For the first two decades of this century, James Huneker was probably America's most prolific critic of the European and American creative scene. Although his early training was in music, Huneker's interests ranged over all the arts and led to his becoming a critic for New York's major magazines and newspapers and, between 1899 and 1921, to his publishing the remarkable total of sixteen volumes—one novel, two collections of short stories, biographies of Liszt and Chopin, and eleven collections of critical essays. His judgments won praise from many, including William Butler Yeats, Bernard Berenson, and Bernard Shaw, and one admirer, Edmund Wilson, acknowledged Huneker's influence on his own work. At the height of Huneker's fame, his friend, H. L. Mencken, published a laudatory article, "James Huneker." Responding to this praise, Huneker wrote to Mencken: "As for the 'J.H.' (James Huneker) it is despairingly exaggerated—why, warum, pourquoi, perche? A newspaperman in a hell of a hurry writing journalese is not to be dumped in a seat of the mighty so easily." [Letters of James Huneker, 1922]

This self evaluation was to prove prophetic, and today only two of Huneker's books—-nopin (New York, 1900) and Ivory Apes and Peacocks (New York, 1915)—are in print. Moreover, scholars sneeringly view him as a journalist, a popularizer, an appreciator without critical standards. That he had standards, however, is implicit in his letter to Mencken; clearly Huneker saw the difference between first-class writing and the kind that may result from the exigencies of newspaper deadlines, and when he put a newspaper article between covers, he took care to revise it. Thus much of his criticism, in addition to its historical significance, has the cogency of an informed, well-planned argument.

James Gibbons Huneker was born in Philadelphia in 1857. His father, a well-to-do house painter with intellectual leanings, had wanted his son to become a lawyer, but the son, who was immersed in studying the piano and reading voraciously and who had greatly upset his father by visiting the likes of Walt Whitman in nearby Camden, New Jersey, had no intention of sacrificing a life in the arts to the world of torts and briefs. In 1878 Huneker left Philadelphia for Paris where he continued his piano studies in the hope of making a career as a virtuoso. Although he came to realize that he lacked the technical equipment to fulfill this hope, his Paris stay was to prove invaluable, giving him first-hand contact with European artistic life and the opportunity to comment about it in letters written to the Philadelphia Bulletin. These formed the foundation for his career in journalism. Returning to America in 1879, he settled ultimately in 1886 in New York City, teaching piano at The National Conservatory and writing free-lance articles for newspapers and magazines. The favorable reception of his first book, Mezzotints in Modern Music (New York, 1899), led to prominent positions on New York's major newspapers, The Times, The Sun, and The World for which he wrote music, drama, and literary criticism. Often he was sent by these papers to Europe, assignments that enabled him to meet among others Joseph Conrad, Claude Debussy, and Richard Strauss. The many books Huneker wrote during this time did not prevent his remaining an active journalist throughout his life, and his last publication was a brief review for The World of the Boston Symphony Orchestra's Carnegie Hall concert on February 5, 1921. Four days later, Huneker died.

Eight years after his death Mencken collected some of his essays in a memorial volume [Essays by James Huneker 1929]; in its introduction Mencken noted: "The young professors who write literary history for sophomores seldom mention him today, but there was more in him than all their N. P. Willises and Charles Dudley Warners—nay than in their Lowells and Howellses." Doubtless this praise is tinged with Mencken's iconoclasm and some lack of objectivity that must have resulted from the friendship he shared with Huneker. Indeed, Howells and Huneker had mutual admirations, Tolstoy and Henry James among them, but Huneker was from a later generation than Howells and travelled newer roads. Edmund Wilson, in a position to write more objectively than Mencken, saw in Huneker's criticism the only comments of the time "of any real value … on the artistic life of Europe." [A Literary Chronicle: 1920-1950, 1956]

