentration, however, Emerson contrived to express himself abundantly on a great variety of subjects, one of which is the theory of literature. In respect to amount, his literary criticism ranks with that of our chief professed critics, Poe and Lowell. Widely scattered through twelve volumes of 'Works' and ten volumes more of 'Journals,' it would present an imposing bulk if brought together.1 Equally impressive is its comprehensiveness. Much of it is abstract, concerned with essential principles; for Emerson was even more interested than Poe in the poetic principle and the philosophy of composition. But much, also, is concrete, concerned with individual artists. It contains two treatments of Beauty, two of Art, one of Criticism, one of Books, one of The Poet, one of English Literature, one of Imagination, one of The Comic and one of The Tragic, two of Modern Literature, and more than a dozen of individual authors ranging from Plato to Carlyle. None of the essays is concerned, as was so much of Poe's work, with ephemeral writers. All deal with central principles, or with the classics of literature, or with prominent contemporaries. Rarely, if ever, are the same passages used repeatedly, in Poe's fashion; Emerson restates, attacks again and again, from various angles, the chief problems of art, so that in the end, despite contradictions, we feel that we really understand him. This sense of security is strengthened by the fact that he also wrote essays,

1 Following is an incomplete list of Emerson's criticism of art and literature: 1. Passages in Nature (especially the section on Beauty); 2. Art, in Essays, First Series; 3. The Poet, in Essays, Second Series; 4. Plato, in Representative Men; 5. Montaigne, ibid.; 6. Shakspere, ibid.; 7. Goethe, ibid.; 8. Literature, in English Traits; 9. Beauty, in The Conduct of Life; 10. Art, in Society and Solitude; 11. Books, ibid.; 12. The Comic, in Letters and Social Aims; 13. Poetry and Imagination, ibid.; 14. Persian Poetry, ibid.; 15. Poems (passim); 16. Plutarch, in Lectures and Biographical Sketches; 17. Thoreau, ibid.; 18. Carlyle, ibid.; 19. Robert Burns, ibid.; 20. Shakspere, in Miscellanies; 21. Walter Scott, ibid.; 22. Michael Angelo, in The Natural History of Intellect; 23. Milton, ibid.; 24. Art and Criticism, ibid.; 25. Thoughts on Modern Literature, ibid.; 26. Walter Savage Landor, ibid.; 27. Europe and European Books, ibid.; 28. Carlyle's 'Past and Present,' ibid.; 29. The Tragic, ibid.; 30. Reviews, etc., in Uncollected Writings; 31. Passages in the Journals.