of false
feeling, of cheap pathos, of the cheap moral." He is on the trail of
those pious mountebanks who "clutter the marketplaces with their booths,
mischievous half-art and tubs of tripe and soft soap." Superficially, as
I say, he seems to have made little progress in this benign _pogrom_.
But under the surface, concealed from a first glance, he has undoubtedly
left a mark--faint, perhaps, but still a mark. To be a civilized man in
America is measurably less difficult, despite the war, than it used to
be, say, in 1890. One may at least speak of "Die Walkuere" without being
laughed at as a half-wit, and read Stirner without being confused with
Castro and Raisuli, and argue that Huxley got the better of Gladstone
without being challenged at the polls. I know of no man who pushed in
that direction harder than James Huneker.

FOOTNOTES:

[31] The Science of English Verse; New York, Scribner, 1880.

[32] Masks and Minstrels of New Germany; Boston, John W. Luce & Co.,
1911.

[33] New York, Doubleday, Page & Co., 1913.

[34] The Drift of Romanticism; Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1913.

[35] New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1916.

[36] New York, Chas. Scribner's Sons, 1917.

[37] New York, The Macmillan Co., 1917.

IV

PURITANISM AS A LITERARY FORCE

Sec. 1

"Calvinism," says Dr. Leon Kellner, in his excellent little history of
American literature,[38] "is the natural theology of the disinherited;
it never flourished, therefore, anywhere as it did in the barren hills
of Scotland and in the wilds of North America." The learned doctor is
here speaking of theology in what may be called its narrow technical
sense--that is, as a theory of God. Under Calvinism, in the New World as
well as in the Old, it became no more than a luxuriant demonology; even
God himself was transformed into a superior sort of devil, ever wary and
wholly merciless. That primitive demonology still survives in the
barbaric doctrines of the Methodists and Baptists, particularly in the
South; but it has been ameliorated, even there, by a growing sense of
the divine grace, and so the old God of Plymouth Rock, as practically
conceived, is now scarcely worse than the average jail warden or
Italian padrone. On the ethical side, however, Calvinism is dying a much
harder death, and we are still a long way from the enlightenment. Save
where Continental influences have measurably corrupted the Puritan
idea--_e.g._, in such cities as New York, San