Wilson's and Mencken's praise notwithstanding, many factors explain Huneker's declining reputation. For one thing his output is uneven, and some of his pieces, although valuable in their day, are now dated. Many, however, are not, but with their careless factual inaccuracies, occasionally slipshod style, and irreverent tone seem unscholarly. What "scholar," after all, would call a play "art with a capital F"? But all this simply comes down to is that Huneker's work, although lacking the formal dress of scholarship, is nevertheless infused with its spirit. Allusive and suggestive, his essays differ from traditional scholarship as the imaginative professor differs from his traditional colleague. The latter often gives a well-ordered lecture, apparently covering everything and providing his students with the illusion that his subject has been wrung dry; the former, in contrast, makes no attempt to present a seemingly all-inclusive, Harvard-outline-styled talk. Instead he speaks around his subject, stimulating a variety of ideas and opening new channels of thought that kindle his students' imaginations. Huneker's criticism is often of this order. It abounds with ideas, which when carefully gleaned, suggest further thought. A good case in point are these remarks about James's Wings of the Dove:

The fiction of the future! It is an idea that propounds itself after reading the Wings of the Dove. Here at last is the companion work to the modern movement in music, sculpture, and painting. Why prose should lag behind its sister arts I do not know; possibly because every drayman and pothouse politician is supposed to speak it. But any one who has dipped into that well of English undefiled, the seventeenth-century literature, must realize that today [1904] we write parlous and bastard prose. It is not, however, splendid, stately rhythmic prose that Mr. James essays or ever has essayed. For him the "steam-dried" style of Pater, as Brander Matthews cruelly calls it, has never offered attractions.… It is from the great effortless art of the Russian master [Turgenev] that Mr. James mainly derives. But Turgenev is only one form of an influence, and not a continuing one. Hawthorne it was in whom Mr. James first planted his faith; the feeling that Hawthorne's love of the moral problem still obsesses the living artist is not missed in his newer books. The Puritan lurks in James, though a Puritan tempered by culture, by a humanism possible only in this age. Mr. James made the odious work, and still more odious quality of cosmopolitanism a thing of rare delight. In his newer manner, be it never so cryptic, his Americans abroad suffer a rich sea change, and from Daisy Miller to Milly Theale is the chasm of many years of tempered culture … Perhaps it is her [Daisy's] latest sister, Milly, whose dovelike wings hover about the selfish souls of her circle, that is the purer embodiment of an artistic dream. [Overtones, 1904]

This may not be exhaustive criticism (many of Huneker's ideas are amplified later in the essay), but with a couple of hundred words and writing as a contemporary observer without the benefit of "scholarship" to draw upon, Huneker calls to mind a spate of ideas, summarizing the traditions that influenced James and the continuity of tradition in James's heroines, specifying the break with tradition in James's late prose style, and recognizing the clear moral line James draws between Milly Theale and the debased society in which she is forced to plunge.

And it must be remembered that these are the insights of a man whose profession was rooted in music. But this, perhaps, is what makes Huneker's achievements special: his musical bent, rather than confining him, encouraged exploration into various areas of creativity, sparking his interest in literature and art. How his work was consequently affected is best illustrated by letting Huneker speak for himself. The passage that follows comes from "The Greater Chopin" (Mezzotints in Modern Music) and comprises the essay's fifth section.

In the city of Boston, January 19, 1809, a son was born to David and Elizabeth Poe. On March 1, 1809, in the little village of Zela-zowa-Wola, twenty-eight miles from Warsaw, in Poland, a son was born to Nicholas and Justina Chopin. The American is known to the world as Edgar Allan Poe, the poet; the Pole as Frederic Francois Chopin, the composer. October 7, 1849, Edgar Poe died neglected in Washington Hospital at Baltimore, and October 17,1849, Frederic Chopin expired in Paris surrounded by loving friends. Poe and Chopin never knew of each other's existence yet—a curious coincidence—two supremely melancholy artists of the beautiful lived and died almost synchronously.

