"Criticism" - читать интересную книгу автора (Poe Edgar Allan)

BEFORE entering upon the detailed notice which we propose of the
volumes before us, we wish to speak a few words in regard to the
present state of American criticism.
It must be visible to all who meddle with literary matters, that
of late years a thorough revolution has been effected in the
censorship of our press. That this revolution is infinitely for the
worse we believe. There was a time, it is true, when we cringed to
foreign opinion- let us even say when we paid 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. But there was, at all events, a shadow of excuse, and
a slight basis of reason for a subserviency so grotesque. Even now,
perhaps, it would not be far wrong to assert that such basis of reason
may still exist. Let us grant that in many of the abstract sciences-
that even in Theology, in Medicine, in Law, in Oratory, in the
Mechanical Arts, we have no competitors whatever, still nothing but
the most egregious national vanity would assign us a place, in the
matter of Polite Literature, upon a level with the elder and riper
climes of Europe, the earliest steps of whose children are among the
groves of magnificently endowed Academies, and whose innumerable men
of leisure, and of consequent learning, drink daily from those
august fountains of inspiration which burst around them everywhere
from out the tombs of their immortal dead, and from out their hoary
and trophied monuments of chivalry and song. In paying then, as a
nation, a respectful and not undue deference to a supremacy rarely
questioned but by prejudice or ignorance, we should, of course, be
doing nothing more than acting in a rational manner. 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 what we
choose to denominate encouragement is thus, by its general
application, rendered precisely the reverse. In a word, so far from
being ashamed of the many disgraceful literary failures to which our
own inordinate vanities and misapplied patriotism have lately given
birth, and so far from deeply lamenting that these daily puerilities
are of home manufacture, we adhere pertinaciously to our original
blindly conceived idea, and thus often find ourselves involved in