is unnecessary to say anything. One no longer reads them for their
matter, but for their manner. Every flapper now knows all that is worth
knowing about Ibsen, Strindberg, Maeterlinck and Shaw, and a great deal
that is not worth knowing. We have disentangled Hauptmann from
Sudermann, and, thanks to Dr. Lewisohn, may read all his plays in
English. Even Henry Becque has got into the vulgate and is familiar to
the Drama League. As for Anatole France, his "Revolt of the Angels" is
on the shelves of the Carnegie Libraries, and the Comstocks have let it
pass. New gods whoop and rage in Valhalla: Verhaeren, Artzibashef,
Przybyszewski. Huneker, alas, seems to drop behind the procession. He
writes nothing about these second-hand third-raters. He has come to
Wedekind, Schnitzler, Schoenberg, Korngold and Moussorgsky, and he has
discharged a few rounds of shrapnel at the Gallo-Asiatic petti-coat
philosopher, Henri Bergson, but here he has stopped, as he has stopped
at Matisse, Picasso, Epstein and Augustus John in painting. As he says
himself, "one must get off somewhere."...
Particularly if one grows weary of criticism--and in Huneker, of late, I
detect more than one sign of weariness. Youth is behind him, and with it
some of its zest for exploration and combat. "The pathos of distance" is
a phrase that haunts him as poignantly as it haunted Nietzsche, its
maker. Not so long ago I tried to induce him to write some new Old Fogy
sketches, nominating Puccini, Strawinsky, Schoenberg, Korngold, Elgar.
He protested that the mood was gone from him forever, that he could not
turn the clock back twenty years. His late work in _Puck_, the _Times_
and the _Sun_, shows an unaccustomed acquiescence in current valuations.
He praises such one-day masterpieces as McFee's "Casuals of the Sea"; he
is polite to the gaudy heroines of the opera-house; he gags a bit at
Wright's "Modern Painting"; he actually makes a gingery curtsy to Frank
Jewett Mather, a Princeton professor.... The pressure in the gauges
can't keep up to 250 pounds forever. Man must tire of fighting after
awhile, and seek his ease in his inn....
Perhaps the post-bellum transvaluation of all values will bring Huneker
to his feet again, and with something of the old glow and gusto in him.
And if the new men do not stir up, then assuredly the wrecks of the
ancient cities will: the Paris of his youth; Munich, Dresden, Vienna,
Brussels, London; above all, Prague. Go to "New Cosmopolis" and you will
find where his heart lies, or, if not his heart, then at all events his
oesophagus and pylorus.... Here, indeed, the thread of his meditations
is a thread of nutriment. However diverted by the fragrance of the Dutch
woods, the church bells of Belgium, the music of Stuttgart, the bad
pictures of Dublin, the plays of Paris, the musty romance of old Wien,
he always comes back anon to such ease as a man may find in his inn.
"The stomach of Vienna," he says, "first interested me, not its soul."
And so, after a dutiful genuflexion to St. Stephen's ("Old Steffel," as
the Viennese call it), he proceeds to investigate the paprika-chicken,
the _Gulyas_, the _Risi-bisi_, the _Apfelstrudel_, the _Kaiserschmarrn_
and the native and authentic _Wienerschnitzel_. And from food to
drink--specifically, to the haunts of Pilsner, to "certain semi-sacred
houses where the ritual of beer-drinking is observed," to the shrines at
which beer maniacs meet, to "a little old house near a Greek church"
where "the best-kept Pilsner in Vienna may be found."
The best-kept Pilsner in Vienna! The phrase enchants like an entrance of
the horns. The best caviare in Russia, the worst actor on Broadway, the
most virtuous angel in Heaven! Such superlatives are transcendental. And
yet,--so rare is perfection in this world!--the news swiftly follows,
unexpected, disconcerting, that the best Pilsner in Vienna is far short
of the ideal. For some undetermined reason--the influence of the
American tourist? the decay of the Austrian national character?--the
Vienna _Bierwirte_ freeze and paralyze it with too much ice, so that it
chills the nerves it should caress, and fills the heart below with
heaviness and repining. Avoid Vienna, says Huneker, if you are one who
understands and venerates the great Bohemian brew! And if, deluded, you
find yourself there, take the first _D-zug_ for Prague, that lovely
city, for in it you will find the Pilsen _Urquell_, and in the Pilsen
_Urquell_ you will find the best Pilsner in Christendom--its colour a
phosphorescent, translucent, golden yellow, its foam like whipped cream,
its temperature exactly and invariably right. Not even at Pilsen itself
(which the Bohemians call Plezen) is the emperor of malt liquors more
stupendously grateful to the palate. Write it down before you forget:
the Pilsen _Urquell_, Prague, Bohemia, 120 miles S. S. E. of Dresden, on
the river Moldau (which the natives call the Vitava). Ask for Fräulein
Ottilie. Mention the name of Herr Huneker, the American
_Schriftsteller_.
