As he says
himself, "one must get off somewhere."...
Particularly if one grows weary of criticism--and in Huneker, of late, I
detect more than one sign of weariness. Youth is behind him, and with it
some of its zest for exploration and combat. "The pathos of distance" is
a phrase that haunts him as poignantly as it haunted Nietzsche, its
maker. Not so long ago I tried to induce him to write some new Old Fogy
sketches, nominating Puccini, Strawinsky, Schoenberg, Korngold, Elgar.
He protested that the mood was gone from him forever, that he could not
turn the clock back twenty years. His late work in _Puck_, the _Times_
and the _Sun_, shows an unaccustomed acquiescence in current valuations.
He praises such one-day masterpieces as McFee's "Casuals of the Sea"; he
is polite to the gaudy heroines of the opera-house; he gags a bit at
Wright's "Modern Painting"; he actually makes a gingery curtsy to Frank
Jewett Mather, a Princeton professor.... The pressure in the gauges
can't keep up to 250 pounds forever. Man must tire of fighting after
awhile, and seek his ease in his inn.
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