Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/823

 THE LITERARY INTERESTS OF CHICAGO 807

merings of prosperity" the second year, but the magazine was merged with another short-lived Chicago periodical, Rubric, "a magazine de luxe," which the "Skytes" said in their adieu was "the only purely literary and artistic magazine whose policy was sufficiently consistent with that of the Blue Sky to allow a reasonable fusion."

The Scroll was the name of another periodical, evidently of this general artist-dilettante group, which was listed as "literary" in the newspaper annuals of 1902 and 1903, when its founding date was given as 1899; but from the collections of files and the recollections of literary workers no further informa- tion about it is attainable.

All of these magazines, with the line of artist-class sentiment woven into their literary texture, may possibly be characterized in a general way as examples of I' Art Nouveau in letters.

The cosmopolitan outlook given to Chicago by the World's Columbian Exposition stood out in five or six general magazines attempted in the latter part of the nineties. In them this aspect of the social influences left by the Fair was to be seen more clearly than in the illustrated and artistic journals which were the chief crop of the period. They show that the western cos- mopolitanism mentioned in the introductory paragraphs of the first in this series of papers on literary interests had been reached. The spirit of westernism retained potency, but the current idea was that cosmopolitan products could and should come out of this western center.

A title of purely cosmopolitan connotation had been given to no periodical started in Chicago in a previous decade. The most typical and significant of those with the enlarged point of view was first issued in 1896, and was named the International. It was published much longer than a majority of the ephemeral magazines of Chicago.

The first role which the International took on the publishing stage made it unquestionably a cosmopolite. Its pages were filled with translations described by the magazine as "Eng- lished" of stories which had been published in the contem- porary literary periodicals of France, Spain, Italy, Ger-