Part 1 (1/2)

Vie de Boheme.

by Orlo Williams.

I

LA VRAIE BOHeME

_La Boheme, c'est le stage de la vie artistique; c'est la preface de l'Academie, de l'Hotel-Dieu ou de la Morgue._

MURGER: ”Scenes de la Vie de Boheme.”

If there is one reason for which the growth of newspapers during the last century may be looked at askance, it is the journalist's persistency in perpetuating phrases. Phrases and catchwords at the moment of invention are works of a peculiar genius, of which some men have an abnormal share, though it may crop out suddenly in the most unlikely places; but a good catchword, that crystallization of a drop of some elusive current that is momentarily pa.s.sing through public opinion, that apt naming of some newly formed group of men or ideas, never comes out of an inkpot: it is essentially, as the French finely recognize, a _mot_, a pearl of speech. It darts out in some happy moment of human intercourse, often almost unconsciously, when the words on a man's lips are less than usual rebellious to the expression of his thoughts, or when the exhilaration of some public utterance has charged the air so that the little telling point, hitherto cold and dormant, flashes suddenly into incandescence. Such a phrase, born on the lips of one, can only be nurtured on the lips of many: its success implies continued utterance. It becomes a heaven-sent convenience to save human circ.u.mlocution, a new topic for the dullards, a new toy for the _blases_. In these communicative days, indeed, journalism increases a thousand-fold the possibilities of its radiation, but a good catchword has always made its way without the help of print. There has never existed a human society, at any developed stage of civilization, that has not been perfectly capable of hitting off a new idea or a new group in some telling phrase or name without the intervention of a scribe. At the same time, conversational man, left to himself, is no less quick to forget than to invent. A new phrase properly fades as soon as the novelty of that which inspired it, but once it has appeared upon a single written page it has been given an artificial life of varying but incalculable duration. This artificial existence has been infinitely increased by the newspaper. The journalist, who has little time to think, is naturally loth to let a convenient label go, so that, long after its original parcel of ideas or beings has pa.s.sed away, he will keep tagging it on to other parcels with a certain show of relevance which effectually conceals the fact that it ought long ago to have been filed for the etymological dictionary.

A phrase which has thus lingered artificially in common use is the word ”Bohemian.” n.o.body can deny that it is a useful label, simply because it is so vague, conveying as it does the sense of some deliberate divergence from the usages of polite society, without being in the least embarra.s.singly clear as to the degree or direction of that divergence.

It is a term, so apparently specific, so really loose, equally capable of carrying blame and admiration, which people will go on applying to men and women, their lives and their clothes, without inquiring whether there is in fact any answering reality. It would be easy enough to confuse its simple users by a few question. They might be asked, for instance, what a Bohemian is, when they would probably reply, in the slipshod phraseology of to-day, that he is an odd person who wears funny clothes and does quaint things. But then, it might be pointed out, a docker from Limehouse is equally odd and quaint from their point of view, though they do not call him a Bohemian; on which they will rather pettishly explain that they mean artists and musicians and so on, people who don't ”work.” To help them out on this point, in fine, they mean people who potentially rank with the members of learned professions, but who choose to live a less respectable life, in which paying calls, dressing for dinner, and attending to the dictates of social morality are considered of small importance, though the exact degree of social unorthodoxy is left as undefined as the qualifying degree of artistic performance. The same lady will comprehend in the term the middle-aged civil servant who haunts studios of an evening, wears pale tweeds, but is otherwise a pearl of inartistic chivalry, and the scaramouch of a painter, whom she calls ”charming” because he is clever, and whose absorption in art has entirely ruined him as a social being. I propose another question. Why are Bohemians so called? The answer seems easy--because they live in Bohemia. And Bohemia? Again the label produces a difficulty. To pursue any geographical inquiries concerning Bohemia in a Socratic spirit would quickly produce exasperation in any catechumen, and I will presume the result without the method. The answers would generally amount to this: that it seems agreed, simply since the word is used, that there is a Bohemia, but its lat.i.tude and longitude are indefinable. It is not confined to Chelsea or St. John's Wood, or even, of course, to England; apparently it transcends the ordinary differences of nationality, existing always and everywhere. The possibility of its having existed once and somewhere--I give away freely at this early stage the foundation of this book--never occurs, for labels have a tremendous potency of suggestion. Bohemia is commonly a.s.sumed to exist now in the midst of this commercial day. It is generally accepted--with more or less warmth according to individual tastes--as an inst.i.tution not, perhaps, entirely desirable for itself, but a necessary patch in the motley dress of civilization. It is proclaimed gleefully or admitted under constraint, as the case may be, that clever, artistic men and women, wisely or perversely, choose to gather there, and that certain epithets, such as quaint, amusing, unconventional--the ethical implications of the adjectives differing with their user--are applicable to it. But _la vie de Boheme_, once so vivid a reality, has now no tangible substance: it wanders about, the palest ghost of a legend, formless and indistinct. The young may look forward to it and the old pretend to look back on it, but young and old, in either case, are turning their mind's eye upon a mere abstraction.

