Finding myself in the Fine Arts Building, I am in dangerous proximity of another “Temple” that invites my friendly hostility. But I vision the brandishment of the Editor’s fatal pencil—silenzia! Yet, if I must refrain from, or at least postpone, my general attack on THE LITTLE REVIEW, let me be allowed, pray, to whip one of my confreres, the Scavenger. Whether a sound thrashing will do him good or not is doubtful; but he certainly deserves flagellation. As a denier, as a depreciator, as an anti, he is as convincing as a bulldog; but when he loves, when he lauds and affirms, his voice thins to that of a sick puppy. He should be administered cure from his mania of showering superlatives upon false gods and counterfeit prophets. I dislike the rôle of a Good Samaritan, but our Scavenger is so young, so impressionable; perhaps he will repent. Besides, I sympathize with him. He is one of those promising Americans who suffocate in their native atmosphere, or lack of atmosphere, and are easily lured and led astray by will-o’-the wisps. In his yearning for wings he is apt to proclaim a domestic rooster as an eagle; in his craving for sun, for light, he often mistakes a cardboard butaforial sun for Phœbus Apollo. Hence his admiration for that Arch-Borrower, Huneker. “He is one of the two or three American critics that are above Puritanic provincialism, that are broad, European!” exclaims Scavenger. It is true; but this truth serves only as a testimonia pauperitatis for the intellectual state of this country, where glittering counterfeit coins are less odious than Simon-pure Americanism. The Huneker-cult is one of the American tragedies of which I have spoken on other occasions, the tragedy of surrogates. The young generation, seething with longing for the great and the beautiful in life and art, is forced to feed on substitutes in the absence of real quantities. They want to read a living word about Verlaine, about Huysmans, about Matisse, about those winged titans who make Trans-Atlantic life so rich and pulsating, and they turn to Huneker, the great concocter of newspaper clippings and boulevard gossip. When Scavenger read for me Huneker’s admirable essay on Huysmans I was not yet aware that whatever was admirable in the essay had been borrowed almost in toto from Havelock Ellis’s _Affirmations_.[2] Why use the second or third-hand patched up cloak of Boulevardier-Huneker, when you may drink from the very source, from Arthur Symons, from Havelock Ellis, from—oh, well, who can recount them? Ah, the tragedy of substitutes! [2] _Affirmations, by Havelock Ellis. Boston: Houghton Mifflin._