SOURCE: "Huneker's Criticism of French Literature," in The French Review, Vol. XIV, No. 24, December, 1940, pp. 130-37.

Several years ago I attempted a study of American criticism of French literature. I wanted to discover which American critics had written most copiously and most discerningly about the literature of France. I began by excluding from my study, perhaps a little arbitrarily, those writers who appeared to me to be book reviewers or literary historians, rather than critics. And I excluded also those critics whose work, since they were still alive, remained unfinished.

It soon became apparent that almost all the criticism of the kind I had in mind was written between 1865 and the present time. Criticism is one of those literary forms which invariably develop last. First comes the creative impulse, to be followed later by the urge to analyze. Therefore it is not surprising that American writers produced but little criticism of any kind during the Colonial Period. From 1815 to 1865 there were, of course, good critics. But they did not seem much interested in French literature. Emerson's essay on Montaigne, in Representative Men, and Lowell's essay on Rousseau, in Among My Books, are among the few exceptions to the rule.

After the Civil War a number of able critics turned their eyes toward France. The earliest of these is Henry James, whose book French Poets and Novelists appeared in 1878. James was followed by Brander Matthews, author of French Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century, published in 1901. Then came James Huneker, with Egoists, in 1909, and Irving Babbitt, with Masters of French Criticism, in 1912. These are the outstanding American critics of French literature. A secondary list would include Lafcadio Hearn, Vance Thompson, Amy Lowell, and Stuart P. Sherman.

Henry James is the most voluminous American critic of French literature, having contributed to American and British periodicals more than ninety essays on the subject. Brander Matthews is the pioneer in French drama during the second half of the nineteenth century, and the author of an important Life of Moliere. Irving Babbitt is the official interpreter of French critics. He is also, of course, the chief authority on Rousseau and Romanticism. James, Matthews, and Babbitt all practice, however, that kind of criticism which is sometimes called "dogmatic". They assume that life and art are founded on certain definite principles, and that these principles are very clearly perceptible to themselves. A much less sanguine, and therefore far more stimulating, critic is James Huneker. Huneker is always the brilliant impressionist. Like Anatole France in La Vie Litteraire, he "relates the adventures of his soul in the midst of masterpieces."

In Steeplejack, his autobiography, James Gibbons Huneker states that his mother taught him in his teens "to love the noble literature of Bossuet and of Lacordaire." "I lay the blame on the Exposition of 1879," he says, "for my subsequent running away to Paris." When Huneker left Philadelphia to sail for France he was eighteen. He bought a fourth-class passage on a French Line steamship for the alluring price of twenty-eight dollars. He was going to Paris ostensibly to study music. It was his sojourn there, however, that was largely responsible for his determination to become a critic, not only of music, but also of literature and the other arts.

Upon his arrival in Paris the young man was temporarily overwhelmed. His French, he had already discovered on shipboard, was not the language spoken in France. The Latin Quarter was not the same as that described in Murger's Vie de Boheme. Some friends of his parents undertook to show him the city, but in the end their mania for visiting churches irked him beyond endurance. He decided to take matters into his own hands, and rented a room on the top floor of an old house in the Rue Puteaux.

Huneker's room contained a bed, a wash-stand, a wardrobe, a stove, and an antiquated upright piano. He practiced playing from six to ten hours every day. All the other lodgers objected, and one old lady told him that his playing reminded her of the time, eight years earlier, when Paris had been bombarded by the Prussians. In the meantime he was often hungry. On such occasions he would sometimes go to bed and lie there with a heavy volume of Chopin's music on his stomach.

On November 14,1878, Huneker sent a letter to the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. It was printed, and from then until the following summer he sent a letter to the paper every week. Each letter netted him five dollars. When his monthly check arrived, he would eat his fill of steak a la Chateaubriand and Brussels sprouts, accompanied by a bottle of Burgundy wine.

Huneker saw Victor Hugo half a dozen times. He thought him "a commonplace old gentleman, with a white clipped beard and the inevitable umbrella of the prudent Parisian." Hugo usually rode on the top of an omnibus, and was always saluted by bared heads. "It's Monsieur Hugo, the great poet," whispered a conductor as the illustrious Frenchman nimbly mounted to the imperiale. His eyes alone proclaimed the fire of genius. "They burnt in his head like lamps."

