America Discovers Bohemia

by HARRY LEVIN

1

NOTORTOUSLY vague are the boundaries of Bohemia. “Is it a state, not of soul, but of the purse?” asked one of its leading citizens, James Huneker. As a way of life it is evidently both; it involves both social and psychological consequences; it offers both the vicissitudes of a precarious career and the adventures of an enlivened sensibility. Its American prototype, in both respects, was Poe. But, though his work met affinities among the Pre-Raphaelites in England and even became the object of a cult among the Symbolists in France, he founded no esthetic school among his countrymen. His campaigns against didacticism and his experiments with technique were continued, not in organized movements, but by isolated figures.

Whitman may seem, when we view the fifties in retrospect, to have dominated the writers that foregathered at Pfaff’s beer-cellar under Broadway; but the official record of those foregatherings is Bayard Taylor’s The Echo Club, and Other Literary Diversions, a faint echo of mild diversions. A heartier atmosphere of literary conviviality was exhaled by San Francisco during the sixties, but within another decade its Bohemians had become lions: Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Joaquin Miller had drifted eastward. Oscar Wilde, carrying the gospel of Ruskin and Morris to the American lecture platform in 1882, merely created advance publicity for the Gilbert and Sullivan Patience. For William Dean Howells, under the spell of Cambridge Brahminism, Bohemianism was “a sickly colony, transplanted from the mother asphalt of Paris, and never really striking root in the pavements of New York.”

The vie de Bohême was deeply rooted in the interstices of European society, in the rift between artists and philistines, between a radical intelligentsia and a predominant bourgeoisie. In America, where expansion left further room for individualism, the tensions were less explicit and the protests more superficial. When artistic flowering required intensive cultivation, however, Americans still sought training and encouragement on the other side of the Atlantic. What the Latin Quarter was to Parisians, or Soho to Londoners, the whole of Europe was to them: a seacoast of Bohemia. Some of them, like Whistler, were destined for fabulous exploits within that international domain.

Henry Harland, having tried unsuccessfully to catch the local color of Manhattan in his earlier stories, later emerged as editor of The Yellow Book and one of the arbiters of English estheticism, Francis Vielé-Griffin and Stuart Merrill were naturalized into the innermost circles of French poetry, and Merrill completed the cycle by translating a selection of Symbolist prose into his native language. But the contributions of the expatriates — unless, like Henry James, they were still preoccupied with American themes — belong to the foreign cultures they embraced. We are here concerned with repatriates, with the new ideas and attitudes they brought home from the Old World, with the enrichment — or, at any rate, the sophistication — they brought to the nineties, which transcended the range of more genteel criticism by looking beyond England to the Continent and beyond the art of literature to music and plastic arts.

Thomas Beer has suggested that mauve, which Whistler defined as “pink trying to be purple,” is the shade that characterizes this decade. It is an apt characterization of the popular blends that a domesticated Bohemianism produced. With the success of Trilby, the Franco-English Du Maurier reinforced that picturesque and sentimental conception of the artist’s life which the German-French Murger had popularized a generation before. The quizzical hedonism of Omar Khayyám, bound in crushed leather, made its appearance on many a parlor table. The Boston Irishman, John Boyle O’Reilly, had tossed off a maudlin lyric, “In Bohemia,” which was endlessly reprinted and parodied. Richard Ilovey, after some translation from Mallarmé, collaborated with the Canadian poet, Bliss Carman, in the breezy series of Songs from Vagabondia.

A vagabond pose, congenially flouting the lesser conventions, was becoming respectable and even profitable. Elbert Hubbard, reversing the process of William Morris, converted art. into industry; his personal literary organ, with conscious and unconscious irony, was called The Philistine. Upand-coming cities now boasted of their Bohemian Clubs. The oldest, established at San Francisco in 1872, has outlasted the rest; its businessmen, to be sure, have long outnumbered its more professionally Bohemian members. Of all these symptoms, the most significant was the eruption of little magazines throughout the country. Many of these were hardly more than manifestoes, but a few survived long enough to introduce lively talents and open exciting horizons — notably the San Francisco Lark, the Chicago Chap-Book, and the cosmopolitan M’lle New York.

