dvance of
the English Novel"[35] if you would see a fine art treated as a moral
matter, and great works tested by the criteria of a small-town
Sunday-school, and all sorts of childish sentimentality whooped up. And
plough through Brownell's "Standards,"[36] if you have the patience, and
then try to reduce its sonorous platitudes to straight-forward and
defensible propositions.

Sec. 2

Now for the exception. He is, of course, James Gibbons Huneker, the
solitary Iokanaan in this tragic aesthetic wilderness, the only critic
among us whose vision sweeps the whole field of beauty, and whose
reports of what he sees there show any genuine gusto. That gusto of his,
I fancy, is two-thirds of his story. It is unquenchable, contagious,
inflammatory; he is the only performer in the commissioned troupe who
knows how to arouse his audience to anything approaching enthusiasm. The
rest, even including Howells, are pedants lecturing to the pure in
heart, but Huneker makes a joyous story of it; his exposition,
transcending the merely expository, takes on the quality of an
adventure hospitably shared. One feels, reading him, that he is charmed
by the men and women he writes about, and that their ideas, even when he
rejects them, give him an agreeable stimulation. And to the charm that
he thus finds and exhibits in others, he adds the very positive charm of
his own personality. He seems a man who has found the world fascinating,
if perhaps not perfect; a friendly and good-humoured fellow; no frigid
scholiast, but something of an epicure; in brief, the reverse of the
customary maker of books about books. Compare his two essays on Ibsen,
in "Egoists" and "Iconoclasts," to the general body of American writing
upon the great Norwegian. The difference is that between a portrait and
a Bertillon photograph, Richard Strauss and Czerny, a wedding and an
autopsy. Huneker displays Ibsen, not as a petty mystifier of the women's
clubs, but as a literary artist of large skill and exalted passion, and
withal a quite human and understandable man. These essays were written
at the height of the symbolism madness; in their own way, they even show
some reflection of it; but taking them in their entirety, how clearly
they stand above the ignorant obscurantism of the prevailing criticism
of the time--how immeasurably superior they are, for example, to that
favourite hymn-book of the Ibsenites, "The Ibsen Secret" by Jennette
Lee! For the causes of this diff