The Coast Of Bohemia

by William Dean Howells

Overview

Mr. Howells has always had a pretty taste in titles, and 'The Coast of Bohemia', by its name alone, brings pleasurable anticipations. Nor are they doomed to disappointment in this instance, for the story is pleasing in all its aspects. The Bohemia upon whose coasts it bids us linger is the somewhat sophisticated and denationalized Bohemia of the New York art schools and studios ; the flavor of its life is very different from that of the enchanted region which Murger opened for us, but its ways are engaging if decorous, and its denizens are very much alive while not too much in earnest. We do not discover among them any of the queer creatures that we have rather learned to expect in a novel by Mr. Howells — for once those creatures with their fads seem to have been shelved — but find merely a little group of humanly interesting men and women, leading lives rational in the main, and brought into relations which elicit the author's best powers of serious analysis, relieved by touches of his dry and delightful humor. The manner is still that of real ism, but a realism not too exclusive of the methods of art, and capable of giving the name of Charmian to one of the characters, no slight concession to the enemy. Moreover, the story is essentially a love-story, and it comes to the proper conclusion of love-stories, although there is one period of suspense when, knowing the perverse capabilities of the writer, the reader wonders if it really is going to end anywhere. It is well that there should be searchings of soul, but it is not well that they should rob stories — as Mr. Howells sometimes permits them to — of their legitimate endings.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783849657598
Publisher:	Jazzybee Verlag
Publication date:	04/29/2020
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	344
File size:	453 KB

Read an Excerpt

VI. Lcdlow went back to New York and took up his work with vigor and with fervor. The picture of the County Fair, which ho exhibited at the American Artists', ran a gauutlet of criticism in which it was belabored at once for its unimaginative vulgarity and its fantastic unreality; then it returned to his studio and remained unsold, while the days, weeks, months and years went by and left each their fine trace on him. His purposes dropped away, mostly unfulfilled, as he grew older and wiser, but his dreams remained and he was still rich in a vast future. His , impressionism was somewhat modified; he offered his ! palette less frequently to the public; he now and then permitted a black object to appear in his pictures; his purples and greens were less aggressive. His moustache had grown so thick that it could no longer be brushed up at the points with just the effect ho desired, and he suffered it to branch straight across his cheeks; his little dot of an imperial had become lost in the beard which ho wore so conscientiously trimmed to a point that it might be described as religiously pointed. He was now twenty-seven. At sixteen Cornelia Saunders had her first love- affair. It was with a young man who sold what ho called art-goods by sample — satin banners, gilt rolling- pins, brass disks and keramies; ho had permitted himself to speak to her on the train coming over from the Junction, where she took the cars for Pymantoning one afternoon after a day's shopping with her mother in Lakeland. It did not last very long, and in fact it hardly survived the brief stay which the young man made in Pymantoning, where his want of success in art-goods was probably owing to the fact that hogave his whole time to Cornelia, or rather Cornelia's mother, whom he found much more conve...