James Huneker

“ We gaze deep into the very abyss, and discover new, whirling forms. It did not seem to be the strings of a piano that were sounding. No, every tone was like an echoing drop of water. Any one who admires the technic of art must bow before Liszt; he that is charmed with the genial, the divine gift, bows still lower. The Orpheus of our day has made tones sound through the great capital of machinery and a Copenhagener has said that 'his fingers are simply railroads and steam engines.' His genius is more powerful to bring together the great minds of the world than all the railroads on earth. ”

“ Commonplace, even provincial as are their gestures, their surroundings, we presently see the envelope of humanity melt away, and soon exposed are the real creatures, the real men and women, exposed as in a dream. It is a cruel art this that unwraps leaf by leaf the coverings of the human soul. With the average dramatist, clever though he may be, his inspiration compared to Ibsen's is like fire in a sheaf of straw—the spark glows for an instant and then there is a vivid crackling of shallow flame. We witness the illuminated edge of an idea, and then it fades into the blackness. ”

“ It is a country where the peasants tell a joke with the tears streaming down their faces and if the vodka is sufficiently fiery, will dance at a funeral. The clatter and swirl of the finale is deafening, the motto in the major key is sounded shrill, and through the movement there is noise and confusion, a hurly-burly of peasants thumping their wooden shoes and yelling like drunken maniacs. All the romance, all the world-weariness has fled to covert, and the composer is at his worst with the seven devils he has brought to his newly garnished mansion. ”

“ Baudelaire of the bitter heart! All luxury, all sin, all that is the shame and the glory of mankind is here, as in a tapestry dulled by the smoke of dreams; but as in his most sanguinary combats not a sound, not a motion comes from this canvas. When the slaves, lovely females, are thrown to the fish to fatten them for some Roman patrician's banquet, we admire the beauty of colour, the clear static style, the solidity of the architecture, but we are unmoved. If there is such a thing as disinterested art it is the claustral art of Moreau—which can be both perverse and majestic. ”

“ Sculpture is a static, not a dynamic, art; therefore, let us observe the rules, preserve the chill spirit of the cemetery! What Mallarmé attempted in poetry Rodin accomplished in clay. His marbles do not represent, but present emotion, are the evocation of emotion; as in music, form and substance coalesce. If he does not, as did Mallarmé, arouse “the silent thunder afloat in the leaves,” he summons from the vasty deep the spirits of beauty, love, hate, pain, joy, sin, ecstasy, above all, ecstasy. The primal and danger-breeding gift of ecstasy is bestowed upon few. ”

“ Bach could spin music as a spider spins its nest, from earth to the sky and back again. Did you ever hear Rubinstein play the B-flat Prelude and Fugue? If you have not, count something missed in your life. He made the prelude as light as a moonbeam, but there was thunder in the air, the clouds floated away, airy nothings in the blue, and then celestial silence. Has any modern composer written music in which is packed as much meaning, as much sorrow as may be found in the B-flat minor Prelude? It is the matrix of all modern musical emotion. ”

“ Be Egoists. There is no truth but my truth. No world but my world. I am I. And then Stirner waves away God, State, society, the family, morals, mankind, leaving only the "hateful" Ego. The cosmos is frosty and inhuman, and old Mother Earth no longer offers us her bosom as a reclining-place. Stirner has so decreed it. We are suspended between heaven and earth, like Mahomet's coffin, hermetically sealed in Self. Instead of "smiting the chord of self," we must reorchestrate the chord that it may give out richer music. (Perhaps the Higher Egoism which often leads to low selfishness.) ”

“ If the room was a laboratory, where were the retorts, the oven, the phials, the jars, the usual apparatus of a modern chemist? He saw nothing, except an old-fashioned electric fan and a few dusty books. The fireworks—were those overgrown wheels and gaunt windmills and gas-house the secret of the prince's self-banishment to this dreary coast? What dreams did he seek to incarnate on this strand, in this queer tower, locked away from the world with a charming princess—a fairy princess whose heart beat with love for the oppressed, in whose hand he might some time see the blazing torch of freedom? ”

