There was a stimulating aliveness about him always, an air of living
eagerly and a bit recklessly, a sort of defiant resiliency. In his
very frame and form something provocative showed itself—an insolent
singularity, obvious to even the most careless glance. That Caligulan
profile of his was more than simply unusual in a free republic,
consecrated to good works; to a respectable American, encountering
it in the lobby of the Metropolitan or in the smoke-room of a
_Doppelschrauben-schnellpostdampfer_, it must have suggested inevitably
the dark enterprises and illicit metaphysics of a Heliogabalus. More,
there was always something rakish and defiant about his hat—it was
too white, or it curled in the wrong way, or a feather peeped from the
band—, and a hint of antinomianism in his cravat. Yet more, he ran to
exotic tastes in eating and drinking, preferring occult goulashes and
risi-bisis to honest American steaks, and great floods of Pilsner to
the harsh beverages of God-fearing men. Finally, there was his talk,
that cataract of sublime trivialities: gossip lifted to the plane of
the gods, the unmentionable bedizened with an astounding importance,
and even profundity.
In his early days, when he performed the tonal and carnal prodigies
that he liked to talk of afterward, I was at nurse, and too young to
have any traffic with him. When I encountered him at last he was in
the high flush of the middle years, and had already become a tradition
in the little world that critics inhabit. We sat down to luncheon
at one o’clock; I think it must have been at Lüchow’s, his favorite
refuge and rostrum to the end. At six, when I had to go, the waiter was
hauling in his tenth (or was it twentieth?) _Seidel_ of Pilsner, and
he was bringing to a close _prestissimo_ the most amazing monologue
that these ears (up to that time) had ever funnelled into this
consciousness. What a stew, indeed! Berlioz and the question of the
clang-tint of the viola, the psychopathological causes of the suicide
of Tschaikowsky, why Nietzsche had to leave Sils Maria between days in
1887, the echoes of Flaubert in Joseph Conrad (then but newly dawned),
the precise topography of the warts of Liszt, George Bernard Shaw’s
heroic but vain struggles to throw off Presbyterianism, how Frau Cosima
saved Wagner from the libidinous Swedish baroness, what to drink when
playing Chopin, what Cézanne thought of his disciples, the defects in
the structure of “Sister Carrie,” Anton Seidl and the musical union,
the complex love affairs of Gounod, the early days of David Belasco,
the varying talents and idiosyncrasies of Lillian Russell’s earlier
husbands, whether a girl educated at Vassar could ever really learn to
love, the exact composition of chicken paprika, the correct tempo of
the Vienna waltz, the style of William Dean Howells, what George Moore
said about German bathrooms, the true inwardness of the affair between
D’Annunzio and Duse, the origin of the theory that all oboe players are
crazy, why Löwenbräu survived exportation better than Hofbräu, Ibsen’s
loathing of Norwegians, the best remedy for Rhine wine _Katzenjammer_,
how to play Brahms, the degeneration of the Bal Bullier, the sheer
physical impossibility of getting Dvorak drunk, the genuine last words
of Walt Whitman....
I left in a sort of fever, and it was a couple of days later before I
began to sort out my impressions, and formulate a coherent image. Was
the man allusive in his books—so allusive that popular report credited
him with the actual manufacture of authorities? Then he was ten times
as allusive in his discourse—a veritable geyser of unfamiliar names,
shocking epigrams in strange tongues, unearthly philosophies out of
the backwaters of Scandinavia, Transylvania, Bulgaria, the Basque
country, the Ukraine. And did he, in his criticism, pass facilely from
the author to the man, and from the man to his wife, and to the wives
of his friends? Then at the _Biertisch_ he began long beyond the point
where the last honest wife gives up the ghost, and so, full tilt, ran
into such complexities of adultery that a plain sinner could scarcely
follow him. I try to give you, ineptly and grotesquely, some notion
of the talk of the man, but I must fail inevitably. It was, in brief,
chaos, and chaos cannot be described. But it was chaos made to gleam
and corruscate with every device of the seven arts—chaos drenched in
all the colors imaginable, chaos scored for an orchestra which made the
great band of Berlioz seem like a fife and drum corps. One night a few
months before the war, I sat in the Paris Opera House listening to the
first performance of Richard Strauss’s “Josef’s Legend,” with Strauss
himself conducting. On the stage there was a riot of hues that swung
the eyes ’round and ’round in a crazy mazurka; in the orchestra there
were such volleys and explosions of tone that the ears (I fall into
a Hunekeran trope) began to go pale and clammy with surgical shock.
