student of poetical theory can easily claim that such sentences as these are post-Coleridgean, they are really timeless, like the glorious spirit of Shelley itself.

EDGAR ALLAN POE

Poe's essay on "The Poetic Principle," written to serve as a lecture during the last year (1849) of his brief life, illustrates his conviction that "the truly imaginative mind is never otherwise than analytic." As applied to Shelley, this dictum is far from true, but it expresses Poe's idealization of his own extraordinary gift for logical analysis. He was a craftsman who was never weary of explaining the trade secrets of his art, and though his criticism is uneven in quality and uninformed by deep and accurate scholarship, he expounded certain critical principles with incomparable clearness.

In "The Poetic Principle," together with some popularization of Coleridge, and some admixture no doubt of that "fudge" which Lowell thought so inextricably compounded with Poe's “genius,” there will be found the famous definition of the "Poetry of words as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty." Poetry, according to Poe, excites, by elevating the soul. But as all excitements, by psychological necessity, are transient, it is only short poems that are truly poems at all. Such brief and indeterminate glimpses of the supernal loveliness, "the creation of supernal beauty," is the poet's struggle-and despair. If Poe's formulation of the task and method of poetry lacks, as it doubtless does, universal validity, it is nevertheless a key to the understanding of his own exquisitely musical fragments of lyric verse.

WHITMAN ON AMERICA AND POETRY

7

Walt Whitman, like Poe and Coleridge, is mystic and transcendental in his theory of poetry. Unlike them, he is an arch-rebel in poetic practice. The Preface to "Leaves of Grass" (1855) is not so much a critical essay as a manifesto. It is vociferous, impassioned, inconsecutive. Some paragraphs of it were later turned into verse, so rich was it in emotion. The central theme is the opportunity 6 H. C., xxviii, 371ff. 7 H. C., xxxix, 388ff.

which the immediate age in America offers to the poet. The past has had its fit poetical expression, but the new world of democracy and science now demands a different type of bard. The qualifications are obdurately clear: he must love the earth and animals and common people; he must be in his own flesh a poem, at one with the universe of things; his soul must be great and unconstrained. He must perceive that everything is miraculous and divine. The poet is to be the priest of the new age, and of all the coming ages. Whitman does not enter, in the Preface, upon the discussion of the technique of his own unmetrical, rhapsodic verse. Yet this verse, which has challenged the attention of two generations, and which is slowly making its way toward general recognition, is scarcely to be understood without a knowledge of the theory of poetry which underlies it. The Preface states that theory, confusedly, if one tries to parse and weigh it sentence by sentence, but adequately, if one watches simply, as Whitman bids, the "drift" of it.

MATTHEW ARNOLD

"I do not contest Mr. Walt Whitman's powers and originality," wrote Matthew Arnold in 1866, but he adds this warning: "No one can afford in literature to trade merely on his own bottom and to take no account of what the other ages and nations have acquired: a great original literature America will never get in this way, and her intellect must inevitably consent to come, in a considerable measure, into the European movement." It is not the least useful service of Arnold's own essay on "The Study of Poetry" that it takes us at once into this European movement. The essay was written as a preface to a collection of English verse "one great contributory stream to the world river of poetry." Arnold insists throughout, in characteristic fashion, upon the necessity of developing a sense for the best, for the really excellent. He points out the fallacies involved in the purely historical and the purely personal estimates. He uses lines and expressions of the great masters as "touchstones" for detecting the presence or absence of high poetic quality. He takes Aristotle's remark about the "higher truth" and 8 H. C., xxviii, 65ff.

"higher seriousness" of poetry as compared to history, and tests therewith the "classic" matter and manner of English poets.

