. The man, for
all his grand dreams, had a shoddy soul; he belonged authentically to
the era of cuspidors, "females" and Sons of Temperance. His occasional
affectation of scholarship has deceived no one. It was no more than
Yankee bluster; he constantly referred to books that he had never read.
Beside, the typical American critic of those days was not Poe, but his
arch-enemy, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, that almost fabulous ass--a Baptist
preacher turned taster of the beautiful. Imagine a Baptist valuing
Balzac, or Moliere, or Shakespeare, or Goethe--or Rabelais!

Coming down to our own time, one finds the same endless amateurishness,
so characteristic of everything American, from politics to cookery--the
same astounding lack of training and vocation. Consider the solemn
ponderosities of the pious old maids, male and female, who write book
reviews for the newspapers. Here we have a heavy pretension to culture,
a campus cocksureness, a laborious righteousness--but of sound aesthetic
understanding, of alertness and hospitality to ideas, not a trace. The
normal American book reviewer, indeed, is an elderly virgin, a
superstitious bluestocking, an apostle of Vassar _Kultur_; and her
customary attitude of mind is one of fascinated horror. (The Hamilton
Wright Mabie complex! The "white list" of novels!) William Dean
Howells, despite a certain jauntiness and even kittenishness of manner,
was spiritually of that company. For all his phosphorescent heresies, he
was what the up-lifters call a right-thinker at heart, and soaked in the
national tradition. He was easiest intrigued, not by force and
originality, but by a sickly, _Ladies' Home Journal_ sort of piquancy;
it was this that made him see a genius in the Philadelphia Zola, W. B.
Trites, and that led him to hymn an abusive business letter by Frank A.
Munsey, author of "The Boy Broker" and "Afloat in a Great City," as a
significant human document. Moreover Howells ran true to type in another
way, for he long reigned as the leading Anglo-Saxon authority on the
Russian novelists without knowing, so far as I can make out, more than
ten words of Russian. In the same manner, we have had enthusiasts for
D'Annunzio and Mathilde Serao who knew no Italian, and celebrants of
Maeterlinck and Verhaeren whose French was of the finishing school, and
Ibsen authorities without a single word of Dano-Norwegian--I met one
once who failed to recognize "Et Dukkehjem" as the original title of "A
Doll's