Suddenly, above all the uproar, a piccolo launched into a new and saucy
tune—in an unrelated key!... Instantly and quite naturally, I thought
of the incomparable James. When he gave a show at Lüchow’s he never
forgot that anarchistic passage for the piccolo.
I observe a tendency since his death to estimate him in terms of
the content of his books. Even Frank Harris, who certainly should
know better, goes there for the facts about him. Nothing could do
him worse injustice. In those books, of course, there is a great
deal of perfectly sound stuff; the wonder is, in truth, that so much
of it holds up so well to-day—for example, the essays on Strauss,
on Brahms and on Nietzsche, and the whole volume on Chopin. But
the real Huneker never got himself formally between covers, if one
forgets “Old Fogy” and parts of “Painted Veils.” The volumes of his
regular canon are made up, in the main, of articles written for the
more intellectual magazines and newspapers of their era, and they
are full of a conscious striving to qualify for respectable company.
Huneker, always curiously modest, never got over the notion that it
was a singular honor for a man such as he—a mere diurnal scribbler,
innocent of academic robes—to be published by so austere a publisher
as Scribner. More than once, anchored at the beer-table, we discussed
the matter at length, I always arguing that all the honor was enjoyed
by Scribner. But Huneker, I believe in all sincerity, would not
have it so, any more than he would have it that he was a better
music critic than his two colleagues, the pedantic Krehbiel and the
nonsensical Finck. This illogical modesty, of course, had its limits;
it made him cautious about expressing himself, but it seldom led him
into downright assumptions of false personality. Nowhere in all his
books will you find him doing the things that every right-thinking
Anglo-Saxon critic is supposed to do—the Middleton Murry, Paul Elmer
More, Clutton-Brock sort of puerility—solemn essays on Coleridge and
Addison, abysmal discussions of the relative merits of Schumann and
Mendelssohn, horrible treatises upon the relations of Goethe to the
Romantic Movement, dull scratchings in a hundred such exhausted and
sterile fields. Such enterprises were not for Huneker; he kept himself
out of that black coat. But I am convinced that he always had his own
raiment pressed carefully before he left Lüchow’s for the temple of
Athene—and maybe changed cravats, and put on a boiled shirt, and took
the feather out of his hat. The simon-pure Huneker, the Huneker who was
the true essence and prime motor of the more courtly Huneker—remained
behind. This real Huneker survives in conversations that still haunt
the rafters of the beer-halls of two continents, and in a vast mass of
newspaper impromptus, thrown off too hastily to be reduced to complete
decorum, and in two books that stand outside the official canon, and
yet contain the man himself as not even “Iconoclasts” or the Chopin
book contains him, to wit, the “Old Fogy” aforesaid and the “Painted
Veils” of his last year. Both were published, so to speak, out of the
back door—the former by a music publisher in Philadelphia and the
latter in a small and expensive edition for the admittedly damned.
There is a chapter in “Painted Veils” that is Huneker to every last
hitch of the shoulders and twinkle of the eye—the chapter in which
the hero soliloquizes on art, life, immortality, and women—especially
women. And there are half a dozen chapters in “Old Fogy”—superficially
buffoonery, but how penetrating! how gorgeously flavored! how
learned!—that come completely up to the same high specification. If I
had to choose one Huneker book and give up all the others, I’d choose
“Old Fogy” instantly. In it Huneker is utterly himself. In it the last
trace of the pedagogue vanishes. Art is no longer, even by implication,
a device for improving the mind. It is wholly a magnificent adventure.
