read all his plays in
English. Even Henry Becque has got into the vulgate and is familiar to
the Drama League. As for Anatole France, his "Revolt of the Angels" is
on the shelves of the Carnegie Libraries, and the Comstocks have let it
pass. New gods whoop and rage in Valhalla: Verhaeren, Artzibashef,
Przybyszewski. Huneker, alas, seems to drop behind the procession. He
writes nothing about these second-hand third-raters. He has come to
Wedekind, Schnitzler, Schoenberg, Korngold and Moussorgsky, and he has
discharged a few rounds of shrapnel at the Gallo-Asiatic petti-coat
philosopher, Henri Bergson, but here he has stopped, as he has stopped
at Matisse, Picasso, Epstein and Augustus John in painting. As he says
himself, "one must get off somewhere."...

Particularly if one grows weary of criticism--and in Huneker, of late, I
detect more than one sign of weariness. Youth is behind him, and with it
some of its zest for exploration and combat. "The pathos of distance" is
a phrase that haunts him as poignantly as it haunted Nietzsche, its
maker. Not so long ago I tried to induce him to write some new Old Fogy
sketches, nominating Puccini, Strawinsky, Schoenberg, Korngold, Elgar.
He protested that the mood was gone from him forever, that he could not
turn the clock back twenty years. His late work in _Puck_, the _Times_
and the _Sun_, shows an unaccustomed acquiescence in current valuations.
He praises such one-day masterpieces as McFee's "Casuals of the Sea"; he
is polite to the gaudy heroines of the opera-house; he gags a bit at
Wright's "Modern Painting"; he actually makes a gingery curtsy to Frank
Jewett Mather, a Princeton professor.... The pressure in the gauges
can't keep up to 250 pounds forever. Man must tire of fighting after
awhile, and seek his ease in his inn....

Perhaps the post-bellum transvaluation of all values will bring Huneker
to his feet again, and with something of the old glow and gusto in him.
And if the new men do not stir up, then assuredly the wrecks of the
ancient cities will: the Paris of his youth; Munich, Dresden, Vienna,
Brussels, London; above all, Prague. Go to "New Cosmopolis" and you will
find where his heart lies, or, if not his heart, then at all events his
oesophagus and pylorus.... Here, indeed, the thread of his meditations
is a thread of nutriment. However diverted by the fragrance of the Dutch
woods, the church bells of Belgium, the music of Stuttgart, the bad
pictures of Dublin