5, may stand with scarcely the change of a word today; he did
a lot of valiant pioneering for Strindberg, Hervieu, Stirner and Gorki,
and later on helped in the pioneering for Conrad; he was in the van of
the MacDowell enthusiasts; he fought for the ideas of such painters as
Davies, Lawson, Luks, Sloan and Prendergest (Americans all, by the way:
an answer to the hollow charge of exotic obsession) at a time when even
Manet, Monet and Degas were laughed at; he was among the first to give a
hand to Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane and H. B. Fuller.
In sum, he gave some semblance of reality in the United States, after
other men had tried and failed, to that great but ill-starred revolt
against Victorian pedantry, formalism and sentimentality which began in
the early 90's. It would be difficult, indeed, to overestimate the
practical value to all the arts in America of his intellectual
alertness, his catholic hospitality to ideas, his artistic courage, and
above all, his powers of persuasion. It was not alone that he saw
clearly what was sound and significant; it was that he managed, by the
sheer charm of his writings, to make a few others see and understand it.
If the United States is in any sort of contact today, however remotely,
with what is aesthetically going on in the more civilized countries--if
the Puritan tradition, for all its firm entrenchment, has eager and
resourceful enemies besetting it--if the pall of Harvard quasiculture,
by the Oxford manner out of Calvinism, has been lifted ever so
little--there is surely no man who can claim a larger share of credit
for preparing the way....

Sec. 3

Huneker comes out of Philadelphia, that depressing intellectual slum,
and his first writing was for the Philadelphia _Evening Bulletin_. He is
purely Irish in blood, and is of very respectable ancestry, his maternal
grandfather and godfather having been James Gibbons, the Irish poet and
patriot, and president of the Fenian Brotherhood in America. Once, in a
review of "The Pathos of Distance," I ventured the guess that there was
a German strain in him somewhere, and based it upon the beery melancholy
visible in parts of that book. Who but a German sheds tears over the
empty bottles of day before yesterday, the Adelaide Neilson of 1877? Who
but a German goes into woollen undershirts at 45, and makes his will,
and begins to call his wife "Mamma"? The green-sickness of youth is
endemic from pole to pole, as much s