Huneker and Humanism  

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’’Let us pray that we are not struck by religious zeal; re- ligious people are not always good people; good people are not envious, jealous, penurious, censorious, or busybodies, or too much bound up in the prospect of the mote in their brother’s eye and unmindful of the beam in their own. Fur- thermore, good people do not unveil with uncharitable joy the faults of women. Have faith. Have hope, and remember that charity is as great as chastity.

"Let us pray for the misguided folk who, forgetful of Moth- er Church, her wisdom, her consolations, flock to the tents of lewd, itinerant, mumbo- jumbo howlers, that blaspheme the sacred name as they epileptically leap, shouting glory- kingdom come and please settle at the captain’s office.

"Though they run on all fours and bark as hyenas, they shall not enter the city of the saints, being money-chang- ers in the Temple, and tripe-sellers of souls. Better Tophet and its burning pitch than a wilderness of such apes of God. Some men and women of culture and social position indorse these sorry buffoons, the apology for their para- doxical conduct being any port in a storm; any degrading circus, so it be followed by a mock salvation. But salva- tion for whom? »Vhat deity cares for such foaming at the mouth? such fustian? Conversion is silent and comes from within, and not to the din of brass-bands and screaming hallelujahs. It takes all sorts of gods to make the cos- mos, but why return to the antics and fetishes of our pri- mate ancestors, the cave-dwellers? This squirming and panting and brief reform ’true religion’? On the contrary it is a throwback to bestiality, to the vilest instincts.

A ’soul’ that has to be saved by such means is a soul not worth the saving. To the discard with it, where, flaming in purgatorial fires, it may be refashioned for future re- incarnation on some other planet." 1.

"Nov;, I am what an old and very dear priest calls a ’hick- ory Catholic,’ yet I love the odour of incense, the mystic bells, the music, the atmosphere of the altar, above all the intellectual life of the church. 'There is a world of thought suspended like Mahomet’s coffin above the quotidian existence of religion. It is not free to everyone, nor is it an arcanum forbidden all but the few." 2.

"Religion has given an emotional coloring to my modes of thought. It has been called a crutch for lame minds by Huxley; it is really a spiritual anodyne. Mankind demands some superstition — to give it a Voltaire name. ’Ecrasez I’infamel’ he wrote, forgetting that belief in the impos- sible is an organic necessity, and not sacerdotal dupery. Without vision people perish." 3.

1. Unicorns, Page 357

2 . Steeplejack, Volume 1, Page 55

3 . Ibid., Bolume 1, Page 192

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"Heligion and government were not invented by priests and kings to enslave us. Our organic needs evolved them.'* 1.

It was more a question of religious impulse, reverent feel- ing with Huneker than a matter of denominational orthodoxy:

'*1, who am not of what is euphemistically called the reli- gious temperament, cannot pass a church without saluting and often entering. Two rituals fascinate me. The Homan Catholic and the Hebrew. . . . The soul of man is older than his handiv/ork, and his soul has always aspired after the vision. Totem and fetish, tabu, magic, animism, and idols are incorporated in the solemn church services of to- day. Heligious emotion is as old as humanity. Baudelaire would not permit his friends to mock his grotesque wooden idol, because, as he whispered, a god might be concealed ini it. The idea of divinity lurking everyvi^here was one of the charms of the pagan world. Man was accomplice in the eternal mysteries. Religion, that most ancient and jealous thing, was a forest peopled by gods, pluralistic deities. Some men outlive this feeling. I cannot. And the aesthet- ic symbolism of the Mass is alluring. But suppose that it would have been possible to have consulted me at the age of understanding. Would I have subscribed to the tenets of the Roman Catholic Church? Ur, to take a comjnoner example, was I asked whether I preferred being a Democrat or Repub- lican?" 2.

Was Huneker a Humanist in his feeling about religion? Vi/hat is the humanistic position on religion? Horman Poerster does not give religion much place in the humanistic scheme of things; T. S. Eliot says it is a necessity and that the humanistic posi- tion is insecure without the inevitable corollary of religion. Professor Babbitt certainly did not exclude religion. He main- tained that we knew nothing concerning the nature of "the high- er will" and that it might or might not be a working of the divine in the minds of men. At any rate, humanism and religious feeling are not incompatible. Huneker realized the existence in the world of "man" and of "more-than-man, " the dualism of "breed*'

1. Steeplejack, Volume 1, Page 319

2. Ibid., Volume 1, Page 34

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and of '*not-TDy-bread-alone . " This in itself, is good humanistic ioctrine.

freedom of the Will

Huneker's position with respect to the humanistic postulate

of the freedom of the will is not so clear. Sometimes he seems

to believe that the development of laaterialis tic psychology has

precluded the possibility of the freedom of the will:

"We live, as a modern thinker puts it, because we stand like the rest of cognisable nature under the universal law of causality; this idea is founded not on a metaphysical but a biological basis, ivietaphysics is a pleasing diver- sion, though it doesn’t get us to finalities, happiness is an absolute. Therefore it has no existence. 'There never was, there never will be an earthly paradise, no matter what the socialists say. Content is the suramum bonum of mankind; the content that comes with sound health and a clear conscience. The wrangling over Free vVill is now con- sidered a sign of gho st -worship . ” 1.

And again,

"The constancy of the human intellect proclaimed by Remy de Gourmont may be one more metaphysical illusion. Historical perspective is too limited to permit any but vague general- izations. AS for fatalism, what else are those who write and speak of Free-vVill, Immanence of the Deity, but fatal- ists? If the exterior world is a mirage, of our innerself, then the lack of continuity, the fragmentary attempts, the disjointed thinking without sequence or import, are not all these things natural for the reason that they are?" 2.

i In spite of all this, we should believe in the freedom of

1

j

jthe will for the courage it will give us.

"Nothing endures but mobility, changeless change. Never- j theless, we speak of stability, permanence, immortality, the absolute when nature abhors an absolute. The Eternal j Return is now. It is the eternal recommencement. . . . But

we must believe, the very affirmation of belief --say in

free-will--puts courage into actions." 3.

There is hope for the doctrine of the freedom of the ^vill

I

Unicorns, Page 157 Steeplejack, Voliune 1, Page 316

3. Ibid., Volume 1, Page 315

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46

5 ven in a mechanized, naturalistic view of man and his thought processes ;

“Perpetual motion, squaring the circle, are only variants of the alchemical pursuit of the philosopher's stone, the transmutation of the baser metals, the cabalistic Abraca- dabra, the quest of the absolute. Man can't live on ma- chinery alone, and the underfed soul of the past period of positivism craves more spiritual nourishment today. Hasn't tne remarkable mathematician Henry Poincare (author of Science and Hypothesis , The Value of Science , Science and Method ) declared that between the construction of the spirit and the absolute truth there is an abysm caused by free choice and the voluntary elimination which have ne- cessitated such inferences? Note the word 'free'; free- will is restored to its old and honourable estate in the hierarchy of thought.” 1.

“Literally we are imprisoned for life, with the privilege of telephoning our cerebral control to ask it to phone us the news of outer existence. It's the greatest- fairy-tale imaginable, our life. But it is not free--oh, no I In a I physical sense we are the grand-children of vegetables

I which live by solar heat; and of the so-called lov/er ani-

j mals --query: why lower? Like them we, too, are automatons,

i ruled by the same rigid laws; we borrow vitality from the

j vegetable kingdom, and we are nourished by this triple- distilled solar energy. . . . Our nervous system is the I whole animal. And these nerves may be so finely spun that they receive messages from the Fourth Dimension of Space. “2,

Here what looks like deterministic monism on the face of it

is not contradictory to the principles of Humanism, Maybe the

^ethical imagination has its moorings in the Fourth Dimension of

!

Space 1

Summary of Preceding Humanistic Ideas

It is said that anything may be proved by the use of sta- tistics and surely a random quoting of examples is open to the same objection. The examples quoted, however, have been chosen as representative of Huneker's ideas, not solely to foster the main idea of this thesis. Taking them for what they are worth.

1, Unicorns, Page 196

2. Steeplejack, Volume 1, Page 3].7

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47

we see that Huneker did not disregard the value of the classics; that he saw life sanely and saw it whole; that he had proport ior, and discrimination; that he v/as not deceived by humanitarianism; that he was not a reformer; that he did not have the acquisitive I instinct; that he was devoid of philistine tendencies; that he

j

was not concerned with dogmas and creeds; that he had the Chris-

i

I

Itian virtues and that one especially beloved of the humanists, humility; that he recognized the Demon of the Absolute and the dualism inherent in life. VVe cannot be so positive regarding his religious feeling or regarding his belief in the freedom of 'the will but we have seen that in these ideas Huneker leans in

I

the humanistic direction.

The way is not so clear as regards the question of objec-

I

tivity and subjectivity, of the imposition of general terms upon a piece of criticism and this represents the crux of our consi- deration of Huneker as a humanistic critic.

Huneker tells us often enough that he has no interest in objectivity:

Subjectivity and Objectivity

In a letter to Edward P. Mitchell regarding a forthcoming newspaper article, he says:

"I’ve sought for odd types--the old dilettante; the art auctioneer; the woman without taste in pictures; the paint- er’s hat of Hammers tein; M. Victor Haurel’s collar modelled after Hyacinthe Rigaud; the cane of Herr Roosevelt--these are the general subjects. I had included one other, ’ Crito the Critic , ’ but I feared it was too subjective. The rest I have sought for ob jectivity--odious word--for a dramati- zation of my spleen." 1.

1. Letters, Page 35

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I Regarding Anatole France; ’’After his clever formula that i there is no such thing as objective criticism, that all

j criticism but records the adventures of one’s soul among I the masterpieces, France was attacked by Brunetiere--of

whom the ever-acute Mr. James once remarked that his 'in- telligence has not kept pace with his learning, ’ Those critical watchwords (subjectivity and objectivity) are things of yester-year, and one hopes forever.”

"He Anatole France demonstrated that in the matter of judgment we are prisoners of our ideas, and he also formed a school that has hardly done him justice, for every im- pressionistic value is not necessarily valid. It is easy to send one's soul boating among masterpieces and call the result 'criticism'; the danger lies in the contingency that one may not boast the power of artistic navigation pos- sessed by Anatole France, a master steersman in the deeps and shallows of literature,” 1.

"The genius beholds another world because he has a profound?- er conception of the world which lies before us all, inas- much as it presents itself with more objectivity and dis- tinctness than it does to less favored mortals.” 2,

We are told in many places in Huneker's works that utter

subjectivity is impossible; that the critic cannot, in any way,

entirely divorce himself of xuis personality, whether he would or

no. The following excerpt is from an essay on the music of

!\.rnold Schoenberg in Ivory iipes and Peacocks ;

"In the first place the personality of the listener is bound to obtrude itself, dissociation from one's ego — if such a thing were possible--would be intellectual death; only by the clear, persistent image of ourselves do we ex- ist--banal psychology as old as the hills." 3.

