extravagance or an error here and there lie validly against the saying
of it? I think not. I could be a professor if I would and show you slips
enough--certain ponderous nothings in the Ibsen essays, already
mentioned; a too easy bemusement at the hands of Shaw; a vacillating
over Wagner; a habit of yielding to the hocus-pocus of the mystics,
particularly Maeterlinck. On the side of painting, I am told, there are
even worse aberrations; I know too little about painting to judge for
myself. But the list, made complete, would still not be over-long, and
few of its items would be important. Huneker, like the rest of us, has
sinned his sins, but his judgments, in the overwhelming main, hold
water. He has resisted the lure of all the wild movements of the
generation; the tornadoes of doctrine have never knocked him over. Nine
times out of ten, in estimating a new man in music or letters, he has
come curiously close to the truth at the first attempt. And he has
always announced it in good time; his solo has always preceded the
chorus. He was, I believe, the first American (not forgetting William
Morton Payne and Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, the pioneers) to write about
Ibsen with any understanding of the artist behind the prophet's mask; he
was the first to see the rising star of Nietzsche (this was back in
1888); he was beating a drum for Shaw the critic before ever Shaw the
dramatist and mob philosopher was born (_circa_ 1886-1890); he was
writing about Hauptmann and Maeterlinck before they had got well set on
their legs in their own countries; his estimate of Sudermann, bearing
date of 1905, may stand with scarcely the change of a word today; he did
a lot of valiant pioneering for Strindberg, Hervieu, Stirner and Gorki,
and later on helped in the pioneering for Conrad; he was in the van of
the MacDowell enthusiasts; he fought for the ideas of such painters as
Davies, Lawson, Luks, Sloan and Prendergest (Americans all, by the way:
an answer to the hollow charge of exotic obsession) at a time when even
Manet, Monet and Degas were laughed at; he was among the first to give a
hand to Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane and H. B. Fuller.
In sum, he gave some semblance of reality in the United States, after
other men had tried and failed, to that great but ill-starred revolt
against Victorian pedantry, formalism and sentimentality which began in
the early 90's. It would be difficult, indeed, to overestimate the
practical value to all the arts in America of his intellectual
alertness, his catholic hospitality to ideas, his artistic courage, and
above all, his powers of persuasion. It was not alone that he saw
clearly what was sound and significant; it was that he managed, by the
sheer charm of his writings, to make a few others see and understand it.
If the United States is in any sort of contact today, however remotely,
with what is aesthetically going on in the more civilized countries--if
the Puritan tradition, for all its firm entrenchment, has eager and
resourceful enemies besetting it--if the pall of Harvard quasiculture,
by the Oxford manner out of Calvinism, has been lifted ever so
little--there is surely no man who can claim a larger share of credit
for preparing the way....
§ 3
Huneker comes out of Philadelphia, that depressing intellectual slum,
and his first writing was for the Philadelphia _Evening Bulletin_. He is
purely Irish in blood, and is of very respectable ancestry, his maternal
grandfather and godfather having been James Gibbons, the Irish poet and
patriot, and president of the Fenian Brotherhood in America. Once, in a
review of "The Pathos of Distance," I ventured the guess that there was
a German strain in him somewhere, and based it upon the beery melancholy
visible in parts of that book. Who but a German sheds tears over the
empty bottles of day before yesterday, the Adelaide Neilson of 1877? Who
but a German goes into woollen undershirts at 45, and makes his will,
and begins to call his wife "Mamma"? The green-sickness of youth is
endemic from pole to pole, as much so as measles; but what race save the
wicked one is floored by a blue distemper in middle age, with
sentimental burblings _a cappella_, hallucinations of lost loves, and
an unquenchable lacrymorrhea?... I made out a good case, but I was
wrong, and the penalty came swiftly and doubly, for on the one hand the
Boston _Transcript_ sounded an alarm against both Huneker and me as
German spies, and on the other hand Huneker himself proclaimed that,
even spiritually, he was less German than Magyar, less "Hun" than Hun.
