of the commonplace, seeking to possess it in ecstatic contemplation, Lowell is content to pursue it by the arduous way that leads from range to range toward the summit. Between men as they are and ideal Man are those many-formed types which constitute the chief substance of enduring literature. Lovers of outlines and boundaries, the Greeks delineated these types, and the comprehensive intellect of Shakspere, adding an "exquisite analysis of complex motives," revealed them with unexampled truth and variety. If Dante, master of the human soul, showed best the capacities of spiritual imagination, Shakspere, master of men, excelled all other poets in humanistic or ethical imagination.

Imagination, in these activities, is for Lowell the main instrument in the attainment of understanding of life, and of the happiness that springs from understanding. It was consequently natural for him to tend to measure a work of art by the vitality of its ethical or spiritual insight. This would determine its quality of beauty, and quality, he everywhere implies, is the final and highest consideration. Explicitly, however, he insists again and again that the initial and inescapable consideration in a work of art is quantity, that is, its degree of beauty rather than its kind, since it is this which determines whether indeed it may be called a work of art at all. Accordingly, his primary criterion, as we have already observed, is that of form. Form being the sine qua non of art, Lowell maintains that first among all the functions of the imagination is form-giving. Imagination is from this point of view to be defined as "the faculty that shapes, gives unity of design and balanced gravitation of parts "; it is a faculty that "looks before and after" (connecting beginning, middle, and end, as Aristotle would say); and the seat of this presiding faculty "is in the higher reason "-reason, as Wordsworth phrases it, "in its most exalted mood." Of imagination thus conceived as a shaping or creative faculty, Wordsworth himself was "wholly void," for though he owned a rich quarry he could not build a poem. As his "insight" was "piecemeal," so was his "utterance." proaching, at his finest, the majesty of Milton, he ever lapsed into the diffuse and commonplace. And not only Wordsworth, foremost of the English romantic poets, but virtually all modern writers in Europe and America, Lowell rated as wanting in this sine qua non of art because they neglected the whole in their concern for expressive parts; Matthew Arnold's own indictment of

Ap

modern poetry is not more sweeping. Not occasionally but in nearly every essay that he wrote, Lowell demands of his subjects that they reveal the presence of "the plastic imagination, the shaping faculty," "that shaping imagination which is the highest [primary, rather] criterion of a poet."

Yet expressive parts are, of course, needed to constitute the whole, and although modern criticism makes too much of them, they must be provided for in an adequate aesthetic. Subordinate to the plastic imagination, then, as means are subordinate to an end, the expressive imagination nevertheless plays an essential role. It provides the images, the feelings, the concepts, the rhythms, the words that will fitly represent what the writer wishes to convey. Shakspere has this excellence with all the rest, finding in that teeming mind of his the vehicle for communicating his every intention. A writer like Carlyle, on the other hand, has the power of expression without the plastic sense, stimulating us endlessly without leading us toward any large and luminous object. Lowell might as well have instanced himself as an example; for assuredly his merit as an artist is the modern merit of brilliant piecemeal insight and utterance, both in his poems and in his essays, and his defect is the absence of the shaping faculty and the hgher spiritual imagination that makes a cosmos out of chaos. In his capacity of literary critic, however, he did not rest content, as Poe constantly and Emerson sometimes inclined to do, with the judgment of others in accordance with his own merits and defects, but frankly invoked standards that would depreciate himself along with his contemporaries. This argues a disinterestedness and a breadth as rare as they are admirable.

It remains to say that all these kinds of imagination, spiritual, plastic, and expressive-corresponding nearly with the vision, the faculty divine, and the accomplishment of verse required of the poet by Wordsworth-must be authenticated by other human faculties. Possibly having in mind another phrase of Wordworth's, "emotion recollected in tranquillity," Lowell speaks of profound poetry as "very passion of very soul sobered by afterthought and emboded in eternal types by imagination." Before passion is fit to be embodied, it must be worked upon by the mind in its reflective and contemplative activity, which deepens and enriches while it tranquillizes, and, melting away the dross of egoism, begets "that concurring instinct of all the faculties which is the self-forgetting

