things of beauty. If in what professed to be poetry he found ugly things, he unhesitatingly condemned them; if he found anything which seemed beautiful, nobody could welcome it more eagerly. Poe really loved his art; and whatever his lack of training, he had a natural, instinctive, eager perception of beauty. This, too, he set forth in a style always simple and clear, always free from affectation or mannerism, and always marked by a fine sense of rhythm. All these merits appear saliently in those portions of his work which deal with actual fact.

His philosophical writings seem more suspicious. As a journalist Poe sometimes deliberately hoaxed the public; and when you read such papers as his "Poetic Principle," his "Rationale of Verse," or his "Philosophy of Composition," it is hard to feel sure that he is not gravely hoaxing you. On the whole, he probably was not. In his work of this kind one feels intense ingenuity, total lack of scholarship, and a temper far from judicial. The traits which make Poe's occasional criticisms excellent-swiftness of perception and fineness of taste-are matters not of training but of temperament.

Poems.

Temperament, indeed, of a markedly individual kind is Tales and what gives lasting character and vitality to the tales and the poems by which he has become permanently known. Both alike are instantly to be distinguished from the critical work at which we have glanced by the fact that they never deal with things which he believed actually to exist, whether in this world or in the next. Poe's individual and powerful style, to be sure, full of what seems like vividness, constantly produces "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith;" but the futile attempts to illustrate his work prove that fictions

Individu

ality.

even so vivid as Usher and the Lady Madeline and the unearthly house of their doom are things which no one can translate into visual terms without demonstrating their unreality. Yet, for all this unreality, there hovers around them a mood, a temper, an impalpable but unmistakable quality, which could hardly have emanated from any other human being than Edgar Allan Poe.

This individuality is hard to define. One or two things about it, however, seem clear. In tales and poems alike he is most characteristic when dealing with mysteries; and though to a certain point these mysteries, often horrible, are genuinely mysterious, they reveal no trace of spiritual insight, no sense of the eternities which lie beyond human perception. Excellent in their way, one cannot but feel them to be melodramatic. From beginning to end Poe had that inextricable combination of meretriciousness and sincerity which marks the temperament of actors in general.

Yet genius he certainly had, and to no small degree in that excellent form which has been described as "an infinite capacity for taking pains." In his tales, now of melodramatic mystery, again of elaborate ingenuity, one feels not only his constant power of imagination, one feels also masterly precision of touch. As you read over and over again both Poe's verse and his prose, particularly if you read aloud, you will feel more and more that almost every vowel, every consonant, and more surely still every turn of the rhythm which places the accent so definitely where the writer means it to fall, indicates not only a rare sense of form, but a still more rare power of expression.

They indicate more than this, too. Whether the things

which Poe wished to express were worth his pains is not the question. He knew what they were, and he unfeignedly wished to express them. He had almost in perfection a power more frequently shown by skilful melodramatic actors than by men of letters,-the power of assuming an intensely unreal mood and of so setting it forth as to make us for the moment share it unresistingly. This power one feels perhaps most palpably in the peculiar melody of his verse. The "Haunted Palace" may be stagey, but there is something in its lyric quality-that quality whereby poetry impalpably but unmistakably performs the office best performed by pure music-which throws a reader into a mood almost too subtle for words.

In the strenuousness of Poe's artistic conscience we found a trait more characteristic of America than of England,—a trait which is perhaps involved in the national self-consciousness of our country. His general purity of feeling, which might hardly have been expected from the circumstances of his personal career, is equally characteristic of his America. It is allied, perhaps, with that freedom from actuality which we have seen to characterize his most apparently vivid work. The world which bred Poe was a world whose national life was still inexperienced. Intensely individual, and paradoxically sincere, Poe Summary set forth a peculiar range of mysterious though not significant emotion. In the fact that this emotion, even though insignificant, was mysterious, is a trait which we begin to recognize as characteristically American, at least at that moment when American life meant something else than wide human experience. There is something characteristically American, too, in the fact that Poe's work gains its effect from artistic conscience, an ever present

sense of form. Finally, there is something characteristically American in Poe's instinctive delicacy. Poe's chief merits, in brief, prove merits of refinement. Even through a time so recent as his, refinement of temper, conscientious sense of form, and instinctive neglect of actual fact remained the most characteristic traits, if not of American life, at least of American letters.

7

VI

THE KNICKERBOCKER SCHOOL

REFERENCES

THE KNICKERBOCKER SCHOOL

WORKS: The Knickerbocker; or New York Monthly Magazine, 60 vols., New York, 1833-62; The Knickerbocker Gallery: A Testimonial to the Editor of the Knickerbocker Magazine from its Contributors, New York: Hueston, 1855.

BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM: Duyckinck and Griswold, passim. The Knickerbockers, by Henry van Dyke, is announced in the series of "National Studies in American Letters" (New York: Macmillan).

SELECTIONS: As above; also Stedman and Hutchinson (see Index, Vol. XI, under the various names).

WILLIS

WORKS: No complete edition. "The thirteen volumes in uniform style, issued by Charles Scribner from 1849 to 1859, form as nearly a complete edition of Willis's prose since 1846 as is ever likely to be made" (Beers, Willis, p. 353). There is a complete edition of Willis's Poems, New York: Clark & Maynard, 1868. A very convenient volume of selections is the Prose Writings of Nathaniel Parker Willis, edited by H. A. Beers, New York: Scribner, 1885.

BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM: H. A. Beers, Nathaniel Parker Willis, Boston: Houghton, 1885 (AML).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Foley, 322-325; *Beers, Willis, 353–356.

SELECTIONS: Duyckinck, II, 440-443; Griswold, Prose, 485-494; Griswold, Poetry, 372-378; Stedman, 102-106; *Stedman and Hutchinson, VI, 256–269.

In the course of our glances at Poe we had occasion to recognize the existence of an extensive, though now forgotten, periodical literature,-Godey's Lady's Book, The