The word ”Bohemian” has become as conventional as ”gentleman,” with less content for all its greater glamour.

The glamour of Bohemia, too, is projected from a paradox. On the a.s.sumption that it exists, those who wish to live in Bohemia idealize it; those who have lived in it boast of it; and those who might have lived in it, but did not, pretend that they did. Yet those who wish to live in it know nothing of it, and those who lived in it, for all their boasting, have left it. It seems to take shape, like a mirage, only in prospect or retrospect. There are witnesses to the distant glint of its magic towers in the rosy mists of sunrise or the golden haze of sunset, but of the light and shade within its streets there are none, for those who might be supposed to be pa.s.sing through its gates are strangely reticent, and seem mysteriously to lose the sense of their glorious nationality. A man may say with a thrill, ”I will be a Bohemian,” or with a glow, ”I was a Bohemian,” but of him who said, ”I am a Bohemian,”

the only proper view would be one of deepest suspicion. He would certainly be a masquerader.

Yet many people, at least in England, do so masquerade--people who affect Chelsea, slouch hats, and ill-cut garments, who haunt Soho restaurants, talk and smoke cigarettes in half a dozen studios, toady sham genius, flutter in emanc.i.p.atory ”movements,” and generally do nothing on quite enough a year. Not long ago a distinguished artist, genially inspired by dinner at a club of Bohemian traditions and most respectable members.h.i.+p, gave utterance to the view that, though the velvet coat had disappeared before evening dress, the Bohemian still existed. Upon that a writer in an evening paper made the wise comment:

”There are people, it is true, who indulge in mild unconventionality; they feed in Soho, and talk of cabarets. But these people are seldom artists and never Bohemian. The unconventionality of these people is a mere outward pose, which compels any artist who wishes to preserve his individuality and good name to pay careful attention to the external forms.

Bohemianism, such as it was, sprang up in Paris, and that is sufficiently good reason for its failure in England.”

The journalist has here risen above the temptation of the label, and his words are just. The gist of the matter lies, perhaps, in his last sentence, but that point must wait its turn. There is no doubt that there exists in London, not to speak of other cities, a large body of people of varying ages, occupations, beliefs, and principles who keep up a masquerade of Bohemianism. As a body they are worthy citizens enough, whose intelligence on some subjects is above the average, but they are masqueraders none the less if they wish to pa.s.s as _enfants de Boheme_.

