Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/68

48 which might have been as readily foreseen, we have been brought to merge in simple show our notions of taste itself."

While his Americanism resented "the disgusting spectacle of our subserviency to British criticism," it resented equally the inverted patriotism that commends a bad book because an American wrote it:

"There was a time, it is true, when we cringed to foreign opinion—let us even say when we paid a most servile deference to British critical dicta. That an American book could, by any possibility, be worthy perusal, was an idea by no means extensively prevalent in the land; and if we were induced to read at all the productions of our native writers, it was only after repeated assurances from England that such productions were not altogether contemptible....... The excess of our subserviency was blamable—but, as we have before said, this very excess might have found a shadow of excuse in the strict justice, if properly regulated, of the principle from which it issued. Not so, however, with our present follies. We are becoming boisterous and arrogant in the pride of a too speedily assumed literary freedom. We throw off, with the most presumptuous and unmeaning hauteur, all deference whatever to foreign opinion—we forget, in the puerile inflation of vanity, that the world is the true theatre of the biblical histrio—we get up a hue and cry about the necessity of encouraging native writers of merit—we blindly fancy that we can accomplish this by indiscriminate puffing of good, bad, and indifferent, without taking the trouble to consider that