Thomas Mann’s turn-of-the-century artist characters in three stories were profoundly influenced by the aestheticism, preciosity, and decadence of the fin-de-siècle. Reacting against stifling bourgeois convention and rapid technological change, many authors had retreated into their Ivory Towers. Or, like Gérard de Nerval, who led a lobster on a leash, dyed green and embossed with rhinestones, along the Champs Elysées, expressed their defiance of tradition and custom. The hero of Villiers de l’lsle-Adam’s Axël (1890) loftily proclaimed his indifference to ordinary existence. Just before committing suicide, he declared, “As for living? Our servants will do that for us.”1 The precious, luxury-loving, neurasthenic, and degenerate heroes of J.-K. Huysmans’ Against Nature (1884) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), who celebrated their refined taste in lapidary prose, were the spiritual ancestors of Mann’s artist heroes.
Henry James took up the theme of the artist’s life in many of his best stories. In “The Lesson of the Master” (1888) he portrays the inevitable conflict between family life and the pursuit of art, a higher calling that demands total dedication and solitude. In his own life James adopted the persona of the artist-as-celibate to disguise his repressed homosexuality. In this story the great writer Henry St. George (speaking for the author whose name he shares) explains to the young aspirant Paul Overt the emotional demands of the sacrificial quest for artistic perfection and that a man endangers his work if he devotes himself to personal rather than to intellectual passion:
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