To distinguish a clear-cut direction or a guiding coterie behind these fads and trends would be to oversimplify. Yet they point to the growth of a class of self-educated intellectuals, whose characteristic form of expression might be described as esthetic journalism. As a cultural influence it differed from its European counterpart, by striving rather to educate than to shock the middleclass reader. As a means of education it was not addressed to a privileged few or concentrated upon the past, but eager to spread a wide awareness of contemporary developments in taste and thought. Despite this world of difference between the academic and the journalistic, the lines were occasionally crossed.

Charles Warren Stoddard, whose South Sea vagabondage terminated in religious conversion, assumed the first professorship of English at the Catholic University of America. Harry Thurston Peck, sometime professor of Latin at Columbia, subsequently edited The Bookman and championed the modems. Henry Adams, rejecting both a professorial and an editorial chair, could look down from the lonely eminence of his leisure; whereas the esthetic journalists, enunciating views which often paralleled his, had to write for a living. Though their American market — to judge from George Gissing’s account — was not quite so discouraging as Grub Street, they inevitably wasted a good deal of talent in boiling the pot. Free-lances for better or worse, they accepted the conditions of their profession. Much of their writing was bound to prove ephemeral; some of it remains worthy of reconsideration.

2

THE militant independence of the free-lance is personified in Ambrose Bierce. Resisting all other affiliations and categories, his restlessness finds its appropriate haven in Bohemia, which — according to his definition — was the “taproom of a tavern on the road from Boeotia to Philistia.” A youthful veteran of the Civil War, a belated Argonaut to the West Coast, he relived his affrays and disillusionments in the rough-and-tumble of the San Francisco press. Joining the western invasion of London during the seventies, he mingled with the cockney wits, published some grimly facetious books under the pseudonym of Dod Grile, and even broke a lance in defense of the exiled Empress Eugénie.

Failing to capture the British public that lionized Clemens and Harte, he retreated to California, where his later career linked the bygone frontier generation with younger writers like Jack London and George Sterling. His principal employer was the young William Randolph Hearst, who was wise enough to give Bierce free rein. His most effective journalistic coup was to prevent Collis P. Huntington from lobbying a railway refunding bill through Congress. Bierce’s separation from his wife, and the tragic deaths of both their sons, embittered his private life. After the turn of the century he made his home — insofar as he had one — in Washington, which afforded increasing scope to Iris misanthropy. In 1913, at the age of seventy, after supervising the publication of his collected works and revisiting the battlefields of his youth, he disappeared across the Mexican border, leaving biography to trail off in legend.

No reader, thumbing through those twelve volumes of Collected Works, can avoid being struck by their monumental disproportion. As if in a last effort to compensate for the good books he might have written, Bierce padded the set with outdated editorials and stale hoaxes and forgotten polemics, disregarding his habitual distinction between journalism and literature. Frequently the degree of animus seems disproportionate to the issue, and usually the style is disproportionately superior to the subject. Black Beetles in Amber aims at the kind of elegant preservation that Pope accorded his enemies in The Dunciad, but Bierce’s fluent verse seldom rises very high above its occasion.

His prose, on the other hand, has a crisp precision which is almost unparalleled among his contemporaries; his puristic standards of usage, which he brought back from England, are set forth in his little handbook, Write It Right. America needed, but did not want, a Swift. It needed the sharp reservations of the satirist, armed like Bierce with the weapon of wit. It wanted only the blunt affirmations of the humorist. “Nearly all Americans are humorous; if any are born witty, heaven help them to emigrate!” exclaimed Bierce. Though many of his satirical sketches suggest that Gulliver might have discovered another Brobdingnag in California, one of his serious essays laments “The Passing of Satire.” His points were too fine, his targets too ubiquitous. His phobias included millionaires, labor leaders, women, and dogs. His values were ultimately negative — the values of war.

