les above all his
other work. Story-writing, indeed, was his first love, and his Opus 1 a
bad imitation of Poe, by name "The Comet," was done in Philadelphia so
long ago as July 4, 1876. (Temperature, 105 degrees Fahrenheit.) One
rather marvels that he has never attempted a novel. It would have been
as bad, perhaps, as "Love Among the Artists," but certainly no bore. He
might have given George Moore useful help with "Evelyn Innes" and
"Sister Teresa": they are about music, but not by a musician. As for me,
I see no great talent for fiction _qua_ fiction in these two volumes of
exotic tales. They are interesting simply because Huneker the story
teller so often yields place to Huneker the playboy of the arts. Such
things as "Antichrist" and "The Woman Who Loved Chopin" are no more, at
bottom, than second-rate anecdotes; it is the filling, the sauce, the
embroidery that counts. But what filling! What sauce! What
embroidery!... One never sees more of Huneker....

Sec. 8

He must stand or fall, however, as critic. It is what he has written
about other men, not what he has concocted himself, that makes a figure
of him, and gives him his unique place in the sterile literature of the
republic's second century. He stands for a _Weltanschauung_ that is not
only un-national, but anti-national; he is the chief of all the curbers
and correctors of the American Philistine; in praising the arts he has
also criticized a civilization. In the large sense, of course, he has
had but small influence. After twenty years of earnest labour, he finds
himself almost as alone as a Methodist in Bavaria. The body of native
criticism remains as I have described it; an endless piling up of
platitudes, an homeric mass of false assumptions and jejune conclusions,
an insane madness to reduce beauty to terms of a petty and pornographic
morality. One might throw a thousand bricks in any American city without
striking a single man who could give an intelligible account of either
Hauptmann or Cezanne, or of the reasons for holding Schumann to have
been a better composer than Mendelssohn. The boys in our colleges are
still taught that Whittier was a great poet and Fennimore Cooper a great
novelist. Nine-tenths of our people--perhaps ninety-nine hundredths of
our native-born--have yet to see their first good picture, or to hear
their first symphony. Our Chamberses and Richard Harding Davises are
national figures; our Norrises and Dreisers are scarcely tole