for which he had a market, and which are humorous only to one who sees the luricrous side of their failure. He analyzed mirth as the product of incongruity, and went to work upon a theory to produce it. The result is seen not only in the extravaganzas to which I refer,

and

a fine disdain. Poe resorted to them of malice aforethought, and under pretense of correctness. Still, the work of a romancer and poet is not that of a book5 worm. What he needs is a good reference-knowledge, and this Poe had. His irregular school-boy training was not likely to give him the scholastic habit, nor would his impatient manhood otherwise

it is a pity that these should have been hunted up so laboriously, but in the use of what he thought was humor to barb to have confirmed it. I am sure that we his criticisms, and as a contrast to the exciting passages of his analytical tales. One of his sketches, The Duc de l'Omelette,' after the lighter French manner, is full of grace and jaunty persiflage, 15 but most of his whimsical 'pot-boilers' are deplorably absurd. There is something akin to humor in the sub-handling of his favorite themes,- such as the awe and mystery of death, the terrors of pes- 20 tilence, insanity, or remorse. The grotesque and nether side of these matters presents itself to him, and then his irony, with its repulsive fancies, is as near humor as he ever approaches. That is to say, 25 it is grave-yard humor, the kind which sends a chill down our backs, and implies a contempt for our bodies and souls, for the perils, helplessness and meanness of the stricken human race.

30

Poe is sometimes called a man of extraordinary learning. Upon a first acquaintance, one might receive the impression that his scholarship was not only varied, but thorough. A study of his 35 works has satisfied me that he possessed literary resources and knew how to make the most of them. In this he resembled Bulwer, and, with far less abundant materials than the latter required, employed them as speciously. He easily threw a glamor of erudition about his work, by the use of phrases from old authors he had read, or among whose treatises he had foraged with special design. It was 45 his knack to cull sentences which, taken by themselves, produce a weird or impressive effect, and to reframe them skilfully. This plan was clever, and resulted in something that could best be muttered 50 'darkly, at dead of night'; but it partook of trickery, even in its art. He had

little exact scholarship, nor needed it, dealing, as he did, not with the processes of learning, but with results that could 55 subserve the play of his imagination. Shakespere's anachronisms and illusions were made as he required them, and with

may consider that portion of his youth to have been of most worth which was devoted, as in the case of many a born writer, to the unconscious education obtained from the reading, for the mere love of it, of all books to which he had access. This training served him well. It enabled him to give his romance an alchemic air, by citation from writers like Chapman, Thomas More, Bishop King, etc., and from Latin and French authors in profusion. His French tendencies were natural, and he learned enough of the language to read much of its current literature and get hold of modes unknown to many of his fellow-writers. I have said that his stock in trade was narrow, but for the adroit display of it examine any of his tales and sketches, for example, Berenice,' or 'The Assignation.'

In knowledge of what may be called the properties of his romance, he was more honestly grounded. He had the good fortune to utilize the Southern life and scenery which he knew in youth. It chanced, also, that during some years of his boyhood that formative period whose impressions are indelible he lived in a characteristic part of England. He had seen with his own eyes castles, abbeys, the hangings and tapestries and other bygone trappings of ancient rooms, and remembered effects of decoration and color which always came to his aid. These he used as if he were born to them; never, certainly, with the surprise at their richness which vulgarizes Disraeli's 'Lothair.' In some way, known to genius, he also caught the romance of France, of Italy, of the Orient, and one tale or another is transfused with their atmosphere; while the central figure, however disguised, is always the image of the romancer himself. His equipment, on the whole, was not a pedant's, much less that of a searcher after truth; it was that of a poet and a literary workman. Yet he had the hunger

5

for loveliness so governed the emotions and convictions. His service of the beautiful was idolatry, and he would have kneeled with Heine at the feet of Our Lady of Milo, and believed that she yearned to help him. This consecration to absolute beauty made him abhor the mixture of sentimentalism, metaphysics, and morals, in its presentation. It was a foregone conclusion that neither Longfellow, Emerson, Lowell, nor Hawthorne should wholly satisfy him. The question of moral' tendency concerned him not in the least. He did not feel with Keats that Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' and that a divine perfection may be reached by either road. This deficiency narrowed his range both as a poet and as a critic. His sense of justice was a sense of the fitness of things, and strange to say -when he put it aside he forgot that he was doing an unseemly thing. Otherwise, he represents, or was one of the first to lead, a rebellion against formalism, commonplace, the spirit of the bourgeois. In this movement Whitman is his countertype at the pole opposite from that of art; and hence they justly are picked out from the rest of us and associated in foreign minds. Taste was Poe's supreme faculty. Beauty, to him, was a definite and logical reality, and he would have scouted Véron's claim that it has no fixed objective laws, and exists only in the na

