50 THE BRONX SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 



work then the exclusion of Poe's name' is a survival of the 

 provincialism of judgment and taste against which he raised 

 his voice seventy years ago. Is the selection of names in the 

 Hall of Fame to be a record of individual tastes and opinions 

 or of the judgment of th.it company of intelligent readers who 

 constitute a court of ultimate jurisdiction? 



The real obstacle in the way of the adequate appreciation 

 of Poe has been and is the lack of the sense of beauty, the 

 undeveloped artistic feeling of the country. In this vast 

 workshop, where a new order of society is being fashioned. 

 his work has been and still is misunderstood and undervalued. 

 Its detachment from work-a-day interests, from ethical agita- 

 tions, from social and political movements, from the toils and 

 trials of the hour, from the spirit of restless energy, have 

 seemed to many Americans to show an entire lack of serious- 

 ness, and without seriousness there is no real art; they have 

 failed to see that Poe was deeply and genuinely serious in his 

 love of beauty, his passion for perfection of form. Tn his 

 vision of the place of beauty in the rounded life of the soul, 

 in the harmonious social expression of humanity, he was far 

 in advance of the civilization in which he lived, and he is 

 still far in advance of any general sensitiveness to the delicate 

 and spiritual harmonies of which art is the language. 



The sum and substance of Poe's real offence is that he was 

 an artist and an artist only. Poe reacted so radically from 

 the practical ideals and work of his time that he took refuge 

 in pure ideality. The refuge of the artist is always to be 

 found in his art; and to a nature so sensitive as Poe's, a mind 

 so delicately adjusted to its tools and its task, and so easily 

 thrown out of relation to them, there was perhaps no other 

 resource. Between the art of the author of Tsrafel and the 

 life about him there was a deep abyss which the poet never 

 attempted to cross. The material with which he constantly 

 dealt becomes significant alike of the extraordinary suscepti- 

 bility of his genius, and of the lack of the forms of life about 

 him to satisfy and inspire him. He expresses the dissonance 