One day, at the Cafe Sylvain, Huneker spied Guy de Maupassant. The burly young fellow was enjoying a glass of beer. He looked decidedly uninteresting. On another day, in the Rue Saint-Lazare, Gustave Flaubert went striding by. He was "huge, veritable Viking, with the long, drooping mustache of a trooper, and big blue eyes in a large red face."

One of the literary figures whom Huneker found most fascinating was Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Of him he writes: "He was the greatest liar I ever met… He was an accomplished monologuist, and needed but a vinegar-cruet as an audience." Huneker marvelled at his novel, I'Eve future, whose heroine was a woman made of steel springs, and whose hero was no one less than Thomas A. Edison.

Huneker frequented not only the Louvre but also the Trocadero, being deeply interested in contemporary art. Among the reigning painters in 1878 were Meissonnier, Carolus-Duran, and Cabanel, "whose Venus painted with a brush dipped in soft soap," he says, "may be seen smiling on a couch of sea-foam at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts." He was much impressed by Carolus-Duran, the teacher of John Singer Sargent, "with his velvet jacket, lace collar and cuffs, dark, handsome head, and eyes sparkling with diabolic verve."

Meanwhile poor Huneker was refused admission to the Paris Conservatory of Music. He prepared for his examination by going to church daily for a week. But God declined to overlook his technical shortcomings. "Quelle barbe!" exclaimed one of the ladies present, when he made his first appearance with a fluffy blond beard attached to the end of his chin. He was much too frightened to play his best. Consequently he failed to pass the examination.

A little later Huneker went to Italy to consult the director of the conservatory at Bologna. On the way back to Paris he spent three days in the vicinity of Lake Geneva. There he visited Rousseau's birthplace, the cathedral where Calvin preached, and Voltaire's estate at Ferney. Once more in Paris, he soon deserted it in favor of Auteuil, where he was welcomed by his friend Vance Thompson, the American poet and author of French Portraits. Thompson lived in a villa which had been purchased by the great Boileau in 1685. Auteuil had been the home of Benjamin Franklin, and of that Madame Helvetius whom Franklin wished to marry. The place was fraught with memories of Lamartine, Hugo, Balzac, George Sand, Musset, and the Goncourt brothers.

At length Huneker returned to America. In 1886, determined to become a writer, he went to live in New York. But later he revisited Europe many times. And never, up to his death in 1921, did he lose his interest in the poets, dramatists, and novelists of France.

Nearly all of Huneker's essays on French literature first came out in papers like The Philadelphia Bulletin, The New York Sun, and The New York Times. Some, however, appeared originally in The Atlantic Monthly, Smart Set, The North American Review, and Scribner's Magazine. The best were subsequently reprinted, together with other essays, in the many volumes published by the author between 1904 and 1921.

Following, in chronological order, are the names of the volumes that contain Huneker's essays on French literature: Overtones, Iconoclasts, Egoists, The Pathos of Distance, Ivory, Apes and Peacocks, Unicorns, Bedouins, and Variations. These books include chapters on Balzac, Maeterlinck, Anatole France, Barrès, Huysmans, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Gautier, Verlaine, Bergson, George Sand, and several others less well known. Approximately twenty French writers are discussed. Most of them belong to the second half of the nineteenth century, and more than half are novelists.

"My favorite book," says Huneker, "is Egoists." It is, at any rate, in Egoists that we find six of the author's most important essays on French literature. It contains chapters on Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Anatole France, Huysmans, and Barrès, not to mention Ernest Hello and Francis Poictevin. By studying five of these chapters, beginning with the one on Stendhal, we can obtain some insight into the critic's method as applied to novelists.

Huneker wrote the Stendhal essay thirty years ago, before Henry Beyle was widely known in the United States as one of the great masters of the French psychological novel. He refers to Stendhal as "the most personal of writers," "the Superman of his day," and as "the Paul Pry of psychologists." "The queen of Stendhal women," he affirms, "is Gina, la duchesse Sanseverina.… That loveable lady, with the morals of a grande dame out of the Italian Renaissance, will never die. A more vital woman has not swept through literature since the Elizabethans." But he adds that "love for Stendhal was without a Beyond.… (He) left the soul out of his scheme of life.… For this reason his windows do not open upon eternity."