Though The Monk and the Hangman’s Daughter is still readable, though it skillfully handles the ironic situation of Anatole France’s Thaïs, it is merely Bierce’s revision of G. A. Danziger’s translation of a German romance by Richard Voss. And, though The Devil’s Dictionary is still quotable, it is no more than an alphabetical compendium of Bierce’s deadliest witticisms and most philosophical epigrams. His securest achievement is concentrated in two volumes of short stories. “Denied existence by the chief publishing houses of the country,” he informs us, In the Midst of Life was published privately at San Francisco under the original title of Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. The second collection, Can Such Things Be?, attained a New York publisher two years later, in 1893.

There is no padding here. Defining the novel as “a short story padded,” Bierce preferred the abbreviated form for its totality of effect. His technique of directing suspense toward a dramatic crisis is modeled on Poe, but Bierce’s horrors are more realistically motivated: thus premature burial, in “One of the Missing,” becomes a war casualty. Sometimes his settings encroach upon Bret Hartc’s territory, but Bierce’s miners are far from sentimental, and even his “Baby Tramp” comes to a macabre end. Many of his denouements take place at graves. Editors, no doubt, were frightened away from these tales. Their violent obsession with sudden death cuts through the conventional twists of fiction to a mordant sense of reality. Dramas, flashbacks, hallucinations, as in “ The Mocking Bird,” provide irony but no escape.

Bierce’s heroic theme, which Stephen Crane undertook a few years later, was not the Civil War in its strategic grandeur, but its impact upon the individual consciousness. Every story is a single episode of conflict: son against father; lover against rival; a house — one’s own — destroyed; a spy — one’s brother—shot. Underlying them all, evoked in vivid imagery, is the contrast formulated in “An Affair of Outposts” between the civilian’s preconceptions of military glory and the soldier’s experience of ugliness and brutality. In “Chickamauga,” an excruciating study in point of view, a child’s idyll turns into a battle and the child turns out to be a deaf-mute.

Further tales seek a moral equivalent for war in claim-jumping and psychic experiment, ghoulish practical jokes and pseudoscientific fantasies. Naturalism did not exclude the storyteller’s concern with the supernatural, and Bierce’s rationalism operates to lend credibility to his ghost stories. Peculiarly haunting is “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” with its interpolation of Bierce’s own recurrent dream, its Kafkaesque nightmare of the poet lost in the wood, its Freudian realization of “the dominance of the sexual element in all the relations of life.” But his most nostalgic reminiscences are reserved for Chickamauga and Shiloh and Kenesaw Mountain. He himself is the lone survivor of “A Resumed Identity,” a Rip Van Winkle of the Civil War to whom everything afterward is an anticlimax. Even when he describes the Sierras, in “The Night-Doings at Deadman’s,” it is with the eye of a former topographical officer in the Union Army: —

Snow pursued by the wind is not wholly unlike a retreating army. In the open field it ranges itself in ranks and battalions; where it can get a foothold it makes a stand; where it can take cover it does so. You may see whole platoons of snow cowering behind a bit of broken walk The devious old road, hewn out of the mountain side, was full of it. Squadron upon squadron had struggled to escape by this line, when suddenly pursuit ceased. A more desolate and dreary spot than Deadman’s Gulch in a winter midnight it is impossible to imagine.

3

LAFCADIO HEARN is not less completely the Bohemian for having remained a foreigner, a transient contributor to American literature. On his devious pilgrimage from the Old World toward the Orient, he spent more than twenty years in this country, and nearly all of his work encountered its audience here. Born in 1850 on an Ionian island, to a Greek mother and an Anglo-Irish father, he had been educated sporadically in Ireland, England, and France. Emigrating in 1869, he was appalled by the grinding mechanisms of New York; he sought out connections in Cincinnati, and there obtained his earliest newspaper assignments. He was estranged from his friends, however, when they opposed his marriage to a mulatto woman. By 1877 he was glad to move on to the Latinized environment of New Orleans, where his journalistic and literary activities exfoliated.

