("Visionaries" has even
appeared in Bohemian.) Both are made up of what the Germans call
_Kultur-Novellen_--that is, stories dealing, not with the emotions
common to all men, but with the clash of ideas among the civilized and
godless minority. In some of them, _e.g._, "Rebels of the Moon," what
one finds is really not a story at all, but a static discussion, half
aesthetic and half lunatic. In others, _e.g._, "Isolde's Mother," the
whole action revolves around an assumption incomprehensible to the
general. One can scarcely imagine most of these tales in the magazines.
They would puzzle and outrage the readers of Gouverneur Morris and
Gertrude Atherton, and the readers of Howells and Mrs. Wharton no less.
Their point of view is essentially the aesthetic one; the overwhelming
importance of beauty is never in any doubt. And the beauty thus
vivisected and fashioned into new designs is never the simple
Wordsworthian article, of fleecy clouds and primroses all compact; on
the contrary, it is the highly artificial beauty of pigments and
tone-colours, of Cezanne landscapes and the second act of "Tristan and
Isolde," of Dunsanyan dragons and Paracelsian mysteries.
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