That notion of it is what Huneker brought into American criticism, and
it is for that bringing that he will be remembered. No other critic
of his generation had a tenth of his influence. Almost single-handed
he overthrew the æsthetic theory that had flourished in the United
States since the death of Poe, and set up an utterly contrary æsthetic
theory in its place. If the younger men of to-day have emancipated
themselves from the Puritan æsthetic, if the schoolmaster is now
palpably on the defensive, and no longer the unchallenged assassin of
the fine arts that he once was, if he has already begun to compromise
somewhat absurdly with new and sounder ideas, and even to lift his
voice in artificial hosannahs, then Huneker certainly deserves all the
credit for the change. What he brought back from Paris was precisely
the thing that was most suspected in the America of those days: the
capacity for gusto. Huneker had that capacity in a degree unmatched by
any other critic. When his soul went adventuring among masterpieces
it did not go in Sunday broad-cloth; it went with vine leaves in its
hair. The rest of the appraisers and criers-up—even Howells, with
all his humor—could never quite rid themselves of the professorial
manner. When they praised it was always with some hint of ethical, or,
at all events, of cultural purpose; when they condemned that purpose
was even plainer. The arts, to them, constituted a sort of school for
the psyche; their aim was to discipline and mellow the spirit. But to
Huneker their one aim was always to make the spirit glad—to set it, in
Nietzsche’s phrase, to dancing with arms and legs. He had absolutely
no feeling for extra-æsthetic valuations. If a work of art that stood
before him was honest, if it was original, if it was beautiful and
thoroughly alive, then he was for it to his last corpuscle. What if it
violated all the accepted canons? Then let the accepted canons go hang!
What if it lacked all purpose to improve and lift up? Then so much the
better! What if it shocked all right-feeling men, and made them blush
and tremble? Then damn all men of right feeling forevermore.
With this ethical atheism, so strange in the United States and so
abhorrent to most Americans, there went something that was probably
also part of the loot of Paris: an insatiable curiosity about the
artist as man. This curiosity was responsible for two of Huneker’s
salient characters: his habit of mixing even the most serious
criticism with cynical and often scandalous gossip, and his pervasive
foreignness. I believe that it is almost literally true to say that he
could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had
seen the composer’s mistress, or at all events a good photograph of
her. He thought of Wagner, not alone in terms of melody and harmony,
but also in terms of the Tribschen idyl and the Bayreuth tragi-comedy.
Go through his books and you will see how often he was fascinated by
mere eccentricity of personality. I doubt that even Huysmans, had
he been a respectable French Huguenot, would have interested him;
certainly his enthusiasm for Verlaine, Villiers de l’Isle Adam and
other such fantastic fish was centered upon the men quite as much
as upon the artists. His foreignness, so often urged against him by
defenders of the national tradition, was grounded largely on the fact
that such eccentric personalities were rare in the Republic—rare, and
well watched by the _Polizei._ When one bobbed up, he was alert at
once—even though the newcomer was only a Roosevelt. The rest of the
American people he dismissed as a horde of slaves, goose-steppers,
cads, Methodists; he could not imagine one of them becoming a
first-rate artist, save by a miracle. Even the American executant was
under his suspicion, for he knew very well that playing the fiddle
was a great deal more than scraping four strings of copper and catgut
with a switch from a horse’s tail. What he asked himself was how a man
could play Bach decently, and then, after playing, go from the hall to
a soda-fountain, or a political meeting, or a lecture at the Harvard
Club. Overseas there was a better air for artists, and overseas Huneker
looked for them.
These fundamental theories of his, of course, had their defects. They
were a bit too simple, and often very much too hospitable. Huneker,
clinging to them, certainly did his share of whooping for the sort of
revolutionist who is here to-day and gone to-morrow; he was fugleman,
in his time, for more than one cause that was lost almost as soon as
it was stated. More, his prejudices made him somewhat anæsthetic, at
times, to the new men who were not brilliant in color but respectably
drab, and who tried to do their work within the law. Particularly in
his later years, when the old gusto began to die out and all that
remained of it was habit, he was apt to go chasing after strange
birds and so miss seeing the elephants go by. I could put together a
very pretty list of frauds that he praised. I could concoct another
list of genuine _arrivés_ that he overlooked. But all that is merely
saying that there were human limits to him; the professors, on their
side, have sinned far worse, and in both directions. Looking back
over the whole of his work, one must needs be amazed by the general
soundness of his judgments. He discerned, in the main, what was good
and he described it in terms that were seldom bettered afterward.
His successive heroes, always under fire when he first championed
them, almost invariably moved to secure ground and became solid men,
challenged by no one save fools—Ibsen, Nietzsche, Brahms, Strauss,
Cézanne, Stirner, Synge, the Russian composers, the Russian novelists.
