[Open-bio-announce] say anything. One no longer reads them for their matte

[Arzola]

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
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