Sad work for the Philistines--but a joy to the elect! All this
polyphonic allusiveness, this intricate fuguing of ideas, is not to be
confused, remember, with the hollow showiness of the academic
soothsayer. It is as natural to the man, as much a part of him as the
clanging Latin of Johnson, or, to leap from art to art Huneker-wise, the
damnable cross-rhythms of Brahms. He could no more write without his
stock company of heretic sages than he could write without his ration of
malt. And, on examination, all of them turned out to be real. They are
far up dark alleys, but they are there!... And one finds them, at last,
to be as pleasant company as the multilingual puns of Nietzsche or
Debussy's chords of the second.
As for the origin of that style, it seems to have a complex ancestry.
Huneker's first love was Poe, and even today he still casts affectionate
glances in that direction, but there is surely nothing of Poe's
elephantine labouring in his skipping, _pizzicato_ sentences. Then came
Carlyle--the Carlyle of "Sartor Resartus"--a god long forgotten.
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