sively stated. Tschaikowsky is
correctly put down as a highly talented but essentially shallow
fellow--a blubberer in the regalia of a philosopher. Brahms, then still
under attack by Henry T. Finck, of the _Evening Post_ (the press-agent
of Massenet: ye gods, what Harvard can do, even to a Wuertemberger!) is
subjected to a long, an intelligent and an extremely friendly analysis;
no better has got into English since, despite too much stress on the
piano music. And Richard Strauss, yet a nine days' wonder, is described
clearly and accurately, and his true stature indicated. The rest of the
book is less noteworthy; Huneker says the proper things about Chopin,
Liszt and Wagner, and adds a chapter on piano methods, the plain fruit
of his late pedagogy. But the three chapters I have mentioned are
enough; they fell, in their time, into a desert of stupidity; they set a
standard in musical criticism in America that only Huneker himself has
ever exceeded.

The most popular of his music books, of course, is the "Chopin" (1900).
Next to "Iconoclasts," it is the best seller of them all. More, it has
been done into German, French and Italian, and is chiefly responsible
for Huneker's celebrity abroad as the only critic of music that America
has ever produced. Superficially, it seems to be a monument of pedantry,
a meticulous piling up of learning, but a study of it shows that it is
very much more than that. Compare it to Sir George Grove's staggering
tome on the Beethoven symphonies if you want to understand the
difference between mere scholastic diligence and authentic criticism.
The one is simply a top-heavy mass of disorderly facts and worshipping
enthusiasm; the other is an analysis that searches out every nook and
corner of the subject, and brings it into coherence and intelligibility.
The Chopin rhapsodist is always held in check by the sound musician;
there is a snouting into dark places as well as a touching up of high
lights. I myself am surely no disciple of the Polish tuberose--his
sweetness, in fact, gags me, and I turn even to Moszkowski for
relief--but I have read and re-read this volume with endless interest,
and I find it more bethumbed than any other Huneker book in my library,
saving only "Iconoclasts" and "Old Fogy." Here, indeed, Huneker is on
his own ground. One often feels, in his discussions of orchestral music,
that he only thinks orchestrally, like Schumann, with an effort--that
all music, in his mind, gets i