tself translated into terms of piano
music. In dealing with Chopin no such transvaluation of values is
necessary; the raw materials are ready for his uses without preparation;
he is wholly at home among the black keys and white.

His "Liszt" is a far less noteworthy book. It is, in truth, scarcely a
book at all, but merely a collection of notes for a book, some of them
considerably elaborated, but others set down in the altogether. One
reads it because it is about Liszt, the most fantastic figure that ever
came out of Hungary, half devil and half clown; not because there is any
conflagration of ideas in it. The chapter that reveals most of Huneker
is the appendix on latter-day piano virtuosi, with its estimates of such
men as de Pachmann, Rosenthal, Paderewski and Hofmann. Much better stuff
is to be found in "Overtones," "The Pathos of Distance" and "Ivory, Apes
and Peacocks"--brilliant, if not always profound studies of Strauss,
Wagner, Schoenberg, Moussorgsky, and even Verdi. But if I had my choice
of the whole shelf, it would rest, barring the "Chopin," on "Old
Fogy"--the _scherzo_ of the Hunekeran symphony, the critic taking a
holiday, the Devil's Mass in the tonal sanctuary. In it Huneker is at
his very choicest, making high-jinks with his Davidsbund of one,
rattling the skeletons in all the musical closets of the world. Here,
throwing off his critic's black gown, his lays about him right and left,
knocking the reigning idols off their perches; resurrecting the old, old
dead and trying to pump the breath into them; lambasting on one page and
lauding on the next; lampooning his fellow critics and burlesquing their
rubber stamp fustian; extolling Dussek and damning Wagner; swearing
mighty oaths by Mozart, and after him, Strauss--not Richard, but Johann!
The Old Fogy, of course, is the thinnest of disguises, a mere veil of
gossamer for "Editor" Huneker. That Huneker in false whiskers is
inimitable, incomparable, almost indescribable. On the one hand, he is a
prodigy of learning, a veritable warehouse of musical information, true,
half-true and apocryphal; on the other hand, he is a jester who delights
in reducing all learning to absurdity. Reading him somehow suggests
hearing a Bach mass rescored for two fifes, a tambourine in B, a wind
machine, two tenor harps, a contrabass oboe, two banjos, eight tubas and
the usual clergy and strings. The substance is there; every note is
struck exactly in the middle--but what outla