Munsey, author of "The Boy Broker" and "Afloat in a Great City," as a
significant human document. Moreover Howells ran true to type in another
way, for he long reigned as the leading Anglo-Saxon authority on the
Russian novelists without knowing, so far as I can make out, more than
ten words of Russian. In the same manner, we have had enthusiasts for
D'Annunzio and Mathilde Serao who knew no Italian, and celebrants of
Maeterlinck and Verhaeren whose French was of the finishing school, and
Ibsen authorities without a single word of Dano-Norwegian--I met one
once who failed to recognize "Et Dukkehjem" as the original title of "A
Doll's House,"--and performers upon Hauptmann who could no more read
"Die Weber" than they could decipher a tablet of Tiglath-Pileser III.
Here and there, of course, a more competent critic of beautiful letters
flings out his banner--for example, John Macy, Ludwig Lewisohn, Andre
Tridon, Francis Hackett, Van Wyck Brooks, Burton Rascoe, E. A. Boyd,
Llewellyn Jones, Otto Heller, J. E. Spingarn, Lawrence Gilman, the late
J.
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