"I am," he said, "a Celto-Magyar: Pilsner at Donneybrook Fair. Even the
German beer and cuisine are not in it with the Austro-Hungarian." Here,
I suspect, he meant to say Czech instead of Magyar, for isn't Pilsen in
Bohemia? Moreover, turn to the chapter on Prague in "New Cosmopolis,"
and you will find out in what highland his heart really is. In this
book, indeed, is a vast hymn to all things Czechic--the Pilsen
_Urquell_, the muffins stuffed with poppy-seed jam, the spiced chicken
liver _en casserole_, the pretty Bohemian girls, the rose and golden
glory of Hradschin Hill.... One thinks of other strange infatuations:
the Polish Conrad's for England, the Scotch Mackay's for Germany, the
Low German Brahms' for Italy. Huneker, I daresay, is the first
Celto-Czech--or Celto-Magyar, as you choose. (Maybe the name suggests
something. It is not to be debased to _Hoon_-eker, remember, but kept at
_Hun_-eker, rhyming initially with _nun_ and _gun_.) An unearthly
marriage of elements, by all the gods! but there are pretty children of
it....
Philadelphia humanely disgorged Huneker in 1878. His father designed him
for the law, and he studied the institutes at the Philadelphia Law
Academy, but like Schumann, he was spoiled for briefs by the stronger
pull of music and the _cacoëthes scribendi_. (Grandpa John Huneker had
been a composer of church music, and organist at St. Mary's.) In the
year mentioned he set out for Paris to see Liszt; his aim was to make
himself a piano virtuoso. His name does not appear on his own exhaustive
list of Liszt pupils, but he managed to quaff of the Pierian spring at
second-hand, for he had lessons from Theodore Ritter (_né_ Bennet), a
genuine pupil of the old walrus, and he was also taught by the venerable
Georges Mathias, a pupil of Chopin. These days laid the foundations for
two subsequent books, the "Chopin: the Man and His Music" of 1900, and
the "Franz Liszt" of 1911. More, they prepared the excavations for all
of the others, for Huneker began sending home letters to the
Philadelphia _Bulletin_ on the pictures that he saw, the books that he
read and the music that he heard in Paris, and out of them gradually
grew a body of doctrine that was to be developed into full-length
criticism on his return to the United States. He stayed in Paris until
the middle 80's, and then settled in New York.
All the while his piano studies continued, and in New York he became a
pupil of Rafael Joseffy. He even became a teacher himself and was for
ten years on the staff of the National Conservatory, and showed himself
at all the annual meetings of the Music Teachers' Association. But bit
by bit criticism elbowed out music-making, as music-making had elbowed
out criticism with Schumann and Berlioz. In 1886 or thereabout he joined
the _Musical Courier_; then he went, in succession, to the old
_Recorder_, to the _Morning Advertiser_, to the _Sun_, to the _Times_,
and finally to the Philadelphia _Press_ and the New York _World_.
Various weeklies and monthlies have also enlisted him: _Mlle. New York_,
the _Atlantic Monthly_, the _Smart Set_, the _North American Review_ and
_Scribner's_. He has even stooped to _Puck_, vainly trying to make an
American _Simplicissimus_ of that dull offspring of synagogue and
barbershop. He has been, in brief, an extremely busy and not too
fastidious journalist, writing first about one of the arts, and then
about another, and then about all seven together. But music has been the
steadiest of all his loves; his first three books dealt almost wholly
with it; of his complete canon more than half have to do with it.
