"It would be difficult to sum up 'Melomaniacs' in a phrase. Never did a book, in my opinion at any rate, exhibit greater contrasts, not, perhaps, of strength and weakness, but of clearness and obscurity. It is inexplicably uneven, as if the writer were perpetually playing on the boundary line that divides sanity of thought from intellectual chaos. There is method in the madness, but it is a method of intangible ideas. Nevertheless, there is genius written over a large portion of it, and to a musician the wealth of musical imagination is a living spring of thought"--Harold E. Gorst, in _London Saturday Review_ (Dec. 8, 1906).
CONTENTS: Henrik Ibsen--August Strindberg--Henry Becque--Gerhart Hauptmann--Paul Hervieu--The Quintessence of Shaw--Maxim Gorky's Nachtasyl--Hermann Sudennann--Princess Mathilde's Play--Duse and D'Annunzio--Villiers de l'lsle Adam--Maurice Maeterlinck.
"His style is a little jerky, but it is one of those rare styles in which we are led to expect some significance, if not wit, in every sentence."--G.K. Chesterton, _in London Daily News._
"No other book in English has surveyed the whole field so comprehensively."--The Outlook.
"A capital book, lively, informing, suggestive."--London Times Saturday Review.
"Eye-opening and mind-clarifying is Mr. Huneker's criticism; ... no one having read that opening essay in this volume will lay it down until the final judgment upon Maurice Maeterlinck is reached."--Boston Transcript.
_WITH FRONTISPIECE PORTRAIT OF RICHARD STRAUSS_
CONTENTS: Richard Strauss--Parsifal: A Mystical Melodrama--Literary Men who loved Music (Balzac, Turgenieff, Daudet, etc.)--The Eternal Feminine--The Beethoven of French Prose--Nietzsche the Rhapsodist--Anarchs of Art--After Wagner, What?--Verdi and Boito.
"The whole book is highly refreshing with its breadth of knowledge, its catholicity of taste, and its inexhaustible energy."--_Saturday Review, London._
"In some respects Mr. Huneker must be reckoned the most brilliant of all living writers on matters musical."--_Academy, London._
"No modern musical critic has shown greater ingenuity in the attempt to correlate the literary and musical tendencies of the nineteenth century."--_Spectator, London._