Of all the eminent and noble cities between the Alleghenies and the
Balkans, Prague seems to be Huneker's favourite. He calls it poetic,
precious, delectable, original, dramatic--a long string of adjectives,
each argued for with eloquence that is unmistakably sincere. He stands
fascinated before the towers and pinnacles of the Hradschin, "a miracle
of tender rose and marble white with golden spots of sunshine that would
have made Claude Monet envious." He pays his devotions to the Chapel of
St. Wenceslaus, "crammed with the bones of buried kings," or, at any
rate, to the shrine of St. John Nepomucane, "composed of nearly two tons
of silver." He is charmed by the beauty of the stout, black-haired,
red-cheeked Bohemian girls, and hopes that enough of them will emigrate
to the United States to improve the fading pulchritude of our own
houris. But most of all, he has praises for the Bohemian cuisine, with
its incomparable apple tarts, and its dumplings of cream cheese, and for
the magnificent, the overpowering, the ineffable Pilsner of Prague. This
Pilsner motive runs through the book from cover to cover. In the midst
of Dutch tulip-beds, Dublin cobblestones, Madrid sunlight and Atlantic
City leg-shows, one hears it insistently, deep down in the orchestra.
The cellos weave it into the polyphony, sometimes clearly, sometimes in
scarcely recognizable augmentation. It is heard again in the wood-wind;
the bassoons grunt it thirstily; it slides around in the violas; it
rises to a stately choral in the brass. And chiefly it is in minor.
Chiefly it is sounded by one who longs for the Pilsen _Urquell_ in a far
land, and among a barbarous and teetotaling people, and in an atmosphere
as hostile to the recreations of the palate as it is to the recreations
of the intellect.
As I say, this Huneker is a foreigner and hence accursed. There is
something about him as exotic as a samovar, as essentially un-American
as a bashi-bazouk, a nose-ring or a fugue. He is filled to the throttle
with strange and unnational heresies. He ranks Beethoven miles above the
native gods, and not only Beethoven, but also Bach and Brahms, and not
only Bach and Brahms, but also Berlioz, Bizet, Bruch and Bülow and
perhaps even Balakirew, Bellini, Balfe, Borodin and Boïeldieu. He
regards Budapest as a more civilized city than his native Philadelphia,
Stendhal as a greater literary artist than Washington Irving, "Künstler
Leben" as better music than "There is Sunlight in My Soul." Irish? I
still doubt it, despite the _Stammbaum_. Who ever heard of an Irish
epicure, an Irish _flâneur_, or, for that matter, an Irish
contrapuntist? The arts of the voluptuous category are unknown west of
Cherbourg; one leaves them behind with the French pilot. Even the
Czech-Irish hypothesis (or is it Magyar-Irish?) has a smell of the
lamp. Perhaps it should be Irish-Czech....
§ 7
There remain the books of stories, "Visionaries" and "Melomaniacs." It
is not surprising to hear that both are better liked in France and
Germany than in England and the United States. ("Visionaries" has even
appeared in Bohemian.) Both are made up of what the Germans call
_Kultur-Novellen_--that is, stories dealing, not with the emotions
common to all men, but with the clash of ideas among the civilized and
godless minority. In some of them, _e.g._, "Rebels of the Moon," what
one finds is really not a story at all, but a static discussion, half
aesthetic and half lunatic. In others, _e.g._, "Isolde's Mother," the
whole action revolves around an assumption incomprehensible to the
general. One can scarcely imagine most of these tales in the magazines.
They would puzzle and outrage the readers of Gouverneur Morris and
Gertrude Atherton, and the readers of Howells and Mrs. Wharton no less.
