to the universal. "All great poets have their message to deliver us, from something higher than they . . . In the company of the epic poets there was a place left for whoever should embody the Christian idea of a triumphant life, outwardly all defeat, inwardly victorious, who should make us partakers of that cup of sorrow in which all are communicants with Christ." And Dante has done this. If the normal method of the poets, even of the great poets, is to teach like life by indirection, nevertheless the high cunning of Dante showed that it is possible to combine "poesy with doctrine" without loss of power in either, but rather enhancement. While Emerson, impatient of the labor of removing the historical barriers to an understanding of the Divine Comedy. never paid due homage to Dante, but looked to the future for his type of the poet-priest, Lowell by dint of "twenty years of assiduous study" (as he himself tells us) arrived at the conclusion that the type had been for once realized, and not merely foreshadowed, in Dante himself.

1

If Lowell found his highest happiness in Dante, his debt to some of the other "moderns" was not much less. In the more strictly modern ages, from Milton down to his own time, he found to be sure, nothing that stirred the whole of his nature to passion, and he gave excellent reasons for not being stirred deeply. Toward the ancients, at the other extreme chronologically, his prevailing attitude was one of admiration rather than love, an attitude that would probably not have been reversed if he had bestowed twenty years of study to the Greeks. In the half-way moderns, however, above all in Dante, Cervantes, Calderon, and Shakspere, he found the function of literature achieved with a warmth of energy that kindled his utmost enthusiasm. Conceding the supremacy of the Greeks in respect to form, and consequently in respect to imagination in its plastic activity, he held that the best of the moderns had a sufficient sense of form along with a richness of ethical and spiritual imagination wanting in the ancients. This was true even of Calderon, "with his tropical warmth and vigor of production," who won a place close to Lowell's heart (see, for instance, "The Nightingale in the Study ") but who, because

1 Most of these reasons have been brought together and interpreted by "Lowell's Criticism of Romantic Harry Hayden Clark in an article on Literature," Publications of the Modern Language Association, XLI (1926), 20,9-228.

he was Spanish rather than broadly human, could not be ranked critically with Cervantes and the others. In Don Quixote the imagination of Cervantes is not so much Spanish as "universal and cosmopolitan "; his book is "a human book in the fullest sense of the word," next to Shakspere in innate understanding of human nature, in the power of embodying "generic types rather than individuals," so that "Don Quixote and Sancho, like the men and women of Shakspere, are the contemporaries of every generation." These two characters, "who together make a complete man," Lowell found specially significant for consideration of latter-day generations of quixotic romanticists, since, as Coleridge has it, Don Quixote is Reason without common sense, while Sancho is common sense without Reason-both are vital to the integrity of man. The criticism of modern romanticism suggested by Cervantes attracted Lowell the more because it was expressed in a humorous and satiric vein kindred to his own, a vein, moreover, "thoroughly good-natured," unembittered by the experience of life, sweet and fresh despite a large acquaintance with misfortune and disenchantment, as if "the notion of Weltschmerz, or the misery of living and acting in this beautiful world" had never occurred to him.

As for Shakspere "once more," "that divine apparition known to mortals as Shakspere," as Lowell styles him even in his late years— the romantic critics were right, he maintains, in regarding him. as a great artist, though it is not for his plastic and expressive imagination that we love him, but rather for his serene and comprehensive humanity. Like Chaucer, Shakspere delights "in the pageantry of the actual world," and, unlike Dante, essentially holds to "the moral of worldly wisdom," so that his genius is human rather than spiritual; and yet he lifted the human to a plane higher than the actual by means of his typifying or idealizing imagination. Men and women as we know them reappear in his plays shorn of all that is accidental and meaningless, and stand revealed as enduring types of what men and women essentially are. Dante, writing an epic on Man instead of a man, had left men for Shakspere: and Shakspere gladly took them for his theme, not chance individuals but broad types of men, creating beneath the summit of Dante and above the plain of everyday humanity a vast plateau region where the air is fresh and clear"how serene and high he seems," how grandly he rises above

our self-exploiting nineteenth century, with its melancholy livercomplaint!" As free as Cervantes of egoistic Weltschmerz, he elevates us to the region of the eternally human, of das ewig Weibliche and das ewig Männliche. To know Shakspere is to know life itself, and in that knowledge to be happy. Only the destiny of man remains obscure, and for a vision of that we must climb with Dante, as Lowell unweariedly did, towards the summit and the vision beatific.

