importance of being Old Fogy. And this is all I know about
the man.

James Huneker.

I

OLD FOGY IS PESSIMISTIC

Once every twelve months, to be precise, as the year dies and the sap
sinks in my old veins, my physical and psychologic--isn't that the
new-fangled way of putting it?--barometer sinks; in sympathy with Nature
I suppose. My corns ache, I get gouty, and my prejudices swell like
varicose veins.

Errors! Yes, errors! The word is not polite, nor am I in a mood of
politeness. I consider such phrases as the "progress of art," the
"improvement of art" and "higher average of art" distinctly and
harmfully misleading. I haven't the leisure just now to demonstrate
these mistaken propositions, but I shall write a few sentences.

How can art improve? Is art a something, an organism capable of "growing
up" into maturity? If it is, by the same token it can grow old, can
become a doddering, senile thing, and finally die and be buried with all
the honors due its long, useful life. It was Henrik Ibsen who said that
the value of a truth lasted about fifteen years; then it rotted into
error. Now, isn't all this talk of artistic improvement as fallacious as
the vicious reasoning of the Norwegian dramatist? Otherwise Bach would
be dead; Beethoven, middle-aged; Mozart, senile. What, instead, is the
health of these three composers? Have you a gayer, blither, more
youthful scapegrace writing today than Mozart? Is there a man among the
moderns more virile, more passionately earnest or noble than Beethoven?
Bach, of the three, seems the oldest; yet his _C-sharp major Prelude_
belies his years. On the contrary, the _Well-tempered Clavichord_ grows
younger with time. It is the Book of Eternal Wisdom. It is the Fountain
of Eternal Youth.

As a matter of cold, hard fact, it is your modern who is ancient; the
ancients were younger. Consider the Greeks and their naive joy in
creation! The twentieth-century man brings forth his works of art in
sorrow. His music shows it. It is sad, complicated, hysterical and
morbid. I shan't allude to Chopin, who was neurotic--another empty
medical phrase!--or to Schumann, who carried within him the seeds of
madness; or to Wagner, who was a decadent; sufficient for the purposes
of my argument to mention the names of Liszt, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky and
Richard Strauss. Some day when the weather is wretched, when icicles
hang by the wall, and "ways be foul" and "foul is fair and fair is
foul"--pa