Description

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.