$1.50 net
CONTENTS: Paul Cezanne--Rops the Etcher--Monticelli--Rodin--Eugene
Carriere--Degas--Botticelli--Six Spaniards--Chardin--Black and
White--Impressionism--A New Study of Watteau--Gauguin and
Toulouse-Lautrec--Literature and Art--Museum Promenades.
"The vivacity of Mr. Huneker's style sometimes tends to conceal the
judiciousness of his matter. His justly great reputation as a journalist
critic most people would attribute to his salient phrase. To the present
writer, the phrase goes for what it is worth--generally it is eloquent
and interpretative, again merely decorative--what really counts is an
experienced and unbiassed mind at ease with its material. The criticism
that can pass from Goya, the tempestuous, that endless fount of facile
enthusiasms, and do justice to the serene talent of Fortuny is certainly
catholic. In fact, Mr. Huneker is an impressionist only in his aversion
to the literary approach, and in a somewhat wilful lack of system. This,
too, often seems less temperamental than a result of journalistic
conditions, and of the dire need of being entertaining.
"We like best such sober essays as those which analyze for us the
technical contributions of Cezanne and Rodin. Here, Mr. Huneker is a
real interpreter, and here his long experience of men and ways in art
counts for much. Charming, in the slighter vein, are such appreciations
as the Monticelli, and Chardin. Seasoned readers of Mr. Huneker's
earlier essays in musical and dramatic criticism will naturally turn to
the fantastic titles in this book. Such border-line geniuses as Greco,
Rops, Meryon, Gustave Moreau, John Martin, are treated with especial
gusto. We should like to have an appreciation of Blake from this ardent
searcher of fine eccentricities. In the main the book is devoted to
artists who have come into prominence since 1870, the French naturally
predominating, but such precursors of modern tendencies or influential
spirits as Botticelli, Watteau, Piranesi are included. Eleven 'Museum
promenades,' chiefly in the Low Countries and in Spain, are on the whole
less interesting than the individual appreciations--necessarily so, but
this category embraces a capital sketch of Franz Hals at Haarlem, while
the three Spanish studies on the Prado Museum, Velasquez, and Greco at
Toledo, are quite of the best. From the Velasquez, we transcribe one of
many fine passages:
"'His art is not correlated to the other arts. One does not dream
of music or poetry or sculpture or drama in front of his pictures.
One thinks of life and then of the beauty of the paint. Velasquez
is never rhetorical, nor does he paint for the sake of making
beautiful surfaces as often does Titian. His practice is not art
for art as much as art for life. As a portraitist, Titian's is the
only name to be coupled with that of Velasquez. He neither
flattered his sitters, as did Van Dyck, nor mocked them like Goya.
And consider the mediocrities, the dull, ugly, royal persons he was
forced to paint! He has wrung the neck of banal eloquence, and his
prose, sober, rich, noble, sonorous, rhythmic, is, to my taste,
preferable to the exalted, versatile volubility and lofty poetic
tumblings in the azure of any school of painting.'
"Here we see how winning Mr. Huneker's manner is and how insidious.
Unless you immediately react against that apparently innocent word
'tumblings,' your faith in the grand style will begin to disintegrate.
It is this very sense of walking among pitfalls that will make the book
fascinating to a veteran reader. The young are advised to temper it with
an infusion of Sir Joshua Reynolds's 'Discourses,' _quantum
sufficit_."--FRANK JEWETT MATHER, JR., in _New York Nation_ and _Evening
Post_.