Not a ripple from the European war disturbs the surface of the essays gathered together by Mr. James Huneker, the accomplished American litterateur, who does so much to inform public taste in the United States.

Unreflecting readers of Ivory Apes and Peacocks might easily jump to the conclusion that he lived in a vacuum, and by some fourth dimensional trick passed from his library to concert halls and art galleries, alike unconscious of peoples half choked by squalid conditions in peace times, and massed into heroic union in the time of Armageddon.

His essays were evidently written before the struggle of titanic forces convulsed the world—certainly before the German pirate sank the Lusitania, for the memory of that crime would have imposed certain restrictions which are not here observed, and altered a point of view, which now displays a marvel of ante-war detachment. I refer to Mr. Huneker's essays on "Frank Wedekind," "Max Liebemann and Some Phases of Modern German Art," and similar intellectual absorptions.

There are, however, many brilliant pages in Ivory Apes and Peacocks, which one can read with pleasure, particularly the opening essay on Mr. Joseph Conrad. It is a legitimate relief to allow Mr. Huneker to create the frame of mind necessary to the entertainment of such considerations, taking us, as they do for a while, from under the shadow of hell, flung far and wide by the Central Powers, into the indestructible sunlight.

"The figure of Joseph Conrad," says the author, "stands solitary among English novelists as the very ideal of a pure and disinterested artist. Amid the clamour of the marketplace a book of his is a sea shell, which pressed to the ear, echoes the far-away murmur of the sea; always the sea, either as rigid as a mirror under hard blue skies, or shuddering symphonically up some exotic beach." "Conrad is a painter doubled by a psychologist; he is the psychologist of the sea—and that is his chief claim to originality. … Like all true artists, Conrad never preaches. His moral is in suffusion, and who runs may read."

Much, however, can be said for the writer whose passion for life sweeps him beyond the limitations of the conventional reticence Mr. Huneker would impose upon artists. If literature is the flower of life, it is surely as well sometimes to hear what the gardener has to say, even though it may destroy the illusion that the flower came into existence of its own volition.

Ardent Whitmanites, as a corrective to any egregious tendency in their enthusiasm, may be referred to the essay entitled "A Visit to Walt Whitman," a piece of destructive criticism interspersed with ill-natured anecdotes. Mr. Huneker or anyone else is quite entitled to think that Whitman's philosophy is "fudge," but it is open to question whether it is desirable or in good taste to fortify the case against Whitman by quoting what a policeman said at the Philadelphia ferry, "That old gas-bag comes here every afternoon. He gets free rides across the Delaware." It is singular that the only American Mr. Huneker writes about in this book at any length should be torn to pieces.

Mr. Huneker commands respectful attention when he writes of Russian literature. His knowledge of the subject seems to be profound, and readers who only know one or two of the Russian masterpieces can learn much from him. Here again, however, his allegiance to the method of the "disinterested artist" becomes manifest, and his admiration ceases when Tolstoy used his great art consciously for definite ends.

During the course of his acute survey of a wide field these pregnant observations occur:

Taking Gogol as the norm of modern Russian fiction—we see the novel strained through the rich mystic imagination of Dostoievsky; viewed through the more equable, artistic and pessimistic temperature of Turgenieff, until it is seized by Leo Tolstoy, and passionately transformed to serve his own didactic purposes.

Dostoievsky is praised almost without reservation, though you are not allowed to forget how interesting a case he was for the alienist: "Tolstoy wrote of life; Dostoievsky lived it, drank its sour dregs." Even so must a novelist first grovel in mud before he can describe it? Indeed, Mr Huneker appears to believe that an artist should have no ideal outside his art, that he must be a specialised function, and no more. Were the conditions of the world ideal, something might then be said for that point of view. As things stand, however, such an attitude seems to be a denial of humanity.

Everyone who knows Mr. Huneker's work acknowledges his ability as an art critic. The amount of knowledge he manages to pack into "The Magic Vermeer" will convict well-informed students of ignorance of the Dutch master, beloved of Mr. E. V. Lucas, who has written delightfully about him.

Mr. Huneker also deals with other themes, to which I have not called attention, and always his level of excellence is high, and his opinions definite. He is able to define his own ignorance, and his influence is all the stronger because he nowhere allows the reader to see any of his opinions in the process of formation.