he excavations for all
of the others, for Huneker began sending home letters to the
Philadelphia _Bulletin_ on the pictures that he saw, the books that he
read and the music that he heard in Paris, and out of them gradually
grew a body of doctrine that was to be developed into full-length
criticism on his return to the United States. He stayed in Paris until
the middle 80's, and then settled in New York.

All the while his piano studies continued, and in New York he became a
pupil of Rafael Joseffy. He even became a teacher himself and was for
ten years on the staff of the National Conservatory, and showed himself
at all the annual meetings of the Music Teachers' Association. But bit
by bit criticism elbowed out music-making, as music-making had elbowed
out criticism with Schumann and Berlioz. In 1886 or thereabout he joined
the _Musical Courier_; then he went, in succession, to the old
_Recorder_, to the _Morning Advertiser_, to the _Sun_, to the _Times_,
and finally to the Philadelphia _Press_ and the New York _World_.
Various weeklies and monthlies have also enlisted him: _Mlle. New York_,
the _Atlantic Monthly_, the _Smart Set_, the _North American Review_ and
_Scribner's_. He has even stooped to _Puck_, vainly trying to make an
American _Simplicissimus_ of that dull offspring of synagogue and
barbershop. He has been, in brief, an extremely busy and not too
fastidious journalist, writing first about one of the arts, and then
about another, and then about all seven together. But music has been the
steadiest of all his loves; his first three books dealt almost wholly
with it; of his complete canon more than half have to do with it.

Sec. 4

His first book, "Mezzotints in Modern Music," published in 1899,
revealed his predilections clearly, and what is more, his critical
insight and sagacity. One reads it today without the slightest feeling
that it is an old story; some of the chapters, obviously reworkings of
articles for the papers, must go back to the middle 90's, and yet the
judgments they proclaim scarcely call for the change of a word. The
single noticeable weakness is a too easy acquiescence in the empty
showiness of Saint-Saens, a tendency to bow to the celebrated French
parlour magician too often. Here, I daresay, is an echo of old Paris
days, for Camille was a hero on the Seine in 1880, and there was even
talk of pitting him against Wagner. The estimates of other men are
judiciously arrived at and persua