SOURCE: "An American Speaks," in The Bookman, New York, Vol. XLIX, No. 294, March, 1916, pp. 189-90.

In the following essay, Sherren's appraisal of Huneker's Ivory Apes and Peacocks is influenced by Great Britain's conflict with Germany during World War I.

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...