Always drawn toward the tropical and the primitive, he served for the better part of two years as correspondent in Martinique and the neighboring islands. Travel sketches in various periodicals and two or three miscellanies of exotic lore established his reputation, and he went to Japan in 1890 under the auspices of Harper’s Magazine. When the customary misunderstandings arose, he was forced to seek other employment: he taught English in government schools, wrote editorials for the Kobe Chronicle, and lectured for a while in the Imperial University at Tokyo. Meanwhile he had fallen in love with the country, married a Japanese woman, and been adopted into her Samurai family.

The striking paradox of Hearn’s career is that so deracinated a personality should ultimately sink its roots into so conventional a civilization. In one of his innumerable essays on “Ghosts’' he refers to himself as “the civilized nomad whose wanderings are not prompted by hope of gain, not determined by pleasure, but simply compelled by certain necessities of his being,— the man whose inner secret, nature is totally at variance with the stable conditions of a society to which he belongs only by accident.” Was it his hyphenated origin, his diminutive stature, or his disfigured eye that compelled him toward the Tennysonian vision of a summer isle, a savage woman, and a dusky race?

Certainly, as his letters reveal, he was ill at ease among the so-called improvements of the Occident, and out of sympathy with “the Whitmanesque ideal of democracy.” Mergers Bohemianism counterpoised the ideal of art for art’s sake, and Wilde’s derided lecture tour — which Hearn defended in the New Orleans Item — was an “acute provocative to the consideration of estheticism in the United States.” From first to last he professed himself a romanticist; his boyish solace from the commonplace realism of city life had been the public library; afterward, when he gathered together a small collection of his own, he boasted that every volume was quaint or curious. Valuable by-products of this wayward bookishness were his graceful translations from Gautier, Flaubert, and Anatole France. Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème was his prospectus for Japan.

“ Knowing that I have nothing resembling genius, and that any ordinary talent must be supplemented with some sort of curious study in order to place it above the mediocre line, I am striving to woo the Muse of the Odd, and hope to succeed in thus attracting some little attention,” he had frankly resolved. Because he was never at home in America, he retained a traveler’s perception of its strange corners and colorful survivals. As a reporter he specialized in the romance of reality: lurid murders and artist’s models, madhouses and carnivals, voodoo rites and Creole cookery. His Louisiana friend, Fere Rouquette, had lived among the Choctaws and written a Nouvelle Atala; the most charming memento of Hearn’s sojourn in the West Indies was Chita: A Memory of Last Island, which also embodies localized memories of Paul et Virginie.

Local color, heightened by his imaginative strokes, blends into exoticism. The intense expressiveness of Hearn’s own style is attributable to the quality he admired in Poe: “the colorpower of words.” American cities made him yearn for “a violet sky among green peaks and an eternally lilac and lukewarm sea.” The Japanese tones of his later writings are more subdued. The suggestivencss of the word “ghostly” was for him an incantation; for him, as for many agnostics, fantasy replaced belief. Believing that ghosts represented ancestral experience, now banished by steam and electricity, he tried to recapture them in books like Kwaidan.

“The dominant impression made by his personality . . . Huneker remarked of Hearn, “is itself impressionistic.” A posthumous title, Diary of an Impressionist, subsumes his entire work, which — fragile and casual though it be — has extended since his death into an indefinite sequence of volumes. The books by which he is most likely to be remembered are the twelve that deal with his adopted country and span the last decade of his life, from Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan to Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation. Their naive charm has tended to fade in the light of more recent years. Hearn was anything but a shrewd observer of mores and politics, and his ignorance of the language disqualified him from interpreting the literature. His most memorable episodes are descriptions of shrines, gardens, fans, insects, and bric-a-brac.

