Franz Liszt

BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER

Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

PROMENADES
of an
IMPRESSIONIST

$1.50 net

Contents: Paul Cézanne—Rops the Etcher—Monticelli—Rodin—Eugene Carrière—Degas—Botticelli—Six Spaniards—Chardin—Black and White—Impressionism—A New Study of Watteau—Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec—Literature and Art—Museum Promenades.

"The vivacity of Mr. Huneker's style sometimes tends to conceal the judiciousness of his matter. His justly great reputation as a journalist critic most people would attribute to his salient phrase. To the present writer, the phrase goes for what it is worth—generally it is eloquent and interpretative, again merely decorative—what really counts is an experienced and unbiassed mind at ease with its material. The criticism that can pass from Goya, the tempestuous, that endless fount of facile enthusiasms, and do justice to the serene talent of Fortuny is certainly catholic. In fact, Mr. Huneker is an impressionist only in his aversion to the literary approach, and in a somewhat wilful lack of system. This, too, often seems less temperamental than a result of journalistic conditions, and of the dire need of being entertaining.

"We like best such sober essays as those which analyze for us the technical contributions of Cézanne and Rodin. Here, Mr. Huneker is a real interpreter, and here his long experience of men and ways in art counts for much. Charming, in the slighter vein, are such appreciations as the Monticelli, and Chardin. Seasoned readers of Mr. Huneker's earlier essays in musical and dramatic criticism will naturally turn to the fantastic titles in this book. Such border-line geniuses as Greco, Rops, Meryon, Gustave Moreau, John Martin, are treated with especial gusto. We should like to have an appreciation of Blake from this ardent searcher of fine eccentricities. In the main the book is devoted to artists who have come into prominence since 1870, the French naturally predominating, but such precursors of modern tendencies or influential spirits as Botticelli, Watteau, Piranesi are included. Eleven 'Museum promenades,' chiefly in the Low Countries and in Spain, are on the whole less interesting than the individual appreciations—necessarily so, but this category embraces a capital sketch of Franz Hals at Haarlem, while the three Spanish studies on the Prado Museum, Velasquez, and Greco at Toledo, are quite of the best. From the Velasquez, we transcribe one of many fine passages:

"'His art is not correlated to the other arts. One does not dream of music or poetry or sculpture or drama in front of his pictures. One thinks of life and then of the beauty of the paint. Velasquez is never rhetorical, nor does he paint for the sake of making beautiful surfaces as often does Titian. His practice is not art for art as much as art for life. As a portraitist, Titian's is the only name to be coupled with that of Velasquez. He neither flattered his sitters, as did Van Dyck, nor mocked them like Goya. And consider the mediocrities, the dull, ugly, royal persons he was forced to paint! He has wrung the neck of banal eloquence, and his prose, sober, rich, noble, sonorous, rhythmic, is, to my taste, preferable to the exalted, versatile volubility and lofty poetic tumblings in the azure of any school of painting.'

"Here we see how winning Mr. Huneker's manner is and how insidious. Unless you immediately react against that apparently innocent word 'tumblings,' your faith in the grand style will begin to disintegrate. It is this very sense of walking among pitfalls that will make the book fascinating to a veteran reader. The young are advised to temper it with an infusion of Sir Joshua Reynolds's 'Discourses,' quantum sufficit."—Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., in New York Nation and Evening Post.

EGOISTS

A BOOK OF SUPERMEN
With Portrait and Fac-simile Reproductions

12mo. $1.50 net; Postpaid $1.65

Contents: Stendhal—Baudelaire—Flaubert—Anatole France—Huysmans—Barrès—Hello—Blake—Nietzsche—Ibsen—Max Stirner.

"The work of a man who knows his subject thoroughly and who writes frankly and unconventionally."—The Outlook.

"Stimulating, provocative of thought."—The Forum.

ICONOCLASTS:
A Book of Dramatists

12mo. $1.50 net

Contents: Henrik Ibsen—August Strindberg—Henry Becque—Gerhart Hauptmann—Paul Hervieu—The Quintessence of Shaw—Maxim Gorky's Nachtasyl—Hermann Sudermann—Princess Mathilde's Play—Duse and D'Annunzio—Villiers de l'Isle Adam—Maurice Maeterlinck.

"His style is a little jerky, but it is one of those rare styles in which we are led to expect some significance, if not wit, in every sentence."—G. K. Chesterton, in London Daily News.

"No other book in English has surveyed the whole field so comprehensively."—The Outlook.

"A capital book, lively, informing, suggestive."—London Times Saturday Review.

"Eye-opening and mind-clarifying is Mr. Huneker's criticism; ... no one having read that opening essay in this volume will lay it down until the final judgment upon Maurice Maeterlinck is reached."—Boston Transcript.

