Ivory, Apes and Peacocks — A Reader’s Guide

The Sea as a Recurring Motif

In the opening essay, Huneker presents Conrad's work as a 'sea-shell which pressed to the ear echoes the far-away murmur of the sea.' This image of the sea as a container of sound and memory reappears in later essays, though often transformed. When describing Stuttgart in the Strauss chapter, Huneker contrasts the oppressive, bowl-shaped valley with the memory of 'summer-sunlit Holland and its wide plains punctuated only by church spires and windmills.' The sea becomes a symbol of escape and artistic freedom, set against the claustrophobia of provincial life. Huneker's own prose mimics this ebb and flow: long, rhythmic sentences describing Conrad's genius give way to sharp, observational details about train stations and royal processions.

Movement Between High and Low

Huneker's essays frequently juxtapose elevated artistic commentary with mundane, almost journalistic observations. In the Stuttgart chapter, he moves from discussing Richard Strauss's music to describing the king's arrival at the station, the crowd's behavior, and the price of restaurant meals. This structural choice reflects his belief that art is inseparable from the circumstances of its production. The essay on Walt Whitman likely follows a similar pattern, though the excerpt only hints at it. Huneker's voice shifts between the rhapsodic—'the rich, salty tang of an Elizabethan adventurer'—and the sardonic: 'Curiosity is perhaps the prime root of patriotism.' This tonal mobility keeps the reader alert to unexpected connections.

The Gallery of Portraits as a Unified Work

Though the book collects essays on separate figures, Huneker creates continuity through recurring themes: the tension between tradition and innovation, the role of the artist in society, and the limits of critical language. The essay on Joseph Conrad praises him as a 'pure and disinterested artist' amid the 'clamour of the market-place,' a stance that echoes through later pieces on Schoenberg, Moussorgsky, and the Italian Futurists. The title itself—borrowed from the biblical account of Solomon's trade—suggests that these artists are exotic imports, valuable but potentially decadent. Huneker's critical method is itself a form of collecting, arranging his subjects like objects in a cabinet of curiosities.

The Role of the Observer

Huneker frequently inserts himself into the scene, as when he describes watching the king's arrival in Stuttgart or recalling a carriage accident with Emperor Franz Josef. These first-person passages ground the criticism in lived experience, but they also reveal the limits of his perspective. He admits to being a foreigner, a 'stare-cat' himself, and his observations are often tinged with irony. This self-awareness prevents the essays from becoming mere pronouncements; instead, they read as conversations between a knowledgeable but fallible guide and his reader. The effect is to make the reader complicit in the act of judgment, aware that every critical portrait is also a self-portrait.

Readers approaching Ivory, Apes and Peacocks should expect not a systematic treatise but a series of vivid, opinionated encounters. Huneker's associative method rewards those who follow his leaps from music to painting to literature without demanding expertise in any single field. The book is best read as a performance of critical intelligence, where the connections between subjects matter as much as the subjects themselves.

Some afternoons, Huneker’s essays drift like tidewater—Conrad bleeding into Cézanne, music threading through paint—and I recall how his restless, associative mind once felt almost tender toward women’s inner lives. That gentleness surfaces again in a quieter volume I keep returning to, its observations unhurried as a letter kept in a drawer. It lingers beside him, unsaid. Her Royal Highness Woman — Context and Discussion feels like a shared, half-finished thought.