Orlo Williams

“ It is the settled people, I have already said, who bring forth the fine fruit of English manners, and where is settlement to-day? Society is regrouping itself busily like iron filings on a sounding board, values are profoundly changing, ideals are in the agonies of birth and death. The seething crowd in Oxford Street is England in miniature: people are everywhere hurrying to and fro, physically and mentally, laden with new ideas, new purposes and new experiences. ”

“ The dance, sustained only by good spirits, never flagged, till in the final galop every mask with his partner rushed pell-mell from the room, leaped wildly down the rickety stairs, dashed up the Impasse, and came to rest under the moonlit ruins of the old priory, where a little cabaret had opened, and only the late dawn of winter drove Bohemia to its bed, to dream of the Pompadour salon, of Ourliac's satirical buffoonery, and of Roger de Beauvoir's magnificent Venetian costume of apple-green velvet with silver embroidery, and his inexhaustible wit, for once born of no champagne. ”

“ You see her often enough in London, watching the Russian ballet with an air of proprietorship, as if her appreciation was the only thing that mattered, that of the ordinary herd being cold, earthy and altogether negligible; you may see her selling programmes at charity matinées, flattering and fluttering by her radiant presence the audience—"oh, my dear, such quaint stuffy horrors!"—who buy; you will see her in the company of the rich more often than in that of the well bred, for money is to her infinitely more than manners and flashy novelty more than solid worth. ”

“ We are fond of labels and catchwords, lightly casting away their implications. So it has come to pass 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 pass 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. ”

“ Let me plead with the women of England not so to misuse the name of a great ideal, as it has been misused before: they will not by so doing redress the wrongs of inequality. If they are supremely conscious of their worth, let them at least preserve the urbanity of the truly great who assert no claim but act upon the easy assumption of its general recognition. But it would be better if they could emulate the humility of the truly wise who, measuring themselves humbly by their ideals, find no delight in standing on tip-toe among their fellow mortals. ”

“ 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 passing 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. ”

“ The drawing-room or sitting-room of an enlightened English woman is neither a salon, awful in its bleak precision, nor simply a feminine boudoir, beflowered and rustling like a robe de chambre to which the entry of a man, even of a husband, takes on the air of a gallantry or an intrusion. It remains sacred to the woman, yet rather as the main sanctuary of the household of which she is the priestess than as the holy of holies; and, in this connection, it is interesting to remark that the English woman, as a rule, has no visible inner sanctuary. ”

“ We Englishmen can hardly understand the magic of this joyous phrase, vingt ans; through French prose and poetry it sounds again and again like a tinkling silver bell calling those who have lived and loved in youth to hark back for a moment in passionate regret, in an ecstasy of remembrance. To think of Bohemia without that silver tinkle in one's ears is to do it a grave injustice, for Bohemia throbbed with it then as with a tocsin, as with a summoning bell to a joyous refectory in some transcendant Abbaye de Thélème. ”

“ So distrustful is she of artifice that she seldom shines in the fine rapier-play of witty conversation: her interchange of ideas may be compared rather to the game of lawn tennis, with plenty of movement and hard-hitting in it, most balls being returned from the base line with a well-timed drive, not snappily volleyed at the net. She is most attractive when a flush of emotion colours her thinking, showing thus as an effective foil to her mankind who think unemotionally or wear the mask of indifference to conceal their sensitiveness. ”

“ By 1830 Paris was a boiling cauldron of passionate enthusiasm. Revolution was aflame once more. Barricades—the mere word is a trumpet-call to Frenchmen—had been erected once more in the streets, and once more blood had flowed in their defence. Paris for years had smouldered with indignation, and now her young men glowed with triumph. The people should come to its own again, and they should be its champions. ”

“ Let her harry overweening man as much as she will, shaking her broom in his face, compelling him to call her in to reinforce his weakness and striving victoriously for equality with him in every service to the community; but only at her peril will she cast aside permanently her good manners as despicable relics of older restraints and seclusions. They are the natural flower of her good comradeship and motherliness: why should she stunt the growth from those two roots which are fixed ineradicably in the deepest fibres of her nature? ”

“ The true Bohemia—as distinct from the Bohemia of mere idealists, incapables, and amateurs—he regards as a narrow, stony path leading up the sides of an arduous mountain, beset by the chasms of doubt and misery, but making for a possible goal, the goal of a sufficient income. Divested of all its agréments—resourcefulness, humour, courage, extravagance, which are properly attributes of youth, the real illuminant—Murger's Bohemia is laid bare as a merely economic state. ”

