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is collecting and arranging, but he is also searching for more material, and he never quite arrives at the point where he can pause long enough to put his conclusions into print. He has not even made a catalogue of the contents of his museum. When we inquired eagerly for at least some kind of a list of its possessions he replied: "Why should I make a catalogue? It would not be complete, for I am always finding something new. Why make a catalogue that would not be perfect?"

That is the true Calabrian psychology. One is reminded of Pirandello's story of a small town which lacked paved streets and modern improvements because whenever the municipal council met to consider such improvements they had all advanced so far in their scientific studies that they knew the most recent inventions would soon be surpassed by better machinery. And while they waited for perfection, they did nothing. The scholar was like that. It was a fault, of course. But at least it was not the vulgar fault of self-advertising. Southern Italians have much in common with the Orientals. When one sees a row of peasants lined up in the shade, sitting on the ground and leaning against the wall, one cannot believe they are not Arabs. When Gregorovius visited Calabria, he is said to have exclaimed: "Can this be Italy? or is it a lopped-off limb of Turkey?"

The scholar remains unknown and isolated. But he has his compensations. As we walked on the white beach one afternoon, he repeated long passages of Dante and Carducci and lesser poets. He discoursed upon Pascoli, contrasting him with Carducci in a vein of really penetrating criticism. When he professed admiration for certain English poets I was skeptical, for he had read them only in translations. But even there he was not superficial. His greatest enthusiasm was for Shelley; and I wondered how many English archæologists could discuss the Prometheus Unbound with as much understanding as he showed, or what one of them would touch so surely upon the poetical quality of the Epipsychidion. “I have few books, “he said, “I know nothing at all about the new books. They are old before they reach me, if indeed they ever reach me. So I read my favorites over and over." Among his favorites, one soon discovers, are Homer and Virgil, Plato and the Greek dramatists.

Certainly it was not for lack of time that he failed to make his catalogue and to publish his theories and his "finds". He seemed to have time for everything. He spent hours over the telephone in the railroad station trying to find us an automobile in a neighboring town to take us into the interior. The car was found and promised for the following morning. At five o'clock he was on hand, pacing up and down the street in front of the hotel watching for the car. It never came. Its owner sent a messenger to say that he was ill-the one telephone could not be used at that early hour-and he began the search anew. Finally he came to tell us that he had found another car, but, alas! he had just learned that the trip was quite impossible. The river was swollen by the recent rains and the "new bridge" was not yet built.

The scholar was not surprised and not in the least apologetic. He dismissed the plan with that patient shrug of his people which seems to say, "What would you? We are in the hands of destiny. It is nature; it is what you will. How can we blame ourselves for the inevitable or for not knowing what was unknowable?"

And again there were compensations. He found a one-horse cart which took us up the rough and winding road to the nearest hill town, which seemed to be sculptured out of the solid rock, and there we saw the basilica of which he had spoken a majestic structure and another interesting church almost in ruins. One of the natives, a rough citizen in working clothes, contrasting with the urbane appearance of the scholar, brought the key of the neglected church and guided us through it, pointing with a gesture of despair at the leaking roof and the mosaic pavement covered with fallen stones and plaster. We admired the marble altar and the curious loggia of the apse, and when, as we went out, we offered him the usual fee for such a service, he mentioned that the scholar was a friend of his, declined our offer with a smile, and bowed us out with the manners of a lord.

No detail of church and basilica was lost upon the scholar. He does not scorn a Roman church because it is not Greek. On the outside of an old house in the town we had read the inscription "Ut videas bona." The scholar is inclined to see the good in every thing, and as he talked of artists whose names are not in the books, we resolved to read his historical criticisms of Calabrian art.

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But what was it all worth, Calabrian art or Norman architecture or Grecian sculpture, compared with the view from the ruined castle above the town? Mountains and sea, winding river valleys, sheer cliffs festooned with vines and hung with masses of aloes and fichi d'India, Aspromonte gathering up the clouds, a blue sky melting into a blue sea, streaked with green and purple beyond a long line of glittering sand-how could one descend from that and be content to live in a dreary town beside a dingy railroad and to spend one's time digging in the ground for dusty fragments of ancient art? The scholar's dream seemed a delusion. We came down between fields of a wine-red flower, and blue linen blossoms and scarlet poppies, along hedges bright with yellow broom and fragrant with rosemary and honeysuckle. The air grew sultry as we rattled into the town. The sun setting in an orange sky was hidden behind the railroad station.

On the following day we saw the scholar once more in his museum, and I was convinced beyond a doubt that the truth of his inner life was the supreme reality. He was fitting together the fragments of a Greek vase and, as he held the pieces in his hands, he drew our attention to the symbolism of the design with that light on his face which I knew I should remember when I had forgotten all else about him. It was as if he were filled with the joy of creation-as if he himself were the originator of the design.

