Our Steeplejack Of The Seven Arts

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Title:     Our Steeplejack Of The Seven Arts
Author: Robert Cortes Holliday [More Titles by Holliday]

There is a rather frisky looking apartment house there now, a pastry shop and tea room occupying the ground floor--behind it, the other side of a venerable brick wall, a tiny, ancient burying ground. But in days of yester-year here stood a tavern of renown, the Old Grape Vine, which on this site, Sixth Avenue at Eleventh Street, had given cheer since Sixth Avenue was little more than a country road. A sagging, soiled white, two-story frame structure, with great iron grill lamps before the door. Within, the main room was somewhat reminiscent of London's Olde Cheshire Cheese.

The proprietor was a canny Scot, one MacClellan. ("Old Mac"! Whither has he gone?) I was coming along by there the other day, and I asked a man with whom I chanced to walk if he remembered the Old Grape Vine. "Ah! yes;" he said; "they had mutton pies there." They did. And excellent ale, also, served in battered pewter mugs. "They" had here, too (some fifteen years ago), excellent society beneath the dingy light. Roaring, roistering George Luks (as he was then) very much to the fore. At the rickety mahogany table where Frans-Halsian George held forth frequently was to be found the painter William J. Glackens and his brother "Lew," humorous draughtsman for Puck. Ernest Lawson sometimes came in. A Mr. Zinzig, a very pleasant soul and an excellent pianist and teacher of the piano, often was of the company. A Mr. FitzGerald, art critic in those days of the Sun, sometimes "sat in." And a delightful old cock, Mr. Stephenson, art critic then of the Evening Post. Among the most devoted habitués of the place was an old-school United States army officer turned writer of military stories. (When the proceedings had progressed to a certain stage of mellowness it was his habit to go home and return directly arrayed in his uniform.) There was, too, a queer figure of a derelict journalist associated with Town Topics. There was an inoffensive gentleman of leisure whose distinction was that he was brother to a famous Shakespearean scholar. (As the hour grew late he would begin to whistle softly to himself through his teeth.) There was a rotund being of much reading who perpetually smoked a very old pipe and who was editor of a tobacco journal. There was a man of the sea who continually told stories of Japan. (After eleven he was somewhat given to singing.) There was an illustrator for a tu'penny magazine, who (so as to seem to be a large staff) signed a variety of names to his work. From the land of R. L. S., he. One time while in a doze (somewhere else) he was robbed. His comment upon his misfortune became a classic line. It was: "By heaven! As long as whiskey is sold to lose ten dollars is enough to drive a Scot mad!" (This was long before anybody had ever heard of the now illustrious Mr. Volstead.) And many more there were. Ah, me! ah, me! How the picture has changed!

Well, the point of all this (if it have any point) is that it was in the Old Grape Vine (of tender memory) that I first saw James Gibbons Huneker. I think that, in his promenades as an impressionist, he was there but seldom. Though we know that high among the Seven Arts he rated the fine art of drinking Pilsner. The old places of Martin's and Lüchow's (headquarters on a time for the musical cognoscenti) were ports of call on his rounds; and he moved freely, I believe, among the places of refreshment along the foreign quarter of lower Fourth Avenue. At the Grape Vine, I understand, he was an especial friend of Luks, and probably of Glackens and Lawson. And, though he was a very famous man, he seemed to like the motley company.

Ten or twelve years ago I was earning a living more honestly than perhaps I have been making one since. I was a clerk in a book store--the retail department, it happened, of the house which publishes Mr. Huneker's books. And there, from my position "on the floor," I frequently saw him moving in and out. Moving rather slowly, with the dignity of bulk. A distinguished figure, quietly but quite neatly dressed, very erect in carriage, head held well back, supporting his portliness with that physical pride of portly men, a physiognomy of Rodinesque modelling--his cane a trim touch to the ensemble. He was, I distinctly remember, held decidedly in regard by the retail staff because he was (what, by a long shot, a good many "authors" were not) exceedingly affable in manner to us clerks.

The moment I have particularly in mind was when Samuel Butler's volume "The Way of All Flesh" first appeared in an American edition. We all know all about Butler now. But, looking back, it certainly is astonishing how innocent most all of us then were of any knowledge of the great author of "Erewhon." Even so searching a student of literature as W. C. Brownell was practically unacquainted with Butler. He was taking home a copy of "The Way of All Flesh" to read. Mr. Huneker was standing by. In some comment on the book he remarked that Butler had been a painter. "A painter!" exclaimed Mr. Brownell, in a manner as though wondering how it came about he knew so little of the man. "But this," said Mr. Huneker, referring to the novel, "is not his best stuff. That is in his note-books." Brownell: "And where are they?" Huneker: "In the British Museum." Mr. Brownell made a fluttering gesture (as though to express that he "gave up") toward Mr. Huneker: "He knows everything!" he ejaculated.

