Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

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MEMOIRS OF AN EDITOR

of beauty or of curious significance along every highway
or byway of human delight. Music, graphic and plastic
art, architecture, dramatic expression on the stage, the
subtleties of psychologic imagining, all found Hazeltine
rather cold. He could write about them, learnedly of
course, but he never bubbled or chortled in joy at the contact. These things were to Huneker like the blood in his
veins or the sunshine that warmed his cuticle; and so
interchangeable was his faculty of appreciation that more
remarkably than any other critic known to me in my time
he could think and write of one art in the terms of another.
He heard music in metaphysics, saw definite color values
in the printed page, envisaged alarums and excursions in
a mezzotint, and interpreted a poem, a fagade or a painting
by the same rules of rhythm. So fluid was his talent that
he passed from one post of aesthetic censorship to another
as readily as if there was no transition.
I asked him on one occasion to visit the Drake collection of brass pots and pitchers, then at the auction-rooms.
He went with all the zest that would have accompanied
him to Velasquez in the Prado. "I've not 'let loose a
rhapsody in brass,'" he wrote me the next day, "but I
longed for the pen of a Balzac or a Gautier when I saw
those glittering masterpieces."
One December I crossed the ocean, coming home, with
him and the loyal wife to whom it is due that so many
of his personal epistles, almost unique in rich interest in
these gray twilight days of letter writing, have been preserved in type to supplement the volume after volume in
which the knowledge and judgments and whimsies and
name catalogues and ideas recondite came pouring and
roaring and hurrying and scurrying like the waters of

Lodore. Not less than a hundred and a half, I suppose,
of his letters reached me during the period of our association, notwithstanding the fact that he gave me frequently
the pleasure of his company in person. They were all