Part of Huneker's enthusiasm for Gustave Flaubert resulted from their chance encounter, already mentioned, in the streets of Paris. In his essay he calls Flaubert "the most artistic of novelists" and "a man in love with beautiful sounds." "It is almost touching," he thinks, "in these times when a man goes into the writing business as if vending tripe, to recall the example of Flaubert, for whom art was more sacred than a religion.… Dual in temperament, he swung from an almost barbaric Romanticism to a cruel analysis of life that made him the pontiff of the Realistic school … Since Madame Bovary French fiction, for the most part, has been Flaubert with variations."

Huneker begins his essay on Anatole France by making the usual comparison with Renan, whose gifts of "irony and pity" France inherited. "Pagan in his irony, his pity wholly Christian, Anatole France has in him," asserts the critic, "something of Petronius and not a little of Saint Francis." "Few writers," he continues, "swim so easily under such a heavy burden of erudition.… The full flowering of France's knowledge and imagination in things patristic and archeologic is to be seen in Thaïs, a masterpiece of color and construction. A monument of erudition, thick with pages of jewelled prose, Thais is a book to be savored slowly and never forgotten.… Smooth in his transitions, replete with sensitive rejections … a lover and a master of large luminous words … the very marrow of the man is in his unique style."

Huneker's essay on Huysmans, like the one on Stendhal, was to some extent the work of a pioneer. From the writings of Huysmans, the critic observes, "pessimism is never absent; his firmament is clotted with black stars.… The soul in its primordial darkness interests him, and he describes it with the same penetrating prose as he does the carcass of an animal.… Of superior interest is (Huysmans') struggle up the ladder to (spiritual) perfection. This painful feat is slowly accomplished in la Cathedrale, l'Oblat, and Lourdes."

In his essay on Maurice Barrès, Huysmans first describes that writer's philosophy during the earlier part of his career. "The proper study of Maurice Barrès," according to the critic, "was Maurice Barrès.… He boldly proclaimed the culte du moi.… The impressionism which permeates (Le Jardin de Bérénice) is a veritable lustration for those weary of commonplace modern fiction.… With the advent, in 1897, of les Déracinés, a sharp change in style may be noted. It is the sociological novel in all its thorny efflorescence."

The passages quoted above represent James Huneker's criticism of five French novelists of the nineteenth century. What, having perused these passages, is one to conclude with regard to the critic's grasp of his subject and with regard to the manner in which his impressions are recorded? This is a question which cannot, of course, be answered to the satisfaction of everyone. Moreover it is a problem whose solution is of special rather than of general interest. I believe, nevertheless, that one or two characteristics of Huneker's criticism are easily ascertainable and perhaps worth mentioning.

Anyone who studies the criticism of French literature produced by Henry James, by Brander Matthews, and even by Irving Babbitt becomes aware of a certain element which is totally lacking in the criticism of Huneker. I refer to the tendency, especially marked in the case of Henry James, to introduce into the judgment of a work of art the question of morality. This is something that Huneker virtually never does. For better or for worse he judges a piece of literature on its merits as an artistic production, without regard to whether or not it seems to bolster up this or that preconceived standard of human behavior.

No reader of Huneker's criticism can fail to be impressed with the man's astonishing background. His criticism is, to an extraordinary degree, allusive. In discussing a certain writer he invariably refers to other writers who preceded him. He refers to still other writers, the man's contemporaries, who were working in foreign lands and in foreign languages. Not content with this, he introduces painters and musicians, past and present, domiciled in every country of Europe. Such allusions would be worthless were they culled from an encyclopedia. But in the case of Huneker one knows that he is perfectly acquainted, through untiring study, with the men and works whereof he speaks.

One of the most remarkable things about Huneker's criticism is his literary style. It is far from possessing the meticulous perfection or the suave urbanity to be found in that of Henry James. It is, however, a forceful style, replete with life and color. It is the style of a man who is not only sensitive to beauty, but who is also able to react to beauty, or to ugliness, with refreshing youthfulness and vigor. Huneker is original, if not always discreet, in his choice of metaphors. He it was who called Brunetiere a "constipated critic," and Bergson "the playboy of western philosophy."