which animates the imaginative student, and, had he been led to devote himself to science, would have contributed to the sum of knowledge. In writing 'Eureka,' he was unquestionably sincere, and forgot himself more nearly than in any other act of his professional life. But here his inexact learning betrayed him. What was begun in conviction - a swift generalization from scientific theories of the 10 universe grew to be so far beyond the data at his command, or so inconsistent with them, that he finally saw he had written little else than a prose poem, and desired that it should be so regarded. Of 15 all sciences, astronomy appeals most to the imagination. What is rational in 'Eureka' mostly is a re-statement of accepted theories; otherwise the treatise is vague and nebulous, a light dimmed by its own vapor. The work is curiously saturated with our modern Pantheism; and although in many portions it shows the author's weariness, yet it was a notable production for a layman venturing 25 within the precincts of the savant. The poetic instinct hits upon truths which the science of the future confirms; but as often, perhaps, it glorifies some error sprung from its too ardent generaliza- 30 tion. Poe's inexactness was shown in frequent slips. sometimes made unconsciously, sometimes in reliance upon the dullness of his rivals to save him from detection. He was on the alert for other 35 ture of the observer. Although the

20

people's errors: for his own facts, were
he now alive, he could not call so lightly
upon his imagination. Even our younger
authors, here and abroad, now are so well
equipped that their learning seems to 40
handicap their winged steeds. Poe had,
above all, the gift of poetic induction.
He would have divined the nature of an
unknown world from a specimen of its
flora, a fragment of its art. He felt him- 45
self something more than a bookman. He
was a creator of the beautiful, and hence
the conscious struggle of his spirit for the
sustenance it craved. Even when he was
most in error, he labored as an artist, 50
and it is idle criticism that judges him
upon any other ground.

Accept him, then, whether as poet or romancer, as a pioneer in the art of feeling in American literature. So far as he was devoted to art for art's sake, it was for her sake as the exponent of beauty. No man ever lived in whom the passion

brakes of art were on his imagination, his taste was not wholly pure; he vacillated between the classic forms and those allied with color, splendor, Oriental decoration; between his love for the antique and his impressions of the mystical and grotesque. But he was almost without confraternity. An artist in an unartistic period, he had to grope his way, to contend with stupidity and coarseness. Again, his imagination, gloating upon the possibilities of taste, violated its simplicity. Poe longed for the lamp of Aladdin, for the riches of the Gnomes. Had unbounded wealth been his, he would have outvied Beckford, Landor, Dumas, in barbaric extravagance of architecture. His efforts to apply the laws of the beautiful to imaginary decoration, architecture, landscape, are very fascinating as seen in The Philosophy of Furniture.' 'Landscape Gardening,' and 'Landor's Cottage.' 'The Domain of Arnheim' is a marvel

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH (1836-1907) 1

Thomas Bailey Aldrich was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and spent there that early boyhood which he has reproduced so vividly in his Story of a Bad Boy. He did not go to college because of his father's early death and the consequent necessity for earning money for the family needs. From 1852 to 1866 he lived in New York City, engaged in editorial work on various papers, and for a time he saw much of the Bohemian circle of poets and literary adventurers which flourished there in the years just before the war. He began publishing early, issuing his first dainty volume of poetry, The Bells, in 1855 and following it with other editions in 1858, 1859, 1861, 1863, and 1865. In this, the New York period of his life, he was a poet of the art for beauty's sake school, often somewhat sentimental, but always faultlessly accurate and artistic. The second period of his life began when Fields and Osgood offered him the editorship of Every Saturday. The rest of his life was connected with Boston. From 1881 to 1890 he was editor of The Atlantic Monthly. He published several distinctive short stories, three or four novels, and many carefully-wrought lyrics, a final and definitive edition of which he issued in his last years with the title Songs and Sonnets. He married into a wealthy Boston family, traveled much,- twice circling the earth, and wrote only when the mood was upon him.

As a poet he must be classed as distinctively a lyrist. It is hard to speak of his work without referring to the English poet Herrick, as he himself has done in 'Hesperides.' He was the most artistic of our poets, the maker of exquisitely carved jewels of verse, perfect in their way, but throwing little light upon human life and its meaning. In his later years he did more substantial work. His prose is as distinctive as his verse, especially his short stories. He added the surprise ending, and gave to the form a lightness of touch and an urbane, patrician tone that hitherto had been lacking in American shorter fiction.