We should, of course, be surprised now that anybody did not know that Butler had been a painter. When, just a short time ago, W. Somerset Maugham adapted for the purposes of his sensational novel "The Moon and Sixpence" the character and career of Paul Gauguin, it was in the pages of Huneker that many first looked for, and found, intelligence concerning the master of the Pont Aven school of painting. Well, Gauguin is now an old story. And Ibsen, Tolstoy, Wagner, Richard Strauss, Rimbaud, De Gourmont, Nietzsche, Meredith, Henry James, William James, Bergson, Barrès, Anatole France, Flaubert, Lemaître, Huysmans, Maeterlinck, Baudelaire, Stirner, Strindberg, Faguet, Shaw, Wilde, George Moore, Yeats, Synge, Schnitzler, Wederkind, Lafargue, Rodin, Cézane, Matisse, Picasso, Van Gogh, George Luks, that wondrous "flock of Unicorns"--they all are old stories, too ... now. But it was our Steeplejack, James Huneker, who was our pioneer watcher of the skies. And what in the large sweep of his vision of the whole field of the world's beauty he saw, he reported with infinite gusto. "Gusto," as H. L. Mencken in the Huneker article of his "Book of Prefaces" says, "unquenchable, contagious, inflammatory."

The extent of the personal contact which Mr. Huneker enjoyed and maintained with the first-rate literary men of the world was amazing. While I was with the book shop I speak of, "presentation copies" of each new book of his, to be sent out "with the compliments of the author," were piled up for forwarding literally several feet high. They went to all the great in letters, in every country, that you could think of. Anatole France, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, George Brandes, Edmund Gosse, George Moore--people like that.

Vast was the incoming stream of books to him, presentation copies, review copies, "publicity" copies; so great a flood that it was necessary for him periodically to call in an old book man to clear his shelves by carting away a wagon-load or two of--genuine treasure. A catalogue I one time saw of such volumes "from the library of James Huneker" was sufficient in riches to have been the catalogue of the entire stock of a very fair shop dealing in "association" volumes, first editions, and so forth. And a survey of the books themselves made it quite apparent that a reader who has read every word that Huneker ever printed (and that would be a person who had read a good deal) may yet (very likely) be a reader who has not read some of the best of Huneker. I refer to "Jimmie's" humorous, pungent marginalia.

Mr. Huneker's close friends have taken occasion since his death to speak warmly of his kindness toward obscure, struggling talent. There was a side to him, akin to this, which I have not seen commented upon. Huneker's fame as a critic had been for years accepted throughout Europe. When his "New Cosmopolis" was published (a book I did not myself think so highly of) Joyce Kilmer, then newly come to journalism, reviewed it for the New York Times, very eulogistically. Mr. Huneker went to the trouble of looking up Kilmer to thank him very simply for his praise.

Mr. Huneker was a loyal and disinterested servant of good literature wherever he found it, and his happily was the power to be an ambassador to success. So short a time as about four years ago very few people had heard of William McFee. "Aliens," his first book, had met with no appreciable success. The manuscript of "Casuals of the Sea" (or the English "sheets" of the book, I do not recall which) came into the hands of a publishing house at Garden City. A member of the editorial staff of this house at this time was Christopher Morley. And I happened at the moment to have a job as sort of handy man at editorial chores around the premises. Morley immediately became a great "fan" for the book. Undoubtedly a fine book, and it was accepted, but (there was a question) could it be "put across"? It was very long, not of obviously popular character, and the author's name commanded no attention at all.

The first "advance" copy of the book sent out went (at Morley's direction) to Mr. Huneker. He was then writing regularly critical articles for something like a half dozen publications. "Casuals of the Sea" (such things did not turn up every day) was a "find" for his enthusiasm, He "pulled" two columns of brilliant Hunekerean firecrackers about it in the New York Sun; wrote another article of length on the book for the New York Times; gave the volume a couple of paragraphs of mention in his department on the Seven Arts at that time running in Puck, and perhaps mentioned the book elsewhere also. With the weight of such fervor and authority "Casuals" was most auspiciously launched. It could not now, by any chance, be passed by.

