polyphonic allusiveness, this intricate fuguing of ideas, is not to be
confused, remember, with the hollow showiness of the academic
soothsayer. It is as natural to the man, as much a part of him as the
clanging Latin of Johnson, or, to leap from art to art Huneker-wise, the
damnable cross-rhythms of Brahms. He could no more write without his
stock company of heretic sages than he could write without his ration of
malt. And, on examination, all of them turned out to be real. They are
far up dark alleys, but they are there!... And one finds them, at last,
to be as pleasant company as the multilingual puns of Nietzsche or
Debussy's chords of the second.

As for the origin of that style, it seems to have a complex ancestry.
Huneker's first love was Poe, and even today he still casts affectionate
glances in that direction, but there is surely nothing of Poe's
elephantine labouring in his skipping, _pizzicato_ sentences. Then came
Carlyle--the Carlyle of "Sartor Resartus"--a god long forgotten.
Huneker's mother was a woman of taste; on reading his first scribblings,
she gave him Cardinal Newman, and bade him consider the Queen's English.
Newman achieved a useful purging; the style that remained was ready for
Flaubert. From the author of "L'Education Sentimentale," I daresay, came
the deciding influence, with Nietzsche's staggering brilliance offering
suggestions later on. Thus Huneker, as stylist, owes nearly all to
France, for Nietzsche, too, learned how to write there, and to the end
of his days he always wrote more like a Frenchman than a German. His
greatest service to his own country, indeed, was not as anarch, but as
teacher of writing. He taught the Germans that their language had a snap
in it as well as sighs and gargles--that it was possible to write German
and yet not wander in a wood. There are whole pages of Nietzsche that
suggest such things, say, as the essay on Maurice Barres in "Egoists,"
with its bold tropes, its rapid gait, its sharp _sforzandos_. And you
will find old Friedrich at his tricks from end to end of "Old Fogy."

Of the actual contents of such books as "Egoists" and "Iconoclasts" it
is unnecessary to say anything. One no longer reads them for their
matter, but for their manner. Every flapper now knows all that is worth
knowing about Ibsen, Strindberg, Maeterlinck and Shaw, and a great deal
that is not worth knowing. We have disentangled Hauptmann from
Sudermann, and, thanks to Dr. Lewisohn, may