"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.