There are pitfalls, without question, lurking in the path of Arnold's apparently sure-footed and adroit method, but the temper of his performance needs no praise. He brings us steadily and serenely back to "the European movement," to the laws and standards that endure. But he also teaches that life and art are inexhaustible in their resources. “The future of poetry is immense"; that is the first sentence of Arnold's essay; and it will be also the confirmed final truth of any reader who has taken pains to acquaint himself with the utterance of poets about poetry. Walter Bagehot wrote long ago: "The bare idea that poetry is a deep thing, a teaching thing, the most surely and wisely elevating of human things, is even now to the coarse public mind nearly unknown. . . . All about and around us a faith in poetry struggles to be extricated, but it is not extricated. Some day, at the touch of the true word, the whole confusion will by magic cease; the broken and shapeless notions will cohere and crystallize into a bright and true theory." We are still waiting, no doubt, for that true and final word, but if it is ever spoken, it is likely to be uttered by one of the poets.

IV. ÆSTHETIC CRITICISM IN

GERMANY

BY PROFESSOR W. G. HOWARD

YOETHE admonishes the artist to create in forms of beauty,

G

not to talk about beauty, and it is certain that no man ever became a poet from the study of an “art of poetry." Language is abstract, and art is concrete, the understanding is slow and emotion is swift, the reason may be convinced, but the senses cannot be persuaded. There is no disputing about tastes. Nevertheless, we know that taste can be cultivated, and that understanding not only makes the taste more discriminating but also multiplies the sources of æsthetic pleasure. Artists as well as amateurs and philosophers have ever sought to further such understanding.

The sculptor or the painter, whose primary means of expression are forms and colors, assumes the secondary function of teacher when he places at the disposal of his "school" the results of his studies in technique or theory. The philosophical lover of art delights to speculate on the constituents of beauty, and the critic boldly formulates the laws upon the basis of which he judges and classifies. Poetry, probably the earliest of the fine arts, was first subjected to this æsthetic legislation; but music, dancing, sculpture, and painting were soon brought under the same dominion, and have long been regarded as sisters of one and the same household with poetry.

THE RISE OF ESTHETIC CRITICISM

Especially since the revival of learning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, practice in the arts has been accomplished by a running commentary of theory. The men of the Renaissance, having before them not merely numerous examples of Greek sculpture and the epics of Homer and Virgil, but also Aristotle's "Poetics" and Horace's "Art of Poetry," and seeing in these products of antiquity

the height of human achievement, attempted in various ways to apply the canons of ancient taste to the settlement of contemporary problems. Accordingly, we find in Italy and, following the Italians, in France, England, and Germany, many writers on æsthetics only gradually emancipating themselves from the constraint of certain axioms which, being ancient, are unhesitatingly received as authoritative. Thus, all of the fine arts are, with Aristotle, regarded as arts of imitation—imitation, not of real but of ideal nature, of beautiful nature, as the French call it; and this vague and elusive conception is usually left without any very illuminating definition. Similarly, a painting is thought of, after Simonides, as a dumb poem, and a poem as a speaking picture; and, repeating a misunderstood phrase of Horace, men confidently say, "Like picture, like poetry."

The tendency is, then, to assimilate or at most to compare the several arts, and few observations penetrate beneath the surface. Artists calculated proportions and devised elaborate rules of technical procedure; writers of poetics discussed diction and rhetorical figures; but in treatises on painting and poetry alike, three "parts"-invention, disposition, and coloring-furnished the traditional subdivisions. Intelligence and industry seemed competent, if not to vie with the ancient genius, at least to follow the paths that the ancients had trod. With all their formalism, however, the critics seldom failed to insist that the end of art is to arouse emotion; to instruct, indeed, but also, as Horace had said, to please. Now pleasure is a personal reaction. We may ask what it is that pleases us in a work of art, or what there is in us that makes us sensitive to æsthetic pleasure; and the principal advance that modern theory has made beyond the point reached by the Renaissance consists in a better answer to the second question. In other words, our theory has, or seeks, a psychological foundation.

LESSING

To be sure, that modern work in which the sharpest line is drawn between the fields of painting and poetry, Lessing's "Laocoön," appears to treat the two arts in their most objective aspect, and is, in fact, far more concerned with the means than with the purpose or the substance of artistic expression. Lessing argues that if the means