Coda
When a man begins to chatter of his promenades among the masterpieces it may be assumed that he has crossed the sill of middle-age. Remy de Gourmont, gentle ironist, calls such a period l’heure insidieuse. Yet, is it not something—a vain virtue, perhaps—to possess the courage of one’s windmills! From the Paris of the days when I haunted the ateliers of Gérôme, Bonnat, Meissonier, Couture, and spent my enthusiasms over the colour-schemes of Decamps and Fortuny, to the Paris of the revolutionists, Manet, Degas, Monet, now seems a life long. But time fugues precipitately through the land of art. In reality both periods overlap; the dichotomy is spiritual, not temporal.
The foregoing memoranda are frankly in the key of impressionism. They are a record of some personal preferences, not attempts at critical revaluations. Appearing first in the New York Sun, the project of their publication in book form met with the approbation of its proprietor, William Mackay Laffan, whose death in 1909 was an international loss to the Fine Arts. If these opinions read like a medley of hastily crystallised judgments jotted down after the manner of a traveller pressed for time, they are none the less sincere. My garden is only a straggling weedy plot, but I have traversed it with delight; in it I have promenaded my dearest prejudices, my most absurd illusions. And central in this garden may be found the image of the supreme illusionist of art, Velasquez.
Since writing the preceding articles on El Greco and Velasquez the museum of the Hispanic Society, New York, has been enabled, through the munificent generosity of Mr. Archer M. Huntington, to exhibit his newly acquired El Grecos and a Velasquez. The former comprise a brilliantly coloured Holy Family, which exhales an atmosphere of serenity; the St. Joseph is said to be a portrait of El Greco; and there also is a large canvas showing Christ with several of his disciples. Notable examples both. The Velasquez comes from the collection of the late Edouard Kann and is a life-size bust portrait of a sweetly grave little girl. Señor Beruete believes her to represent the daughter of the painter Mazo and his wife, Francisca Velasquez, therefore a granddaughter of Velasquez. The tonalities of this picture are subtly beautiful, the modelling mysterious, the expression vital and singularly child-like. It is a fitting companion to a portrait hanging on the same wall, that of the aristocratic young Cardinal Pamphili, a nephew of Pope Innocent X, also by the great Spaniard.
Mezzotints in Modern Music
Brahms, Tschaïkowsky, Chopin, Richard Strauss, Liszt and Wagner
“Mr. Huneker is, in the best sense, a critic; he listens to the music and gives you his impressions as rapidly and in as few words as possible; or he sketches the composers in fine, broad, sweeping strokes with a magnificent disregard for unimportant details. And as Mr. Huneker is, as I have said, a powerful personality, a man of quick brain and an energetic imagination, a man of moods and temperament—a string that vibrates and sings in response to music—we get in these essays of his a distinctly original and very valuable contribution to the world’s tiny musical literature.”—J. F. Runciman, in London Saturday Review.
Melomaniacs
Contents: The Lord’s Prayer in B—A Son of Liszt—A Chopin of the Gutter—The Piper of Dreams—An Emotional Acrobat—Isolde’s Mother—The Rim of Finer Issues—An Ibsen Girl—Tannhäuser’s Choice—The Red-Headed Piano Player—Brynhüd’s Immolation—The Quest of the Elusive—An Involuntary Insurgent—Hunding’s Wife—The Corridor of Time—Avatar—The Wegstaffes give a Musicale—The Iron Virgin—Dusk of the Gods—Siegfried’s Death—Intermezzo—A Spinner of Silence—The Disenchanted Symphony—Music the Conqueror.
“It would be difficult to sum up ‘Melomaniacs’ in a phrase. Never did a book, in my opinion at any rate, exhibit greater contrasts, not, perhaps, of strength and weakness, but of clearness and obscurity. It is inexplicably uneven, as if the writer were perpetually playing on the boundary line that divides sanity of thought from intellectual chaos. There is method in the madness, but it is a method of intangible ideas. Nevertheless, there is genius written over a large portion of it, and to a musician the wealth of musical imagination is a living spring of thought”—Harold E. Gorst, in London Saturday Review (Dec. 8, 1906).
Iconoclasts
A Book of Dramatists
CONTENTS: Henrik Ibsen—August Strindberg—Henry Becque—Gerhart Hauptmann—Paul Hervieu—The Quintessence of Shaw—Maxim Gorky’s Nachtasyl—Hermann Sudennann—Princess Mathilde’s Play—Duse and D’Annunzio—Villiers de l’lsle Adam—Maurice Maeterlinck.
“His style is a little jerky, but it is one of those rare styles in which we are led to expect some significance, if not wit, in every sentence.”—G.K. Chesterton, in London Daily News.
