ph Bourne, is in _The Dial_,
June 14, 1917.

III

JAMES HUNEKER

Sec. 1

Edgar Allan Poe, I am fond of believing, earned as a critic a good deal
of the excess of praise that he gets as a romancer and a poet, and
another over-estimated American dithyrambist, Sidney Lanier, wrote the
best textbook of prosody in English;[31] but in general the critical
writing done in the United States has been of a low order, and most
American writers of any genuine distinction, like most American painters
and musicians, have had to wait for understanding until it appeared
abroad. The case of Emerson is typical. At thirty, he was known in New
England as a heretical young clergyman and no more, and his fame
threatened to halt at the tea-tables of the Boston Brahmins. It remained
for Landor and Carlyle, in a strange land, to discern his higher
potentialities, and to encourage him to his real life-work. Mark Twain,
as I have hitherto shown, suffered from the same lack of critical
perception at home. He was quickly recognized as a funny fellow, true
enough, but his actual stature was not even faintly apprehended, and
even after "Huckleberry Finn" he was still bracketed with such laborious
farceurs as Artemus Ward. It was Sir Walter Besant, an Englishman, who
first ventured to put him on his right shelf, along with Swift,
Cervantes and Moliere. As for Poe and Whitman, the native recognition of
their genius was so greatly conditioned by a characteristic horror of
their immorality that it would be absurd to say that their own country
understood them. Both were better and more quickly apprehended in
France, and it was in France, not in America, that each founded a
school. What they had to teach we have since got back at second
hand--the tale of mystery, which was Poe's contribution, through
Gaboriau and Boisgobey; and _vers libre_, which was Whitman's, through
the French _imagistes_.

The cause of this profound and almost unbroken lack of critical insight
and enterprise, this puerile Philistinism and distrust of ideas among
us, is partly to be found, it seems to me, in the fact that the typical
American critic is quite without any adequate cultural equipment for the
office he presumes to fill. Dr. John Dewey, in some late remarks upon
the American universities, has perhaps shown the cause thereof. The
trouble with our educational method, he argues, is that it falls between
the two stools of English humanism and German relentlessnes