It would be a strained parallel to compare Chopin and Poe at many points yet the chronological events referred to, are not the only comparisons that might be made without the fear or flavor of affection. There are parallels in the soullives as well as in the earth-lives of these two men—Poe and Chopin seem ever youthful—that may be drawn without extravagance. True, the roots of Chopin's culture were more richly nurtured than Poe's, but the latter, like a spiritual air plant, derived his sustenance none know how. Of Poe's forbears we may hardly form any adequate conception; his learning was not profound, despite his copious quotations from almost forgotten and recondite authors; yet his lines to Helen were written in boyhood. The poet in his case was indeed born, not made. Chopin, we know, had careful training from the faithful Elsner; but who could have taught him to write his opus 2, the variations over which Schumann rhapsodized, or even that gem, his E flat nocturne—now, alas! somewhat stale from conservatory usage?

Both these men, fledged in their gifts, sprang from the Jovian brain and, while they both improved in the technics of their art, their individualities were at the outset as sharply defined as were their limitations. Read Poe's "To Helen", and tell me if he made more exquisite music in his later years. You remember it:

Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy naïad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome.

I refrain from giving the third verse; but are not these lines remarkable in beauty of imagination and diction when one considers they were penned by a youngster scarcely out of his teens!

Now glance at Chopin's earlier effusions, his opus 1, a rondo in C minor; his opus 2 already referred to; his opus 3, the C major polonaise for 'cello and piano; his opus 5, the Rondeau a la Mazur in F; his opus 6, the first four mazourkas, perfect of their kind; opus 7, more mazourkas; opus 8, the G minor trio, the classicism of which you may dispute; nevertheless it contains lovely music. Then follow the nocturnes, the concerto in F minor, the latter begun when Chopin was only twenty, and so on through the list. Both men died at forty—the very prime of life, when the natural forces are acting freest, when the overwrought passions of youth had begun to mellow and yet there were several years before the close, a distinct period of decadence, almost deterioration. I am conscious of the critical claims of those who taste in both Poe's and Chopin's later music the exquisite quality of the over-ripe, the savor of morbidity.

Beautiful as it is, Chopin's polonaise-fantaisie opus 61, with its hectic flush—in its most musical, most melancholy cadences—gives us a premonition of death. Composed three years before he died, it has the taint of the tomb about it and, like the A minor mazourka, said by Klindworth to be Chopin's last composition, the sick brain is heard in the morbid insistence of the theme, of the weary "wherefore?" in every bar. Is not this iteration like Poe's in his last period? Real "Ulalume" with its haunting, harrowing harmonies:

Then my heart it grew ashen and sober,
As the leaves that were crisped and sere—
As the leaves that were withering and sere.

In terror she spoke, letting sink her
Wings until they trailed in the dust—
In agony sobbed, letting sink her
Plumes till they trailed in the dust—
Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust.

This poem, in which sense swoons into sound, has all the richness of color, the dangerous glow of the man whose brain is perilously near the point of unhingement.

Poe then, like Chopin, did not die too soon. Morbid, neurotic natures, they lived their lives with the intensity that Walter Pater declares is the only true life. "To burn always with his hard, gem-like flame," he writes "to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. Failure is to form habits."

Certainly Chopin and Poe fulfilled in their short existences these conditions. They burned ever with the flame of genius and that flame devoured their brains as surely as paresis. Their lives, in the ordinary Philistine or Plutus-like sense, were failures; uncompromising failures. They were not citizens after the conjugal manner nor did they accumulate pelf. They certainly failed to form habits and, while the delicacy of the Pole prevented his indulging in the nightside Bohemianism of the American, he nevertheless contrived to outrage social and ethical canons. Poe, it is said, was a drunkard, though recent researches develop the fact that but one glass of brandy drove him into delirium. Possibly like Baudelaire, his disciple and translator, he indulged in some deadly drug or perhaps congenital derangement, such as masked epilepsy, or some cerebral disorder, colored his daily actions with the semblance of arrant dissipation and recklessness.

There are two Poes known to his various friends. A few knew the one, many the other; some knew both men. A winning, poetic personality, a charming man of the world, electric in speech and with an eye of genius—a creature with a beautiful brain, said many. Alas! the other; a sad-eyed wretch with a fixed sneer, a bitter, uncurbed tongue that lashed alike friend and foe, a sot, a libertine, a gambler—God! what has not Edgar Allan Poe been called! We all know that Griswold distorted the picture, but some later critics have declared that Poe, despite his angelic treatment of his cousin-wife Maria Clemm, was not a man of irreproachable habits.