§ 4
His first book, "Mezzotints in Modern Music," published in 1899,
revealed his predilections clearly, and what is more, his critical
insight and sagacity. One reads it today without the slightest feeling
that it is an old story; some of the chapters, obviously reworkings of
articles for the papers, must go back to the middle 90's, and yet the
judgments they proclaim scarcely call for the change of a word. The
single noticeable weakness is a too easy acquiescence in the empty
showiness of Saint-Saëns, a tendency to bow to the celebrated French
parlour magician too often. Here, I daresay, is an echo of old Paris
days, for Camille was a hero on the Seine in 1880, and there was even
talk of pitting him against Wagner. The estimates of other men are
judiciously arrived at and persuasively stated. Tschaikowsky is
correctly put down as a highly talented but essentially shallow
fellow--a blubberer in the regalia of a philosopher. Brahms, then still
under attack by Henry T. Finck, of the _Evening Post_ (the press-agent
of Massenet: ye gods, what Harvard can do, even to a Würtemberger!) is
subjected to a long, an intelligent and an extremely friendly analysis;
no better has got into English since, despite too much stress on the
piano music. And Richard Strauss, yet a nine days' wonder, is described
clearly and accurately, and his true stature indicated. The rest of the
book is less noteworthy; Huneker says the proper things about Chopin,
Liszt and Wagner, and adds a chapter on piano methods, the plain fruit
of his late pedagogy. But the three chapters I have mentioned are
enough; they fell, in their time, into a desert of stupidity; they set a
standard in musical criticism in America that only Huneker himself has
ever exceeded.
The most popular of his music books, of course, is the "Chopin" (1900).
Next to "Iconoclasts," it is the best seller of them all. More, it has
been done into German, French and Italian, and is chiefly responsible
for Huneker's celebrity abroad as the only critic of music that America
has ever produced. Superficially, it seems to be a monument of pedantry,
a meticulous piling up of learning, but a study of it shows that it is
very much more than that. Compare it to Sir George Grove's staggering
tome on the Beethoven symphonies if you want to understand the
difference between mere scholastic diligence and authentic criticism.
The one is simply a top-heavy mass of disorderly facts and worshipping
enthusiasm; the other is an analysis that searches out every nook and
corner of the subject, and brings it into coherence and intelligibility.
The Chopin rhapsodist is always held in check by the sound musician;
there is a snouting into dark places as well as a touching up of high
lights. I myself am surely no disciple of the Polish tuberose--his
sweetness, in fact, gags me, and I turn even to Moszkowski for
relief--but I have read and re-read this volume with endless interest,
and I find it more bethumbed than any other Huneker book in my library,
saving only "Iconoclasts" and "Old Fogy." Here, indeed, Huneker is on
his own ground. One often feels, in his discussions of orchestral music,
that he only thinks orchestrally, like Schumann, with an effort--that
all music, in his mind, gets itself translated into terms of piano
music. In dealing with Chopin no such transvaluation of values is
necessary; the raw materials are ready for his uses without preparation;
he is wholly at home among the black keys and white.
His "Liszt" is a far less noteworthy book. It is, in truth, scarcely a
book at all, but merely a collection of notes for a book, some of them
considerably elaborated, but others set down in the altogether. One
reads it because it is about Liszt, the most fantastic figure that ever
came out of Hungary, half devil and half clown; not because there is any
conflagration of ideas in it. The chapter that reveals most of Huneker
is the appendix on latter-day piano virtuosi, with its estimates of such
men as de Pachmann, Rosenthal, Paderewski and Hofmann. Much better stuff
is to be found in "Overtones," "The Pathos of Distance" and "Ivory, Apes
and Peacocks"--brilliant, if not always profound studies of Strauss,
Wagner, Schoenberg, Moussorgsky, and even Verdi. But if I had my choice
of the whole shelf, it would rest, barring the "Chopin," on "Old
Fogy"--the _scherzo_ of the Hunekeran symphony, the critic taking a
holiday, the Devil's Mass in the tonal sanctuary. In it Huneker is at
his very choicest, making high-jinks with his Davidsbund of one,
rattling the skeletons in all the musical closets of the world. Here,
throwing off his critic's black gown, his lays about him right and left,
knocking the reigning idols off their perches; resurrecting the old, old
dead and trying to pump the breath into them; lambasting on one page and
lauding on the next; lampooning his fellow critics and burlesquing their
rubber stamp fustian; extolling Dussek and damning Wagner; swearing
mighty oaths by Mozart, and after him, Strauss--not Richard, but Johann!
