o as measles; but what race save the
wicked one is floored by a blue distemper in middle age, with
sentimental burblings _a cappella_, hallucinations of lost loves, and
an unquenchable lacrymorrhea?... I made out a good case, but I was
wrong, and the penalty came swiftly and doubly, for on the one hand the
Boston _Transcript_ sounded an alarm against both Huneker and me as
German spies, and on the other hand Huneker himself proclaimed that,
even spiritually, he was less German than Magyar, less "Hun" than Hun.
"I am," he said, "a Celto-Magyar: Pilsner at Donneybrook Fair. Even the
German beer and cuisine are not in it with the Austro-Hungarian." Here,
I suspect, he meant to say Czech instead of Magyar, for isn't Pilsen in
Bohemia? Moreover, turn to the chapter on Prague in "New Cosmopolis,"
and you will find out in what highland his heart really is. In this
book, indeed, is a vast hymn to all things Czechic--the Pilsen
_Urquell_, the muffins stuffed with poppy-seed jam, the spiced chicken
liver _en casserole_, the pretty Bohemian girls, the rose and golden
glory of Hradschin Hill.... One thinks of other strange infatuations:
the Polish Conrad's for England, the Scotch Mackay's for Germany, the
Low German Brahms' for Italy. Huneker, I daresay, is the first
Celto-Czech--or Celto-Magyar, as you choose. (Maybe the name suggests
something. It is not to be debased to _Hoon_-eker, remember, but kept at
_Hun_-eker, rhyming initially with _nun_ and _gun_.) An unearthly
marriage of elements, by all the gods! but there are pretty children of
it....

Philadelphia humanely disgorged Huneker in 1878. His father designed him
for the law, and he studied the institutes at the Philadelphia Law
Academy, but like Schumann, he was spoiled for briefs by the stronger
pull of music and the _cacoethes scribendi_. (Grandpa John Huneker had
been a composer of church music, and organist at St. Mary's.) In the
year mentioned he set out for Paris to see Liszt; his aim was to make
himself a piano virtuoso. His name does not appear on his own exhaustive
list of Liszt pupils, but he managed to quaff of the Pierian spring at
second-hand, for he had lessons from Theodore Ritter (_ne_ Bennet), a
genuine pupil of the old walrus, and he was also taught by the venerable
Georges Mathias, a pupil of Chopin. These days laid the foundations for
two subsequent books, the "Chopin: the Man and His Music" of 1900, and
the "Franz Liszt" of 1911. More, they prepared t