“ Know thyself! is wisdom, but if you are sick unto death with yourself and its petty, insistent claims upon your volitions, then forget thyself! might be a sounder motto. Mona had not the temperament dynamic; nor yet was she lymphatic. In the company of Ulick she had let herself go, as will some women in the more masterful grip of the male, without relinquishing the captaincy of her inner citadel. And now she had mentally dismissed her lover, realizing in a sudden illumination that his instability, as unstable as an anchor that drags, would be a bar to their happiness. ”

“ Scheff is too fond of pleasure to do anything great. He is to give the signal—that's glory enough for him. But you, discontented American, have the stuff in you to make a martyr. We need martyrs. You hate me? Good! But you must worship Illowski. Art gives place to life, and in Illowski's music is the new life. He will sweep the globe from pole to pole, for all men understand his tones. Other gods have but prepared the way for him. No more misery, no more promises unfulfilled by the rulers of body and soul—only music, music like the air, the tides, the mountains, the moon, sun, and stars! ”

“ Whatever the fluctuations of the chameleon of the Seven Arts, the best music will be always beautiful; beautiful with the old or the new beauty. Ugliness for the sheer sake of ugliness never endures; but one must be able to define modern beauty, else find oneself in the predicament of those deaf ones who could not or would not hear the beauty of Wagner; or those blind ones who would not or could not see the characteristic truth and beauty in the pictures of Edouard Manet. The sting and glamour of the Liszt orchestral music has compelling quality. ”

“ Judged by this Chopin’s music—some of his music—is perfect. He says wonderful things in a wonderful way, and in his master eloquence his voice pierces the mist that hangs so heavily about the base of the Bach and Beethoven peaks. It is not always a sonorous voice, but it is singularly fine, sweet and penetrating. Chopin is a dreamer of dreams and not a bard, but when the sword leaps from the scabbard—O, the charm of its design! The ring of steel is the warrior’s, the voice is the voice of a man mad with patriotic passion, the shy, feminine soul is completely withdrawn. ”

“ While I am far from agreeing with those who hold that in the early Chopin all his genius was completely revealed, yet this nocturne is as striking as the last, for it is at once sensuous and dramatic, melancholy and lovely. Emphatically a mood, it is best heard on a gray day of the soul, when the times are out of joint; its silken tones will bring a triste content as they pour out upon one's hearing. The second section in octaves is of exceeding charm. As a melody it has all the lurking voluptuousness and mystic crooning of its composer. ”

“ Essence of painting, would have been a truer statement. There is no other-worldliness here, but something more normal, a suggestion of solid reality, a vision of life. The various figures breathe; so potent is their vitality that my prime impression in entering the room was a sense of the presence of others. Perhaps this is not as consummate art as the voluptuous colour-symphonies of Titian, the golden exuberance of Rubens, the abstract spacing of Raphael, the mystic opium of Rembrandt; but it is an art more akin to nature, an art that is a lens through which you may spy upon life. ”

“ It is one of the functions of music to make us feel, another to make us think; the greatest masters are ever those who make us both feel and think in one vivid moment. This Beethoven has done, Wagner has done, and now Richard Strauss. You cannot call his music frigidly intellectual, as is often the music of Brahms, nor does it relapse into such debauches of frenetic passion as Tschaïkowsky’s—the imperial intellect of Strauss controls his temperament. He is, like Nietzsche, a lyric philosopher, but never, like Nietzsche, will he allow the problems of life and art to overthrow his reason. ”

“ No one can imagine too much when the imagination is that of a poet. Baudelaire divined the work of the artist and set it down scrupulously in prose of rectitude. He did not paint pictures in prose. He did not divagate. He did not overburden his pages with technical terms. But the spirit he did disengage in a few swift phrases. The polemics of historical schools were a cross for him to bear, and he bore all his learning lightly. Like a true critic, he judged more by form than theme. There are no types; there is only life, he had cried before Jules Laforgue. ”