Again,

"We know that the most ' objective ' --comical old categories 'objective' ana 'sub jective ' — philosophies are tinged by the temperaments of their makers; perhaps the chief character- istic of philosophers is their unphilosophic contempt for fellow-thinkers," 4.

Yet, as has been indicated, Huneker never believed that a flow of genuine impressions was enough to form the basis of a

1. Egoists, Page 153 3. Ivory Apes and Peacocks,

2. Variations, Page 17 Page 95

4, Variations, Page 2

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49

icriticism. Those who classify Huneker as a pure impressionist fail to take this fact into consideration. There was always some sense of norm, of standard, of criterion, against which the impressions were rated, were it only, in some cases, Hune- ker ’s innate good taste. Mere subjectivity is not enough.

"it’s all well enough to talk of temperamental bias, but a critic must observe a few of the rules of the game, or else not play fair.'* 1.

The presence of standards in Huneker 's critical equipment is implied rather than stressed; yet we find such statements as these :

"Tolerance is often a virtue of sceptics — but is it a vir- tue? Good art is never obscene; the only obscene is bad art." 2.

Regarding Frank Wedekind: "llis admirers speak of him as a unicorn, a man so original as to be without forerunners, without followers. A monster? For no one can escape the coimaon law of descent, whether physical or spiritual." 3.

"Even the Pont Aven School, headed by Gauguin and Van Gogh, is dating. The truth is that the time factor is grossly overestimated. Good art in 1500 or 1830, or 1867 or 1918, remains good art." 4.

Two letters to his friend, John '^uinn, dated respectively March 26, 1916 and April 7, 1916, do not sound like emanations from a pure impressionist;

"Remember, Johr., all these petty revolutions, interesting, even significant at times, will never even deflect for a moment the broad current of eternal art. It’s so in music I and literature; it's so in art. There is a norm, and these

' young chaps may fume and sputter, but back to it they must

j revert else rot and drop from the parent trunk." 5.

j

I "I am told twenty times a month to stick to my last, music

criticism and begad I think people are right. One must grow, but a good picture is as good in 1920 as the day it

jl. Letters, Page 63 4. Steeplejack, Vol. 1, P. 241

|2. Steeplejack, Vol. 1, P. 176 5. Letters, Page 206

3. Ivory Apes and Peacocks,

Page 123

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was painted, say 1900. I don't believe in schools or move- ments. There are only painters with talent. All the rest is ornam.ent or superfluous." 1.

"it may be the decadence, as any art is in decadence which stakes the parts against the whole." 2.

In his criticism Huneker was an example of the golden mean. iHe was neither wholly impressionistic nor wholly judicial; he

I

was analytic and synthetic; he was deductive and inductive, nei- ther conservative nor radical. He believed the critic should have sympathy and sincerity. For him there was no identity of genius and taste.

Subjectivity Precludes Humanistic Hating

Where Huneker falls short in the set-up for the humanistic critic is in his failure to recast the account of the phenomena of criticism into the terms of the noumenal. He tells us he is not concerned with "general ideas," and if we mean by the term metaphysical concepts, that is true. The surprising thing is that there is so much in his criticism which can be related to general currents of thought when the nature of his contributions is considered, a person writing for the daily press cannot be overconcerned v/ith philosophical matters. Possibly Huneker 's great vitality and abounding interest in life precluded the quiet contemplation of the philosopher, ^it any rate, I think we must set Huneker down as deficient in relation to the capa- city for abstract thought demanded of the humanistic critic. Huneker ' s iSub jectivity Hot Unmitigated

Fvery criticism Huneker made, however, went up against the

1. Letters, Page 208

2. Bedouins, Page 78

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j great sounding-board which, was James G. Huneker and was reject-

!

I ed or accepted by its falseness or truth of tone. Huneker may

Inot have been greatly occupied with general precepts. He didn't 1

ihave to be for the purpose of arriving at a real estimate. In i

his erudition, his scholarship, his knowledge of all the arts,

I his "humanity" (which we shall assume to have the two meanings wnich he gave it; one, an interest in the classics, and two, that quality represented in the highest compliment a pupil pays his teacher when he calls him "human"), his sympathy, his im- mediate perception of the best minds, was the complete criteri- on for evaluating a work of art. He failed in so doing some- times, as he would be the first to tell you, but even his most abject failures have some validity. He was equipped as few critics have been really to appraise a work of art. In short, when Huneker completed a criticism, it stood for representative human judgment by as representative a "human" as ever comes along. It wasn’t that he didn't consider "general ideas" in reaching his conclusions, but they were a fundamental part of his equipment, something tacit, inherent, prerequisites. Sure- ly his evaluations are clearer for the average reader without the philosophical jargon than they v/ould have been with it.

Huneker reached that seemingly impossible Babbittian standard — he achieved intensity on a background of calm. He had sufficient life and eagerness to rescue his attitude from the dead-level a complete humanistic attainment alv/ays seems

I

to imply.

Romantic ( N on -humani s tic) ideas in Himeker ' s Work

Now let us consider the other side of the situation to see if any anti -humanistic traits have crept up the Romantic back stairs .

Impressionism, with its emphasis upon the experiences of the senses, is a romantic manifestation but 1 think it has been shown that Huneker’s was a tempered, governed impressionism, not a riot of sight and sound and little else.

Most of the rom.antic tendencies, whether of the real or of the inverted kind, we may cast aside as negative in the case of Euneker, for instance:

The Natural Rights Theory

’’Rousseau is to blame for the 'Social Contract’ and the 'Equality' nonsense that has poisoned more than one na- tion's political idea," 1.

"Huysmans never betrayed the slightest interest in doc- trines of equality; for him, as for Baudelaire, socialism, the education of the masses, or democratic prophylactics were hateful. ... He did not believe in art for the multitude and the tableau of a billion humans bellowing to the moon the hymn of universal brotherhood made him shiver as v/ell it miight . . . . Art is for those who have the brains and patience to understand it. It is not a free port of entry for poet and philistine alike." 2,

Naturalism

As for naturalism, which is the inverted form of Romanti-

cism:

"The art of fiction has become finer, and more spiritual, especially in England, where the influence of Henry James is more potent than in his native land. But dear progres- sive Amierica is still in the throes of a naturalism which died at the birth of .sola's vilest offspring, ^ Terre .

Mr. Howells set the fashion of realism, a tempered realismj though he stemmed from. Jane Austen and Turgenev. Kis is

1. Agoists, Page 366

2. Ibid., Page 179

!

i

53

the art of the miniature painter. Prank Norris followed

1 him and Stephen Crane, both at a long distance, preceded

by Henry B. Fuller (in his i;\iith the Procession and the Cliff-Dwellers), ^ola v/as not a realist merely because he dwelt v;ith certain unpleasant facts. He was a myopic romanticist writing in a style both violent and tumefied, the history of his soul in the latrines of life. Life as i a v\hole he never saw steadily; it was for him more like a

{ succession of lurid lantern slides. If, in the Court of

Realism, Flaubert is king, then '/jola. ranks only as an ex- cavator.” 1.

”We know now that Zola was only masquerading in the gor- geous rags of romanticism with a vocabulary borrowed from Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, and Flaubert; we know, too, that despite the argot of L’ Assommoir , the book is as ro- mantic as a Bougeureau canvas --the formula is the same: highly glazed surfaces, smug sentiment, and pretty color- ing.” 2,

”Vi/e turn our heads the other way when his fcorky's] women curse and rave. ifi/alt i/lihitman, said Ivioncure Conv/ay, brought the slop pail into the drawing-room; but for Gorky there is no drawing-room. Life is only a dung -heap.” 3.

The Perfectibility of Man

”Man is not a perfectible animal; not on this side of eternity,” 4.

”The interrogation posed on the horizon of our conscious- ness, regarding the perfectibility of mankind, is best an- swered by a definition of socialism as that religion which proves all men to be equally stupid.” 5.

Temperamental Overflow

Huneker did not sanction the romantic urge to indulge in

one’s individual idosyncrasy, to cultivate one's "temperamental

overflow. ”

"Etching rules. Vi/hy? Because an artist of overwhelming genius set upon the art his seal. Because it is a consum- mate medium for expressing personality, and in all the arts personality is the slogan of the hour. Vife must bare our souls in our work, cry young folk; the rest, art in- cluded, can go hang 1 But the question is whether these same souls are worth the bother of such exposure.” 6.

1. Steeplejack, Vol. 1, P. 270 4, Egoists, Page 370

2. Iconoclasts, Page 269 5. Ibid., Page 212

3. Ibid., Page 272 6. Variations, Page 78

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"Poe, then, like Chopin, did not die too soon. Neurotic natures, they lived their lives with the intensity which Walter Pater has declared is the true existence. ’To burn always with this hard, gera-like flarae, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. Failure is to form habits.' Alas ! that way madness lies for the majority of mankind, notwithstanding the aesthetic exhortation of Pater. Poe and Chopin fulfilled the Pater conditions during their brief sojourn on our parent planet. They ever burned with the flame of genius and that flame devoured them. They were not citizens of moral repute. Nor did they accumu- late ’mortal pelf.’” 1.

Inspiration

Huneker had no part in the romantic belief that inspiration

i is more important than perspiration in creating a work of art.

I

"stung by the gadfly of necessity, I had to follow my market: all newspaper men must. I was to learn that

versatility is not heaven-sent, but is largely a matter of elbow-grease." 2.

"You may be sure of one thing--no one in the history of the Seven Arts has mastered his material save in the sweat of his brow. Work and days." 3.

Huneker sometimes called himself sentimental but it was in

j playful mood. Sentimentalism, an attribute of Romanticism, was I

something which he pounded incessantly.

Sentimentalism

"That apocalyptic genius, Benjamin De Casseres, once divid- ed our native fiction-mongers into four groups. Punk, Junk, Bunk, and Bull, Punk includes the ladies with triple-bar- reled names--there are plenty with two; Junk, all the writers on so-called social service, pollyannas, new- thought ers, and pseudo-psychologists; Bunk is the fashion- abl able novel; and Bull applies to the Jack London school;

ramping, roaring, robust rough-riders and heroes from the wilds of the Woolly West; bastards of the Bret Earte fic- tion. It is a just classification. vVe needs must have our ’art’ dosed with saccharine." 4.

"if you happen to write a best-seller, you are acclaimed a genius, hud when you think it over, a man who can sell a million copies of a book compounded of sentimental slush

1. Bedouins, Page 3. Variations, Page 13

2. Steeplejack, Voliune 2, 4. Steeplejack, Volume 2,

Page 3 Page 172

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and slimy piety must be a genius. VVhat else is he? An I artistic writer? No. Respectable? Yes." 1.

"a liquorish sentimentality is the ever-threatening rock upon which the bark of young American novelists goes to pieces. (Pardon the mixed metaphor.) Be sentimental and you will succeed I Vi^e agree with Dostoievsky that in fic- tion, as v/ell as in life, there are no general principles, only special cases. But these cases, could they not be typical? even if there are not types, only individuals, iind are men and women so inthralled by the molasses of sentimentalism in life? Have the motion-pictures hopeless ly deranged our critical values? I know that in America charity covers a multitude of mediocrities, nevertheless,

I am loath to believe that all one reads in praise of I wretched contemporary fiction is meant in earnest." 2.