“ Would it not have a woman’s form to wriggle in ecstasy as a gigantic tear squeezed out of Mary Pickford’s magnified eyelid? It is a monstrosity unworthy to exist, and yet it now thrives amazingly upon its ample diet. In thousands of halls in towns, villages and cities it is fed every afternoon and evening with variations of the same crudity which never palls upon its unregenerate palate. Who can speak of art in England with this vast daily sacrifice to its negation drawing millions to the unedifying rites? ”

“ It was a more beautiful comradeship than one can say, in which all wished the success of all without insensate exaggeration and without collective vanity, in which each of us offered to lend his shoulder to the foot of him who wished to climb and to reach his goal.... It was a happy time, dear Théophile, of which we ought to be proud, for when one has traversed this life so often saddened by so much bitterness, we ought to be proud of having found in it some hours of joy, we ought to boast of having been happy! ”

“ Her husband may show to more advantage in spacious and crowded scenes, but if she look not well at her own table she will look well nowhere: for in the house that she has made her own, built up and ruled, among the “things” that are so part of herself that she can hardly leave them without a pang, even for the joy of returning to them with rapture, watching the service which answers her will and the faces which reflect her love, an added grace is given to her figure, a brightness to her eyes and a melody to her voice. ”

“ But la vie de Bohème, 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 assumption that it exists, those who wish to live in Bohemia idealize it; those who have lived in it boast of it ”

“ In those families, especially, where in the last resort it is not necessary for the daughters to earn their living in the labour market, this policy of drift is most obvious. A little French, a little music, a little history, a little recitation of approved poets—that is the recipe for the education of a “nice, refined girl.” As if any girl worth her salt would be content with a diet of spoon feeding. It is only those who have never learnt anything that imagine any useful learning to be possible without the desire to know more than it was good for you to be taught. ”

“ When one passes in a cabriolet along this dead half-quarter, and one's look penetrates the little alley de Doyenné, a chill strikes one's soul, and one wonders who can live there and what must happen there in the evening when that alley changes into a den of cut-throats, and the vices of Paris, wrapped in the mantle of night, flourish at their height. ”

“ She will manœuvre for the most accomplished partner, whether it be at tennis or bridge, and, if he be a man, she will ignore all other deficiencies on his part, so long as he will help her to win and will gain her the kudos of appearing remarkably accomplished in the public eye. She knows nothing of the comradeship of sport, and will unblushingly give her partner at the morning’s golf the cold shoulder at the evening’s dance if some backboneless elegant, with as little muscle as he has character, happens to show her off with greater effect at the jazz or the fox-trot. ”

“ Where youth and art combine the Bohemian spirit is always there; only the possibilities of Bohemia have in the course of time been crowded out. But in Murger's Paris Bohemia, shorn of earthly glory as it was, without lot in the brilliance of the boulevard, cut off from the more thriving traders in the artistic market-place, was still a possibility because the Bohemian tradition was still fairly strong, and because Paris was still a small city, its life little disturbed by a floating population of aliens and its interests completely self-centred. ”

“ The nursery is the enemy of self-consciousness, it is the home of frankness and a light hearted innocence. No good Englishwoman is ever out of place in a nursery, whether it be hers or another’s: she knows instinctively that there are few places on earth where her virtues are more obvious, and she herself has been a little English girl in that happy nursery land which is the cradle of all good Englishwomen. ”

“ 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, passionate 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? ”

“ Well, for one thing, Mary, who is of a more independent temperament than Emily, has not had the opportunity of finding out that living on one’s own is not all that fancy paints it. She is possessed by the idea, and she will only learn how much she misses her home when she has suffered from some of the facts which its realisation entails. It might be almost worth while to let her try for a time: if she comes back with relief, well and good. If she finds independence preferable with all its drawbacks, the wisdom of having ceased to put constraint upon her will be obvious. ”

“ Bohemia had originated in a literary creed, but in its consummation it was to pass beyond the letter and take hold of human life. This consummation came with extraordinary rapidity; there were no feeble tentatives, no half-successes. A new community arose in Paris, almost out of the ashes of the cénacle, vastly different though it was from the obscure group in Jehan du Seigneur's humble studio. It was animated by all that was best in Romanticism—its disregard for academic convention, its colour, its joyousness, its warmth of feeling, and its sympathy with all human passions ”