He paused in his work and spoke of the view from the mountain. "You admire my Calabria?" he asked. I had fancied that he had left all that beauty behind him when he came down into the plain. I felt now that it was always with him. It was the enduring background of his vision.

Just across the Straits, in Sicily, a drama of Euripides was being acted in a Greek theatre to a large audience of tourists and visitors from the North. The scholar remained in his isolation. We should not see that great performance, inaugurated by Italy's Premier. Nor had we entered idyllic valleys peopled with singing shepherds. But we had made a rich discovery. We had found, on a scarred and battered spot of earth, a plain and simple scholar, working with patience day by day and living an enchanted life, dreaming the Hellenic dreams of Italy.

POE'S PHILOSOPHY OF COMPOSITION

BY JAMES SOUTHALL WILSON

Edgar Allan Poe Professor of English, University of Virginia

THERE was a devil in the belfry of American literary criticism from 1835 to 1849 that set all the placid editorial Dutch clocks a-buzzing. Poe's tale, The Devil in the Belfry, may describe for us the situation. The Dutch borough of Vondervatteimittiss consisted of sixty little houses exactly alike. There was a fat little Dutch clock on every mantel piece and a potted cabbage on each side of it. In each little house there was a little fat old lady in a dress of orange with stockings of green and shoes of pink, tied with yellow ribbons puckered into the shape of a cabbage, who was cooking sauerkraut and pork. There were three little boys in three-cornered hats, purple waistcoats, buckskin knee breeches, red stockings and silver-buckled shoes; each with a dumpy watch in one hand and a pipe in the other. There were fat tabby cats and fat lazy pigs. In front of each door, a puffy little old gentleman, exactly like the boys, only bigger, with big round eyes and a double chin, sat, watch in hand, and watched the steeple of the House of the Town Council as the hands of the clock in the belfry approached the figure twelve. Their end in life was to keep their watches exactly with the time of the town clock. The mottoes of this town were, "It is wrong to alter the good old course of things," and "We will stick by our clocks and our cabbages."

Suddenly through the town there came dancing the strangest figure a queer young man in a black swallow-tail coat and knee breeches, with stumpy looking pumps and a vast length of white handkerchief dangling from his pocket behind him. This strange visitor bounced right into the House of the Town Council, to the dismay of all the little men, and began at once belaboring the belfry man with a huge fiddle that he carried under his Just then however, the clock started striking and twelve

arm.

o'clock was both watch-setting time and cabbage time, so all the little men, watches in hand, began counting the strokes of the hour. "One!" said the clock. "Von!" echoed each little old gentleman in every leather-bottomed arm chair. "Two!" struck the big bell. "Doo!" repeated all the repeaters. "Three! Four! Five! Six! Seven! Eight! Nine! Ten!" rang the bell. “Dree! Vour! Fibe! Sax! Seben! Aight! Noin! Den!" answered the others. "Eleven!" "Eleben!" "Twelve!" "Dvelf!" They dropped their voices in perfect satisfaction "Und dvelf it is!" said all the little gentlemen putting up their watches. But the big bell struck again: "Thirteen!" said he. "Der Teufel!" groaned the little old gentlemen, "Dirteen! Dirteen! Mein Gott, it is dirteen o'clock. Der Teufel!" And Der Teufel it was! The Devil was in the Belfry, and such a hubbub as befell in Vondervotteimittiss I can never tell you: but it never regained its self-admiring, timeserving placidity again.

This odd tale is symbolic of what happened in literary circles in 1835, when Edgar Allan Poe found his way into the sanctum of The Messenger in Richmond. He gave the thirteenth stroke to the critical clock, that disturbed the complacency of the mutual admiration society of provincial editors and their friends which in the main formed the critical standards of the day. Their consternation was unassuaged when Poe died in 1849, and all together they cried out in the closing words of Poe's tale: "Let us proceed in a body and restore the ancient order of things in Vondervotteimittiss by ejecting that little fellow from the steeple!" But alas for Vondervotteimittiss! he has been ringing the bells in the belfry ever since.

The stroke of his criticism still sounds a dominant note from the belfry, and his own works are the best examples of his critical theories. Tempests in teapots might ruffle the surface of his criticisms in his reviews, but always the deeper currents of his deliberate critiques and creative writings flowed true to his compass. The preface of his early poems, published when he was twenty-two, suggested almost as clear cut a philosophy of composition as his later essays. To understand Poe's theory of his own art it is well to reconstruct from his phrases a simple statement of it.

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