The Old Fogy, of course, is the thinnest of disguises, a mere veil of
gossamer for "Editor" Huneker. That Huneker in false whiskers is
inimitable, incomparable, almost indescribable. On the one hand, he is a
prodigy of learning, a veritable warehouse of musical information, true,
half-true and apocryphal; on the other hand, he is a jester who delights
in reducing all learning to absurdity. Reading him somehow suggests
hearing a Bach mass rescored for two fifes, a tambourine in B, a wind
machine, two tenor harps, a contrabass oboe, two banjos, eight tubas and
the usual clergy and strings. The substance is there; every note is
struck exactly in the middle--but what outlandish tone colours, what
strange, unearthly sounds! It is not Bach, however, who first comes to
mind when Huneker is at his tricks, but Papa Haydn--the Haydn of the
Surprise symphony and the Farewell. There is the same gargantuan gaiety,
the same magnificent irreverence. Haydn did more for the symphony than
any other man, but he also got more fun out of it than any other man.
"Old Fogy," of course, is not to be taken seriously: it is frankly a
piece of fooling. But all the same a serious idea runs through the book
from end to end, and that is the idea that music is getting too
subjective to be comfortable. The makers of symphonies tend to forget
beauty altogether; their one effort is to put all their own petty trials
and tribulations, their empty theories and speculations into cacophony.
Even so far back as Beethoven's day that autobiographical habit had
begun. "Beethoven," says Old Fogy, is "dramatic, powerful, a maker of
storms, a subduer of tempests; but his speech is the speech of a
self-centred egotist. He is the father of all the modern melomaniacs,
who, looking into their own souls, write what they see therein--misery,
corruption, slighting selfishness and ugliness." Old Ludwig's groans, of
course, we can stand. He was not only a great musician, but also a great
man. It is just as interesting to hear him sigh and complain as it would
be to hear the private prayers of Julius Caesar. But what of
Tschaikowsky, with his childish Slavic whining? What of Liszt, with his
cheap playacting, his incurable lasciviousness, his plebeian warts? What
of Wagner, with his delight in imbecile fables, his popinjay vanity, his
soul of a _Schnorrer_? What of Richard Strauss, with his warmed-over
Nietzscheism, his flair for the merely horrible? Old Fogy sweeps them
all into his ragbag. If art is to be defined as beauty seen through a
temperament, then give us more beauty and cleaner temperaments! Back to
the old gods, Mozart and Bach, with a polite bow to Brahms and a
sentimental tear for Chopin! Beethoven tried to tell his troubles in his
music; Mozart was content to ravish the angels of their harps. And as
for Johann Sebastian, "there was more real musical feeling, uplifting
and sincerity in the old Thomas-kirche in Leipzig ... than in all your
modern symphony and oratorio machine-made concerts put together."
All this is argued, to be sure, in extravagant terms. Wagner is a mere
ghoul and impostor: "The Flying Dutchman" is no more than a parody on
Weber, and "Parsifal" is "an outrage against religion, morals and
music." Daddy Liszt is "the inventor of the Liszt pupil, a bad piano
player, a venerable man with a purple nose--a Cyrano de Cognac nose."