“A land where lotus is a common article of diet,” where everything is marshaled in esthetic order, where egotistical individualism is conspicuous by its absence—as Kokoro reminds us — does not lack attractions. But Japan was already becoming aggressively and mechanically westernized; while Hearn, who continually warned his students against this unholy synthesis, was swept from his university post in a rising wave of hostility toward Westerners. Tired of lotuseating, he might have gone back to America if ill health had not finally overtaken him in 1904. He never escaped from what he had never found: himself. “Ironically,” as Katherine Anne Porter points out, “he became the interpreter between two civilizations equally alien to him.”

4

SINCE Hearn had departed from the United States at the very outset of the nineties, he could only help from a distance to set the scene. And Bierce, though he heard “the note of desperation” sounded in the final decade of the century, had been shaped by a more rugged period. It was left for Edgar Saltus to play the sophisticate, to dramatize the cut-glass brilliance of the fin de siècle. Where the others were intellectually sequestered, he belonged to society in the exclusive sense of the term. Scion of a New York family, brother of a minor poet, he responded more fully to literary and philosophical studies in France and Germany than to the Columbia Law School.

His fellow student, Stuart Merrill, was enabled to function in an artistic milieu by remaining abroad; by returning home, where art was hardly more than an ornamental plaything, Saltus cast himself in the part of a dilettante and a dandy. His sobriquet, “the pocket Apollo,” implies a varied endowment, and his legend is seasoned by three marriages and two divorces. His career on various newspapers was less sensational than his career in them. He traveled widely, gravitating in later years to southern California. Toward 1900, under the pressure of hack-writing, his work begins to repeat itself; his earlier books best preserve the leisurely skepticism and nonchalant preciosity of his once fashionable manner. By the time of his death, in 1921, it was thoroughly outmoded.

When Saltus is recollected, he is sometimes regarded as an American disciple of Oscar Wilde, to whom he devoted a succinct memoir. Actually he parallels, rather than emulates, the English esthete, who was his junior by a year. With Love and Lore in 1890, a year before the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray’ Saltus defended fiction against the prudishness of Anthony Comstock by recognizing only two kinds: “Stories which are well written and stories which are not.” Two years before Salomé he had touched upon the same subject, which had been common property since Flaubert’s Hérodias. Saltus, like Wilde, derived his critical outlook from France, as he duly acknowledged in one of his poems: —

His first book, an anecdotal monograph, shows that he was also on speaking terms with Balzac, From these and other French writers, including Mérimée and Barbey d’Aurevilly, he translated extensively. German metaphysics, in its realistic and pessimistic phase, was a further influence. The Philosophy of Disenchantment, a pocket exposition of the doctrines of Schopenhauer and von Hartmann, jauntily concluded that life was an affliction. The Anatomy of Negation followed logically as well as chronologically; it proceeded down the ages with the iconoclasts, pausing here and there to admire a shattered idol. Jesus, to cite the crucial instance, was “the most entrancing of nihilists but no innovator.” Long afterward, re-enchanted by theosophy, Saltus strolled through the museum of the world’s religions in The Lords of the Ghostland.

But philosophic doubt and religious denial were the starting point for epicurean pastimes. The next stage was history, and the ideal theme was Rome, not in its grandeur so much as its decadence. Imperial Purple, a scandalous chronicle of the Caesars, luxuriated in passages that matched its title. Saltus, considering it his most sumptuous triumph, subjected the Tsars to a similar treatment many years later in The Imperial Orgy. Among his potboilers loomed a three-volume survey of great lovers, and Historia Amoris gave full indulgence to his rather prurient sense of the past. Under the guise of historical documentation it was possible to discuss matters still too delicate for fictional handling, and Saltus was well versed in those authorities that booksellers classify as erotica and curiosa.

An unexpurgated library of such works, “everything, in fact, from Aristophanes to Zola,” is catalogued in Mr. Incoul’s Misadventure. This piquant novel, the first of sixteen, observes an amoral code whereby murder and adultery arc far less heinous than cheating at cards. A typical intermingling of pornography and hagiography, which reads like a collaboration between Flaubert and General Lew Wallace, is Mary Magdalen. How it was received by Henry James, to whom it is dedicated, tempts speculation. Other novels, set against modern backgrounds, are spun out increasingly thin. Their mounting reliance on artifice and sensation, on perfumes and poisons, on bejewelled luxury and operatic vice, leads directly into the jurisdiction of the detective story.

