SOURCE: "The Intelligentsia," in Intellectual America: Ideas on the March, 1941. Reprint by The Macmillan Company, 1948, pp. 399-536.

An American educator, historian, and literary critic, Cargill edited critical editions of the works of such major American authors as Henry James, Frank Norris, Walt Whitman, and Thomas Wolfe. In the following excerpt, Cargill examines the novel Painted Veils in order to understand the crisis of faith Huneker experienced late in his life.

One purveyor of European ideas to Americans in this period was both a cosmopolitan and a man of taste. This was James Gibbons Huneker, the Philadelphia Irishman of whom H. L. Mencken has written so well, not in A Book of Prefaces, but in the Introduction to the Essays which he selected and edited for Scribner's in 1929. As any one knows who has read Steeplejack (1918) or Painted Veils (1920), Huneker at the end of his critical and creative life...