ourg; one leaves them behind with the French pilot. Even the
Czech-Irish hypothesis (or is it Magyar-Irish?) has a smell of the
lamp. Perhaps it should be Irish-Czech....

Sec. 7

There remain the books of stories, "Visionaries" and "Melomaniacs." It
is not surprising to hear that both are better liked in France and
Germany than in England and the United States. ("Visionaries" has even
appeared in Bohemian.) Both are made up of what the Germans call
_Kultur-Novellen_--that is, stories dealing, not with the emotions
common to all men, but with the clash of ideas among the civilized and
godless minority. In some of them, _e.g._, "Rebels of the Moon," what
one finds is really not a story at all, but a static discussion, half
aesthetic and half lunatic. In others, _e.g._, "Isolde's Mother," the
whole action revolves around an assumption incomprehensible to the
general. One can scarcely imagine most of these tales in the magazines.
They would puzzle and outrage the readers of Gouverneur Morris and
Gertrude Atherton, and the readers of Howells and Mrs. Wharton no less.
Their point of view is essentially the aesthetic one; the overwhelming
importance of beauty is never in any doubt. And the beauty thus
vivisected and fashioned into new designs is never the simple
Wordsworthian article, of fleecy clouds and primroses all compact; on
the contrary, it is the highly artificial beauty of pigments and
tone-colours, of Cezanne landscapes and the second act of "Tristan and
Isolde," of Dunsanyan dragons and Paracelsian mysteries. Here, indeed,
Huneker riots in the aesthetic occultism that he loves. Music slides
over into diabolism; the Pobloff symphony rends the firmament of Heaven;
the ghost of Chopin drives Mychowski to drink; a single drum-beat
finishes the estimable consort of the composer of the Tympani symphony.
In "The Eighth Deadly Sin" we have a paean to perfume--the only one, so
far as I know, in English. In "The Hall of the Missing Footsteps" we
behold the reaction of hasheesh upon Chopin's ballade in F major....
Strangely-flavoured, unearthly, perhaps unhealthy stuff. I doubt that it
will ever be studied for its style in our new Schools of Literature; a
devilish cunning if often there, but it leaves a smack of the
pharmacopoeia. However, as George Gissing used to say, "the artist
should be free from everything like moral prepossession." This lets in
the Antichrist....

Huneker himself seems to esteem these fantastic ta