implications alike for thought and for feeling, and reveals its intricacies with imaginative penetration.

Art was for Poe one long series of technical problems more or less consciously confronted, and in this prevailing interest in technical problems his resemblance to modern decadents is once more evident. All the motives and methods that have thus far been noted as characteristic of Poe imply that art is for the most part a matter of technical dexterity, and depends for its success on shrewd calculation of effects, on the wise use of confessedly artificial material, and on masterly execution. With life itself the artist is only incidentally concerned; he looks to it merely as to a storehouse whence he may draw the crude material that is to be worked up into art; depth of interpretation and genuineness of human appeal are only subordinate excellences. Art exists for its own sake and is its own justification. A poem, Poe asserts, in The Poetic Principle, should be "written solely for the poem's sake." In this phrase, he substantially anticipates the famous formula of art for art's sake which modern æstheticism has adopted as its distinctive legend.

And indeed it is precisely because of his mastery of technique that Poe has lived and is sure to live in literature. The genre he most cultivated is slight; his "criticism of life" is insignificant, almost meaningless. The "beauty" that connects itself with his work is felt to be an adventitious beauty imported into life through a morbid temperament, rather than essential beauty actually resident in life, and revealed through the swift play of poetic imagination. Yet beauty Poe's best tales certainly create with an almost inevitable artistic instinct for the possibilities and requirements of artificial production. His really memorable short stories have perfect unity of effect, are delicately elaborated with vibrant detail, make often marvellously subtle play upon swiftly responsive nerves, which have been put into tremulous readiness by cunning hints and premonitions, and employ in their wording and in their cadences a sound-symbolism that is conjuring in its creation of atmosphere and reënforcement of effect. A great part of the power of his most weird romances comes from the visionary concreteness of his style, from his complete visualization of the fantastic incidents he invents, or rather from his complete realization of

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them for all the senses. Such tales as Eleanora and the Assignation have almost the brilliant sensuous surface of the best romantic poetry, deal almost as continuously in glowing detail for eye and ear. Poe's world gains its mystery and occasional ghastliness, not like Hawthorne's, through vagueness and the tantalizing duplicity of symbolism, but through a direct representation of the sights and sounds that go with crisped nerves and morbid mental states, through the intense realization of the visionary experiences of disordered imaginations, through vivid portrayal of disease and death. Poe's world is a burnished world of exquisite falseness which bribes us to accept it by its congruity of detail, its self-consistency, and its visionary intensity and splendor of realization. It seems real because it is so magnificently false. The harmony is everywhere perfectly preserved, in the preparation of effects, in the choice of details, in tone and in atmosphere.

Poe's style is delicately artificial, to suit his subject-matter and his methods. He is fond of calculated involutions and inversions and of nicely modulated rhythms. He had evidently read De Quincey with intense appreciation, and there are repeatedly in Poe's most highly finished prose echoes of De Quincey's cadences and groupings of accent. In such visionary tales as Eleanora the style has the sustained music and the elaborate melodies of an incantation, and does much by its subtly modulated rise and fall, its apt accelerations and delays, and its sympathetically shifting tone-color, to subdue and control the reader's imagination, and to impose upon him with surreptitious persuasiveness the images, the moods, and the fantastic dreaming that Poe would have him helplessly accept. In his critical writings, on the other hand, Poe's style is keen, analytical, acrid, harshly accentuated. Here again is illustrated the curious division in Poe between emotions and imagination on the one hand, and intellect on the other. Poe's favorite critic is Macaulay. "The style and general conduct of Macaulay's critical papers," Poe assures us, "could scarcely be improved." Accordingly, in his own critical essays, there is much of the over-anxious emphasis, the challenging manner, the demonstrative tone that make Macaulay's literary essays so lacking in subtlety, delicacy, and charm. There is much, too, of Macaulay's hardness of finish, unsensitiveness to the shade, and confident

maladroitness. On the other hand, Poe cannot at all rival Macaulay in wide reading, varied knowledge, command of literary gossip and apt anecdote, or in dignity of experience and breadth of culture. Accordingly, Poe as a critic escapes being a miniature, “shallow-hearted" Macaulay only through his genius for analysis and his insight into technical problems. He has a far surer intuition than Macaulay in whatever concerns the mechanics. of art. In his essays on special poets or poems, he explains many obscure passages with genuine niceness of instinct, and comments often with great delicacy of perception upon beauties of technique and of structure. In his essays on the theory of art, he adopts in some degree the romantic doctrine of art as a revealer of what he calls "supernal loveliness," and writes with a plausible imitation of academic sincerity a plea for the Poetic Principle, as though its presence in the human soul were a proof of immortality. Poetry, he implies, is the ultimate form of speech. Yet, despite the amiable volubility with which Poe recommends this doctrine, the essay does not succeed in getting itself believed; it is largely vitiated by the tone of the professional lecturer, who seems to be saying what he knows will please or impress, rather than uttering his own frank thought.

