Page:Edgar Allan Poe - a centenary tribute.pdf/53

 our methods of instruction; but I am vastly mistaken if, thanks partly to us, there is not a much larger amount of intelligent reading done in this country today by a proportionately larger number of people than was the case twenty years ago. Reading as one of the means to aristocratic culture, has probably shown no such advance; it may even have retrograded, though I am not sure of that, except in so far as our attitude toward the great, the indispensable culture of Greece and Rome leaves me dissatisfied; but reading as a means to democratic culture has made, I believe, an advance truly extraordinary. Now these two sorts of reading seem bound to affect each other, and they are continually coming together in our schools and colleges. Provincial, sectional, crassly individualistic estimates of authors and books are held with decreasing tenacity in a country of increasing democratic culture. Schools, newspapers, lectures, and literary clubs of all sorts may seem to us, in our pessimistic moods, to be merely appliances for the dissemination of bad taste and misinformation, and they do disseminate a depressing deal of both, but, at bottom and in the large, their influence is beneficial in creating and transmitting interest and in checking extravagant individualism. These agencies, not only make for an increased reading and study of Poe and other leading American writers, but they also tend to normalize opinion about them, to render it less and less likely that bizarre judgments, whether favorable or unfavorable, will be passed upon them. This formation of an intelligent public opinion upon literary topics is necessarily a matter of generations, and, if it ever tends to check the legitimate,