passion of the entire man." The essence of this selfless passion is not the superficial excitement of the emotions, nor even the "fine madness" of the soul, but that "something even finer than fine madness," viz., "the imperturbable sanity" that characterizes the great poets. This Lowell everywhere insists upon, under a variety of names: "reserve," "restraint," "sobriety," "repose," and the like. In his enthusiasm for imagination, which in his day had only recently been made the central term in literary criticism, and had not yet fallen into the limbo of the trite where it now dwells not without hope of restoration, Lowell contrived to maintain his critical equilibrium by steadily insisting upon the ineluctible claims of its "less showy and more substantial allies." "There must be wisdom," he writes, "as well as wit, sense no less than imagination, judgment in equal measure with fancy, and the fiery rocket must be bound fast to the poor wooden stick that gives it guidance if it would mount and draw all eyes." The image, to be sure, is romantically derogatory to the allies, making them only a poor wooden stick; yet, after all, the stick that gives guidance is indispensable for right aspiration toward the heavens. A more ordinary but juster image appears in the essay on Percival, whose verse carries every inch of canvas that diction and sentiment can crowd, but the craft is leaky, and we miss that deep-grasping keel of reason which alone can steady and give direction." The most enlightening example, however, is that of Dante, who in his Vita Nuova enables us to see in some sort "how, from being the slave of his imaginative faculty, he rose by self-culture and force of will to that mastery of it which is art." For Dante attained the harmony of his faculties, imaginative, moral, and intellectual, essential to his great poetic achievement, and his aspiration toward the heavens was not a flight into the inane but a steady climb "to that supersensual region where the true, the good, and the beautiful blend in the white light of God." Platonist by nature, Aristotelian by training, and the very avatar of the Christian idea, "his feet keep closely to the narrow path of dialectics, because he believed it the safest, while his eyes are fixed on the stars." Allowing no "divorce between the intellect and the soul in its highest sense," he makes reason and intuition work together to the same end of spiritual perfection." Though of aspiration all compact, he will not, like so many moderns, trust himself to the thin air with

out guidance, but will follow the leading of reason till it can lead no more:

What Reason seeth here

Myself [Virgil] can tell thee; beyond that await

For Beatrice, since 'tis a work of Faith.

These are lines quoted by Lowell himself; and they may be taken to have expressed for him his conviction that in literature no less than in life the value of imagination, the aspiring and creative power, is determined by its relation to reason, the power of guidance.

III

In the foregoing attempt to summarize with some degree of system Lowell's innumerable brief discussions of form and of imagination, we have repeatedly touched upon but never formulated his position in regard to the immemorial problem of the function of literature. Possibly the problem itself received its final statement in the well-worn words of Horace: Should poetry, should literature, instruct or delight, or instruct and delight at the same time?. How did Lowell deal with this question?

His attitude is surprisingly definite and consistent; and it is an attitude that forbids our continuing to set him down as a Puritan whose didacticism was ill concealed with romantic gusto and random insight. We have too often accepted as truth his satiric portrait of himself in A Fable for Critics, forgetting that it is a portrait of the immature Lowell, still in his twenties, still burdened with the isms of his sentimental and Transcendental period, not the Lowell who returned from Europe a few years later with a larger vision of the values of life. There is not only self-condemnation but also prophecy in his recognition that

The top of the hill he will ne'er come nigh reaching

Till he learns the distinction 'twixt singing and preaching.

He saw the distinction in 1848; he learned it a few years later under the tutelage of European experience and an inner compulsion; he exemplified it well enough in the best of his later poetry; and he stated it in its significant nuances in his literary criticism.

"The first duty of the Muse," he says with ample candor, "is to be delightful." While this is not the whole duty of the poet,

it is his primary and fundamental obligation, just as the plastic imagination, while not the only kind of imagination, is the first kind that we look for in his work. A poem is an aesthetic, not a moral or intellectual performance; its special concern is with beauty, not with goodness or truth. Lowell plainly enough denounces "that invasion of the aesthetic by the moral" and by the intellectual," which has confused art by dividing its allegiance." In a passage in which he is apparently combatting the didactic tendencies of Arnold's conception of the grand style, of culture, and of the value of poetry, he deplores a recent disposition "to value literature and even poetry for their usefulness as courses of moral philosophy or metaphysics, or as exercises to put and keep the mental muscles in training." Elsewhere, he complains of Wordsworth that he regarded poetry "as an exercise rather of the intellect than as a nepenthe of the imagination." Lowell also tells us that late in life he reread the whole of the Arabian Nights "with as much pleasure as when I was a boy, perhaps with more. For it appears to me that it is the business of all imaginative literature to offer us a sanctuary from the world of the newspapers, in which we have to live, whether we will or no." He thus allows ample room for what he terms "literature as holiday," literature as a charmer of leisure," literature suited to "our hours of relaxation." He was well aware, like Aristotle long before him, of a merely recreative function of literature; and he was equally well aware, as Aristotle had been, of a higher function, in which the principle of pleasure reappears, so to speak, on a higher plane, in vital relation with moral and intellectual values. It is the function of imaginative literature not only to give mere pleasure (πpòs dový) but also to give rational enjoyment (pòs daywynv): not only to give the pleasure of pastime which prepares us for work, but also to give what might better be called happiness, an end and not a means, a serious working of the soul and not a sportive activity. If it is necessary to relate to some tradition Lowell's view of the end of literature, let us refrain from the facile and false assumption that he was a “Puritan (as was Milton for that matter) and instead label him an Aristotelian. In a dozen passages he protests, as outspokenly as Poe, against the heresy of the didactic involved in the deliberate teaching of morals through literature-it is gravel in strawberries and cream. The primary object in tragedy, for example, "is