A reason for this masquerade may be found partly in the very human love of ”dressing up” which is never to be discouraged, partly in the glorification of Bohemia in which writers of novels and reminiscences are p.r.o.ne to indulge. Probably George du Maurier's ”Trilby” has been responsible for more misconceptions on this matter than any other single book, on account of its very charm, a charm that needs no further praise at this date. The author himself, who wrote about that which he knew, made no extravagant claims to have drawn Bohemia in the early part of ”Trilby,” but it is that which in the eyes of most of his readers he is unavoidably represented as doing. So far as Taffy, the Laird, and Little Billie are concerned, they are simply transplanted Britons of the Victorian era, art students with means enough to pursue their studies without pot-boiling and to keep open house for a collection of other joyous young people, of whom Svengali was alone the complete Bohemian, while Trilby herself with perfect propriety mended their socks. Trilby's part in this studio life is a sentimental idyll which n.o.body would wish to destroy, but it is none the less true, in spite of her creator's plea for her _quia multum amavit_ in a delightful page of circ.u.mlocution, that he has effectually distilled out of her any essence of Bohemianism which she is dimly represented as possessing. George du Maurier knew Paris when Bohemia was no more, but even he must have known the rougher, wilder, less comfortable side of the Quartier Latin. Yet that he glossed it over is perfectly comprehensible. Even those who lived to write about the Bohemia that once was could not help tinging their memories with the romantic yearning of middle age. In a life where hards.h.i.+p and happiness kaleidoscopically alternate, pain--especially in the shape of material want or the sense of unjust neglect--obscures in the moment of struggle the more brightly coloured gla.s.ses of health and joy which more often than not surround it. In retrospect, by a merciful dispensation, the sombre lines almost entirely disappear, only to be recalled by an unnatural effort of memory. What stood out in retrospect, in the special case of _la vie de Boheme_, was the happiness of youth that would never return, its _insouciance_, its untrammelled companions.h.i.+ps, the poetry of its first love, its gaiety and irresponsible humour, its courage, its ready makes.h.i.+fts in adversity. The ex-Bohemian had, what the Bohemian had not, a contrast by which to measure his regrets--the cares of domesticity, the wearisome demands of society upon its members, the responsibilities and cares of an a.s.sured position, howsoever humble, the dulling of pleasure's edge, joints stiffening, hair bleaching. The snows of yesteryear were falling upon others now; and that the young rogues might not be too uplifted, he must write his _militavi non sine gloria_, hinting the while that the special glory of Bohemia paled at the precise moment of his exodus. George du Maurier poured over ”Trilby” some of this romantic recollection, and other less gifted novelists have done the same for certain _coteries_ that have lived in London. To them is due much of the glamour still implied in the phrase ”Bohemian,” a glamour which is seldom corrected by a reading of George Gissing's ”New Grub Street.” Yet no conception of Bohemia into which the sombre details of that book will not naturally fit can possibly approach the truth.

This last sentence, I am aware, may be used to challenge my acquaintance with the truth since I a.s.sume its existence. To any such challenge the whole of this book is an answer, and its reader will at the end, it is hoped, be in possession of at least as much truth as its author, if not the little more which criticism supplies. In the case of a subject so little complicated an elaborate initial summary of aims and processes and steps of proof will be unnecessary. Those who wish to do so will have little difficulty in following a study, which provided no little entertainment to the student, of the life that was truly to be called Bohemian. I have been so far concerned to hint that I do not deal in any heterogeneous parcels which have come to pa.s.s under an old label. The label was applied at a particular time to a particular parcel, and the one and only original parcel is the _vie de Boheme_ which in this book I attempt to unwrap.

It might be supposed from the commonness of allusions to Bohemia and Bohemianism that the terms were contemporary, at least, with the intrusion of artists and men of letters into society, and that before the existence of the Bohemia whose capital is Prague the name of some other nation was, in the same way, taken in vain. However, this is not the case. The _grculus esuriens_ to whom the Roman poet so scornfully refers had no doubt many Bohemian qualities, but the emphasis of the taunt is laid on his foreign nationality, not upon his mode of existence. Even after the Bohemia of the atlas came into being it knew for many centuries no usurper of its name. Will Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and the merry company of the ”Mermaid” tavern neither called themselves nor were called Bohemians. Samuel Johnson, Goldsmith, and the other less distinguished inhabitants of Grub Street suffered many verbal indignities, but not that. Coleridge and Charles Lamb might be alluded to as Bohemians now, but in their day the term had even yet not been invented. Murger's preface to ”Scenes de la Vie de Boheme” proves that so late as 1846 a universal understanding of his t.i.tle could not be taken for granted, since he begins by carefully distinguis.h.i.+ng the geographical Bohemia from the artistic. The modern sense of the term originated, in fact, in Paris at the time of the Romantic movement, being only an extension of the meaning of ”gipsy” or ”vagabond” long attached to the word _bohemien_ in France. Our ”Bohemian” was introduced into the English language by Thackeray, who learnt it during his student-period in Paris.