OVERTONES:
A Book of Temperaments

WITH FRONTISPIECE PORTRAIT OF RICHARD STRAUSS

12mo. $1.25 net

Contents: Richard Strauss—Parsifal: A Mystical Melodrama—Literary Men who loved Music (Balzac, Turgenieff, Daudet, etc.)—The Eternal Feminine—The Beethoven of French Prose—Nietzsche the Rhapsodist—Anarchs of Art—After Wagner, What?—Verdi and Boito.

"The whole book is highly refreshing with its breadth of knowledge, its catholicity of taste, and its inexhaustible energy."—Saturday Review, London.

"In some respects Mr. Huneker must be reckoned the most brilliant of all living writers on matters musical."—Academy, London.

"No modern musical critic has shown greater ingenuity in the attempt to correlate the literary and musical tendencies of the nineteenth century."—Spectator, London.

MEZZOTINTS IN MODERN MUSIC

BRAHMS, TSCHAÏKOWSKY, CHOPIN, RICHARD STRAUSS, LISZT AND WAGNER

12mo. $1.50

"Mr. Huneker is, in the best sense, a critic; he listens to the music and gives you his impressions as rapidly and in as few words as possible; or he sketches the composers in fine, broad, sweeping strokes with a magnificent disregard for unimportant details. And as Mr. Huneker is, as I have said, a powerful personality, a man of quick brain and an energetic imagination, a man of moods and temperament—a string that vibrates and sings in response to music—we get in these essays of his a distinctly original and very valuable contribution to the world's tiny musical literature."—J. F. Runciman, in London Saturday Review.

MELOMANIACS

12mo. $1.50.

Contents: The Lord's Prayer in B—A Son of Liszt—A Chopin of the Gutter—The Piper of Dreams—An Emotional Acrobat—Isolde's Mother—The Rim of Finer Issues—An Ibsen Girl—Tannhäuser's Choice—The Red-Headed Piano Player—Brynhild's Immolation—The Quest of the Elusive—An Involuntary Insurgent—Hunding's Wife—The Corridor of Time—Avatar—The Wegstaffes give a Musicale—The Iron Virgin—Dusk of the Gods—Siegfried's Death—Intermezzo—A Spinner of Silence—The Disenchanted Symphony—Music the Conqueror.

"It would be difficult to sum up 'Melomaniacs' in a phrase. Never did a book, in my opinion at any rate, exhibit greater contrasts, not, perhaps, of strength and weakness, but of clearness and obscurity. It is inexplicably uneven, as if the writer were perpetually playing on the boundary line that divides sanity of thought from intellectual chaos. There is method in the madness, but it is a method of intangible ideas. Nevertheless, there is genius written over a large portion of it, and to a musician the wealth of musical imagination is a living spring of thought."—Harold E. Gorst, in London Saturday Review (Dec. 8, 1906).

VISIONARIES

12mo. $1.50 net

Contents: A Master of Cobwebs—The Eighth Deadly Sin—The Purse of Aholibah—Rebels of the Moon—The Spiral Road—A Mock Sun—Antichrist—The Eternal Duel—The Enchanted Yodler—The Third Kingdom—The Haunted Harpsichord—The Tragic Wall—A Sentimental Rebellion—Hall of the Missing Footsteps—The Cursory Light—An Iron Fan—The Woman Who Loved Chopin—The Tune of Time—Nada—Pan.

"The author's style is sometimes grotesque in its desire both to startle and to find true expression. He has not followed those great novelists who write French a child may read and understand. He calls the moon 'a spiritual gray wafer'; it faints in 'a red wind'; 'truth beats at the bars of a man's bosom'; the sun is 'a sulphur-colored cymbal'; a man moves with 'the jaunty grace of a young elephant.' But even these oddities are significant and to be placed high above the slipshod sequences of words that have done duty till they are as meaningless as the imprint on a worn-out coin.

"Besides, in nearly every story the reader is arrested by the idea, and only a little troubled now and then by an over-elaborate style. If most of us are sane, the ideas cherished by these visionaries are insane; but the imagination of the author so illuminates them that we follow wondering and spellbound. In 'The Spiral Road' and in some of the other stories both fantasy and narrative may be compared with Hawthorne in his most unearthly moods. The younger man has read his Nietzsche and has cast off his heritage of simple morals. Hawthorne's Puritanism finds no echo in these modern souls, all sceptical, wavering and unblessed. But Hawthorne's splendor of vision and his power of sympathy with a tormented mind do live again in the best of Mr. Huneker's stories."—London Academy (Feb. 3, 1906).

CHOPIN:
The Man and His Music

WITH ETCHED PORTRAIT

12mo. $2.00

"No pianist, amateur or professional, can rise from the perusal of his pages without a deeper appreciation of the new forms of beauty which Chopin has added, like so many species of orchids, to the musical flora of the nineteenth century."—The Nation.

"I think it not too much to predict that Mr. Huneker's estimate of Chopin and his works is destined to be the permanent one. He gives the reader the cream of the cream of all noteworthy previous commentators, besides much that is wholly his own. He speaks at once with modesty and authority, always with personal charm."—Boston Transcript.

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, NEW YORK