...
Sec. 3
Huneker comes out of Philadelphia, that depressing intellectual slum,
and his first writing was for the Philadelphia _Evening Bulletin_. He is
purely Irish in blood, and is of very respectable ancestry, his maternal
grandfather and godfather having been James Gibbons, the Irish poet and
patriot, and president of the Fenian Brotherhood in America. Once, in a
review of "The Pathos of Distance," I ventured the guess that there was
a German strain in him somewhere, and based it upon the beery melancholy
visible in parts of that book. Who but a German sheds tears over the
empty bottles of day before yesterday, the Adelaide Neilson of 1877? Who
but a German goes into woollen undershirts at 45, and makes his will,
and begins to call his wife "Mamma"? The green-sickness of youth is
endemic from pole to pole, as much so as measles; but what race save the
wicked one is floored by a blue distemper in middle age, with
sentimental burblings _a cappella_, hallucinations of lost loves, and
an unquenchable lacrymorrhea?... I made out a good case, but I was
wrong, and the penalty came swiftly and doubly, for on the one hand the
Boston _Transcript_ sounded an alarm against both Huneker and me as
German spies, and on the other hand Huneker himself proclaimed that,
even spiritually, he was less German than Magyar, less "Hun" than Hun.
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