He did for this Western world what Georg Brandes was doing for
Continental Europe—sorting out the new comers with sharp eyes, and
giving mighty lifts to those who deserved it. Brandes did it in terms
of the old academic bombast; he was never more the professor than
when he was arguing for some hobgoblin of the professors. But Huneker
did it with verve and grace; he made it, not schoolmastering, but a
glorious deliverance from schoolmastering. As I say, his influence was
enormous. The fine arts, at his touch, shed all their Anglo-American
lugubriousness, and became provocative and joyous. The spirit of
senility got out of them and the spirit of youth got into them. His
criticism, for all its French basis, was thoroughly American—vastly
more American, in fact, than the New England ponderosity that it
displaced. Though he was an Easterner and a cockney of the cockneys, he
picked up some of the Western spaciousness that showed itself in Mark
Twain. And all the young men followed him.
A good many of them, I daresay, followed him so ardently that they
got a good distance ahead of him, and often, perhaps, embarrassed him
by taking his name in vain. For all his enterprise and iconoclasm,
indeed, there was not much of the Berserker in him, and his floutings
of the national æsthetic tradition seldom took the form of forthright
challenges. Here the strange modesty that I have mentioned always
stayed him as a like weakness stayed Mark Twain. He could never quite
rid himself of the feeling that he was no more than an amateur among
the gaudy doctors who roared in the reviews, and that it would be
unseemly for him to forget their authority. I have a notion that
this feeling was born in the days when he stood almost alone, with
the whole faculty grouped in a pained circle around him. He was
then too miserable a worm to be noticed at all. Later on, gaining
importance, he was lectured somewhat severely for his violation of
decorum; in England even Max Beerbohm made an idiotic assault upon
him. It was the Germans and the French, in fact, who first praised him
intelligently—and these friends were too far away to help a timorous
man in a row at home. This sensation of isolation and littleness, I
suppose, explains his fidelity to the newspapers, and the otherwise
inexplicable joy that he always took in his forgotten work for the
_Musical Courier_, in his day a very dubious journal. In such waters
he felt at ease. There he could disport without thought of the dignity
of publishers and the eagle eyes of campus reviewers. Some of the
connections that he formed were full of an ironical inappropriateness.
His discomforts in his _Puck_ days showed themselves in the feebleness
of his work; when he served the _Times_ he was as well placed as a
Cabell at a colored ball. Perhaps the _Sun_, in the years before it
was munseyized, offered him the best berth that he ever had, save it
were his old one on _Mlle. New York._ But whatever the flag, he served
it loyally, and got a lot of fun out of the business. He liked the
pressure of newspaper work; he liked the associations that it involved,
the gabble in the press-room of the Opera House, the exchanges of news
and gossip; above all, he liked the relative ease of the intellectual
harness. In a newspaper article he could say whatever happened to pop
into his mind, and if it looked thin the next day, then there was,
after all, no harm done. But when he sat down to write a book—or
rather to compile it, for all of his volumes were reworked magazine
(and sometimes newspaper) articles—he became self-conscious, and so
knew uneasiness. The tightness of his style, its one salient defect,
was probably the result of this weakness. The corrected clippings that
constituted most of his manuscripts are so beladen with revisions and
rerevisions that they are almost indecipherable.
Thus the growth of Huneker’s celebrity in his later years filled him
with wonder, and never quite convinced him. He was certainly wholly
free from any desire to gather disciples about him and found a school.
There was, of course, some pride of authorship in him, and he liked
to know that his books were read and admired; in particular, he was
pleased by their translation into German and Czech. But it seemed to
me that he shrank from the bellicosity that so often got into praise
of them—that he disliked being set up as the opponent and superior of
the professors whom he always vaguely respected and the rival newspaper
critics whose friendship he esteemed far above their professional
admiration, or even respect. I could never draw him into a discussion
of these rivals, save perhaps a discussion of their historic feats at
beer-guzzling. He wrote vastly better than any of them and knew far
more about the arts than most of them, and he was undoubtedly aware
of it in his heart, but it embarrassed him to hear this superiority
put into plain terms. His intense gregariousness probably accounted
for part of this reluctance to pit himself against them; he could
not imagine a world without a great deal of easy comradeship in it,
and much casual slapping of backs. But under it all was the chronic
underestimation of himself that I have discussed—his fear that he
had spread himself over too many arts, and that his equipment was
thus defective in every one of them. “Steeplejack” is full of this
apologetic timidity. In its very title, as he explains it, there
is a confession of inferiority that is almost maudlin: “Life has
been the Barmecide’s feast to me,” and so on. In the book itself he
constantly takes refuge in triviality from the harsh challenges of
critical parties, and as constantly avoids facts that would shock the
Philistines. One might reasonably assume, reading it from end to end,
that his early days in Paris were spent in the fashion of a Y. M. C. A.
secretary. A few drinking bouts, of course, and a love affair in the
manner of Dubuque, Iowa—but where are the wenches?