A latter-day Bohemian, Carl Van Vechten, has credited Saltus with giving New York a mythology:

. harpies and vampires take tea at Sherry’s, succubi and incubi are observed buying opal rings at Tiffany’s.” But these fantastic shapes could not linger in that worldly climate without partaking of its corruptions. Saltus’s preoccupation with the imperial theme was an oblique commentary on the private scandals of contemporary empire-builders; he compared the Vanderbilts to Caligula, sketched Delmonico’s as if it were situated on the Via Sacra, and underlined the analogy between Newport and Nero’s Golden House. “The Gold Book” compiled by Bradstreet’s, “The Gilded Gang” frequenting the society columns, the alliterative collusion of “Manners, Money, and Morals,” were the stuff of his essays and tales. These, if taken seriously, illustrate Pater’s refined epicureanism; otherwise, we can take them as a comic supplement to Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class.

5

IN contradistinction to those that cut dashing figures or enact poignant roles against the esthetic backdrop, James Gibbons Huneker is less of an actor than a spectator. Whether before a stage or a table, whether at a piano or a desk, we think of him as comfortably seated. Owing perhaps to the advantages of this posit ion, he was able to work out the implications of Bohemianism, both as a critical approach and as an attitude toward life, more explicitly than any other American writer. It was more than the warmth of a disciple that led H. L. Mencken to designate him “the chief man in the movement of the nineties on this side of the ocean.” More precisely, Huneker protracted this momentum into the twentieth century; for his first book, Mezzotints in Modern Music, did not appear until 1899, his fortieth year.

But Huneker’s long apprenticeship went back to the days when, as a Philadelphia schoolboy, he had escorted Whitman to concerts; when, as a musical student in Paris, Villiers de l’Isle Adam had bought him a drink; when, as a pupil of Joseffy, he had taught piano for ten years at the National Conservatory of Music in New York. His career as a critic, starting on the Musical Courier in 1887, continued through the Sun, the Times, the World, and other New York papers, interrupted only by occasional travels in Europe. Most of his twenty volumes were pasted together from magazine articles and newspaper renews. He disliked being called a journalist, and styled himself with genial modesty “a newspaper man in a hell of a hurry writing journalese.”

His rambling autobiography, Steeplejack, introduces Huneker as jack of seven arts and master of none. Undoubtedly his interests ranged beyond his accomplishments, and he approached other fields with varying degrees of amateurishness; but he qualified as a professional musician, and his criticism stays closest to the object when confronting the keyboard of his instrument. His most substantial book, Chopin: The Man and His Music, for once subordinates biographical details to technical comments; while Old Fogy: His Musical Opinions and Grotesques playfully exposes romantic enthusiasms to classical prejudices. The Symbolist doctrine that conferred upon music the primacy of the arts was reinforced by Pater’s dictum that all arts aspire to the condition of music. Thus encouraged to venture afield, Huneker recalls, he wrote of painting in terms of tone, of literature as form and color, and of life as a promenade of flavors.

“ I muddled the Seven Arts in a grand old stew. I saw music, heard color, tasted architecture, smelt sculpture, and fugued perfumes.” In this pleasant state of synesthesia, the concert-goer became a gallery-visitor, “working in the key of impressionism.” His hurried critiques became, if not adventures of a soul among masterpieces, then Promenades of an Impressionist. Taste, to so practiced an epicure, was no mere figure of speech; gusto was his canon, and degustation his critical function. His impressions of cities, in The New Cosmopolis, were documented with menus. He would savor a painter, sip a composer, recommend an author, and announce, in Variations: “There is no disputing tastes—with the tasteless.”