“No other book in English has surveyed the whole field so comprehensively.”—The Outlook.
“A capital book, lively, informing, suggestive.”—London Times Saturday Review.
“Eye-opening and mind-clarifying is Mr. Huneker’s criticism; … no one having read that opening essay in this volume will lay it down until the final judgment upon Maurice Maeterlinck is reached.”—Boston Transcript.
Overtones
A Book of Temperaments
With Frontispiece Portrait of Richard Strauss
CONTENTS: Richard Strauss—Parsifal: A Mystical Melodrama—Literary Men who loved Music (Balzac, Turgenieff, Daudet, etc.)—The Eternal Feminine—The Beethoven of French Prose—Nietzsche the Rhapsodist—Anarchs of Art—After Wagner, What?—Verdi and Boito.
“The whole book is highly refreshing with its breadth of knowledge, its catholicity of taste, and its inexhaustible energy.”—Saturday Review, London.
“In some respects Mr. Huneker must be reckoned the most brilliant of all living writers on matters musical.”—Academy, London.
“No modern musical critic has shown greater ingenuity in the attempt to correlate the literary and musical tendencies of the nineteenth century.”—Spectator, London.
Egoists
A Book of Supermen
Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Anatole France, Huysmans, Barrès, Hello, Blake, Nietzsche, Ibsen and Max Stirner.
With portrait of Stendhal, unpublished letter of Flaubert, and original proof page of “Madame Bovary.”
“The best thing in the book happily comes first, the essay on Stendhal. Closely and yet lightly written, full of facts yet as amusing as a bit of discursive talk, penetrating, candid and very shrewd, this study would be hard to beat in English, or, for that matter, in French. It is, too, the best of the essays as regards discrimination. There are no shades of Stendhal’s genius, whether making for good or for ill, that are missed by this analyst, and, moreover, both the lights and shadows are justly distributed… He seeks to show you the color of a man’s mind, and it is evidence of his validity as an essayist that straightway he interests you in the color of his own. He is an impressionist in criticism… Such an essayist is Mr. Huneker, a foe to dulness who is also a man of brains.”—Royal Cortissoz in New York Tribune.
“JAMES HUNEKER: INDIVIDUALIST”
“As a critic, whether of music, the plastic arts, of poetry or fiction or philosophy, he is of those who never attain finality; but he is always stimulating, provocative of thought, and by virtue of this quality, not invariably possessed by critics, he is entitled to a distinctive place in American letters.”
Edward Clark Marsh in The Forum.
Visionaries
Contents: A Master of Cobwebs—The Eighth Deadly Sin—The Purse of Aholibah—Rebels of the Moon—The Spiral Road—A Mock Sun—Antichrist—The Eternal Duel—The Enchanted Yodler—The Third Kingdom—The Haunted Harpsichord—The Tragic Wall—A Sentimental Rebellion—Hall of the Missing Footsteps—The Cursory Light—An Iron Fan—The Woman Who Loved Chopin—The Tune of Time—Nada—Pan.
“The author’s style is sometimes grotesque in its desire both to startle and to find true expression. He has not followed those great novelists who write French a child may read and understand. He calls the moon ‘a spiritual gray wafer’; it faints in ‘a red wind’; ‘truth beats at the bars of a man’s bosom’; the sun is ‘a sulphur-colored cymbal’; a man moves with ‘the jaunty grace of a young elephant.’ But even these oddities are significant and to be placed high above the slipshod sequences of words that have done duty till they are as meaningless as the imprint on a worn-out coin.
“Besides, in nearly every story the reader is arrested by the idea, and only a little troubled now and then by an over-elaborate style. If most of us are sane, the ideas cherished by these visionaries are insane; but the imagination of the author so illuminates them that we follow wondering and spellbound. In ‘The Spiral Road’ and in some of the other stories both fantasy and narrative may be compared with Hawthorne in his most unearthly moods. The younger man has read his Nietzsche and has cast off his heritage of simple morals. Hawthorne’s Puritanism finds no echo in these modern souls, all sceptical, wavering and unblessed. But Hawthorne’s splendor of vision and his power of sympathy with a tormented mind do live again in the best of Mr. Huneker’s stories.”—London Academy (Feb. 3, 1906).
Chopin
The Man and His Music
“No pianist, amateur or professional, can rise from the perusal of his pages without a deeper appreciation of the new forms of beauty which Chopin has added, like so many species of orchids, to the musical flora of the nineteenth century.”—The Nation.
“I think it not too much to predict that Mr. Huneker’s estimate of Chopin and his works is destined to be the permanent one. He gives the reader the cream of the cream of all noteworthy previous commentators, besides much that is wholly his own. He speaks at once with modesty and authority, always with personal charm.”—Boston Transcript.