Huneker's mother was a woman of taste; on reading his first scribblings,
she gave him Cardinal Newman, and bade him consider the Queen's English.
Newman achieved a useful purging; the style that remained was ready for
Flaubert. From the author of "L'Education Sentimentale," I daresay, came
the deciding influence, with Nietzsche's staggering brilliance offering
suggestions later on. Thus Huneker, as stylist, owes nearly all to
France, for Nietzsche, too, learned how to write there, and to the end
of his days he always wrote more like a Frenchman than a German. His
greatest service to his own country, indeed, was not as anarch, but as
teacher of writing. He taught the Germans that their language had a snap
in it as well as sighs and gargles--that it was possible to write German
and yet not wander in a wood. There are whole pages of Nietzsche that
suggest such things, say, as the essay on Maurice Barres in "Egoists,"
with its bold tropes, its rapid gait, its sharp _sforzandos_. And you
will find old Friedrich at his tricks from end to end of "Old Fogy.
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