I

Summary of Romantic Ideas in Huneker ’ s tVork

So far, our qualities of Romanticism are on the negative side as far as Huneker is concerned. He did not believe in the Natural Rights Theory, or in Naturalism, or in the Perfectibili ty of Man. Cultivation of one's personal peculiarities without restraint was to him inartistic. He knew inspiration miust be supplemented by hard work. He abhorred sentimentality. A cos- mopolitan of cosmopolitans, a steeplejack of the arts, a fre- quenter of the haunts of men, one cannot imagine him, of all people, retreating to idyllic nature and the simple life. He was a foe of Puritanism and of laws limiting one's personal freedom but anti-conventional he could not be called. He pro- tests in a letter to Benjamin De Casseres on March 29, 1920

anent dedicating Bedouins to his wife that he was called a Bo-

3 .

hemian when he was nothing but an old bourgeois.

Interest in Outstanding Personalities

There was, however, one respect in which he might be

1. Variations, Page 11

2. Unicorns, Page 85

3. Letters, Page 290

I

56

!

charged with being romantic. This was his marked interest in outstanding personalities, men of unusual accomplishments, ec- centric geniuses, "originals.” He says:

"Set me down as hopelessly romantic, as a cultivator of the cult of great artists in an age when there are only imitators or pigmies. It's born in me, this species of artistic snobbery; I can’t help it." 1.

"in my artistic and literary Zoo there are many queer creatures but it is a mistake to suppose them all freaks.

. . . However, I am not setting up an alibi for the sanity of my favorite artists and writers. It is not necessary. There is, take it by and large, more madness among medio- cre persons, A little madness is a necessary ingredient in the composition of genius. Nor do I claim that my apes peacocks, unicorns, egoists, visionaries, melomaniacs, and steeplejacks are all geniuses. Again, mediocrity is to the fore, a mediocrity tempered by eccentricities." 2.

"when I spoke of my Zoo and its queer inmates, I was think- ing of what Paul Elmer More wrote in 1915: 'How in the name of heaven do you have the will-power to read all those eccentrics and maniacs vshom you seem to knov/ by heart? a week of them would kill me with ennui. After all, there is nothing that really lasts and maintains its interest but the sane and the reticent.’ Words of v/isdom. But sane genius also has its crazy wards, its padded cells: Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe; besides niy ’maniacs' are a pretty sane lot. Some drank. Some murdered sleep, yet Chopin, Stendhal, Anatole Prance, Richard Strauss, Pater, Wagner, Baudelaire, Manet, Brahms — the list is long and far from insane, for I take it neither Poe nor Chopin were quite mad. Drugs anh alcohol did for Poe. Mad, naked William Blake was peculiar, to say the least. Yet a god-intoxicated man. No, I don’t hold with the eminent critic that is Mr. More, and I yield to no one in my ad- miration of Wordsworth, of the Lake School, of the placid and delightful eighteenth-century essayists, a chacun son poison l" 3 .

Concerning art and life Huneker was the person about whom it might have been first written: "Humanus sum, et nihil hu- manum a me alienum puto . " Talent, in whatever wrapping it came, was interesting to him. If it didn’t conform in trappings to

|1. Variations, Page 55 '1 2. Steeplejack, Volume 2, Page 235 3. Ibid., Volume 2, Page 235

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the classics of the past, that was no reason for excluding it.

iClassics can be born today as well as in The Golden Age of i

Greece or the Augustan Age. Naturally, they will not have the same form, but, as Huneker often maintained, excellence is ex- cellence, regardless of the time and medium in which it appears Kuneker was discovering the classics of the future. In his I great zest for the seven arts any outstanding newcomer was ex-

lamined but, unless his contribution was worthy, he didn't be-

{ •

jcome a certified member of the ’’Zoo.”

“iVhenever a new poet or philosopher appears he is straight way accused of tampering with the moral currency. This is only mediocrity's mode of adjusting to marked mental dis- proportions. ... So let us cheer up, read Pater, Baude- laire, and the bible--from which they derive- -and blench not before the dissonantal batteries of the Neo-Scythian composers.” 1.

'Hvhen I praise the dissonantal art of Michael Artzibashef it is not with the idea that either his style or his pes- simism should be aped. That way unoriginality lies. But I do contend that in the practice of his art, its sinceri- ty, its profundity, he might be profitably patterned after by the younger generation. Art should elevate as well as amuse. Must fiction always be silly and shallow? It need be neither sordid nor didactic.” 2.

Of all the possible romantic manifestations surely Huneker may be allov/ed one. He couldn't be a representative human be- ing without some touch of romanticism.

Summary of Humanistic and Romantic Tendencies in Huneker

As we have seen from a detailed examination of the main precepts of the huraanistic belief, Huneker conforms in every aspect of that belief except the idea of freedom of the will and the value of subjectivity and objectivity. We cannot say

1. Variations, Page 34

2. Unicorns, Page 95

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that his attitude toward freedom of the will is contrary to hu- manistic "belief because he usually leaves us the loophole of the possibility of the nervous system's receiving impulses and ideas beyond the scope of material things. Huneker sees the need of the belief in freedom of the will and the possibility of its existence, according to Professor Babbitt, the mere idea of the freedom of the will is enough to justify its existence.

I dare say Huneker was like most human beings --on some days he was ’’the captain of his soul” and on others he was the most insignificant private in the forces of deterministic com- pulsion. Life may be like a multiple-choice examination: one has the prerogative of choice but what guarantee is there that the way one chooses has not been set and determined by forces and factors outside one's control? The words, ”1 am the master of my fate,” may be crammed down one's throat by the next per- son who happens to turn the next corner. The significant thing jis to will in spite of all the gods and all worldly obstacles.

I

jHuneker correctly appraised one of the main ideas in Ibsen. It

is to will even though one's will be disastrous, even though it

1 .

bring one's universe toppling about one's ears. At least, Huneker would agree with the Humanists that man has the power jto will.

I

lUnconcern with General Ideas Precludes Rating as Humanist

I '

I The main bar, however, to classifying Huneker as a Humanist )

comes in his opposition and aversion to definite systems of thought. His bent to eclecticism would probably assert itself,

1. Iconoclasts, Page 132

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59

if he were alive to consider the humanistic proposals. He

would not accept every humanistic idea merely because it would

be the "regular'* thing to do for a Humanist, any more than he

would accept every article in a creed. It might be that he

would subscribe to every doctrine of the Humanists except this

matter of general ideas, as he seems to in his writings. Yet

this matter of ultimate concern with the noumenal instead of

the phenomenal is a vital point in the humanistic creed, and we

cannot classify as Humanist anyone not subscribing to its truth.

Huneker’s romantic tendency implied in his interest in un- usual individuals is but another manifestation of his concern

with subjectivity instead of objectivity. "The representative

human values" were surely implied with Huneker. Every man has

them. Ivian, merely as ordinary man, is interesting, but the fel- low who has these qualities plus some others or the man who has

!

1 some of these basic qualities in paucity or in excess of the

average amount is even more interesting. Huneker would have

j exclaimed with Lola Ridge:

! "l love those spirits

That men stand off and point at.

Or shudder and hood up their souls —

Those ruined ones,

' Where Liberty has lodged an hour

i And passed like flame,

j Bursting asunder the too small house." 1.

And these individualistic tendencies are as much a human pos- session and attribute as the more humdrum, ordinary, human mani- festations. It is only that they aren’t so common. It isn't a

question of Huneker’s denying the value of stock ideas or

1. The New Poetry, Monroe and Henderson, Editors, Page 415 Debris, by Lola Ridge

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60

principles. Autliors who contradicted, them would be mors inter- esting to him because they did contradict them but that would

jnot damage the essential verity of the main principles attacked,

♦

?

jHuneker preferred to look at each man's offering for what it

1

was worth in terms of general excellence, unhampered by adher- ence to any schematic system of abstractions. As an example of

the excellence of this method over a more philosophical hand- ling of material, somebody has pointed out the superiority of

Huneker's essay on Nietzsche for the average person over Paul

Elmer More's treatise on the same subject which Mencken has

1

damned in characteristic fashion:

"head More on Nietzsche if you want to find out just how stupid criticism can be, and yet show the outward forms of sense.” 1.

Huneker was intensely interested in abstractions per se. Con- sider the mysticism of his short stories and his preoccupation

with metaphysical ideas as shown in the articles on The Fourth

2.

Dimension in unicorns, on Creative Involution in the same vol- 3. 4.

ume , the articles on Mystics in Egoists, and other references

throughout the complete writings. Interesting as these ideas

were to Huneker, however, they were still theories, not inflex- ible guides for the testing of worth in general writing. He

kept them in their places. Their places were not, in his con- ception of the fitness of things, in concrete critiques for the

general audience. Write fiction where you can indulge them to

your heart's content. It's a fantastic realm and will admit

them on the basis of their intrinsic worth. Don't intrude them

1. A Book of Prefaces, by H. L. Mencken, Page 158

2. bnicorns. Page 203

3. Ibid., Page 195

4. Egoists, Page 269

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as actualities in criticism.

Because of this lack of concern with abstract thought in his criticism, we are deterred from branding Huneker with the term, Humanist, though he possesses most of the humanistic qual ifications. Considering his aversion to wearing the conformist livery of any school, it is perhaps just as well. We should be sacrificing his individuality for a term of doubtful permanent value .

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i

62

I Huneker as a Critic

Huneker * s Ideas About Criticism

In attempting any just appraisal of Huneker as a critic, it will be pertinent to consider what Huneker believed the func- tion and procedure of the critic should be and what^his equip- ment and aim.

Impossibility of Complete Objectivity

AS we have noted before, Huneker believed it was impossible to attain a really objective article of criticism. The person- ality or the bias of the critic was bound to intrude. In spite of the critic's best intentions and practices, some element of self is inescapable. In a sense, our ego is our instrument for observation and, to correct the possible errors of refraction, Huneker believed that the critic should make an avowal of his own beliefs, prejudices, and tendencies so that the reader may discount or enhance what the critic has to say in the light of

his personal leanings and thereby arrive at an impartial, ob- jective concept of the work of art.

"a critic should confess his limitations, draw up at the beginning of a book a formal scenario of his temperament, prejudices, his likes and dislikes. A French critic, Hennequin, did this, and has since served as an examplar for the English writer, John M. Robinson. Then your read- ers would know what to expect, would discount radical ut- terances on hearing that your grandfather had been a Fenian or that your aunt was opposed to female suffrage. This is no Apologia, but an illuminating diagram." 1.

"l have written enough to give you a fair idea of my men- tal and physical characteristics, so that you will judge

1. Steeplejack, Volume 1, Page 6

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the critic as he should, be. This is the method suggested by Hennequin, of which I told you. A moral precis of the critic and a peek at his temperament, then much that is dark becomes light.” 1.