Their point of view is essentially the aesthetic one; the overwhelming
importance of beauty is never in any doubt. And the beauty thus
vivisected and fashioned into new designs is never the simple
Wordsworthian article, of fleecy clouds and primroses all compact; on
the contrary, it is the highly artificial beauty of pigments and
tone-colours, of Cézanne landscapes and the second act of "Tristan and
Isolde," of Dunsanyan dragons and Paracelsian mysteries. Here, indeed,
Huneker riots in the aesthetic occultism that he loves. Music slides
over into diabolism; the Pobloff symphony rends the firmament of Heaven;
the ghost of Chopin drives Mychowski to drink; a single drum-beat
finishes the estimable consort of the composer of the Tympani symphony.
In "The Eighth Deadly Sin" we have a paean to perfume--the only one, so
far as I know, in English. In "The Hall of the Missing Footsteps" we
behold the reaction of hasheesh upon Chopin's ballade in F major....
Strangely-flavoured, unearthly, perhaps unhealthy stuff. I doubt that it
will ever be studied for its style in our new Schools of Literature; a
devilish cunning if often there, but it leaves a smack of the
pharmacopoeia. However, as George Gissing used to say, "the artist
should be free from everything like moral prepossession." This lets in
the Antichrist....
Huneker himself seems to esteem these fantastic tales above all his
other work. Story-writing, indeed, was his first love, and his Opus 1 a
bad imitation of Poe, by name "The Comet," was done in Philadelphia so
long ago as July 4, 1876. (Temperature, 105 degrees Fahrenheit.) One
rather marvels that he has never attempted a novel. It would have been
as bad, perhaps, as "Love Among the Artists," but certainly no bore. He
might have given George Moore useful help with "Evelyn Innes" and
"Sister Teresa": they are about music, but not by a musician. As for me,
I see no great talent for fiction _qua_ fiction in these two volumes of
exotic tales. They are interesting simply because Huneker the story
teller so often yields place to Huneker the playboy of the arts. Such
things as "Antichrist" and "The Woman Who Loved Chopin" are no more, at
bottom, than second-rate anecdotes; it is the filling, the sauce, the
embroidery that counts. But what filling! What sauce! What
embroidery!... One never sees more of Huneker....
§ 8
He must stand or fall, however, as critic. It is what he has written
about other men, not what he has concocted himself, that makes a figure
of him, and gives him his unique place in the sterile literature of the
republic's second century. He stands for a _Weltanschauung_ that is not
only un-national, but anti-national; he is the chief of all the curbers
and correctors of the American Philistine; in praising the arts he has
also criticized a civilization. In the large sense, of course, he has
had but small influence. After twenty years of earnest labour, he finds
himself almost as alone as a Methodist in Bavaria. The body of native
criticism remains as I have described it; an endless piling up of
platitudes, an homeric mass of false assumptions and jejune conclusions,
an insane madness to reduce beauty to terms of a petty and pornographic
morality. One might throw a thousand bricks in any American city without
striking a single man who could give an intelligible account of either
Hauptmann or Cézanne, or of the reasons for holding Schumann to have
been a better composer than Mendelssohn. The boys in our colleges are
still taught that Whittier was a great poet and Fennimore Cooper a great
novelist. Nine-tenths of our people--perhaps ninety-nine hundredths of
our native-born--have yet to see their first good picture, or to hear
their first symphony. Our Chamberses and Richard Harding Davises are
national figures; our Norrises and Dreisers are scarcely tolerated. Of
the two undoubted world figures that we have contributed to letters, one
was allowed to die like a stray cat up an alley and the other was
mistaken for a cheap buffoon. Criticism, as the average American
"intellectual" understands it, is what a Frenchman, a German or a
Russian would call donkeyism. In all the arts we still cling to the
ideals of the dissenting pulpit, the public cemetery, the electric sign,
the bordello parlour.
But for all that, I hang to a somewhat battered optimism, and one of the
chief causes of that optimism is the fact that Huneker, after all these
years, yet remains unhanged. A picturesque and rakish fellow, a believer
in joy and beauty, a disdainer of petty bombast and moralizing, a sworn
friend of all honest purpose and earnest striving, he has given his life
to a work that must needs bear fruit hereafter. While the college
pedagogues of the Brander Matthews type still worshipped the dead bones
of Scribe and Sardou, Robertson and Bulwer-Lytton, he preached the new
and revolutionary gospel of Ibsen. In the golden age of Rosa Bonheur's
"The Horse Fair," he was expounding the principles of the
post-impressionists. In the midst of the Sousa marches he whooped for
Richard Strauss. Before the rev. professors had come to Schopenhauer, or
even to Spencer, he was hauling ashore the devil-fish, Nietzsche. No
stranger poisons have ever passed through the customs than those he has
brought in his baggage. No man among us has ever urged more ardently, or
with sounder knowledge or greater persuasiveness, that catholicity of
taste and sympathy which stands in such direct opposition to the booming
certainty and snarling narrowness of Little Bethel.
