[An American critic and biographer, Brooks is noted chiefly for his studies of such writers as Mark Twain, Henry James, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and for his influential commentary on the history of American literature. In the following essay, Brooks remembers Huneker as a prototypical American writer attracted to European culture.]

Do you remember the roses in the Luxembourg Gardens, those roses, at once so opulent and so perfect, that blossom against the grey stone of the old balustrades? But one does not forget them: it is as if in some unique fashion they fulfilled the destiny of all the roses. What one perhaps does forget is the sacrifice they represent. Who can estimate the care lavished upon the organisms that bear those blossoms, which are indeed the fruit of a ruthless and incessant pruning? They have scarcely known what it is to sprawl in the sunshine; every stalk, every tendril has submitted to the most rigorous of disciplines. It is a Spartan life, in short, which those plants have led; all their energy has been canalized to a single end. But what a sumptuous end! A good part of our delight in it springs from our having witnessed there the perfect fulfillment of an intention.

That is the French way, with roses and with artists. Our American way is different. We believe, before everything else—and with reason, heaven knows, considering our laborious history—in "having a good time." For us the leaves and the tendrils have as much right to a place in the sun as the blossoms. But what becomes of the blossoms? They are small, too often, defective and short-lived; for nine-tenths of the energy of the organism has been used up in "living." I am thinking, on the one hand, of those French critics with whom James Huneker invites a comparison, and, on the other, of Huneker himself. The life disclosed in his autobiography, Steeplejack—how full it is, how abounding, how generous, and yet, from another point of view, how wasted! Nothing is more appealing about Huneker than his humility. "I have written," he says, "of many things, from architecture to zoology, without grasping their inner substance. I am a Jack of the Seven Arts, master of none." Remembering all we owe to him, we cannot quite accept that protestation; yet it does suggest his status in relation to his own by no means extravagant ideal. Huneker was not an Anatole France, a Jules Lemaltre, a Remy de Gourmont, but who will deny that he had the making of one? Where their works were at once so opulent and so perfect, his, on the whole, were defective and short-lived; and this was because of the dissipation of energy to which his autobiography bears witness. Nothing is more touching than the account he gives of his periodical efforts to stop the "leakage of moral gas" in his career; and certainly no one has ever been more conscious of the creative ideal than he. And if one dwells upon this aspect of so rich a life, it is merely because it so perfectly illustrates the American view of art as a by-product of "having a good time."

Huneker, in fact, was an American of the Americans: they waste their breath who attempt to prove that there was anything "foreign" in his love of beer and music, anything exotic in his real fibre. He tells us that his cosmopolitanism "peeled off like dry paint from a cracked wall when President Wilson proclaimed our nation at war." He seems always to have been cheerfully adaptable and happily adjusted to the ways of his country and its beliefs and assumptions. Fully a third of his book deals with his boyhood in Philadelphia; and there was never a boyhood that more fully meets the qualifications of Professor Brander Matthews for a true-blue American critic, namely, that he should have had firecrackers on the proper occasions and played baseball in a vacant lot. His shudders at the memory, now of the lurid Madame Blavatsky, now of a Black Mass that he witnessed in Paris, his acquiescence in Roosevelt's "amazement" at the fact that, having been in Paris when he was twenty-one, he had not given up his studies and rushed home to cast his first vote, reveal all the ingenuousness of heart, the childlike acceptance of common sense, that mark our countrymen among the peoples of the world. And then there was his inconsecutiveness and his impulsiveness ("I fly off with ease on any tempting tangent, also off my handle"), his breakneck style, his breezy familiarity with all things sacred and profane, his joy in collecting celebrities as a boy collects their autographs, and finally that homesickness for Europe which makes half the charm of his writing—that endowing of everything, philosophic, religious, moral, artistic, so long as it is European, with a rosy veil of romance. Huneker, in fact, was very much, at bottom, the man of the tribe, the homme sensuel moyen, both in the general and in the national sense; and, perceiving this, we can understand more readily why he never quite got possession of himself. In retrospect, that engaging personality strikes one as a sort of national symptom.

For one might almost say that Huneker was a scapegoat for the repressions of a desiccated Puritanism. Starve a people too long, fail to educate its eye, its ear, its palate, drive its senses back, tell it to be satisfied with eating straw, to hold its tongue, to ignore its preferences, not to let its fancy stray, not even to have a fancy, to keep its nose to the grindstone, and sooner or later you will have an eruption. Mediævalism had its eruption in Rabelais, Victorian England had its eruption in the art of the eighteen-nineties, the Middle West is having its eruption today in Greenwich Village. Our whole American generation indeed is having its eruption, and Huneker foreshadowed this eruption. One thinks of him as in some way incarnating the banked-up appetite of all America for the colour and flavour, the gaiety and romance, the sounds and smells of Continental Europe, which our grim commercialism, fortified by Mark Twain's humour, had led us to ridicule and decry, and as going forth to devour it like a cake. Huneker, in a word, was Europe-struck, and his gusto and voracity had behind them the momentum of a nation's hunger. And so it was that, although he had grown up in a singularly free and artistically friendly atmosphere, he could not stop and discriminate, but ran about riotously like a kitten in a field of catnip. Everything in Europe was magical to him, Offenbach as well as Mozart, Chartres Cathedral and the Strauss waltzes, the Brussels beer and the graves of the philosophers: it was all just one blazing Turner sunset. America, in fact, in Huneker, was making up for lost time. He fell on his knees and fairly ate Europe, as Nebuchadnezzar in his madness ate the grass.

It is thus that Huneker might be figured in a sketch of the successive phases of America's artistic development. He is our Yellow Book more violent and promiscuous than England's, as our repressions had been greater; and it is difficult not to see him as a victim for all the sins our countrymen have committed against art. "I have no grievances," he says. "I am what I made myself, therefore I blame myself for my shortcomings." A frank and charming attitude, and one for which we honour him, even as we shall continue to enjoy his writings; for he kept to the end the zest of a hungry crow in a newly sown cornfield. Yet we cannot but think how different the results would have been if the sprawling vine of his talent had been planted in a riper soil and had had the right gardeners to tend it. In short, he is one of those barbaric natural forces, incompletely personalized and differentiated, that stand for us in lieu of a literature, and show us how rich we are in the sheer raw material of creative energy. Half of that creative energy is ice-bound, half of it spills over in a tropical exuberance, but it exists, awaiting the apparatus of civilization. Meanwhile, to them that love much (even if they love too many, as Heine said), much is forgiven; and who has loved more than James Huneker? "I can love, intensely love, an idea or an art," he remarks. "I am a Yea-Sayer." It is true; and, thanks to this love, he will always seem to us as much a creator as a victim of America.