Characteristics of Huneker Miich Show in His Work

Huneker tells us many things which prove his criticism the

product of his own interesting personality. He was a shy boy,

shrinking from contests with other boys, an omnivorous reader,

early acquiring the foundation for his amazing erudition, and a

dreamer, but essentially a real boy.

”l long suffered from shyness, absurd sentimentality and a horror of the actual.” 2.

He confesses to a lack of capacity for hatred:

“Probably the gravest defect in my character is my inabili- ty to hate anyone, or anything for more than five minutes, except hypocrisy and noise.” 3.

We learn of his law-office apprenticeship and smile at the idea of Huneker ’s being a lawyer, even though with his wide knowledge and his remarkable verbal memory, he could have cited case on case to the confusion of his opponents. Was his law- office experience an early indication of his later disinclina- tion for general theories?

"Naturally, I didn't make perceptible progress in the law.

I absorbed the curriculum as a sponge absorbs liquid. My preceptor examined me at intervals, and it was then I first noted what I call my mechanical memory. I memorised as would a parrot. I repeated pages without knowing their meaning. The big technical phrases I gobetted as a dog does a bone. Terminology of any sort always appealed to me. I became proficient in phrases. With medical, or sci- entific terminology, it is the same, whether anatomy, ge- ology, astronomy, or cookery, the technical verbalisms were easy to remember. My judgment centres were not much exer- cised, so that when I underwent regulation examinations at

1. Steeplejack, Volume 1, Page 206

2. Ibid., Volume 1, Page 14

3. Ibid., Volume 1, Page 24

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the Law School, or during the law course at the University I had no trouble in reeling off page after page, because I simply let my memory prompt and turn over in my mind each page as it was finished. But put me to writing out opin- ions on a possible case, and my vaunted memory collapsed. Not taking the slightest interest necessarily I had noth- ing to say. Later in life I met pianists who could play hundreds of pieces. I have questioned them and in nine in- stances out of ten I found the same mechanical memory as mine. They saw the note-groups and the pages, but the mu- sical idea, or its emotional expression, did not much con- cern them. Ideas were not then my shibboleth,” 1.

Reading that Blackstone’s English style interested him more than

the legal principles involved, we are not surprised that he

never became a lawyer.

Interest in Music

Music became the illuminating force in his life, his fa- vorite among the seven arts. His preference was for pure musiCj rather than operatic or other forms. In his day he was account-

ed a world authority on Chopin and Brahms. Music undoubtedly colored his thinking as well as his expression. He often ex- claims at one’s inability to express the appreciation of music in terms of the actual.

"’You write of music as if it were a living thing,' said Arthur Symons to me in a memorable letter. Music is a living thing for me, as living as any vital organism. It lives when it enters the porches of my ears, and it is a living memory. To write about it is quite hopeless. You can describe a picture, a statue, a cathedral, and quote a poem; but you may not describe a symphony.” 2.

Interest in the Seven Arts

His interest in the other arts was only less than his love for music and was sufficient to gain him the rating of an ex-

I pert in those fields. He thought of any one of the arts in

1, Steeplejack, Volume 1, Page 119

2. Ibid., Volume 2, Page 201

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terms of the others and one of his fondest dreams was that of a synthesis of the arts.

• 'I muddled the Seven Arts in a grand old stew, I saw mu-

sic, heard colour, tasted architecture, smelt sculpture and fingered perfume. A mad carnival of the senses." .... Certain musical tones evoke certain colours. And if you investigate you will discover that the aesthetic terminol- ogy of painting resembles that of music. I believed in em- ploying the whole keyboard of analogies, so my criticism often proved trying to my readers, but not to me. I needs must educate them. The arts are separate, yet, as Walter Pater says, all travel towards a central sun in some re- mote constellation. But I abused the scheme, and I am not sorry." 1.

Allusiveness

huneker accounts for some of this mingling of the arts by telling us that he has a centrifugal temperam-ent . One of the things which make his criticism difficult to read, is his con- tinual branching off where allusion leads. We eventually come back after a more interesting journey than the straight-away would have been but the deviation is often confusing.

"Wlien President Wilson spoke of his ’single-track mind,’ he merely proved that by powerful concentration he was able to canalise one idea, to focus it, and thus dispose of it. This innibitory power is not possessed by everyone. 1, for example, have a polyphonic mind. I enjoy the simul- taneous flight of a half-dozen trains of ideas, which run on parallel tracks for a certain distance, then disappear, arriving nowhere. This accounts for my ha If -mad worship of the Seven Arts which have always seemed one single art; when I first read Walter Pater’s suggestion that all the other arts aspire to the condition of music, I said, ’Thatfe it,’ and at once proceeded to write of painting in terms of tone, of literature as if it were only form and color, and of life as if it is a promenade of flavours. Now, I admit that this method apart from its being confusing to the reader, is also aesthetically false. I didn’t require Professor Babbitt to tell us that in his New Laocoon . The respective substance of each art is different, and not even the extraordinary genius of Richard Wagner could fuse

1. Steeplejack, Volume 2, Page 200

66

disparate dissimilarities. The musician in him dominated the poet, dramatist, and scene-painter. And in this para- graph I am precisely demonstrating what I spoke of — my polyphonic habit of thinking, if thinking it may be thus called. I often suffer from a ’split* or dissociated per- sonalities, henc'e my discursiveness--to call such a. fugi- tive ideation by so mild a name. But I started to tell you of my maternal grandfather and I am winding up on Wag- ner. Talk about ’free fantasy’ in a modern tone-poem, or a five-voiced fugue, or a juggler spinning six plates at once r* 1 .

Again,

"President Wilson has the centripetal temperament, or as he puts it, a 'one-track mind.’ So has my friend, Mr. Wickersham. Both men concentrate. Colonel Roosevelt has the centrifugal cast of mind; evidently I have the same.

I fly off with ease on any tempting tangent, also off my handle. The aptitude displayed by the Yankee for a half- dozen pursuits is the sign-manual of the centrifugal soul. It is pleasant to hear the whirring of its wheels though they serve no particular purpose. Thrashing the sea, eating the air promise -crammed, filling the belly with the east wind, fighting windmills --these are a few attributes of the centrifugalist . Ke is nothing if not versatile.

His intensity lasts ten minutes. He is focal in conscious ness, as the psychologists say, but his marginal subcon- sciousness is strongly obtruded. The sensory periphery is more masterful than the hub of his being. . . . The cen- trifugalist is usually an optimist, itll is for the best in this best of demi-mondes. The flowers of evil that blossom^ in the hothouse of hell become pretty pansies when plucked by a centrifugal poet." 2.

Eclecticism

His philosophy was eclectic, culled from the most enticing flowerbeds:

"Eclectic is my taste in creeds and cultures. And in cul- tured eclecticism may be found the shallows and depths, defects and virtues of our times." 3.

Sym.pathy and Tolerance

This is another indication of Huneker’s lack of interest in general ideas or fixed systems of thought but it is also a

1. Steeplejack, Voliime 1, Page 22

2. Ibid., Volume 1, Page 135

3. Ibid., Volume 1, Page 208

67

great factor in fostering his sympathy and tolerance of view.

’’That absence of 'tendenz' which William James complained about in my Egoists , a refusal on my part to indulge in so called 'general views,' in any neat little theory or 'prob lem, ' met the approval of Remy De Gourmont , who detested phrases and empty formulas.” 1.

lumillty

Critics, even the great ones, have "blind spots."

"The 'creative' critics are few. Montaigne, Goethe, Sainte* Beuve, Taine, Baudelaire, Georg Brandes , Nietzsche, Pater, Benedetto Croce, Havelock Ellis, M. Arnold, Arthur Symons, Anatole France, De Gourmont, Edgar Saltus, Brownell-“The list might be spun out, but these names suffice. Yet my idol among them, Sainte-Beuve, missed Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, and to Victor Hugo was inconsiderate — possibly on account of his affair with Adele Hugo. Consider the osrics of literature eternally embalmed in the amber of Sainte-Beuve ' s style, a fatal immortality for so many fu- tile butterflies, and you will admit that he still lives when many a mighty reputation has withered." 2.

Huneker, though he would not include himself among the great

critics, confesses to his own "blind spots."

"l have with all my boasted cosmopolitanism many 'blind' spots, many little Dr. Fells, the reason why I cannot tell. It was with difficulty I read Arnold Bennett, notwithstand- ing the joy he gave me in Buried Alive , yet I couldn't swallow Old 'Wives ' Tale --the hissing length of s's--nor that dull epic, Clayhanger. Mr. Bennett, whose touch is Gallic, who is first and last a newspaper man, is out of his depth in the artistic territory of Tolstoy and Hardy.

He is not a literary artist like George Moore or John Galsv/orthy. But Mr. Bennett enthralled me with his The Pretty Lady , an evocation, artistically evoked. So thus I had to reverse a too hasty judgment upon Arnold Bennett, whose resources are evidently not exhausted." 3.

With but these few glimpses into Hune'ker's character, we

can see that in his case the style or method is the man. It

lends weight to Huneker 's contention that the critic cannot be

wholly objective, try as he may.

1. Steeplejack, Volume 2, Page 253

2. Bedouins, Page 122

3. Steeplejack, Volume 2, page 126

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The Critic * s Purpose and Method

v\/hat did Huneker consider the purpose of the critic? He tells us in a few places.

"it sounds magnanimous, but neither praise nor blame should be the goal of the critic. To spill his ovm soul, that should be his aim. Notwithstanding the talk about objec- tive criticism, no such abstraction is thinkable. A critic relates his prejudices, nothing more. It is well to pos- sess prejudices. They lend to life a meaning." 1.

Lest this sound too romantic for the burden of our thesis,

let us read on:

"in his invaluable studies. Criticism and Standards , William Crary Brownell does not hold with the Brunetiere nor with the Anatole Prance opposing schools of criticism. He detects the doctrinaire and pedagogue in Brunetiere, and he rightly enough fears the tendency tov/ards loose thinking in the camp of the impressionistic criticism, of which Anatole Prance is the recognized head. Mr. Brownell believes in central authority. Yet, he is not a pontiff. He allows the needful scope for a writer’s individuality. It’s all very well to describe the boating of your soul among the masterpieces if you possess a soul comparable to the soul of Anatole Prance, but yours may be a mean little soul dwelling up some back-alley, and your pen a lean, dull one. Will your critical adventures be worth relating?

The epicurean test of the impressionist is not a standard, says Mr. Brownell, ’since what gives pleasure to some, gives none to others, and some standard is a necessary postulate, not only of criticism, but of all discussion, or even discourse.’ He asserts that criticism is an art. ’One of Sainte-Beuve ’ s studies is as definitely a portrait as one of Holbein’s.’ The ’creative-critic’ of Wilde is hardly a reality. There are no super-critics. Only men, cultured and clairvoyant. Sainte-Beuve, Taine, Nietzsche, Arnold, Pater, Benedetto Croce, Georg Brandes — and this Dane is the most cosmopolitan of all--are thinkers and literary artists. It is perilously easy to imitate their mannerisms, as it is to parody the unpoetic parodies of V/hitman, but it ends there. A little humility in a critic is a wise attitude. Humbly to follow and register his emotions aroused by the masterpiece is his function.