This much I have heard; at the time Poe lived in Philadelphia, where he edited a magazine for Burton or Graham—I forget which—my father met him several times at the houses of Judge Conrad and John Sartain, the latter the steel engraver. Poe, my father has repeatedly told me, was a slender, nervous man, very reticent, very charming in manner, though, like Chopin, disposed to a certain melancholy hauteur; both men were probably poseurs. But after one glass of wine or spirits Poe became an uncontrollable demon;—his own demon of perversity; and poetry and blasphemy poured from his lips. John Sartain has told of a midnight tramp he took with Poe, in the midst of a howling storm, in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, to prevent him from attempting his life. This enigmatic man, like Chopin, lived a double life, but his surroundings were different and this particular fact must be accented.

America was not a pleasant place for an artist a half century ago. William Blake the poet-seer wrote: "The ages are all equal but genius is always above its age." Poe was certainly above his age—a trafficking time in the history of the country, when commerce ruled and little heed was given to the beautiful. N. P. Willis, Poe's best friend, counsellor and constant helper, wrote pale proper verse while Poe made a bare living by writing horrific tales wherein his marvellous powers of analysis and description found play and pay. But oh! the pity of it all! The waste of superior talent—of absolute genius. The divine spark that was crushed out, trampled in the mud and made to do duty as a common tallow dip! One is filled with horror at the thought of a kindred poetic nature also being cast in the prosaic atmosphere of this country; for if Chopin had not had success at Prince Valentine Radziwill's soiree in Paris in the year 1831 he would certainly have tried his luck in the New World, and do you not shudder at the idea of Chopin's living in the United States in 1831?

Fancy those two wraiths of genius, Poe and Chopin, in this city of New York! Chopin giving piano lessons to the daughters of wealthy aristocrats of the Battery, Poe encountering him at some conversazione—they had conversaziones then—and propounding to him Heine-like questions: "Are the roses at home still in their flame-hued pride?" "Do the trees still sing as beautifully in the moonlight?"

They would have understood one another at a glance. Poe was not a whit inferior in sensibility to Chopin. Balzac declared that if Chopin drummed on a bare table, his fingers made subtle-sounding music. Poe, like Balzac, would have felt the drummed tears in Chopin's play, while Chopin in turn could not have failed to divine the tremulous vibrations of Poe's exquisitely strung nature. What a meeting it would have been, but again, what inevitable misery for the Polish poet!

A different tale might be told if Poe had gone to Paris and enjoyed some meed of success! How the fine flower of his genius would have bloomed into fragrance if nourished in such congenial soil! We would probably not have had, to such a desperate extent the note of melancholia, so sweetly despairing or despairingly sweet, that we now enjoy in his writings—a note eminently Gothic and Christian. Goethe's "Nur wer die Sehnsucht Kennt" is as true of Poe as of Heine, of Baudelaire, of Chopin, of Schumann, of Shelley, of Leopardi, of Byron, of Keats, of Alfred de Musset, of Senancour, of Amiel—of all that choir of lacerated lives which wreak themselves in expression. One is well reminded here of Baudelaire who wrote of the ferocious absorption in the pursuit of beauty, by her votaries. Poe and Chopin all their lives were tortured by the desire of beauty, by the vision of perfection. Little reckoned they of that penalty which must be paid by men of genius, and has been paid from Tasso to Swift and from Poe and Baudelaire to Guy de Maupassant.

Frederic Chopin's culture was not necessarily of a finer stamp than Edgar Poe's, nor was his range wider. Both men were narrow in sympathies though intense to the point of poignancy and rich in mood-versatility. Both were born aristocrats; purple raiment became them well and both were sadly deficient in genuine humor—the Attic salt that conserves while mocking itself. Irony both possessed to a superlative degree and both believed in the rhythmical creation of lyrical beauty and in the harm of evanescence. Poe declared, in his dogmatic manner, that a long poem could not exist. He restricted the poetical art in form and length, and furthermore insisted that "Beauty of whatever kind in its supreme development invariably excites a sensitive soul to tears." The note of melancholy was to him the one note worthy the singing. And have we not a parallel in Chopin's music?