“ Alas! it is one of the bitter things of old age, one of its keen tortures, to listen to young people, to hear their superb boastings, and to know how short-lived is all art, music the most evanescent of them all. When I was a boy the star of Schumann was just on the rim of the horizon; what glory! what a planet swimming freely into the glorious constellation! Beethoven was clean obscured by the romantic mists that went to our heads like strong, new wine, and made us drunk with joy. How neat, dapper, respectable and antique Mendelssohn! ”

“ The full-pulsed humanity, the dramatic—yes, Brahms is dramatic, not theatric—modes of analysis, the flow, glow, and relentless tracking to their ultimate lair of motives is Browning; but the composer never loses his grip on the actualities of structure. After Chopin, Brahms? He gives us a cooling, deep draught in exchange for the sugared wormwood, the sweet, exasperated poison of the Polish charmer. A great sea is his music, and it sings about the base of that mighty mount we call Beethoven. Brahms takes us to subterrane depths; Beethoven is for the heights. ”

“ Now Hervieu does not pretend to a sympathy with either society or the church. He does not attempt to win our suffrages for the woman or for the man. His is too judicial an intellect to show partisanship, and he is too superior an artist to turn his play into a moral tract. He dives deeper than the law or society; he dives straight into the human heart, and after setting forth his situations his summing up is irrefragable. From the clash of his warring souls comes his tragedy; the divorce is a mere pretext to set his people in action. ”

“ Her ego was transformed after puberty announced itself. She was an orchestra of cells; the multiplicity of her egos astonished, yet did not distress her. She accepted the new stream of consciousness in her that had burst its barriers and painted over her imagination a fresher, more beautiful world. Of physiology and psychology she had more than the rudiments. Sex did not puzzle her, only its cabined seclusion from the general current of daily life. Her mother had been frank with her since she had reached the age of curiousness; in turn Mona was frank with her father. ”

“ His piano music is gay, is marmoreal in its repose, is passionate, is humorous, is jolly, is sad, is depressing, is morbid, recondite, poetic, fantastic and severe. He pours into the elastic form of the sonata hot romantic passion, and in the loosest textured smaller pieces he can be as immovable as bronze, as plastic as clay. He is sometimes frozen by grief and submerged by thought, but he is ever fascinating, for he has something to say and knows how to say it in an individual way. Above all he is profoundly human and touches humanity at many contacts. ”

“ Outside a veiled fumidity, behind which lurked thunderous prospects; the air was still with languorous anticipation, and the month of the year was April. He would not have been human and an artist to have withstood the dumb depression of the moment. Snatches of heavily brocaded harmonies of Chopin, mute interrogations of Brahms, and furtive glitterings of Liszt vibrated through the chamber. One sultry chord, persistently repeated and unresolved, told the temper of him who played.
It was a sober apartment; a half-score of wax tapers sang with a bunch of tuberoses a sweet duo. ”

“ Verdi has felt the moods of his poet and made them his own. The moods, the character-painting, are progressive; Otello, Iago, grow from act to act. The simple-hearted, trusting general with his agonized cry, “Miseria mia,” develops into a savage thirsting for blood; “Sangue, sangue!” he howls; he sees blood; the multitudinous music is incarnadine with it. And it is all vocal, it is written for the human voice; the voice, not the orchestra, is the centre of gravity in this astounding drama. ”

“ Madame Patel retained only one servant in her dignified, miniature household, for she was not rich; but the lamps were burning brightly, and on the table stood cold food, wine and fruit. The music-room was familiar to her late husband's associate. Patel's portrait hung over the fireplace. It represented in hard, shallow tones the face of a white-haired, white-bearded man whose thin lips, narrow nose and high forehead proclaimed him an ascetic of art. The deep-set eyes alone told of talent—their gaze inscrutable and calculating; a disappointed life could be read in every seam of the brow. ”

“ I ask if our old masters made great movements by the manifold variation of themes of a few bars, ought the like to be forbidden to a composer when a recognisably poetic thought is the moving spring? Does not invention belong to such characteristic variation? And just this movement reveals to us most clearly Liszt's profound knowledge of the real nature of music. When the hellish Devil's brood has grown to the most appalling power, then, hovering in the clouds of glory, the main theme of the Gretchen movement appears in its original, untouched beauty. ”