There must be standards, but the two greatest are sympathy and its half-sister, sincerity. The schoolmaster rule of thumb is ridiculous; ridiculous, too, is any man setting

1. Steeplejack, Volume 1, Page 207

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up an effigy of himself and. boasting of his ’objectivity.' The happy mean between sv/ashbucking criticism and the pom- pous academic attitude, dull but dignified, seems diffi- cult of attainment. But it exists. To use the personal pronoun in criticism doesn’t always mean ’subjectivity.’

I don’t believe in schools, movements, or schematologies , or any one method of seeing and writing. Be charitable, be broad--in a word, be cosmopolitan. He is a hobby of mine, this citizen of the world. A novelist may be pro- vincial, parochial as the town pump, that is his picture; but a critic must not be narrov/ in his outlook on the world. He need not be so catholic as to admire both Cezanne and Cabanel, for they are mutually exclusive, but he should be cosmopolitan in his sympathies, else his standards are insufficient. The truth is, criticism is a i full-sized man’s job." 1.

I

I

j The critic is to educate himself and broaden his vievirpoint

and sympathies to the end that he may justly interpret and cor- rectly appraise the work of art. The critic is human; he has his limitations, his prejudices, his preferences, of which he cannot rid himself but his knowledge and his outlook must be jbroad enough for him to render a correct estimate of the work

I

•

I considered. The critic cannot dispense with standards; the de- m-ands of excellence must be always before him. Sincerity and simplicity will help him toward an honest evaluation. Such a method was Huneker’s practice as well as preachment.

No Identity Between Genius and Taste

There was no doubt in Huneker’s mind concerning the non- identity of genius and taste;

"The critic need not be a painter to write of painting; a com.poser to speak of music. His primary appeal is to the public. He is the interpreter. The psychological process es need not concern us. There are the inevitable limita- tions. Describing music in terms of prose is hopeless.

The only true criticism of music is the playing thereof.

We are again confronted with the Vance Thompson crux; write about your liver, or the weather, or calico cats, as

1. Steeplejack, Volume 2, Page 122

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I am now doing. All the rest is technical camouflage. Of course, a catholic critic doesn’t mean an unprejudiced one. A critic without prejudices would be a faultless monster, and like Aristides the Just, should be stoned.” .... 1. ”a 11 said and done, a question of temperament, this opin- ion of one great man about the work of another.

"Therefore, brethren, it behooves us to be humble, as pride goeth before a fall. Like the industrious crow, the critic, or, as you will, the calico cat, should hop after the sowers of beauty, content to pick up in the furrowed field the grains dropped by genius. At best the critic sits down to a Barmecide's feast, to see, to smell, but not to taste the celestial manna vouchsafed by the gods.

We are only contemporaries of genius, all of us, and the calico cat is the badge of' our tribe. But who dares con- fess that shocking truth? And who shall bell the calico cat?" 2.

No Connection Between Morality and Art

Neither was there any connection between morality and art.

He never makes the mistake of the Puritan critics who preceded

and followed him of judging a work of art in the light of the

morals of the artist. Disapproval of the artist's way of life

was no criterion for real appreciation of his work.

”l adored Poe, and sadly wonder over the certain condescen- sion among our native critics when speaking of him. He drank. So did General Grant. He drugged. So did Coler- idge, Dei^uincey, and Charles Baudelaire. He was inconstant, So were Byron, Shelley, Swinburne--oh I billions of humans; what man some time or other hasn’t carried a harem under his hat? Or dreamed of houris never seen on sea or land I But European poets could live recklessly while this unhappy American was hunted to his grave for his temperamental va- riations; and once buried was quickly exhumed by the moral buzzards. As Baudelaire, who gave Poe European fame by translating him, wrote; ’Since when are the jackals per- mitted to defile the graves of genius in the United States? 'Why don’t critics and public alike pose the important question: Is the work good? Is the work bad? Do this and

the moral will take care of itself--that misery-breeding moral, varying like a weather-vane according to clime, time, and circumstance.” 3.

This matter of morality in the artist shows Huneker's power

1. Bedouins, Page 124

2. Ibid., Page 124

3. Steeplejack, Volume 1, Page 100

71

of dispassionate judgment; de neitiier approves nor condemns the artist’s falls from grace. He tries to understand and, wherever possible, condones. Here, in his ovm. particular way, he achieves a degree of objectivity not always reached by those who write objective criticism.

Contemporaries ’ Estimates of Huneker as a Critic Confusion Regarding His i/i/orth

Concerning Huneker 's place in American criticism, the Cur-

rent Opinion for April 1921 said:

"Seldom has so great a critic been subjected to such con- tradictory verdicts. Huneker, if we may judge from recent estimates on both sides of the Atlantic, was anything from a genius of the first order to a charlatan who pitifully wasted his gifts." 1.

The more one delves into the comparatively small literature about Huneker, the more one realizes that this is true. Where he is considered, there is either the hyperbole of praise or the inadequacy of underestimation, Huneker is either the in- spired pathfinder of American culture or a glorified book re- viewer. Some of this confusion regarding his critical impor- tance is the result of lack of perspective. We are too close to Huneker ’s time and his work was too far in advance of his time for correct judgment by his contemporaries.

Estimates -- Favorable and Unfavorable

Let us consider some of the divergent views concerning him to see if we can arrive at a general estimate of his worth to the field of literary criticism.

In the article cited, the opinion of several English

1. Current Opinion, April 1921, Placing James Himeker as a Critic

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papers and periodicals--all in the negative as far as Huneker's critical judgment is concerned--is quoted. The writer of the article remarks that this lack of appreciation in England may be due to a large extent to Huneker’s innate modesty and self- depreciation. His style was doubtless antipathetic to current English reviewing. One finds it hard to conceive of a more com- plete antithesis than that betv/een Huneker’s style and that of I the average English review. Huneker couldn’t have been ponder- ous if he had tried and there are no indications that he ever

did.

Benjamin de Casseres in a review of Bedouins says: He [huneke^ has a marvelous power of suggesting, of stimulating, of suddenly embanking widely separated notions and as suddenly

disassociating them, as some one said about him, his brillian-

1 .

cy and versatility hide his profundity." In a publishers’

note to Variations we find the following:

"Alone among American belletristic writers he {Eunekerj followed the French journalistic literary tradition il- lumed and rendered illustrious by the practice of a long and shining roll of litterateurs. Such a practice tends of itself to popularize its product by inevitably keeping the larger public more or less in mind and therefore es- chewing professional pedantries. The element of person- ality acquires prominence as in conversation. Style it- self becomes conversational. Huneker is as familiar in address as if he were not erudite in material," 2.

Norman T. Byrne, writing in Scribner’s of May 1922, seeks

to find in Huneker’s life physical and emotional foundation for some of his defects and virtues. He pursues his thesis too vigorously for the value of some of the resulting judgments.

1. Scribner’s, May 1922 i2. Variations (Publishers’ note)

I

I

I

II

As an example of this tendency, he attributes to Huneker a de- votion to Catholic ritual, aroused by what Burnes calls his "morbid” love of a pious mother, which makes Huneker incapable of making a correct judgment where an anti-Catholic is consi- dered, and points to Huneker 's articles on Oscar Wilde and James Joyce as indication of this. This is palpably false. Huneker was not over-devout himself and many of the people he praises most loudly were active enemies of the Church, Reli- gion, no more than anything else, ever affected Huneker 's judg- ment. Moreover, Huneker has plenty of ground for his dicta re- garding Wilde and Joyce and they are not religious ones. If there is any critic to whom the quality of catholicity (small "c") could be ascribed, it is to Huneker. His charity of judg- ment amounts almost to a defect.

Mr. Byrne traces out Huneker 's philosophy of life and says it "made for subjective valuation, leniency, a freshening zest

for life that was pagan in spirit and a passionate love for art

1 .

that was almost religious." it also, according to Mr. Byrne, made for presentative , sketchy work which, though never dog- matic, was too humble and lacked general principles.

Mr. Byrne wisely remarks the French influence in Huneker and says:

"He had too vital an appreciation of the beautiful to fol- low Bruneti^re, but he was frightened by the freedom of the impressionistic methods of Anatole France." 2.

This does not sound like the mark of an utter impressionist.

Huneker, in Mr. Byrnes's estimation, had an unreasoning

1. James G. Huneker, by Norman T. Byrne, Scribner's, May 1922, Volume 71, Page 300

2. Ibid., Page 300

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respect for established authority, for venerable institutions,

for time-worn reoutations, “a thing that is also held in check

1 .

by all the natural vitality and genius of the man.’* This respect for authority accounts also for Huneker’s touches of sentimentality. And yet, this man who was so tinged with rever- ence for things that are could be the chief welcomer of all new worthwhile things in the arts. A man who could combine these two points of view must necessarily be possessed of a broad judgment .

Mr. Byrne says that Huneker’s main quality is "freshness."

He is a gust of fresh air "that deranged the musty rooms of a

2 .

criticism grown didactic and lifeless."

Mr. Bernard Smith has an interesting theory regarding Huneker’s role in American criticism. He says the most sig- nificant and potent critical ideas of the twentieth century came from Huneker, Spingarn, and Van VVyck Brooks: Huneker brought in impressionism and Mencken; Spingarn, expressionism; and Van Wyck Brooks, a liberal’s criticism of American society. Of the three. Brooks and Huneker are most important for they alone created schools and attracted foreigners and, of the two, Huneker has done most to affect American taste and criticism as Brooks's force has been spent in narrow range.

The reason for the emergence of these men Mr. Smith at- tributes to the rise of a new bourgeois class, founded upon in- dustry, capitalism, international trade, a city, cosmopolitan class, as the United States began to change from a mercantile

1. Scribner’s May 1922, Volume 71, Page 300

2. Ibid.

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pioneer community into an empire society. This class, Mr. Smith says, was subject to disillusioned, pragmatic, epicurean atti- tudes which characterize the modern spirit. Huneker, in Mr.

Smith’s opinion, was the complete expression of his age and that

1 .

was the reason for his success.

His cosmopolitanism, his sensuality, his indifference to

the Puritan virtues, his contempt for Victorian esthetic, and

2 .

his grim, inflexible individualism” mark him as the mouthpiece of this new society.

Mr. Smith says:

"He was always several steps ahead of the community that bred him, he was seldom in advance of, or superior to, its aspirations or even its latent reflexes. It was this class that came to dominate American life immediately after the World War. It set the whole tone of the decade in the arts and professions, in society, behavior, manners, and politics. And James Huneker ’s mind, his soul, if you will, was the dream of this class incarnate, and indeed it was his friends, his disciples, and pupils, who ruled the roost throughout the twenties. He is a shadow while his follow- ers are canonized, yet it was he who did the spade-work and bequeathed the style and the point of view which were later made popular by a dozen journalists. 'He was a man,' said Van Wyck Brooks, 'of the tribe.' Therein, entirely, lies his importance.” 3.

It would amuse Huneker to be named the head of so vast a movement as a new class of society, him who disclaimed all schools and movements. Huneker stood for representative aes- thetic values which are dateless and timeless. He was influ- enced by his time and place in history as any participating be- ing is, but no critic has ever been more remote from the senti- ments of the general public. He believed in the cult of the great man. Progress is in the advancement of the ideals of the

1. Man of the Tribe, by Bernard Smith, Saturday Review of Literature, August 19, 1933, Volume 10, Page 49

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

exceptional individual, the man who cultivates his human capa- bilities to the highest possible development. Huneker was gre- garious and friendly but no man was less of the ’’tribe." He flays its shortcomings too often. Mencken may be an outstand- ing representative of this allegedly new class in society but Huneker is not Mencken, in spite of their friendship and common qualities. As far as civilization went, Huneker was, least of all, an iconoclast. To a present-day reader he kowtows too much to established authority. That boyhood shyness and life- long gentleness of spirit are endearing qualities but they do not make a revolutionary personality.

Mr. Smith also says that Huneker is hard to read today.

He says that Huneker had no depth, no substance, no wisdom; that he was not a real intellect. He was a pure impressionist, in other words. Huneker was never easy to read and his work is more or less dated. The world-at-large has caught up with him

in some respects but a page of Huneker is still a good mental

1 .

exercise as well as an enjoyable one.

His virtues, Mr. Smith sums up on two words, "sympathy" and "enthusiasm." These made for Huneker his success and also defects. Mr. Smith says that Huneker has seen good in inferior artists. Huneker would be the first to admit it. Mr. Smith

remarks that Huneker has been wrong in certain judgments. Hune-

2 .

ker was big enough not to think himself infallible.

The most unjust estimate of Huneker encountered is that in Fred Lewis Pattee's The New American Literature . Mr. Pattee

1. Man of the Tribe, by Bernard Smith, Saturday Review of Literature, August 19, 1933, Volume 10, Page 49

2. Ibid,

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gives Hunekei^ credit for his anti-Puritanism, his versatility, his pioneer v>rork in introducing European culture to America and for momentary flashes of real critical insight. One feels con- stantly that he is "playing down" Huneker's value and influence and that possibly it comes from the fact that Mr. Pattee over- looked Huneker completely in his History of American Literature .

"To the commonalty he was first known, as far as he was known, in 1917 through Mencken’s essay, later published in his Book of Prefaces . " 1.

One wonders where Mr. Pattee was when Huneker was doing his best work. Huneker was well knovm and appreciated, even before he vjas "discovered" by Mr. Mencken. It is possible to name many people less concerned with the progress of American litera- ture than Mr. Pattee must have been who knew and admired Hunekei years before 1917.

Mr. Pattee makes another assertion which is manifestly un-

true .

"By temperament the man was headlong, impatient, a grasper at half-truths, a maker of epigrams at the expense of truth. His sarcasm was withering. His greatest pleasure was making 'imbeciles realize their imbecility’ and by im- beciles he meant all not in step with his own little com- pany." 2.

Enough has been said here in the evidence concerning Hune- ker's abnormal humility to show that this is a false statement.

(

jHuneker did dislike the pettiness and tawdriness of irjany of the

i

mob’s ideals but what he had to say of it was said with witty geniality, not sarcasm. He had a whimsical tolerance even toward the Philistine in the opinion of a writer in the Weekly

1. The Nev/ American Literature, Page 436

2. Ibid., Page 439

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Review of February 23, 1921:

"Courtesy, almost deference vi/as his habitual attitude toward conservative colleagues who challenged all his values." 1.

Mr. Pattee is disappointed in Steeplejack . Its failure to satisfy he assigns to Huneker’s bohemianism. Steeplejack is disappointing as an autobiography, mainly because it doesn’t tell us enougii of Huneker, Some of the incidents are unimport- ant. Mencken says that the chapter concerning Theodore Roose-

2 .

velt is "downright equivocation." It is distinctly banal.

One cannot imagine Huneker indulging in mob-worship of this kind. There is trivial gossip in Steeplejack but one does read and re- read it with delight and one comes away from it with a vivid realization of contact with a lovable personality and an ex- ceptional one. VVhen one realizes that this was v/ritten serially for The Philadelphia Public Ledger in fifteen weeks, one marvels all the more at its grace and charm. It couldn’t have been Hune- ker’s had it been heavy and dignified. Huneker calls it a "rag

Huneker’s work was "Moby-Dicks, chaotic, mostly trash," to

3.

Mr. Pattee. This, concerning some of the most brilliant writ- ing of the century, is hardly equitable criticism.

To Ludwig Lewisohn,

"the entire modern period of American culture is scarcely thinkable without the long, energetic and fruitful activity of James Huneker. 4. . . .if there had come by 1909 to exist an American minority that v/as aware of the direction of human culture, that group was largely the creation of James Huneker." 5.

l/" Weekly Review, February 23, 1921," Huneker as a Critic, Vol. 4 , Page 186

2. Prejudices, Third Series, by H. L. Mencken, Page 79

3. The New American Literature, by Fred Lewis Pattee, Page 440

4. Expression in America, by Ludv/ig Lewisohn, Page 350

Yet Lewisohn sees Huneker as a pure impressionist.

"He was the pure impressionist, but that is what America needed. For nearly all critics hut himself cut themselves off from the majority of artistic impacts by anterior prin- ciples worthy of the W. C. T. U. But his sensibility was first-rate in quality, for it embraced all the arts and it I was united to a taste that was almost unerring. . . . Not that Huneker had not, when he chose, an intellectual rela- tion to his idols. ’Nietzsche, it should be remembered, was a great psychologist, perhaps greater as such than as a formulator of a philosophical system. ' But Huneker did not choose very often to use his mind. Driven constantly to write for bread, it was easier to be gossipy, allusive, splenetic, to make anecdote and enthusiasm do for substance. .... An austerer and more scrupulous spirit would not so successfully have carried the war of modernity into all the rotting citadels of genteel criticism and Anti-Saloon League taste in letters." 1.

h. W. Boynton laments Huneker' s preoccupation with matters of the stomach and his bohemianism but gives him credit for his versatility, his critical ability, his vitality, and human qual- ities .

"He was versatile with the uncalculating enthusiasm of a boy who will turn from one hilltop to another with complete disregard of all the hard climbing it involves. It's the fresh view he was after. . . . All the work in the world won't produce versatility and I'm sorry to add that versa- tility too often spells superficiality." 2.

"He never praised his own v/ork, but he enjoyed the praise of others. He was inclined to undervalue himself." 3.

"He is an eager lover of the things that are more excellent versatile all the time, but some of the time an exact and exhaustive student; an overflowing spring of generous im- pulses, a sensitive and abiding friend, and a loyal lover. It must have been fun to know him." 4.

There are more enthusiastic judgments concerning Huneker 's critical contribution: Benjamin de Casseres, one of his friends, tells us,

"His birth was as much an event in America as the birth of

1. Expression in America, by Ludwig Lewisolin, Page 354

2. Some Contemporary Americans, by H. ii/. Boynton, Page 226

3. Ibid. , Page 229

4. Ibid., Page 229

80

Walt Whitman and. Edgar Allen Poe." 1.

As early as July 1909, a writer in Current Literature ac- claimed Huneker as the Brandes of American literature and said his position was all the more outstanding because there were so few critics of worth in America.

"We can easily count our critics on our fingers; and unless we are arrantly optimistic in our own interpretation of the critic we need no more than a single hand. On the hand of criticism, Mr. Pollard, himself, (Percival) at his best may be compared to the little finger, Mr. Paul E. More, emi- nently sane and respectable, to the thumb, but James Hune- ker is the forefinger pointing the way to the new." 2.

The Nev; Republic, shortly after Huneker 's death, honestly

estimated his qualities:

"it is no part of the standing quarrel betv/een the field forces of criticism and its general staff to say that Hune- ker was naturally enlisted in active service. This was due in some measure to the exigencies of place and time. His America could not possibly accomodate within its narrow working ideas the multifold artistic Europe of which he had such fresh and special tidings. He was condemned to devote himself to the more immediate forms of interpretation. To such interpretation he gave himself without reserve or stint. It was really a journalistic task undertaken with unselfishness and it was overlighted with new names and references." 3.

"He worked with good heart and true intuition. Not follow- ing others' footsteps, as is the common fault of the author- itarians, he has proved to be the forerunner of the age that is now flourishing, with the heroes of this age the men whom he discerned and proclaimied on his own responsibi- lity, in a manner which was equally spirited." 4.

The New Republic does not want us to classify Huneker with

(Others of the critical profession, maintaining that Huneker was

Ln a class by himself.

"He was a Dionysiac force in criticism., gay and warm, as well as sharp and spiced and stinging. His relish for life and literature, his torrent of allusion and enumeration

1. Current Opinion, 4pril 1921, Placing Huneker as a Critic, Volume 70, Page 534

2. Current Literature, July 1909, James Huneker, Super-Critic, Volume 47, Page 57

3. New Republic, P'ebruary 23, 1921, Vol 25, P. 357 /4. Ibid.

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should keep him froi;. the pigeon-hole of classification. He was a creator who loved every variety of artistic creative- ness, and gave this country an unexampled report of it. To lose him is to lose a true watcher of the skies.” 1.

according to the Literary Digest of Larch 5, 1921, con- servatives and radicals in literature acclaimed him at his death. It stated that no specialist in any one of the arts could impeach Huneker's judgment in the whole gamut of them. It quoted, Ex-Attorney-General George vtf. Wickersham, a boyhood friend of tiuneker, as saying at his funeral regarding the earnestness of tiuneker's criticism:

"He judged all that was produced in any domain of art by comparison with absolute standards. His condemnation v/as not a matter of feeling or prejudice. It was the inevitalUe result of contrast. He could be witty without being cruel. It was this rare quality of impersonal judgment which singles him out as imique among critics. He had a great human tolerance for the failures of any man or vj-oman whom he saw struggling to give the world v/hat he perceived of truth or beauty in created things. He had no tolerance for affectation. He was inexorable in the application of standards of art.” 2.

The Living Age of May 14, 1921 quoted an article by Thomas

4oult which appeared in The English Review of April of that year.

"Huneker’s relish for life and literature showed qualities of which there is no equivalent in England. ’A Dionysiac force in criticism' he has been well called, apart as the poles from our own litterateurs, writing their criticism sadly, our zestless authoritarians.” 3.

In Mr, Moult 's opinion, Huneker had a rich and ripe knowl- edge and no suggestion of writing dovm to his public. The fol- lowing is interesting for its reference to Huneker's allusive- ness :

"He explored Europe and returned to New York with fresh tidings and generally sound pronouncements. He loved to

1. New Republic, February 23, 1921, Volume 25, Page 357

2. Literary Digest, March 5, 1921, Volume 68, Page 28

3. The Living Age, iviay 14, 1921, Volume 309, Page 426

docket his artistic heroes as madmen, wits, saints and sin- ners, and he captured their splendor, their pathos, and their gaiety for his readers in a way that has no compari- son in critical ready-writing. He reveled in allusiveness, confirming one of his author's statements by the words of ten others, checking an English painting by an Italian master, until the reader's mind is as heavily freighted as a catalogue. On one page of his Ivory Apes and Peacocks there may be counted thirty-three references l'* 1.

kr. Moult, too, says that tumeker's later books were not

the equals of the first.

Lawrence Gilman, a friend, writing in the North American of April 1921 said:

"Mr. Huneker in a quite definite and literal sense began and ended a significant period in the aesthetic life of this country. He had scarcely a precursor; he was unique while he lived; and he has no successor." 2.

Mr. Gilman is well av\fare of the significance of Huneker 's

contribution to American letters:

"Vi/hile Hamilton Wright kabie and his confreres were earnest- ly lecturing and essaying upon Thackeray and Dickens, try- ing to estimate, a little uncertainly, George Meredith and relapsing upon James Lane Allen with obvious relief, while their musical and pictorial brothers of the critical craft were engrossed in Brahms and Tchaikovsky, Pinero and Clyde Fitch, Sargent and Abbey, Mr. Huneker gaily conducted to public pasture (as he once put it) a surprising 'flock of Unicorns ' --typifying the dreamers of dreams in the Seven Arts . " 3 .

"To a public culture wnich had been timorous and parochial, a civilization which had been drab, anaemic, and thin, Mr. Huneker, almost unaided, brought color and gayety and abundance. . . . Into the depressing drabness of our crit- ical writing, with its incomparable paltriness and steril- ity, its dullness and triteness, its traditionalism and vapidity, kr . Huneker entered with somewhat the effect of a gusty spring wind blowing through a long-closed Mid- Western parlor." 4.

It is Mr. Gilman's belief that Huneker had completed his work before he died; that his pioneering was done and that his

1. The Living Age., May 14, 1921, Volume 309, Page 426

2. The North American, April 1921, Volume 243, Page 556 f3. Ibid.

Ibid.

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writing had begun to wear thin. Huneker was a stylist and had the gift of summing up an era or a writer in a succint and re- vealing phrase which remains with the reader as a key to the age or individual described. l/i/hen he had done so, if the phrase pleased him, he was likely to repeat it, Huneker tells us in Steeple.jack that at one time he was at “the hypercritical age,

believing that no phrase should be repeated, an insane notion

1 .

that often afflicts ’stylists,’” Later such repetition did not trouble him and there are many instances of it. Of this tendency Mr. Gilman says:

”lt was always a defect in his style that he fell in love with certain epithets, and that these hypnotized him, dogged his footsteps in his prose, tending to make it seem artificial and self-conscious. 2,

To Mr. Gilman the later books are inferior to the earlier and include banalities which the earlier Huneker would have sup- pressed. Vifith the exception of Unicorns , I think this is true. The essays seem more trivial, more journalistic, the good Hune- ker bits are farther apart.

It is a matter of regret to Mr. Gilman that Huneker did not

sare to “attempt any orientation of artistic phenomena in the

3.

social scheme," to reduce his judgments to the terms of general Ideas. Mr. Gilman ascribes this failure to Huneker ’s aversion bo interpreting literature in the light of moral and philosoph- ical codes,

"No doubt he failed to discriminate between the criticism that is enriched by an acute awareness of all the inter- acting forces of its social seating and the incurable American habit of discussing aesthetic phenomena in terms

1. Steeplejack, Volume 1, Page 137

2. The North American, April, 1921, Volume 243, Page 556 •

3. Ibid.

I

I

i

of rigid and sentimental piety, . . . But he need not have

detached himself so wholly from the deeper and wider im- plications of his subject matter.'* 1.

This is Huneker’s main defect in Mr. Gilman's eyes for he goes on to say;

"Yet, when all is said, how immeasurably valuable an influ- ence he was I What susceptibility, clairvoyance, immediacy of response were his. He was innocent of prepossessions, infinitely flexible and generous. He was the friend of any talent fine and strange and courageous enough to incur the dislike of the might army of Bourbons, Puritans, and Boeotians, His critical tact was almost infallible. . . .

He has written pages that will always be cherished by those for whom criticism is one of the several ways of literature --pages of superb and gorgeous imagination, of beautiful insight, of splendid valor. He was, as we have already said of him, both vivid and acute, robust and fine -fingered, tolerant yet unyielding, astringent, yet t ender- -dynamic , contagious, perpetually lovable, inveterately alive. Re- membering him one remembers, too, one of his favorite quo- tations from Nietzsche ; 'Convictions are prisons. . . .

New ears for new music. . . . New eyes for the most remote

things . ' " 2 .

Mencken possesses Huneker's gift of characterizing a writer cr movement with an illuminating phrase, although Huneker's was nore apt to represent a wider judgment. Mencken has v/ritten of iuneker with appreciation and insight. He gives us many person- al glimpses of Huneker, a thing which is difficult to find in bhe case of a man who kept out of the limelight. He calls Hune- ier

"the solitary lokanaan in this tragic aesthetic wilderness, the only critic among us whose vision sweeps the whole j field of beauty, and whose reports of what he sees there

j show any genuine gusto. That gusto of his, I fancy, is

j two-thirds of his story. It is unquenchable, contagious,

I inflammatory; he is the only performer in the commissioned

j troupe who knows how to arouse his audience to anything ap- i proaching enthusiasm." 3.

IL. The North American, April, 1921, Volume 243, Page 556 g. Ibid.

3. A Book of Prefaces, by H. L. Mencken, Page 159

This joy in life is remarked by all the commentators as it must by even the most casual reader of Huneker. To this quality hencken attributes Huneker 's excellence in presentation over the other American critics. Huneker had the incomparable advantage of personal charm. Mencken says that Huneker ’s two studies on Ibsen, contrasted with the general body of writing upon Ibsen, reoresent the difference "between a portrait and a Bertillion

1 .

photograph, Kichard Strauss and Czerny, a wedding and an autopsy." p?he superiority of Huneker ’s treatment comes also from the fact

I

that he was a real man of culture, not the ordinary half -in- formed critic. Mencken says:

"He has reported more of interest and value than any other American critic, living or dead, but the essence of his criticism does not lie so much in what he specifically re- ports as in the civilized point of view from which he re- ports it. He is a true cosmopolitan, not only in the actu- al range of his adventurings , but also and more especially in his attitude of mind. His world is not America, nor Europe, nor Christendom, but the whole universe of beauty. " 2 .

Mencken gives him credit for altering the outlook of American literature and criticism.

"He was, I believe, the first American (not forgetting William Morton Payne and Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, the pi- oneers) 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 val- iant 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

1. ii Book of Prefaces, by H. L. Mencken, Page 160

2. Ibid., Page 161 5. Ibid., Page 162

86

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 Prank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane and H. B. Puller. In sum, he gave some sem- blance 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, in- deed, 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 significatn; 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 quasi-culture, by the Oxford manner out of Calvin- ism, has been lifted ever so little--there is surely no man who can claim a larger share of credit for preparing the way. " 1

More to the same effect--

"VVhile the college pedagogues of the Brander Matthews type still worshipped the dead bones of Scribe and Sardou, Ro- bertson and Bulwer-Lytton, he preached the new and revolu- tionary gospel of Ibsen. In the golden age of Rosa Bon- heur's 'The Horse Pair,' 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 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 cer- tainty and snarling narrowness of Little Bethel.” 2.

jMencken says that Huneker knew as much as forty men

I

I

"and his knowledge was well-ordered and instantly avail- able. He had read everything and seen everything and nothing that he had ever read or seen or heard quite passed, out of his mind." 3.

1. A Book of Prefaces, by H. L. Mencken, Page 162

2. Ibid., Page 192

3. Prejudices: Third Series, by H. L. Mencken, Page 82

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To Mencken, Huneker was a stimulating companion, good- humored and witty, and an enthralling conversationalist. Words and phrases fell from him with startling rapidity and all were worth remembering. Mencken says that Huneker’ s style in his books could not help being allusive as his talk was ten times more allusive than his writing.

Old Fogy and the one novel. Painted Veils , represent the real Huneker more than any other of the books, in Mencken's be- lief. He maintains that Huneker lost something of spontaneity in his books; that in his newspaper writing there was a freer and more characteristic expression of the man. Huneker seemed to feel a restraint in his formal v/riting that he did not feel in his daily newspaper feats.

Mencken does not miss Huneker 's faults and points of defect.

To him, Huneker has no capacity for extra-aesthetic 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." 1.

This led him, according to Mencken, to espouse persons who were

unworthy, "the sort of revolutionary who is here today and gone

2 .

tomorrow" and to neglect the new men who were more drab in ap- pearance. He praised some frauds and overlooked some good peo- ple in Mencken's judgment but, in general, Mencken says one is amazed by the soundness of Huneker 's judgments.

"He discerned the new and the important long before most of his contemporaries discerned it, and he described it habit- ually in terms that were never bettered afterwards." 3.

"His successive heroes, always under fire when he first

1. Prejudices; Third Series, by H. L. Mencken, Page 72

2. Ibid., Page 74

3. Ibid., Page 75

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championed the, almost invariably moved to secure ground and became solid men, challenged by no one save fools-“Ib- sen, Nietzsche, Brahms, Strauss, Cezanne, Stirner, Synge, the Russian Composers, the Russian novelists. He did for this Vi/'estern world what Georg Brandes was doing for Con- tinental Europe--sorting out the new comers with sharp eyes, and giving mighty lifts to those who deserved it." 1.

Most of Huneker’s defects, Mencken feels, came from his

virtues, his extreme modesty. Mencken realizes that Huneker was

not much of a fighter. He says:

"And though he was the greatest of all the enemies that the guardians had to face, it was seldom that he tackled them directly. ... He was always loath to set himself direct- ly against a concrete champion of orthodoxy; he could never get quite over the feeling that he was no more than an ama- teur among such gaudy doctors and that it would be unseem- ly for him to flout them too openly." 2.

Mencken accounts for this timorousness by Huneker' s intense gregariousness and the fact that for long years Huneker was fighting alone, putting forward these new gods with no sustain- ing congregation. The reason probably lies deeper than these facts. He was shy as a boy and gentle in his relationships with others all his life. Vife have remarked his inability to hate anything except hypocrisy and noise. He never lambasted his opponents, believing that they had a right to their opinions even as he. Mencken says that Steeplejack is full of apolo- getic timidity.

"it is the biography of a man who came to the end of his life harboring doubts of his own chief accomplishments and a bit intimidated by his own fame." 3.

Mencken is authority for the statement that it embarrassed Huneker to have his superiority to the rest of the critics dis- cussed. Huneker felt he had spread himself too thinly over the

1. Prejudices: Third Series, by H. L. Mencken, Page 75

2. Century, June, 1921, James Huneker, by H. L. Mencken, Vol. 102, Page 191

3. Ibid., Page 191

89

arts and did not know so much as the supposed experts in the separate fields of art.

Mencken blames this same timidity for Huneker's acceptance Df membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters, viencken affirms that:

"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 cheap-jack novelists and tenth-rate compilers of college textbooks, was intrinsically insulting; it was al- most as if the Musical Union had offered to admit a Brahms.’* 1 .

Just the fact that it might have been discourteous or insulting j Tor Huneker to refuse the membership might have influenced him to accept it. He seems constitutionally unable to hurt anybody’s feelings, even an organization’s.

Mencken, too, noted a dimunition in intensity and idea in , bhe later books of Huneker, a tendency to conform to current es- timations .

"He praises such one-day masterpieces as McPee's ’ Casuals of the Sea ’ ; he is polite to the gaudy heroines of the opera-house; he gags a bit at 'vVright ’ s ’ Modern Painting ’ ; he actually makes a gingery curtsy to Prank Jewett mather, a Princeton professor. . . . The pressure in the gauges can’t keep up to 250 pounds forever. Man must tire of fighting after a while, and seek ease in his inn.” 2.

■fet none of Huneker ’s faults could blind Mencken to his great

influence in American literature.

"into an assembly of national critics who had long Vi^allowed in dogmatic puerilities, Huneker entered v/ith a taste in- finitely surer and more civilized, a learning infinitely greater, and an address infinitely more engaging. Mo man was less the reformer by inclination, and yet hs 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.” 3.

1. Prejudices: Third Series, _ by H. L. Mencken, Page 81

2. A Book of Prefaces, by H. L. Mencken, Page 183

3. Prejudices: Third Series, by H. L, Mencken, Page 83

1

1

1

1

1

90

— — — I

Perhaps the best all-around estimation of Huneker is in

deorpie E. DeMille's Literary Criticism in America. Bernard

Smith, in the article already quoted, says that DeMille's ac- 1

1

count is deification of Huneker. The choice of v/ord is exag-

1

gerated; it is justification. !

1

DeMille points the fact, obvious to anybody who has been |

i

at all concerned with Huneker, that he has been neglected and ^

1

ignored: i

i

"Every now and then some criticaster, of the sort who be- j lieve that authors can be ranked and graded like pupils in; a class in elementary arithmetic, sets out to answer the question , vVho is the great ^imerican critic? The answers ! to this question have been various and surprising. Lowell j has been most often mentioned, but one also hears the names| of Poe, Stedman, and even Margaret Fuller. No one, how- ever, has as yet nominated for the honor James Huneker. Indeed, of all the major Am.erican critics, Huneker has been most persistently ignored. The qualities of the man are so obvious that this demands some attempt at explana- tion. This neglect is no doubt partly due to his lifelong connection with the daily papers--a connection that in- vites the academic epithet-- journalistic . More of it is j

owing to Huneker 's critical isolation. Most critics, the ! reader has probably noticed, speak not only for themselves j but for some group of creative writers, or some general movement of literary thought. They are party leaders, and the party helps them to fame. But Huneker belonged to no movement, advocated no reform, v/as touted by no clique, and it has been in the interest of no particular literary group to shout his praises. Only abroad has his import- ance been recognized. Rem.y de Gourrnont, Paul Bourget,

Georg Brandes , men whose mere awareness of the existence of an American critic mieant a great deal, recorded their estimation of him in flattering terms. Nor v^as this unde- served. One can give him no higher praise than to say that in range of interest, in keenness of intelligence, in catholicity of taste, in brilliance of style, he reminds one constantly of the great French critics of the Nine- teenth Century, of Sainte-Beuve and Taine and Le Maitre."

DeMille traces Huneker’ s life in an attempt to account for

i

—

■ - ■ — ^

1. Literary Criticism in iunerica by George E. DeMille, Page 206

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some of his critical characteristics. It is interesting to note that to the very agency to which Mr. Norman T. Byrne as- cribes Huneker’s supposed inability to judge the vrork of remiss Catholics, his Catholic up-bringing, DeMille ascribes his aloof- ness from Puritanism and the excesses of the anti-Puritanists .

I

"Both the Puritan, who shrieks ’Wipe it out,’ and the anti- Puritan, who demands it everywhere and then attempts to prove that it does not exist, are untrue to the facts of literature and life. Huneker did neither; he was neither prudish nor prurient. He dealt with many authors who were under the moral ban--Wedekind, George Moore, d’Annunzio-- but without descending to become either an apologist or a censor. The point is worth emphasizing, because this de- tachment, this balance, this moral tolerance, has been sadly lacking in most of our American critics.'* 1.

DeMille says Huneker ’s cosmopolitanism gave him valuable

contacts abroad and width of judgment but that he remained as

2 .

Anierican as fried chicken in spite of it.

Huneker ’s great vitality is acknov/ledged by DeMille. He says that critics possessed of such liveliness usually found schools or movements. It v/as huneker ’s distinction that he was both alive and aloof and this combination gives him his pecu-

liar excellence. Some of his work is uniraportnat but the best,

according to DeMille, is comparable to the scholarly work of the

3 .

"most cloistered recluse in critical history" and at the same time the work of a man intensely alive and eternally active in the world’s pursuits.

Huneker ’s interest in mysticism also tempered his vital exuberance that might have become mere barbarism and gave us a better-rounded personality. DeMille traces the importance of

1. Literary Criticism in Anierica, by George E. DeMille, P. 210

2. Ibid., Page 213

3. Ibid., Page 214

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the classical in music upon Huneker’s musical equipment and says;

"One finds the same qualities in his work as a critic of painting- -wide knowledge, classical backbone, liking for the new, the exotic, the strange." 1.

The same could be said of his literary criticism, DeMille

points out the romanticism in his liking for the extremes of

personality and the classicism of his interest in form and style

Huneker’s criticism did not end here but went on to include an

interest in ideas.

"He was equally interested in ideas, and vms always care- ful to lay bare, usually v/ithout accepting or rejecting, the ideas of his authors, iis a result of this breadth of interest, he avoided the imsatisfying narrowness of which one is often conscious when reading critics who stop at form or who deal only with ideas. One gets from Huneker a more complete and rounded picture of the author under consideration than from almost any other critic of litera- ture." 2.

DeMille, too, notes Huneker 's wide knowledge and scholar- ship. He cites an instance in Huneker' s essays on Ibsen.

"Not only was Huneker, when the subject called for it, definitely scholarly in method. He had as wide a back- ground of reading as the vast majority of professional scholars. One often hears the reproach leveled at journal- istic critics that, while versed in modern literature, their knowledge stops at the year 1800. From such reproact Huneker is free. His reading can only be described as im- mense, Within the pages of Steeple jack - -not a critical book, but an autobiography--one finds references to almost every classic author of importance. Here is a list gath- ered at random from a compass of about fifty pages-- Cellini, Bossuet, Kabelais, Montaigne, Goethe, Aquinas, Dante, Cervantes, Bunyan, Horace. No American critic we have considered had read so widely, and few had read so well." 3.

Huneker, to DeMille, was an impressionist. He notes a lack of abstract thought in Huneker.

"in spite of his keen intellect, in spite of his great

1. Literary Criticism in America, by George E. DeMille, P. 221

2. Ibid., Page 251

3. Ibid., Page 224

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interest in ideas, Huneker had little trace, I think, of the specifically philosophical type of mind — the type of mind that seeks to organize its ideas into a system, to base its judgments on general principles which, put togeth- er, make a more or less complete philosophy of literature. Unlike his French masters, unlike most of the American critics who had preceded him, Huneker was not given to dis- cussions of literature and criticism in the abstract. Ex- cept for one chapter in Steeplejack , headed ’Criticism,’ Huneker ’s pronouncements on literary theory were limited to very incidental remarks dropped in the course of his ex- aminations of specific writers.'* 1.

Concerning the charge that Huneker was not greatly con- cerned with American writers JJeMille has this to say:

"Writing from an international viev/point, he naturally had little use for those American writers who loomed large in our eyes during the last century only because of our liter- ary isolation. But both the American writers whom he men- tions and those of whom he omits to speak are evidence of his power of selection, his ability to pick out the best.

It is just for those American v/riters to wiiose reputations time has added that he shows due admiration." 2.

Huneker’ s breadth of viewpoint was not indiscriminate ap- proval. Excellence was his criterion and he could distinguish its lack as well as its presence but he never indulged in casti- gation.

"He might have written excellent destructive criticism, armed as he was with knowledge, analytic power, humor, and the gift of slashing phrase. But his geniality and his utter lack of the reformer’s zeal led him rather to pass over in silence the authors whose crimes outweighed their virtues. Viihat critical fault-finding he did was only for the purpose of separating the real excellence of an author from the weaknesses and errors that block our clear view of that excellence. And it is a tribute to his discrimi- nation that unlike Poe, he never lavished praise on an author undeserving of critical attention." 3.

The dramatic excellence of recent years, DeMille says, is

I

{largely due to Huneker ’s influence.

,|l. Literary Criticism in America, by George E. DeMille, P. 224 j2. Ibid., Page 235 3. Ibid., Page 239

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'^ Iconoclasts , which appeared in 1905, was the first piece of criticism in this country to give serious attention to the continental dramatists. It was also the first book by a major American critic to consider the drama as a subject for criticism," 1.

Other influences of Huneker, according to DeMille:

"His literary cosmopolitanism left its mark on nearly all succeeding American critics, most notably perhaps on Ernest Boyd, who seems at times a conscious imitator of Huneker, His impatience with moral attitudes in literary criticism has been adopted by the literary radicals of Mr. Mencken’s school, men from whom he is in many respects far removed. But in general we may say that Huneker stands as a great critical monolith at the opening of the Twentieth Century." 2 .

Huneker’ s Style and Its influence Upon His Rating as an Im- pressionist

No estimation of Huneker ’s critical ability would be com- plete without some consideration of his style. More than with most writers it was indicative of its user.

"it was flamboyant, daring, dazzling, always erudite," to

3 .

a writer in the Weekly Review of February 23, 1921.

"The style is the book, as it is the man. It is arch, staccato, ironical, witty, galloping, playful, polygot, allusive," says Mencken. He speaks of Huneker ’s "skipping, pizzicato sentences." 4.

DeMille ;

"His stylistic excellence was not the result of long and painful labor with the file; his brilliance was the natural and rapid utterance of a brilliant mind. He enjoyed doing tricks with words; he thought in clever sentences. He wrote in sentences; sometimes in sentences only," 5.

13.

14. ,5.

ii

"Although Huneker ’s manner was always staccato, in his critical works this manner was under thorough control. Disjointed though his paragraphs may appear at first read- ing, this effect is often an optical illusion, the result of a dazzlement produced by the too continuous sparkle and glitter of his sentences. But beneath this coating of jewels there is a rigid steel structure. Every essay has

Literary Criticism in America, Ceorge E. DeMille, Ibid., Page 242 . ,

Weekly Review, 2/23/21, Volume 4, Page 186 A Book of Prefaces, H. L, Mencken, Page 179 Literary Criticism in America, George E. DeMille,

Page 242 Page 231

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