And, indeed, shallowness of conviction is the radical defect in all Poe's work both as theorizer and artist. He has play-feelings, which he uses with the utmost ingenuity in his Tales of Passion and Romance, and which he describes with the happiest facility. He has unsurpassable intellectual acuteness, and invents very pretty and puzzling complications of incident, in unravelling which manikins use their play-wits with astonishing dexterity. He weaves, too, through the help of this same inventive intellect, plausible and suggestive theories about life and art. Yet these many "inventions," artistic and theoretic alike, seem to us all the time merely exquisite make-believe. Poe lacked deep convictions of any kind, profound human experience, genuineness, and wealth of nature. His art is correspondingly superficial and artificial. Nevertheless, his work is sure to live because of its perfection of form. He is a masterly technician, the first of the Decadents, the forerunner of the practicers of art for art's sake.

LEWIS EDWARDS GATES

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SHADOWA PARABLE

Yea! though I walk through the valley of the Shadow.

Psalm of David.

YE who read are still among the living; but I who write shall have long since gone my way into the region of shadows. For indeed strange things shall happen, and secret things be known, and many centuries shall pass away, ere these memorials be seen of men. And, when seen, there will be some to disbelieve and some to doubt, and yet a few who will find much to ponder upon in the characters here graven with a stylus of iron.

The year had been a year of terror, and of feelings more intense than terror for which there is no name upon the earth. For many prodigies and signs had taken place, and far and wide, over sea and land, the black wings of the Pestilence were spread abroad. To those, nevertheless, cunning in the stars, it was not unknown that the heavens wore an aspect of ill; and to me, the Greek Oinos, among others, it was evident that now had arrived the alternation of that seven hundred and ninety-fourth year when, at the entrance of Aries, the planet Jupiter is conjoined with the red ring of the terrible Saturnus. The peculiar spirit of the skies, if I mistake not greatly, made itself manifest, not only in the physical orb of the earth, but in the souls, imaginations, and meditations of mankind.

Over some flasks of the red Chian wine, within the walls of a noble hall in a dim city called Ptolemais, we sat at night, a company of seven. And to our chamber there was no entrance save by a lofty door of brass; and the door was fashioned by the artisan Corinnos, and, being of rare workmanship, was fastened from within. Black draperies likewise, in the gloomy room, shut out from our view the moon, the lurid stars, and the peopleless streets - but the boding and the memory of Evil, they would not be so excluded. There were things around us and about of which I could render no distinct account,- things material and spiritual: heaviness in the atmosphere, a sense of suffocation, anxiety-and, above all, that terrible state of existence

which the nervous experience when the senses are keenly living and awake, and meanwhile the powers of thought lie dormant. A dead weight hung upon us. It hung upon our limbs, upon the household furniture, upon the goblets from which we drank; and all things were depressed, and borne down thereby- all things save only the flames of the seven iron lamps which illumined our revel. Uprearing themselves in tall slender lines of light, they thus remained burning, all pallid and motionless; and in the mirror which their lustre formed upon the round table of ebony at which we sat, each of us there assembled beheld the pallor of his own countenance, and the unquiet glare in the downcast eyes of his companions. Yet we laughed and were merry in our proper way - which was hysterical: and sang the songs of Anacreon - which are madness; and drank deeply - although the purple wine reminded us of blood. For there was yet another tenant of our chamber in the person of young Zoilus. Dead and at full length he lay, enshrouded: the genius and the demon of the scene. Alas! he bore no portion in our mirth, save that his countenance, distorted with the plague, and his eyes in which Death had but half extinguished the fire of the pestilence, seemed to take such interest in our merriment as the dead may haply take in the merriment of those who are to die. But although I, Oinos, felt that the eyes of the departed were upon me, still I forced myself not to perceive the bitterness of their expression, and, gazing down steadily into the depths of the ebony mirror, sang with a loud and sonorous voice the songs of the son of Teios. But gradually my songs they ceased, and their echoes, rolling afar off among the sable draperies of the chamber, became weak, and undistinguishable, and so faded away. And lo! from among those sable draperies where the sounds of the song departed, there came forth a dark and undefined shadow · a shadow such as the moon, when low in heaven, might fashion from the figure of a man; but it was the shadow neither of man, nor of God, nor of any familiar thing. And quivering awhile among the draperies of the room, it at length rested in full view upon the surface of the door of brass. But the shadow was vague, and formless, and indefinite, and was the shadow neither of man nor of God neither God of Greece, nor God of Chaldæa, nor any Egyptian