rated. Of
the two undoubted world figures that we have contributed to letters, one
was allowed to die like a stray cat up an alley and the other was
mistaken for a cheap buffoon. Criticism, as the average American
"intellectual" understands it, is what a Frenchman, a German or a
Russian would call donkeyism. In all the arts we still cling to the
ideals of the dissenting pulpit, the public cemetery, the electric sign,
the bordello parlour.

But for all that, I hang to a somewhat battered optimism, and one of the
chief causes of that optimism is the fact that Huneker, after all these
years, yet remains unhanged. A picturesque and rakish fellow, a believer
in joy and beauty, a disdainer of petty bombast and moralizing, a sworn
friend of all honest purpose and earnest striving, he has given his life
to a work that must needs bear fruit hereafter. While the college
pedagogues of the Brander Matthews type still worshipped the dead bones
of Scribe and Sardou, Robertson and Bulwer-Lytton, he preached the new
and revolutionary gospel of Ibsen. In the golden age of Rosa Bonheur's
"The Horse Fair," he was expounding the principles of the
post-impressionists. In the midst of the Sousa marches he whooped for
Richard Strauss. Before the rev. professors had come to Schopenhauer, or
even to Spencer, he was hauling ashore the devil-fish, Nietzsche. No
stranger poisons have ever passed through the customs than those he has
brought in his baggage. No man among us has ever urged more ardently, or
with sounder knowledge or greater persuasiveness, that catholicity of
taste and sympathy which stands in such direct opposition to the booming
certainty and snarling narrowness of Little Bethel.

If he bears a simple label, indeed, it is that of anti-Philistine. And
the Philistine he attacks is not so much the vacant and harmless fellow
who belongs to the Odd Fellows and recreates himself with _Life_ and
_Leslie's Weekly_ in the barber shop, as that more belligerent and
pretentious donkey who presumes to do battle for "honest" thought and a
"sound" ethic--the "forward looking" man, the university ignoramus, the
conservator of orthodoxy, the rattler of ancient phrases--what Nietzsche
called "the Philistine of culture." It is against this fat milch cow of
wisdom that Huneker has brandished a spear since first there was a
Huneker. He is a sworn foe to "the traps that snare the attention from
poor or mediocre workmanship--the traps of sentimentalism,