To his axiom that the critic was primarily a human being, the corollary, expressed in Unicorns, was that “all human beings are critics.” And, where the critical medium was a part of the daily news, timeliness was as important as human interest. Paul Elmer More, in asking where Huneker dug up “all those eccentrics and maniacs,” indicated the cultural lag between journalistic and academic criticism. Iconoclasts: A Book of Dramatists and Egoists: A Book of Supermen were pioneering achievements which did much to direct the swirling currents of European modernism toward these shores. Huneker’s pantheon was eclectic, if not eccentric; he exalted the individual above the type, the artist above the school; “Anarchs of Art” like Shaw and Nietzsche were the dominating personalities.

If it seems incongruous that these imagebreakers should themselves receive hero-worship, the incongruity is explained by a Nietzschean phrase which Huneker borrowed for one of his books, The Pathos of Distance. Slyly he wondered whether the sordid circumstances of Gorki’s Night-Lodging would be understood “in our happy, sun-smitten land, where poverty and vice abound not, where the tramp is only a creation of the comic journals.” But Europe had also a greater abundance of genius than his musical studies had trained him to expect from his compatriots. Poe, his father’s acquaintance, was among his rare American admirations; but Poe, he thought, was no more American than English; and Poe, furthermore, would have been wiser if he had lived in Paris like Chopin.

The appropriate reward for Iluneker s labors was that Remy de Gourmont and Georg Braudes respected him as a colleague. Though he could not vie with the acumen of the one or the erudition of the other, he acted as a well-informed and sympathetic American spokesman for the impressionism and the cosmopolitanism that they respectively exemplify. His style added a “personal note,” an air of improvisation which now sustains the excitement of discovery and again diffuses into beery rhapsody and polyglot exclamation. Names invite epithets, which bristle with additional names: Huysmans, for example, is “the Jules Verne of esthetics.” Allusions are multiplied into virtual litanies; a single page on Flaubert contains references to nineteen other artists. Titles reflect the trappings of Symbolism: Ivory Apes and Peacocks.

Two volumes of short stories about art and its problems, Melomaniacs and Visionaries, fall somewhere between Henry James and O. Henry. Huneker’s novel, Painted Veils, written at the age of sixty, the year before his death, ushered in the twenties. “In it,” he confided, “the suppressed ‘complexes’ come to the surface.” Sex, heavily orchestrated in the manner of Richard Strauss, comes to the surface of the old Bohemian fable; the Seven Arts are symbolized by seven veils, which ambiguously drape the Seven Sins. The prima-donna heroine is an up-to-date incarnation of the goddess Istar, and the critic hero — an IrishAmerican steeplejack of the arts — resembles Huneker. It is Remy de Gourmont who advises him to return to America, and it is Edgar Salt us who tells him he should have remained in Paris.

6

To RETURN was no mistake, for the age of innocence abroad was expiring, and the time was ripe for sophistication at home. The Exhibition of 1893 made Chicago an international point of distribution for the latest artistic fashions. Concurrently, in many large cities, art museums and symphony orchestras were acquiring a public which needed guidance. Men like H. E. Krehbiel, Henry T. Finck, and W. J. Henderson did helpful work, but seldom strayed from the field of musical reviewing. The theater and the fine arts had exponents, but they lacked Huneker’s breadth. His collaborator on M’lle New York, Vance Thompson, could report literary gossip and editorialize against philistinism; but Thompson’s French Portraits owed its ideas, as well as its illustrations, to Gourmont’s Livre des Masques.

Percival Pollard would chat about central European literature in Masks and Minstrels of New Germany; meanwhile, with Their Day in Court, he drove home an invidious comparison. “The case of American letters,” as Pollard stated it, stood less in need of judicial inquiry than of medical diagnosis. The feminine bias, the commercial motive, the other symptoms were analyzed to show how quantity had superseded quality. Yet a neglected Boston critic, Walter Blackburn Harte, was Pollard’s example and authority for the statement that the United States scarcely contained half a dozen writers who pursued literature as a serious profession. Bierce was his culminating instance of neglect, Huneker the exception that proved his rule: “A cosmopolitan who happened to live in America. But who was not, primarily, interested in American art.”