If he bears a simple label, indeed, it is that of anti-Philistine. And
the Philistine he attacks is not so much the vacant and harmless fellow
who belongs to the Odd Fellows and recreates himself with _Life_ and
_Leslie's Weekly_ in the barber shop, as that more belligerent and
pretentious donkey who presumes to do battle for "honest" thought and a
"sound" ethic--the "forward looking" man, the university ignoramus, the
conservator of orthodoxy, the rattler of ancient phrases--what Nietzsche
called "the Philistine of culture." It is against this fat milch cow of
wisdom that Huneker has brandished a spear since first there was a
Huneker. He is a sworn foe to "the traps that snare the attention from
poor or mediocre workmanship--the traps of sentimentalism, of false
feeling, of cheap pathos, of the cheap moral." He is on the trail of
those pious mountebanks who "clutter the marketplaces with their booths,
mischievous half-art and tubs of tripe and soft soap." Superficially, as
I say, he seems to have made little progress in this benign _pogrom_.
But under the surface, concealed from a first glance, he has undoubtedly
left a mark--faint, perhaps, but still a mark. To be a civilized man in
America is measurably less difficult, despite the war, than it used to
be, say, in 1890. One may at least speak of "Die Walküre" without being
laughed at as a half-wit, and read Stirner without being confused with
Castro and Raisuli, and argue that Huxley got the better of Gladstone
without being challenged at the polls. I know of no man who pushed in
that direction harder than James Huneker.
FOOTNOTES:
[31] The Science of English Verse; New York, Scribner, 1880.
[32] Masks and Minstrels of New Germany; Boston, John W. Luce & Co.,
1911.
[33] New York, Doubleday, Page & Co., 1913.
[34] The Drift of Romanticism; Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1913.
[35] New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1916.
[36] New York, Chas. Scribner's Sons, 1917.
[37] New York, The Macmillan Co., 1917.
IV
PURITANISM AS A LITERARY FORCE
§ 1
"Calvinism," says Dr. Leon Kellner, in his excellent little history of
American literature,[38] "is the natural theology of the disinherited;
it never flourished, therefore, anywhere as it did in the barren hills
of Scotland and in the wilds of North America." The learned doctor is
here speaking of theology in what may be called its narrow technical
sense--that is, as a theory of God. Under Calvinism, in the New World as
well as in the Old, it became no more than a luxuriant demonology; even
God himself was transformed into a superior sort of devil, ever wary and
wholly merciless. That primitive demonology still survives in the
barbaric doctrines of the Methodists and Baptists, particularly in the
South; but it has been ameliorated, even there, by a growing sense of
the divine grace, and so the old God of Plymouth Rock, as practically
conceived, is now scarcely worse than the average jail warden or
Italian padrone. On the ethical side, however, Calvinism is dying a much
harder death, and we are still a long way from the enlightenment. Save
where Continental influences have measurably corrupted the Puritan
idea--_e.g._, in such cities as New York, San Francisco and New
Orleans,--the prevailing American view of the world and its mysteries is
still a moral one, and no other human concern gets half the attention
that is endlessly lavished upon the problem of conduct, particularly of
the other fellow. It needed no official announcement to define the
function and office of the republic as that of an international expert
in morals, and the mentor and exemplar of the more backward nations.
Within, as well as without, the eternal rapping of knuckles and
proclaiming of new austerities goes on. The American, save in moments of
conscious and swiftly lamented deviltry, casts up all ponderable values,
including even the values of beauty, in terms of right and wrong. He is
beyond all things else, a judge and a policeman; he believes firmly that
there is a mysterious power in law; he supports and embellishes its
operation with a fanatical vigilance.
