BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER
What some distinguished writers have said of them:
Maurice Maeterlinck wrote, May 15, 1905: “Do you know that ‘Iconoclasts’ is the only book of high and universal critical worth that we have had for years—to be precise, since Georg Brandes. It is at once strong and fine, supple and firm, indulgent and sure.”
And of “Ivory Apes and Peacocks” he said, among other things: “I have marvelled at the vigilance and clarity with which you follow and judge the new literary and artistic movements in all countries. I do not know of criticism more pure and sure than yours.” (October, 1915.)
“The Mercure de France translated the other day from Scribner’s one of the best studies which have been written on Stendhal for a long time, in which there was no evasion of the question of Stendhal’s immorality. The author of that article, James Huneker, is, among foreign critics, the one best acquainted with French literature and the one who judges us with the greatest sympathy and with the most freedom. He has protested with force in numerous American journals against the campaign of defamation against France and he has easily proved that those who participate in it are ignorant and fanatical.”—“Promenades Littéraires” (Troisième Série),Remy de Gourmont.(Translated by Burton Rascoe for the ChicagoTribune.)
Paul Bourget wrote, Lundi de Paques, 1909, of “Egoists”: “I have browsed through the pages of your book and found that you touch in a sympathetic style on diverse problems, artistic and literary. In the case of Stendhal your catholicity of treatment is extremely rare and courageous.”
Dr.Georg Brandes, the versatile and profound Danish critic, wrote: “I find your breadth of view and its expression more European than American; but the essential thing is that you are an artist to your very marrow.”
“The essays are short, full of a satisfying—and fascinating—crispness, both memorable and delightful. And they are full of fancy, too, of the gayest humor, the quickest appreciation, the gentlest sympathy, sometimes of an enchanting extravagance.”
—New York Times.
“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.”
—Harold E. Gorst, inLondon Saturday Review(Dec. 8, 1906).
“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).
A Book of Dramatists
“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, inLondon Daily News.
“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, inLondon Saturday Review.
“Out of the depressing welter of our American writing upon æsthetics, with its incredible thinness and triteness and paltriness, its intellectual sterility, its miraculous dulness, its limitless and appalling vapidity, Mr. James Huneker, and the small and honorable minority of his peers, emerge with a conspicuousness that is both comforting and disgraceful.... Susceptibility, clairvoyance, immediacy of response, are his; he is the friend of any talent that is fine and strange and frank enough to incur the dislike of the mighty army of Bourbons, Puritans, and Bœotians. He is innocent of prepossessions. He is infinitely flexible and generous. Yet if, in the twenty years that we have been reading him, he has ever praised a commonplace talent, we have no recollection of it. His critical tact is well-nigh infallible.... His position among writers on æsthetics is anomalous and incredible: no merchant traffics in his heart, yet he commands a large, an eager, an affectionate public. Is it because he is both vivid and acute, robust yet fine-fingered, tolerant yet unyielding, astringent yet tender—a mellow pessimist, a kindly cynic? Or is it rather because he is, primarily, a temperament—dynamic, contagious, lovable, inveterately alive—expressing itself through the most transparent of the arts?”
—Lawrence Gilman, inNorth American Review(October, 1915).
“Mr. James Huneker, critic of music in the first place, is a craftsman of diverse accomplishment who occupies a distinctive and distinguished place among present-day American essayists. He is intensely ‘modern,’ well read in recent European writers, and not lacking sympathy with the more rebellious spirits. Ancient serenity has laid no chastening hand on his thought and style, but he has achieved at times a fineness of expression that lifts his work above that of the many eager and artistic souls who strive to be the thinkers of New England to-day. He flings off his impressions at fervent heat; he is not ashamed to be enthusiastic; and he cannot escape that large sentimentality which, to less disciplined transatlantic writers, is known nakedly as ‘heart interest.’ Out of his chaos of reading and observation he has, however, evolved a criticism of life that makes for intellectual cultivation, although it is of a Bohemian rather than an academic kind. Given a different environment, another training, Mr. Huneker might have emerged as an American Walter Pater.”—London Athenæum(November 6, 1915).
WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS
A Book of Temperaments
WITH FRONTISPIECE PORTRAIT OF RICHARD STRAUSS
“In some respectsMr.Huneker must be reckoned the most brilliant of all living writers on matters musical.”
—Academy, London.
A Book of a Thousand and One Moments
“He talks about Bergson as well as Matisse; he never can keep still about Wagner; he hauls over his French library of modern immortals, and he gives a touch to George Moore, to Arthur Davies, and to many another valiant worker in paint, music, and letters. The book is stimulating; brilliant even with an unexpected brilliancy.”—Chicago Tribune.
“We like best such sober essays as those which analyze for us the technical contributions of Cézanne and Rodin. HereMr.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.”—Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., inNew York NationandEvening Post.
WITH PORTRAIT AND FACSIMILE REPRODUCTIONS
“Closely and yet lightly written, full of facts, yet as amusing as a bit of discursive talk, penetrating, candid, and very shrewd.”
—Royal Cortissoz, in theNew York Tribune.
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS, NEW YORK