Blackguard by Maxwell Bodenheim — Read

With Clara Messenger as his guide, Carl began to discover that another world nestled between the dull apartment houses, raucous markets, and underworld saloons which had confined his body -- a world of smoother parlors and studios, in which stood "poets," painters, sculptors, novelists, critics, Little Theater actors, art patrons, students of the arts, all leading their little squads of camp followers or plodding methodically in the ranks. This world was swaggering and overheated, and within it hosts of minor people were raising their faltering or blissfully insincere prayers to a god with a thousand faces, whom they called Artistic Expression -- a god of astigmatic egoism dressed in cautious shades of emotion and thought, and obsessed with a fear of irony and originality.

Carl felt like an emancipated hermit suddenly thrown as a sacrifice to an uproar of contending philosophies and artistic creeds. His mind, accustomed to solitary decisions, became bewildered amidst the bloodless, tin-sword battle around him and he wondered how he could possibly make his own voice heard in the egoistic din. Each man assured him that the other man was a fool or a charlatan, and he listened to their conflicting assumptions of wisdom with a naive dismay.