He is morbid, there is no gainsaying it and, like Poe, is at his best in smaller art forms. When either artist spreads his pinions for symphonic flights, we are reminded of Matthew Arnold's poetical description of Shelley "beating in the void his luminous wings in vain." Poe and Chopin mastered supremely, as Henry James would say, their intellectual instruments. They are lyrists and their attempts at the epical are usually distinguished failures.

Exquisite artificers in precious cameos, these two men are of a consanguinity because of their devotion to Our Ladies of Sorrow, the Mater Lachrymarum, the Mater Suspiriorum and the Mater Tenebrarum of Thomas De Quincey. If the Mater Malorum—Mother of Evil—presided over their lives, they never in their art became as Baudelaire, a sinister "Israfel of the sweet lute." Whatever their personal shortcomings, the disorders of their lives found no reflex beyond that of melancholy. The notes of revolt, of anger, of despair there area but of impurity, no trace whatsoever. Poe's women—those ethereal creatures whose slim necks, willowy figures, radiant eyes and velvet footfalls, encircled in an atmosphere of purity—Poe's women, while not being the womanly woman beloved of William Wordsworth, are after all unstained by any morbidities.

Poe ever professed in daily life, whatever he may have practised, the highest reverence for "das ewig Weibliche" and not less so Chopin, who was fastidious and a very stickler for the more minute proprieties of life. Am I far fetched in my simile when I compare the nature of Poe and Chopin! Take the latter's preludes for example, tiny poems, and parallel them to such verse of Poe's as the "Haunted Palace", "Eulalie", "Annabel Lee", "Eldorado", "The Conqueror Worm" or that incomparable bit, "Israfel":

   In Heaven a spirit doth dwell
Whose heart-strings are a lute
 None sing so wildly well
 As the Angel Israfel.

Poe's haunting melodies, his music for music's sake, often remind us of Chopin. The euphonious, the well sounding, the wohlklang, was carried almost beyond the pitch of endurance, by both artists. They had however some quality of self-restraint as well as the vices of their virtues; we may no longer mention "The Raven" or "The Bells" with equanimity, nor can we endure listening to the E flat nocturne or the D flat valse. In the latter case repetition has dulled the ears for enjoyment; in the former case the obvious artificiality of both poems, despite their many happy conceits, jars on the spiritual ear. The bulk of Chopin's work is about comparable to Poe's. Neither man was a copious producer and both carried the idea of perfection to insanity's border. Both have left scores of imitators but in Poe's case a veritable school has been founded; in Chopin's the imitations have been feeble and sterile.

Following Poe we have unquestionably Algernon Charles Swinburne, who is doubly a reflection of Poe, for he absorbed Poe's alliterative system, and from Charles Baudelaire his mysticism, plus Baudelaire's malificence, to which compound he added the familiar Swinburnian eroticism. Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett-Browning felt Poe's influence, if but briefly, while in France and Belgium he has produced a brood of followers beginning with the rank crudities of Gaboriau, in his detective stories, modelled after "The Murder in the Rue Morgue"; the Belgian Maeterlinck, who juggles with Poe's motives of fear and death, Baudelaire, a French Poe with an abnormal flavor of Parisian depravity super-added and latterly that curious group, the decadents, headed by Verlaine, and Stephen Mallarme. Poe has made his influence felt in England too, notably upon James Thomson, the poet of "The City of Dreadful Night" and in Ireland, in the sadly sympathetic figure of James Clarence Mangan. Of Chopin's indirect influence on the musical world I would not care to dilate fearing you would accuse me of exaggeration. Liszt would not have been a composer—at least for the piano, if he had not nested in Chopin's brain. As I said before, I certainly believe that Wagner profited greatly by Chopin's discoveries in chromatic harmonies, discoveries without which modern music would yet be in diatonic swaddling clothes.