And now, finally, we may proceed to formulate succinctly the conception of literary art and its functions that we have studied in the foregoing pages:

Literature is the ideal representation of human nature. Each literary work must have first of all a self-contained form, possessing such qualities as unity, design, proportion, clearness, economy, power, control, repose, sanity, impersonality. This form is organic; that is, the structure is determined from within by the "soul" or animating conception, and the conception in turn is organic, proceeding from the writer's personal experience and cultural heritage. The faculty that images the whole and the necessary and harmonious relation of the parts is the plastic imagination. Form must be not only organic, but ideal; that is, it must embody the real that resides in the actual. The faculty that images the ideal is the spiritual imagination. When the spiritual imagination acts in its ordinary capacity, representing the perdurable types of human nature, and in so doing achieves an elevated breadth, it may be termed the humanistic or ethical imagination. When it acts in its extraordinary capacity, revealing the life of the soul itself, and in so doing achieves height if need be at the expense of breadth, it is the ultimate spiritual imagination. Of this ultimate spiritual imagination two kinds may be distinguished, an inferior kind that expresses momentary intuitions, and a superior kind that transforms the entire chaos of experience into a vision of the cosmos. In all its activities, the imagination must be guided by other human faculties, most of all by reason.

Form determines quantitatively the beauty of a given work of art; spiritual imagination, guided by reason, determines it qualitatively. In the "possible unity" of the greatest degree and the finest kind of beauty, we may conceive of the perfect work of art. The function of a work of art is to give delight. Of delight

there are two general kinds or grades: first, the delight of recreation, when the more serious faculties are resting with a view to future working and the sportive faculties are free to confer charm upon leisure; secondly, the joyful, exercise of the higher faculties, or perhaps of all the faculties of mind and spirit working in harmony and so producing happiness rather than mere pleasure. For the fulfillment of both grades of delight, excellence of form is requisite; but the higher grade demands in addition moral or spiritual excellence—the contagion of a fine personality or the inspiration of an ideal vision of life.

University of North Carolina.

RECENT BOOKS ABOUT POE1

BY KILLIS CAMPBELL

Walt Whitman once remarked that there is "an indescribable magnetism" about Poe's "life and reminiscences." The statement is true, and it has never been more abundantly illustrated than in very recent years. For although nearly two decades have passed since the celebration of Poe's birth and another two decades must elapse before we may celebrate the centenary of his death, it is doubtful whether there has ever been more widespread scholarly activity in the study of his life and writings than during the last three or four years, and this has found fruitage in upwards of half a dozen ambitious volumes besides a goodly number of essays and papers. Chief among the new books relating to Poe are the Valentine Letters (unhappily published under the cumbrous title Edgar Allan Poe Letters till now Unpublished), edited by Mrs. Mary Newton Stanard, and two full-length biographies, Edgar Allan Poe, the Man, by Miss Mary E. Phillips, and Israfel: The Life and Times of Poe, by Mr. Hervey Allen.

The publication of the Valentine Letters marks the fulfillment of a wish eagerly felt by every student of Poe and of a hope long deferred. That these letters existed had been known ever since the publication of Woodberry's life of Poe in 1885, and their contents had been imparted in confidence to a few students of Poe living in Richmond or visiting there; but for some strange reason these documents had been withheld from publication. The collection includes thirty-one letters-twenty-seven addressed by Poe to his foster-father, John Allan; two from John Allan to Poe; one from Poe to Sergeant "Bully" Graves, a former comrade in the army; and one from Mrs. Clemm, the poet's aunt 1 Edgar Allan Poe Letters till now Unpublished, in the Valentine Museum, Richmond, Virginia. Edited by Mary Newton Stanard. J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia, 1925.

Edgar Allan Poe, The Man. By Mary E. Phillips, with a Foreword by J. H. Whitty. Two Volumes. The John C. Winston Co., Philadelphia,

1926.

Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe. By Hervey Allen. Two Volumes. George H. Doran Company, New York, 1926.