This piece of etymology, nugatory as it may appear, is, in fact, very important. It is the first real delimitation of our inquiry. _La vie de Boheme_ is essentially a French term, and it is therefore fitting that we should examine its implications in that language. Murger in his preface is contradictory, but his very contradiction is pregnant and valuable. At the outset he applies the term _bohemien_ to the literary and artistic vagabonds of all ages. ”La Boheme dont il s'agit dans ce livre n'est point une race nee aujourd'hui, elle a existe de tous temps et partout, et peut revendiquer d'ill.u.s.tres origines.” Homer, he says, was the first Bohemian of Greek antiquity, and his tradition was carried on by the medieval minstrels and troubadours; Pierre Gringoire and Francois Villon, Clement Marot and Mathurin Regnier, Moliere and Shakespeare, Rousseau and D'Alembert were the leading citizens of their contemporary Bohemias. This brings Murger to his own day, of which he says: ”Aujourd'hui comme autrefois, tout homme qui entre dans les arts, sans autre moyen d'existence que l'art lui-meme, sera force de pa.s.ser par les sentiers de la Boheme.” If Chelsea were here to make a triumphant interruption, it would have spoken too soon, for he proceeds to give the definition which serves as an epigraph to this chapter, and, without a word of warning, contradicts what he has said before in the sentence: ”Nous ajouterons que la Boheme n'existe et n'est possible qu'a Paris.” This is a highly serious matter. It leaves old Homer nothing but a Greek poet, and Chelsea--well--little more than Chelsea. However, I cannot imagine Homer objecting, and Chelsea must forgive me, if I accept Murger's statement in the strictest possible way. Further, the Paris implied is the Paris of Murger's own day. That this was so may appear more clearly in the sequel, but for the present it must suffice to say that the Paris of the Romantic period, which gave birth to Bohemia, was unlike the Paris of earlier days in many respects, and no Romantic had any conception of the cosmopolitan Paris of to-day. _La vie de Boheme_, far from being a vague label, was a phrase packed with intimate meaning, meaning which at the time was not at all so fully manifest as under criticism and comparison it may now appear. It depended for its peculiar qualities upon the social and material conditions of Louis Philippe's Paris, which have long since pa.s.sed away.

We go, therefore, beyond Murger and strike out Villon, Gringoire, and Marot from the roll of Bohemia. At most they were only potentially enrolled and lived, like Socrates, in a state of unconscious grace.