I do not, of course, mean to imply that there was anything artificial or "manufactured" about the "vogue" of "Casuals." First, Mr. Huneker was not a reviewer but a critic, if not thoroughly a great one, certainly a very real one; and about the last man going who could be got to "push" anything he did not whole-heartedly believe was fine. And secondly, "Casuals" had "the goods."

Through my connection with the matter of "Casuals" I suppose it was that a correspondence came about between Mr. Huneker and me. And in all my days I have never seen so energetic a correspondent. It seems to me that I got a letter from him about every other morning. I dropped out of the publishing business and went to Indiana for a time. I let him know when I got there, my motive in this being mainly to notify him that I was out of the publishing business and so was no longer in a position to give any business attention to letters relating to books. But letters from him continued to reach me with the same regularity. While, I hardly need say, I enjoyed this correspondence enormously, I was decidedly embarrassed by it, as I could not but keenly feel that I was taking up his time to no purpose. Still, of course, I felt that I should answer each letter of his without an impolite delay, and no sooner did he get my reply than he answered back again. Gradually, however, we got the thing slowed down.

His letters were prodigal of witty things. I am afraid I have not kept them; if so I do not know where they are--I move about a good deal. One neat play of words I remember. I do not know whether or not he himself ever used it elsewhere. I did use it in a book, giving due credit to Mr. Huneker. I had told him that I was going in for writing on my own. His comment was: "He that lives by the pen shall perish by the pen." Some of his letters, I recall, were signed, "Jim, the Penman."

And it was no simple trick to read them. He used a pale ink. The handwriting was small, curious, and to me almost illegible. Why compositors did not mob him I do not know. He wrote everything by hand; never would learn to use a typewriter, and declared that he could not acquire the faculty of dictation.

This leads me to the story of one of the articles he contributed to The Bookman. When, upon my return to New York, I became (for a time) editor of this magazine I pursued him for contributions. Yes, later on he would send us something, but always it was later on, later on. I had about given up hope of ever getting anything from him when a bulky wad of closely-written "copy" on yellow paper arrived. Expecting that it would take me a couple of days to decipher the manuscript, I joyously acknowledged receipt of it at once, without a thought of questioning the nature of the article. When I tried to read the article, after I had held the first page sidewise, next upside down, then examined it in a mirror, I "passed the buck" and sent the copy straight on to the printers. If printers had read him before printers ought to be able to do so again. I advertised the article to appear in the next number of the magazine. When I got the article back in galley proofs--I got a jolt. It wasn't "Bookman stuff" at all, all about a couple of "old rounders," as Mr. Huneker called them, taking a stroll.

I do not think that Mr. Huneker has as yet since his death, to the time these rambling remarks are being written, received anything like adequate recognition in the press. The "obituary" articles in the newspapers have carried the air that he was hardly more than an excellent "newspaper man"--somewhat older, but something like (dare I say?) Heywood Broun or Alexander Woollcott. Ah! no; James Huneker was a critic and an artist, and a figure, too, in our national life. Though he was all his days until almost his last breath a hard-working journalist with an immediate "copy date" before him. And though he most naturally thought of himself, with common-sense pride in his calling, as a journalist. I remember his one time speaking of Arnold Bennett as "a hard-working journalist as well as a novel writer." Indicating his great esteem for the character of journalist. And he used to speak, too, with fraternal pride and affection in inflection, of young men who had written good books, as being among "our men," meaning associated with the same paper as himself.

At the remarkable funeral service held in the new Town Hall in New York high and touching honor was done his memory by the stage and the musical profession, but literature seemed to be officially represented by the person of Richard Le Gallienne alone, and painting and sculpture not at all. The articles by Mr. Huneker's colleagues among music critics have seemed very largely to claim him as quite their own. True, no doubt, his most penetrating writing was done in the field of musical criticism. But, also, Huneker was an evangel who belongs to the Seven Arts.

One thing should be added. It is a sad thing, but it is of the nature of life. A good editorial in The New Republic began: "James Huneker named one of his best books 'The Pathos of Distance.' In a single day his own figure is invested with the memorial gentleness there described." No, not altogether in a single day. He had already begun, and more than begun, to recede into the pathos of distance. His flair was for the championship and interpretation of the "new" men. And, for the most part, his new men had become old men. His stoutest admirer must admit that Mr. Huneker's work was "dated."

But where (and this is sadder still) is his like today?

[The end]
Robert Cortes Holliday's essay: Our Steeplejack Of The Seven Arts

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