Tschaikowsky is the Slav gone crazy on vodka. He transformed Hamlet into
"a yelling man" and Romeo and Juliet into "two monstrous Cossacks, who
gibber and squeak at each other while reading some obscene volume." "His
Manfred is a libel on Byron, who was a libel on God." And even Schumann
is a vanishing star, a literary man turned composer, a pathological
case. But, as I have said, a serious idea runs through all this
concerto for slapstick and seltzer siphon, and to me, at least, that
idea has a plentiful reasonableness. We are getting too much melodrama,
too much vivisection, too much rebellion--and too little music. Turn
from Tschaikowsky's Pathétique or from any of his wailing tone-poems to
Schubert's C major, or to Mozart's Jupiter, or to Beethoven's _kleine
Sinfonie in F dur_: it is like coming out of a _Kaffeeklatsch_ into the
open air, almost like escaping from a lunatic asylum. The one
unmistakable emotion that much of this modern music from the steppes and
morgues and _Biertische_ engenders is a longing for form, clarity,
coherence, a self-respecting tune. The snorts and moans of the pothouse
Werthers are as irritating, in the long run, as the bawling of a child,
the squeak of a pig under a gate. One yearns unspeakably for a composer
who gives out his pair of honest themes, and then develops them with
both ears open, and then recapitulates them unashamed, and then hangs a
brisk coda to them, and then shuts up.
§ 5
So much for "Old Fogy" and the musical books. They constitute, not only
the best body of work that Huneker himself has done, but the best body
of musical criticism that any American has done. Musical criticism, in
our great Calvinist republic, confines itself almost entirely to
transient reviewing, and even when it gets between covers, it keeps its
trivial quality. Consider, for example, the published work of Henry
Edward Krehbiel, for long the _doyen_ of the New York critics. I pick up
his latest book, "A Second Book of Operas,"[37] open it at random, and
find this:
On January 31, 1893, the Philadelphia singers, aided by the New
York Symphony Society, gave a performance of the opera, under the
auspices of the Young Men's Hebrew Association, for the benefit of
its charities, at the Carnegie Music Hall, New York. Mr. Walter
Damrosch was to have conducted, but was detained in Washington by
the funeral of Mr. Blaine, and Mr. Hinrichs took his place.
O Doctor _admirabilis, acutus et illuminatissimus_! Needless to say the
universities have not overlooked this geyser of buttermilk: he is an
honourary A.M. of Yale. His most respectable volume, that on negro
folksong, impresses one principally by its incompleteness. It may be
praised as a sketch, but surely not as a book. The trouble with
Krehbiel, of course, is that he mistakes a newspaper morgue for
Parnassus. He has all of the third-rate German's capacity for
unearthing facts, but he doesn't know how either to think or to write,
and so his criticism is mere pretence and pishposh. W. J. Henderson, of
the _Sun_, doesn't carry that handicap. He is as full of learning as
Krehbiel, as his books on singing and on the early Italian opera show,
but he also wields a slippery and intriguing pen, and he could be hugely
entertaining if he would. Instead, he devotes himself to manufacturing
primers for the newly intellectual. I can find little of the charm of
his _Sun_ articles in his books. Lawrence Gilman? A sound musician but
one who of late years has often neglected music for the other arts.
Philip H. Goepp? His three volumes on the symphonic repertoire leave
twice as much to be said as they say. Carl Van Vechten? A very promising
novice, but not yet at full growth. Philip Hale? His gigantic
annotations scarcely belong to criticism at all; they are musical
talmudism. Beside, they are buried in the program books of the Boston
Symphony Orchestra, and might as well be inscribed on the temple walls
of Baalbec. As for Upton and other such fellows, they are merely musical
chautauquans, and their tedious commentaries have little more value than
the literary criticisms in the religious weeklies. One of them, a
Harvard _maestro_, has published a book on the orchestra in which, on
separate pages, the reader is solemnly presented with pictures of first
and second violins!