Whether or no Bohemia can be said to exist to-day or to have existed in the Middle Ages, at least it can only be by a.n.a.logy from the very definite and localized _Boheme_ which was part of Paris between 1830 and 1848. Though Louis Philippe, the _bourgeois_ king, the admirer of the _juste milieu_, was her ruler, the life of Paris never beat with a quicker pulse than in those days; never was she more gay, more witty, more intellectually scintillating, more paradoxical, in fact more absolutely Parisian than when Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Alfred de Musset, the Princess Belgiojoso, Theophile Gautier, Gerard de Nerval, Nestor Roqueplan, and Baudelaire were among her citizens, when Roger de Beauvoir was dazzling upon a truly brilliant boulevard, when the dandies gracefully lounged and quizzed upon the steps of Tortoni's, when Alexandre Dumas gave his famous fancy-dress ball which drew all Paris, when Marie Dorval shone beside Mademoiselle Mars, when f.a.n.n.y Elssler and Taglioni danced while Duprez and Grisi and Rubini sang, when Gavarni and Daumier drew their caricatures, when Musard conducted his furious quadrilles, when there were still _salons_ in which men and women still knew how to talk, when life was still an artistic achievement in an artistic setting. Memoirs and reminiscences abound of this enchanted city in the time when her intense inner light had not paled before the glare of commercialism and cosmopolitanism, but such sketches and side-views must yield to the all-comprehending picture contained in the works of Balzac, that magnificent magician. Through him the Paris of Louis Philippe s.h.i.+nes doubly brilliant, for its world of flesh and blood was not more wonderful than the fict.i.tious world with which he peopled it, a world of high and low, rich and poor, squalor and splendour, vice and virtue, wit and stupidity--miraculous issue from one poor mortal brain. The Princesse de Cadignan, Madame D'Espard, Madame Firmiani, and Mademoiselle des Touches were its higher, Coralie, Esther, Jenny Cadine, Florine, and Madame Schontz its lower, divinities, and their wors.h.i.+ppers were de Marsay, the engaging Lucien de Rubempre, the remarkable Rastignac, Maxime de Trailles, La Palferine, and all the corrupted crew of Crevels, Malifats, and Camusots; in it the greasy, dirty Maison Vauquer contrasted with the splendid boudoir of a Delphine de Nucingen, the illuminated poverty of a D'Arthez with the vicious luxury of the Nathans and Finots, the huge _coups_ of a Nucingen with the petty usury of a Pere Samanon, the simplicity of a Cousin Pons with the malignity of a Cousine Bette. Into this world of feverish movement and poignant contrasts fits _la Boheme_, lighted by its double facets of fact and fiction. As the actual Bohemians from Petrus Borel and Theophile Gautier to Baudelaire and Murger play their part in the world of fact, so the fict.i.tious Bohemians from Raphael de Valentin and D'Arthez down to Rodolphe, Marcel, and Schaunard play theirs in the world of fiction.

They are all part of that pageant which, though it took eighteen years to pa.s.s and declined in bravery towards its close, may conveniently be called the pageant of 1830.

To disentangle the Bohemian contingent from its accompaniment of press and bustle is my aim in this book, which was suggested, I may frankly say, by some meditations on a second reading of Murger's ”Scenes de la Vie de Boheme,” a work of perennial delight that deserves a better acquaintance in England. In spite of the vivid light thrown by Murger on the life which he is describing, his stories are apt to be misleading unless read in the light of certain knowledge--knowledge which he could presume in his contemporaries and which it is the aim of this book, with all humility, to revive. Murger's little volume, after it has produced its first flush of pleasure and amus.e.m.e.nt, raises many disconcerting questions to a thoughtful reader. The scene it paints, for instance, is remarkably different from the two sides of literary life depicted in Balzac's ”Illusions Perdues.” Neither the brotherhood of the Rue des Quatre Vents nor the fast set into which Lousteau introduces Lucien are connected by an obvious link with Rodolphe and his friends. Then there is the question whether Rastignac in his days at the squalid Maison Vauquer was in any sense a Bohemian. Or, again, it may be asked how far fiction agrees with fact. Did Murger himself lead the same kind of life as a Schaunard or Marcel, and if he did, was the same to be said of other writers and artists, of Theophile Gautier or Gerard de Nerval? How did Bohemia arise, and how far was it, as Murger a.s.serts, a necessary stage in the artistic life? These are some of the obvious inquiries to which it has been my part to attempt an answer, and I would crave the reader's indulgence if, at the outset, I seem to shrink from plunging at once into _la vie de Boheme_. The external details of a way of life cannot be seen in a true light if the social conditions and, still more, the state of mind of which it was an expression are not first made clear. For that reason a little ”fringe of history” makes its appearance and leads to a short consideration of what French writers have called _le mal romantique_. Nevertheless, I have tried to keep the main subject always in view, and not to be led away into discussing aspects of the Romantic period which are not relevant. This is not, I claim with all deference, a concoction of all the old legends and Romantic love affairs. George Sand, for instance, and Alfred de Musset only poke their heads in; Alfred de Vigny and Marie Dorval, Sainte-Beuve and Madame Hugo play no part. Bohemia alone is our concern, a theme which is displayed for what it is worth without any distracting embroideries.