On one point Poe and Chopin were as dissimilar as the poles; the point of nationality. Poe wrote in the English tongue but beyond that he was no more American than he was English. His milieu was unsympathetic, and he refused to be assimilated by it. His verse and his prose depict character and situations that belong to no man's land—to that region East of the moon and West of the sun. In his "Eldorado" he poetically locates the country wherein his soul dramas occur. Thus he sings:

"Over the mountains
  Of the moon
Down the valley of the shadow,
  Ride, boldly ride,"
  The shade replied,
"If you seek for Eldorado."

His creations are mostly bodiless and his verse suggests the most subtle imagery. Shadow of shadows, his prose possesses the same spectral quality. Have you read those two perfect pastels—"Silence" and "Shadow"? If not, you know not the genius of Edgar Allan Poe. Chopin is more human than Poe, inasmuch as he is patriotic. His polonaises are, as Schumann said, "cannons buried in flowers." He is Chopin and he is also Poland though Poland is by no means Chopin. In his polonaises, in his mazourkas, the indefinable Polish Zal lurks, a drowsy perfume. Chopin struck many human chords; some of his melodies belong to that Poe-like region wherein beauty incarnate reigns and is worshipped for itself. This then is the great dissimilarity between the artist in tone and the artist in words. Poe had no country; Chopin had Poland. If Chopin's heart had been exposed "Poland" might have been found blazoned upon it.

But, if Poe lacked political passion he had the passion for the beautiful. Both men resembled one another strangely, in their intensity of expression. Both had the power of expressing the weird, the terrific, and Chopin in his scherzi, thunders from heights that Poe failed to scale. The ethical motif was, curiously enough, absent in both and both despised the "heresy of instruction." Art for art's sake, beauty for beauty's sake alone, was their shibboleth.

Criticism of this kind may no longer be in vogue, but style is ephemeral and imagination permanent. The free play that Huneker gave his imagination in comparing Poe and Chopin is in many ways typical of his work. Of course the defects of that work—factual errors and impressionistic subjectivity about music—are present, but so too are its virtues: indirectly Huneker had contact with Poe and Chopin, his father having known Poe and Huneker himself having studied piano with Chopin's most famous pupil, George Mathias. In short, Huneker was "that man"; he "was there," providing a first-hand contact with tradition that today can be experienced only vicariously. Close to Poe's time, Huneker recognized how the intellectual climate of Poe's period was unconducive to Poe's special talents. What is more Huneker saw how Poe and Chopin shared a mastery of morbid miniature. Naturally, it is easy to disdain Huneker's fantasies of a meeting between Poe and Chopin and of how each might have fared in the other's country. But from such fantasies emerge realities, and one is reminded of how Europe, on the foundation of centuries of tradition, was far more able than the stripling United States to nourish the artistic temperament.

Ultimately this Poe-Chopin comparison illustrates that Huneker, unlike today's "scholar," was no specialist; his one abiding belief was in art, not of course with an F, but with an A. What interested him most was the glory of the creative process, the way in which one mind created order, how that mind had been influenced by another and then became an influence itself. Thus he saw Chopin's antecedents in Bach and Wagner's in Chopin's, the vapidity of Liszt's virtuoso piano pieces, Brahms as a Beethovenian classicist, and Wagner's influence on Schoenberg. He was well ahead of his time in granting Johannes Brahms, Claude Debussy, Joseph Conrad, Bernard Shaw, Henrik Ibsen, and Henry James a place among the immortals. After hearing the world premiere of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire in 1912 and thoroughly disliking it, he nonetheless analyzed the score carefully, an analysis that led him to predict with astonishing accuracy "the old tonal order changed forever." [Ivory Apes and Peacocks]

To appreciate Huneker's accomplishments one has only to ask who is today's Huneker? Who is the critic picking from among today's novelists, playwrights, and composers the ones who will survive in seventy-five years? Viewed in this light Huneker's achievements are substantial. And equally important he exemplified something that today is evanescent: he was not "a Chopin man," "a James man," or "a Shaw man"; he was his own man living deeply in the artistic life of his time. Reading Huneker puts us in touch with that life and serves as a reminder of how criticism itself may be imaginative and creative.