Page:Edgar Allan Poe - a centenary tribute.pdf/39

 literary conditions obtaining in France, it was becoming an international matter.

Shall we pause here to indulge in words of blame or regret? I think not. Poe's attitude toward New England and its writers was almost predetermined, and it has not seriously hurt either. Their attitude toward him has doubtless somewhat retarded the spread of his fame and his influence in America; but it has also stimulated the zeal of his admirers, and it has tested as with fire the gold of his genius. Without such testing would his countrymen be celebrating this centenary of his birth with so much enthusiasm, with so much really national not sectional spontaneity, with so much confidence in the permanent worth of the achievements of the man they commemorate? When I speak of the enthusiasm with which people are celebrating his centenary, I am not, of course, indulging in the delusion that this academic paper I am reading will pass with any of you as a Swinburnian outburst of dithyrambic eulogy. All I am trying to do is to emphasize the widespread and genuine interest this one hundredth anniversary of Poe's birth has aroused throughout the country, and to point out the fact that, as a student of literary history, I see in the phenomenon one of the best proofs that could be furnished of Poe's possession of a great and unique genius. If that genius were as decadent, as meretricious, as paltry, as some critics would have us think it, should we not be obliged to consider a larger number of our fellow-citizens gulled or demented than it would be at all comfortable to believe? If that genius had not added materially to the world's pleasure and profit, is it likely that in sixty years, more than half of