Naturally enough, this moral obsession has given a strong colour to
American literature. In truth, it has coloured it so brilliantly that
American literature is set off sharply from all other literatures. In
none other will you find so wholesale and ecstatic a sacrifice of
aesthetic ideas, of all the fine gusto of passion and beauty, to notions
of what is meet, proper and nice. From the books of grisly sermons that
were the first American contribution to letters down to that amazing
literature of "inspiration" which now flowers so prodigiously, with two
literary ex-Presidents among its chief virtuosi, one observes no
relaxation of the moral pressure. In the history of every other
literature there have been periods of what might be called moral
innocence--periods in which a naif _joie de vivre_ has broken through
all concepts of duty and responsibility, and the wonder and glory of the
universe have been hymned with unashamed zest. The age of Shakespeare
comes to mind at once: the violence of the Puritan reaction offers a
measure of the pendulum's wild swing. But in America no such general
rising of the blood has ever been seen. The literature of the nation,
even the literature of the enlightened minority, has been under harsh
Puritan restraints from the beginning, and despite a few stealthy
efforts at revolt--usually quite without artistic value or even common
honesty, as in the case of the cheap fiction magazines and that of
smutty plays on Broadway, and always very short-lived--it shows not the
slightest sign of emancipating itself today. The American, try as he
will, can never imagine any work of the imagination as wholly devoid of
moral content. It must either tend toward the promotion of virtue, or be
suspect and abominable.
If any doubt of this is in your mind, turn to the critical articles in
the newspapers and literary weeklies; you will encounter enough proofs
in a month's explorations to convince you forever. A novel or a play is
judged among us, not by its dignity of conception, its artistic honesty,
its perfection of workmanship, but almost entirely by its orthodoxy of
doctrine, its platitudinousness, its usefulness as a moral tract. A
digest of the reviews of such a book as David Graham Phillips' "Susan
Lenox" or of such a play as Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler" would make astounding
reading for a Continental European. Not only the childish incompetents
who write for the daily press, but also most of our critics of
experience and reputation, seem quite unable to estimate a piece of
writing as a piece of writing, a work of art as a work of art; they
almost inevitably drag in irrelevant gabble as to whether this or that
personage in it is respectable, or this or that situation in accordance
with the national notions of what is edifying and nice. Fully
nine-tenths of the reviews of Dreiser's "The Titan," without question
the best American novel of its year, were devoted chiefly to indignant
denunciations of the morals of Frank Cowperwood, its central character.
That the man was superbly imagined and magnificently depicted, that he
stood out from the book in all the flashing vigour of life, that his
creation was an artistic achievement of a very high and difficult
order--these facts seem to have made no impression upon the reviewers
whatever. They were Puritans writing for Puritans, and all they could
see in Cowperwood was an anti-Puritan, and in his creator another. It
will remain for Europeans, I daresay, to discover the true stature of
"The Titan," as it remained for Europeans to discover the true stature
of "Sister Carrie."
Just how deeply this corrective knife has cut you may find plainly
displayed in Dr. Kellner's little book. He sees the throttling influence
of an ever alert and bellicose Puritanism, not only in our grand
literature, but also in our petit literature, our minor poetry, even in
our humour. The Puritan's utter lack of aesthetic sense, his distrust of
all romantic emotion, his unmatchable intolerance of opposition, his
unbreakable belief in his own bleak and narrow views, his savage
cruelty of attack, his lust for relentless and barbarous
persecution--these things have put an almost unbearable burden upon the
exchange of ideas in the United States, and particularly upon that form
of it which involves playing with them for the mere game's sake. On the
one hand, the writer who would deal seriously and honestly with the
larger problems of life, particularly in the rigidly-partitioned ethical
field, is restrained by laws that would have kept a Balzac or a Zola in
prison from year's end to year's end; and on the other hand the writer
who would proceed against the reigning superstitions by mockery has been
silenced by taboos that are quite as stringent, and by an indifference
that is even worse. For all our professed delight in and capacity for
jocosity, we have produced so far but one genuine wit--Ambrose
Bierce--and, save to a small circle, he remains unknown today. Our great
humourists, including even Mark Twain, have had to take protective
colouration, whether willingly or unwillingly, from the prevailing
ethical foliage, and so one finds them levelling their darts, not at the
stupidities of the Puritan majority, but at the evidences of lessening
stupidity in the anti-Puritan minority. In other words, they have done
battle, not against, but _for_ Philistinism--and Philistinism is no
more than another name for Puritanism. Both wage a ceaseless warfare
upon beauty in its every form, from painting to religious ritual, and
from the drama to the dance--the first because it holds beauty to be a
mean and stupid thing, and the second because it holds beauty to be
distracting and corrupting.