It seems to me that Huneker stands on a higher level than any of these
industrious gentlemen, and that his writings on music are of much more
value, despite his divided allegiance among the _beaux arts_. Whatever
may be said against him, it must at least be admitted that he knows
Chopin, and that he has written the best volumes upon the tuberculous
Pole in English. Vladimir de Pachmann, that king of all Chopin players,
once bore characteristic testimony to the fact--I think it was in
London. The program was heavy with the études and ballades, and Huneker
sat in the front row of fanatics. After a storm of applause de Pachmann
rose from the piano stool, levelled a bony claw at Huneker, and
pronounced his dictum: "_He_ knows more than _all_ of you." Joseffy
seems to have had the same opinion, for he sought the aid of his old
pupil in preparing his new edition of Chopin, the first volume of which
is all he lived to see in print.... And, beyond all the others, Huneker
disdains writing for the kindergarten. There is no stooping in his
discourse; he frankly addresses himself to an audience that has gone
through the forms, and so he avoids the tediousness of the A B C
expositors. He is the only American musical critic, save Van Vechten,
who thus assumes invariably that a musical audience exists, and the only
one who constantly measures up to its probable interests, supposing it
to be there. Such a book as "Old Fogy," for all its buffoonery, is
conceivable only as the work of a sound musician. Its background is one
of the utmost sophistication; in the midst of its wildest extravagances
there is always a profound knowledge of music on tap, and a profound
love of it to boot. Here, perhaps, more than anywhere else, Huneker's
delight in the things he deals with is obvious. It is not a seminary
that he keeps, but a sort of club of tone enthusiasts, and membership in
it is infinitely charming.
§ 6
This capacity for making the thing described seem important and
delightful, this quality of infectious gusto, this father-talent of all
the talents that a critic needs, sets off his literary criticism no less
than his discourse on music and musicians. Such a book as "Iconoclasts"
or "Egoists" is full of useful information, but it is even more full of
agreeable adventure. The style is the book, as it is the man. It is
arch, staccato, ironical, witty, galloping, playful, polyglot,
allusive--sometimes, alas, so allusive as to reduce the Drama Leaguer
and women's clubber to wonderment and ire. In writing of plays or of
books, as in writing of cities, tone-poems or philosophies, Huneker
always assumes that the elements are already well-grounded, that he is
dealing with the initiated, that a pause to explain would be an affront.
Sad work for the Philistines--but a joy to the elect! All this
polyphonic allusiveness, this intricate fuguing of ideas, is not to be
confused, remember, with the hollow showiness of the academic
soothsayer. It is as natural to the man, as much a part of him as the
clanging Latin of Johnson, or, to leap from art to art Huneker-wise, the
damnable cross-rhythms of Brahms. He could no more write without his
stock company of heretic sages than he could write without his ration of
malt. And, on examination, all of them turned out to be real. They are
far up dark alleys, but they are there!... And one finds them, at last,
to be as pleasant company as the multilingual puns of Nietzsche or
Debussy's chords of the second.
As for the origin of that style, it seems to have a complex ancestry.
Huneker's first love was Poe, and even today he still casts affectionate
glances in that direction, but there is surely nothing of Poe's
elephantine labouring in his skipping, _pizzicato_ sentences. Then came
Carlyle--the Carlyle of "Sartor Resartus"--a god long forgotten.
Huneker's mother was a woman of taste; on reading his first scribblings,
she gave him Cardinal Newman, and bade him consider the Queen's English.
Newman achieved a useful purging; the style that remained was ready for
Flaubert. From the author of "L'Education Sentimentale," I daresay, came
the deciding influence, with Nietzsche's staggering brilliance offering
suggestions later on. Thus Huneker, as stylist, owes nearly all to
France, for Nietzsche, too, learned how to write there, and to the end
of his days he always wrote more like a Frenchman than a German. His
greatest service to his own country, indeed, was not as anarch, but as
teacher of writing. He taught the Germans that their language had a snap
in it as well as sighs and gargles--that it was possible to write German
and yet not wander in a wood. There are whole pages of Nietzsche that
suggest such things, say, as the essay on Maurice Barrès in "Egoists,"
with its bold tropes, its rapid gait, its sharp _sforzandos_. And you
will find old Friedrich at his tricks from end to end of "Old Fogy."