If, then--to return to the train of thought with which I began--Bohemia turns out to be something definite, with a beginning, a development, and an end, some negative criteria, at all events, will be supplied by which to judge the applicability of the label ”Bohemian” to any set of conditions existing to-day, and to decide whether the disappearance of certain special implications and unique circ.u.mstances does not drain the term of all definite meaning except as applied, in retrospect, to the very persons, manners, and ideas which it originally described. By a.n.a.logy from that meaning, there is no harm in saying that there have always been, and always will be, Bohemian individuals with a Bohemian state of mind. Richard Steele was a Bohemian; Lamb, perhaps, was a little too staidly settled at the India House, but his friends, George Dyer, George Burnett and, above all, Coleridge, were certainly Bohemian individuals. They were of that ultra-Bohemian type which never grows out of its Bohemianism, men who remain permanently in what should only be a ”stage” till they pa.s.s the age when, as Nestor Roqueplan said, the ”bohemien” risks being confounded with the ”filou.” Such men as Coleridge and Dyer would be called eccentrics even in the true Bohemia; like poor Gerard de Nerval, they were not entirely sane, and the Bohemian _type_ had essentially perfect sanity. It is for this very reason that _la Boheme_, at its proper time, could exist, and why before and after that time it did not exist. Sane young men, no matter what their fads, fancies, and enthusiasms may be, have no need and no possibility of making to-day that particular demonstration which resulted in Bohemia. The social forces drive them in other directions.

It has long been admitted in France that Bohemia is dead, and that it has been or ever will be revived in England is a delusion resting upon the unintelligent use of a word. Even young Englishmen, as we now consider youth, are too old, far too old, to live the life of which they flatter themselves they are preserving the tradition. The boy who has submitted to discipline for over a dozen years, learned to honour his neighbour on the cricket and football field and to respect society as embodied in the unwritten laws of school life--what has he in common with the youth in France, a bachelor of letters at eighteen, bursting with his own individuality, pa.s.sionate in pursuit of his own ideas, revelling in his new liberty, dreaming, as only a Frenchman can dream, of glory and love, who could attach no meaning to such a phrase as ”playing the game,” wayward, capricious, uproarious, and completely unbalanced? Yet it was such who made the traditions of _la vie de Boheme_. To those who are impelled to break away and lead joyous, untrammelled young lives of privation and artistic striving all sympathy is due, but by masquerading under a tattered banner they do not revive its glory nor increase their own. Paris once had room for Bohemia, but London never. Chelsea and Soho, Highgate and St. John's Wood are to-day no more Bohemian, in the true sense of the word, than Piccadilly or Grosvenor Square. In the lapse of years a few accidental attributes of the real Bohemia have come to be regarded as the essentials of the false. We are fond of labels and catchwords, lightly casting away their implications. So it has come to pa.s.s that Bohemia--that dirty, hungry, lazy, noisy vale of youthful laughter and tears, so enchanting in prospect or retrospect, so uncompromising in actuality, which many had to pa.s.s through and most would have avoided--is looked on as the pleasant home of more or less artistic natures, that men of stable occupations, regular means, and fastidious temperaments may choose for a dwelling-place, just as they may choose a garden city.

Well, let them masquerade, yet Bohemia is dead, and more honour may be done to its memory by recalling how it walked and lived than by casting lots for its old-fas.h.i.+oned garments. Its virtues and its faults were balanced as equally as its good and bad fortunes, but if it were to be revived, the resurrection should begin with that which was its chief glory, the intense artistic enthusiasm that was its charter. ”Nous etions ivres du beau,” wrote Theophile Gautier. London, indeed, would be the better for the infusion of a more Dionysiac spirit into her aesthetic appreciations and ideals. But that is not of the times. At the end of his charming book, ”Les Enfants Perdus du Romantisme,” M. Henri Lardanchet quotes a speech made by the president of some university society to the effect that the youth of to-day, preoccupied with extremely definite problems, has no longer the poetic enthusiasm of the past generation, whereon he is moved to exclaim: