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More authors and I (1922) is a book by C. Lewis Hind

XXVII. JAMES GIBBONS HUNEKER [1]

SOME years ago, a Baltimore friend sent me to London a copy of Promenades of an Impressionist, by James Gibbons Huneker. I read it with amazement. " Do all up-to-date Americans write like this ? " I asked myself.

Such a dazzle of a style ; such a pepper of names; such a hulloa-old-chap familiarity with Eminent Hands in the Seven Arts, mostly foreign ; such staccato sentences, such high spirits, such a gusto for life. It was unlike any other book I had ever read, and although I should not like all literature to be written in the Huneker manner, I was delighted to make acquaintance with Promenades of an Impressionist. It braced me, made me hustle, and I wondered what Dr. Johnson would have thought of Huneker's American style.

" No," said a compatriot of Huneker's, " all Americans do not write like Jim. He's just Jim Huneker, who collects artistic reputations, pins them down like so many butterflies, and he's so enthusiastic about everything that the pins don't seem to hurt. He's antibunk, is Jim."

Pursuing my investigations into the Huneker concatenations I found the following in The Atheneeum apropos New Cosmopolis : " Given a different environment, another training, Mr. Huneker might have emerged as an American Walter Pater."

Has a great journal ever said anything so silly? James Huneker could never have been anything but James Huneker : as for training, he trained himself, just in the way he wanted to be trained ; as for environment, he made himself a citizen of the world. This " gourmet of belles-lettres," as a French critic called him, dedicated to a " half-mad worship of the Seven Arts," was as unlike Pater as Henry James was dissimilar to O. Henry. Walter Pater may be likened to a gentleman-farmer, quiet and thoughtful, brooding on his fields, watching his crops, sensitive to their nourishment and growth, with occasional reflective glances at sky and birds. Huneker is a keen-eyed traveller flashing past on a motor bicycle, waving a greeting to the reflective husbandman as he whizzes toward the next town.

The capitals of the world were Huneker's real homes — the Opera House, the Concert Rooms, the Theatres, Studios and Salons.

Pater is — repose. Huneker is — rush. He was a true American. His curiosity was insatiable. From Walt Whitman to Mary Garden, what an array of distinguished people he knew, remembered and wrote about. His style glitters, jumps, turns back, doubles in its tracks. He likes the short sentence. Thus —

" We must believe in the reality of our Unicorn. He is Pan. He is Puck. He is Shelley. He is Ariel. He is Whim. He is Irony."

James Gibbons Huneker was a protagonist of the Seven Arts : Music, Literature, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Acting, Dancing, but his first love and his last was Music. In Unicorns he writes, " Music-mad, I arrived in Paris during the last weeks of the World's Fair of 1878, impelled there by a parching desire to see Franz Liszt, if not to hear him." Note the use of the word " parching." That was Huneker. He would always rather be shrill than whisper. Imagine a shrill Walter Pater !

He was an inspired journalist, a literary journalist who, like many other brilliant writers, Chesterton for example, do their best work against time, when forced to concentrate by the. approach of the publication hour. His Life of Chopin, probably his best performance, and already a classic, was produced at leisure, as Pater composed. . Huneker was bound to write a fine book on Chopin. He adored him, played him, understood him. In The Pathos of Distance, which contains a chapter on his first visit to Paris in the seventies, he writes —

" I had mastered a page of Chopin ; I was happy ; I was in Paris ; I was young. And being of a practical temperament, I read Browning every morning to prepare myself for the struggle with the world."

There speaks the young American — of a past decade. Other times, other ways.

Never have I been able to recapture the enthusiasm with which I read Promenades of an Impressionist. The Huneker method becomes a little tiring. His attack is always frontal, never round through the sympathies. The way to read him is the way of reading " O. Henry," in single instalments of a column or so in a daily newspaper. Once, in an article by Huneker I counted nineteen names, all of exclusive men, working in the Seven Arts. One had to read him carefully.

Such articles were too good to be lost. Hence the procession of Huneker books, consisting of short essays on Men, Women, Cities, Ideas and Fancies linked under fanciful titles. In his titles, as in his style, he never rests. Here are a few of them —

Overtures — A Book of Temperaments, essays mainly on music, with this quotation from Whitman on the title-page : " Do I contradict myself ? Very well, then, I contradict myself " ; Mezzotints, more about music with a long essay on " The Music of the Future " ; Unicorns, with essays on Cezanne, James Joyce, Creative Involution and Re-reading Mallock ; Egoists, a Book of Supermen, with a quotation from Goethe on the title-page ; Iconoclasts, a Book of Dramatists from Ibsen to Shaw, with the motto " My truth is the truth " ; Ivory, Apes, and Peacocks, the title from 2 Chronicles ix. 21, all about authors and painters ; Nezv Cosmopolis, a Book of Images, interpreting cities, with an Italian quotation on the title-page ; Bedouins, mainly about Mary Garden, but also about George Luks, and Calico Cats, and Caruso on Wheels ; and with a section called " Idols and Ambergris " ; and so on. There was no end to Huneker's fecundity and faithfulness to aesthetic excitement.

Of all his books I prefer the volume of short stories called Visionaries. He had no skill in characterization, but he had ideas, quick, odd and fourth dimensional. Sometimes this player with words descends to a quiet passage : it is very welcome. Pater might almost have written the following. It occurs in the essay on " The Artist and His Wife."

" The true artist temperament, in reality, is the perception and appreciation of beauty whether in pigment, form, tone, words, or in nature. It may exist coevally with a strong religious sense."

Huneker published his autobiography in two volumes. Characteristically he called it Steeplejack with this explanation : " I, who write these words, am no poet, but I have been a steeplejack. I have climbed to the very top of many steeples the world over, and dreamed like the rest of my fellow-beings the dreams that . . ."

It is a jolly book, ill-shaped, but lively and curiously confidential. It should have been longer, or it should have been shorter, which you will. In it I find hints that, like other literary men who have lived by journalism, he had, now and then, a passing regret that he did not devote himself entirely to creative work, to writing grave things, like Pater, in the leisure of ample mornings. Who knows f Probably we all do what we were meant to do, and what we can best do. But — (this from Steeplejack) —

" I love painting and sculpture. I may only look, but never own either pictures or marbles. I would fain be a pianist, a composer of music. I am neither. Nor a poet. Nor a novelist, actor, playwright. I have written of many things, from architecture to zoology, without grasping their inner substance. I am Jack of the Seven Arts, master of none. A steeplejack of the arts."

James Gibbons Huneker ran true to form. Music was his first love and his last, and his idol from first to last was Chopin; perhaps he never expressed himself so completely as in the concluding lines of Steeplejack.

" What shall I do ? Music, always music. There are certain compositions by my beloved Chopin to master which eternity itself would not be too long. . . Courage ! Time is fugacious. How many years have I not played that magic music ? Music the flying vision . . . music that merges with the tender air . . . its image melts on shy, misty shadows . . . the cloud, the cloud, the singing, shining cloud . . . over the skies and far away . . . the beckoning clouds. . . ."

There Huneker speaks, he himself.