But if the trouble could be traced — as Pollard argued to “our lack of proper criticism,” the establishment of criteria depended upon a groundwork of importation and translation. The opinions Huncker imported, the books Hearn and Saltus translated, did much to eradicate the taint of provinciality that Henry James had detected in Poe. Though traditionalists had kept in touch with England, the current stimulus came largely from France. And, though the importers and translators were equally versatile as creative writers, their accomplishment was largely critical. Its results may be counted in educated audiences, rather than achieved masterpieces. Where literature had been traditionally connected with oratory and theology, it could now be conceived through its relation to purely artistic disciplines.

Hence the old-fashioned didactic assumptions gave way to estheticism. Art for art’s sake was never a very positive credo, but it aided in releasing the artist from ulterior constraints — particularly the taboos of sexual reticence. Sometimes, it may seem to us, the prudery of the moralists was outmatched by the prurience of the esthetes; the struggle between them, at all events, would be prolonged and embittered before the subject could be faced in frank simplicity. To turn from subject matter to technique is to note the paradoxical devotion of a group of journalists to the cult of style. Affectation and mannerism did not obscure their genuine feeling for the cadence and the nuance. If they no longer excite us, it is because their successors reaped the benefits of their imitations and experiments.

What these isolated stylists had in common was the endeavor to reproduce experience at the level of consciousness, to relay sensations in unimpeded immediacy, which is connoted by the term impressionism. It is this method which Stephen Crane applied to naturalistic fiction in The Red Badge of Courage, and which Lewis E. Gates reconciled with academic criticism in his 1900 essay on “Impressionism and Appreciation.” Since impressionists are by nature individualists, they cannot be herded very closely together within a concerted movement; their lasting achievements, such as Bierce’s tales, are likely to be the fruits of solit ude. A negative program, however, may be discerned in the antagonism toward middle-class standards, toward everything that the popular lady novelists stood for, toward the distinguished — albeit inhibited — man of letters whom Bierce dubbed “Miss Nancy Howells.”

That Bierce and Howells, born within a few years and a few miles of each other, should have ended so far apart emphasizes the divergence between the genteel tradition and the Bohemian protest. The latter developed, with the twentieth century, into a recognized opposition; it found a local habitation in Greenwich Village, and vociferous organs in The Smart Set, Reedy’s Mirror, and The Masses. The philistines were reduced by Gelett Burgess to Bromides, by Sinclair Lewis to Babbitts, and by Mencken to the Booboisie. The seacoast of Bohemia became the comic opera kingdom of James Branch Cabell’s novels, and romantic bookishness was pushed to its illogical conclusion in his Beyond Life.

Whether we glance ahead to Cabell and Mencken, or backward to Poe and Whitman, it is clear that Bohemianism has continuously oscillated between the poles of escape and revolt: between an imaginative retreat from, and an iconoclastic attack upon, the restrictions of the commonplace. That our means of cultural expression have gradually broadened to comprehend both extremes is due, in large measure, to the work of the esthetic journalists. Edmund Wilson, paying his respects to Huncker and Mencken, has recently asserted that the heyday of the literary free-lance is past; that such potentialities will hereafter be absorbed by staff-written periodicals, by educational institutions, or by Hollywood. If true, this terminates an epoch which goes back to the Civil War and reaches its height in the last years of the nineteenth century.

The fin de siècle was confused by many contemporaries with the end of the world; Max Nordau’s Degeneration, which advanced pseudoscientific reasons for disliking modern literature, was widely appreciated in America. But Americans could not wreathe themselves in the laurels of decadence, as self-conscious Europeans were doing; instead, they welcomed the innovations of the new century as peculiarly theirs. They did not always realize that the American nineties harked back to the European sixties, to the ferment over impressionism, symbolism, naturalism, and nihilism. They chose instead to look forward to the American twenties, to a generation which would win the struggles they had initiated. In short, they were not victims of the romantic agony, but the couriers of critical realism.