More than once, indeed, the book sinks to downright equivocation—for
example, in the Roosevelt episodes. Certainly no one who knew
Huneker in life will ever argue seriously that he was deceived by the
Roosevelt buncombe, or that his view of life was at all comparable to
that of the great demagogue. He stood, in fact, at the opposite pole.
He saw the world, not as a moral show, but as a sort of glorified
Follies. He was absolutely devoid of that obsession with the problem
of conduct which was Roosevelt’s main virtue in the eyes of a stupid
and superstitious people. More, he was wholly against Roosevelt on
many concrete issues—the race suicide banality, the Panama swindle,
the war. He was far too much the realist to believe in the American
case, either before or after 1917, and the manner in which it was
urged, by Roosevelt and others, violated his notions of truth, honor
and decency. I assume nothing here; I simply record what he told me
himself. Nevertheless, the sheer notoriety of the Rough Rider—his
picturesque personality and talent as a mountebank—had its effect on
Huneker, and so he was a bit flattered when he was summoned to Oyster
Bay, and there accepted gravely the nonsense that was poured into his
ear, and even repeated some of it without a cackle in his book. To say
that he actually believed in it would be to libel him. It was precisely
such hollow tosh that he stood against in his rôle of critic of art and
life; it was by exposing its hollowness that he lifted himself above
the general. The same weakness induced him to accept membership in the
National Institute of Arts and Letters. The offer of it to a man of his
age and attainments, after he had been passed over year after year in
favor of all sorts of cheapjack novelists and tenth-rate compilers of
college textbooks, was intrinsically insulting; it was almost as if the
Musical Union had offered to admit a Brahms. But with the insult went
a certain gage of respectability, a certain formal forgiveness for old
frivolities, a certain abatement of old doubts and self-questionings
and so Huneker accepted. Later on, reviewing the episode in his
own mind, he found it the spring of doubts that were even more
uncomfortable. His last letter to me was devoted to the matter. He was
by then eager to maintain that he had got in by a process only partly
under his control, and that, being in, he could discover no decorous
way of getting out.
But perhaps I devote too much space to the elements in the man that
worked against his own free development. They were, after all, grounded
upon qualities that are certainly not to be deprecated—modesty,
good-will to his fellow-men, a fine sense of team-work, a distaste
for acrimonious and useless strife. These qualities gave him great
charm. He was not only humorous; he was also good-humored; even
when the crushing discomforts of his last illness were upon him his
amiability never faltered. And in addition to humor there was wit,
a far rarer thing. His most casual talk was full of this wit, and it
bathed everything that he discussed in a new and brilliant light. I
have never encountered a man who was further removed from dullness;
it seemed a literal impossibility for him to open his mouth without
discharging some word or phrase that arrested the attention and stuck
in the memory. And under it all, giving an extraordinary quality to
the verbal fireworks, there was a solid and apparently illimitable
learning. The man knew as much as forty average men, and his knowledge
was well-ordered and instantly available. He had read everything and
had seen everything and heard everything, and nothing that he had ever
read or seen or heard quite passed out of his mind.
Here, in three words, was the main virtue of his criticism—its
gigantic richness. It had the dazzling charm of an ornate and intricate
design, a blazing fabric of fine silks. It was no mere pontifical
statement of one man’s reactions to a set of ideas; it was a sort
of essence of the reactions of many men—of all the men, in fact,
worth hearing. Huneker discarded their scaffolding, their ifs and
whereases, and presented only what was important and arresting in their
conclusions. It was never a mere _pastiche_; the selection was made
delicately, discreetly, with almost unerring taste and judgment. And
in the summing up there was always the clearest possible statement
of the whole matter. What finally emerged was a body of doctrine that
came, I believe, very close to the truth. Into an assembly of national
critics who had long wallowed in dogmatic puerilities, Huneker entered
with a taste infinitely surer and more civilized, a learning infinitely
greater, and an address infinitely more engaging. No man was less the
reformer by inclination, and yet he became a reformer beyond compare.
He emancipated criticism in America from its old slavery to stupidity,
and with it he emancipated all the arts themselves.