Criticism, as the average American
"intellectual" understands it, is what a Frenchman, a German or a
Russian would call donkeyism. In all the arts we still cling to the
ideals of the dissenting pulpit, the public cemetery, the electric sign,
the bordello parlour.
But for all that, I hang to a somewhat battered optimism, and one of the
chief causes of that optimism is the fact that Huneker, after all these
years, yet remains unhanged. A picturesque and rakish fellow, a believer
in joy and beauty, a disdainer of petty bombast and moralizing, a sworn
friend of all honest purpose and earnest striving, he has given his life
to a work that must needs bear fruit hereafter. While the college
pedagogues of the Brander Matthews type still worshipped the dead bones
of Scribe and Sardou, Robertson and Bulwer-Lytton, he preached the new
and revolutionary gospel of Ibsen. In the golden age of Rosa Bonheur's
"The Horse Fair," he was expounding the principles of the
post-impressionists. In the midst of the Sousa marches he whooped for
Richard Strauss.
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