Orlo Williams

“ 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 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. ”

“ The merciless ridicule of Paris would have killed them in a week, without support as they were. Defiance of the bourgeois, an absolute essential of the true Bohemian creed, was, therefore, not appropriate to the first cénacle, who lived openly the life of ordinary, decent citizens, while secretly preparing the proclamations, the standards, and the weapons by which the cataclysmic victory of 1830 was to be won. In such a tense moment Bohemia could not be born. Their outlook, in the second place, was too lofty to comprehend the lower planes in which Bohemia made itself conspicuous. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Delacroix, the acknowledged king of Romantic painters, is revealed in his letters as the austerest of hard workers, scarcely leaving his studio but for a walk when the shadows began to fall. Yet, if Bohemia was denied genius, it was not denied a very high average of ability, which was enhanced by its burning and disinterested enthusiasm for art. Like all other societies, it had its fools, its knaves, its dunces, and its awkward squad. The Romantic revolution had attracted many scatterbrained fanatics to Paris, with as little artistic aptitude as good sense in their heads. ”

“ 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? ”

“ He had dissected Paris even on the threshold of his career. In some of his early stories, like a brilliant young surgeon fresh from his researches, he overweights the matter in hand with the results of the laboratory. "Ferragus" begins with a long comparison of the streets of Paris; "La Fille aux Yeux d'Or" with a marvellous tirade on the restless race for money and pleasure that is run by all classes, a tirade which, probing as it does all the strata of society, is an epitome, in some sort, of all his work. ”

“ The Revolution of 1848 dispersed the viveurs for ever. It was not that Paris diminished in gaiety during the Second Empire nor that the cafés ceased to be invaded by merry bands of fêtards, but simply that Paris became too gay, too large, and too cosmopolitan. The boulevard was no longer to be kept sacred for a chosen few, and a new generation was rising, which found other channels for its energies than ingurgitatory wit-combats. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 time when eccentricity was a symbol had passed; now it was only a skin to be sloughed, as Marcel saw when in a very sensible lecture delivered to Rodolphe he said:
"Poetry does not exist only in a disordered life, in improvised happiness, in love affairs that only last as long as a candle, in more or less eccentric rebellions against the prejudices which will for ever be the sovereigns of the world: a dynasty is more easily overturned than a custom, even a ridiculous one. ”

“ Into this world of feverish movement and poignant contrasts fits la Bohème, lighted by its double facets of fact and fiction. As the actual Bohemians from Pétrus Borel and Théophile Gautier to Baudelaire and Murger play their part in the world of fact, so the fictitious Bohemians from Raphael de Valentin and D'Arthez down to Rodolphe, Marcel, and Schaunard play theirs in the world of fiction. ”

“ To scare the grocer with a slouch hat and a medieval oath was not only a youthful ebullition, it was a symbolic act. The sombrero defied artistic convention as typified in the top hat; the medieval oath, in its contrast with the paler expletives of modernity, symbolized the return to life and colour in art after a century of grey abstraction. It was with the decline of Romanticism that Bohemia lost its living spirit. Unlike Republicanism, that gathered unseen strength in failure to blossom for a more worthy generation, Romanticism lost its vitality through its very success. ”

“ The left bank has changed no less than the right. The luxurious quarter of the Faubourg Saint-Germain has spread immeasurably, and even where old streets remain, as many do in the Quartier Latin, their houses have been rebuilt. Many a Bohemian could probably have told a parallel to Champfleury's touching story of how, long after his mistress had left him, he witnessed by chance the demolition of an old wall of a house in the quarter, and there on the topmost story was laid bare the room, with its very wallpaper unchanged, where they spent so many happy months of youth and love. ”

“ Not only was it the sound-board from which in a lucky moment the struggling whisperer on the left bank might hear his utterances booming forth to a multitude eager for novelty, not only was it an unofficial academy to which every Bohemian might aspire to belong as soon as he had made his mark, but it was also, during the years following 1830, animated by such a spirit of revelry and reckless amusement that the riots of true Bohemia were as pale ghosts before its more notable orgies. ”

“ The Rue des Quatre Vents, the headquarters of d'Arthez' cénacle, in Balzac's time "one of the most horrible streets in Paris," remains blamelessly near Saint-Sulpice as dull and decent as the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne; and the Rue Vaugirard, where the second cénacle, headed by Pétrus Borel, held its frantic orgies round the punch-bowl and where Murger wrote his "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème," is devoid of any spark of romance. ”

“ 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 emancipatory "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 membership, gave utterance to the view that, though the velvet coat had disappeared before evening dress, the Bohemian still existed. ”

“ In its golden age Bohemia did no more than share the imperfections of all human institutions. It had virtues, a liberty, a pride, and an ideal of its own. Murger had seen the beauty become a slattern, pretty no doubt beneath her smuts, gay in the midst of her sorrows, but free by tolerance, not by protest, her pride almost in the dust and her ideals in the possession of others. ”

“ In what an age do we live! What absurd authority allows immense forces thus to be dissipated! In Bohemia there are diplomats capable of upsetting the plans of Russia, if they felt themselves supported by the power of France. One meets in it writers, administrators, soldiers, journalists, artists! In a word, all kinds of capacity and intellect are represented in it. It is a microcosm. If the Emperor of Russia were to buy Bohemia for some twenty millions, supposing it willing to quit the asphalt of the boulevards, and were to deport it to Odessa, in a year Odessa would be Paris. ”

“ The talents of Bohemia were as diverse as the physiognomies of its citizens. Genius, it might be said with truth, was not more common there than in other walks of life. Real genius is a law and a life to itself; it is no more Bohemian than it is aristocratic, democratic, liberal or conservative. ”

“ 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! ”

“ To strike a more human note in poetry was their chief aim: they were concerned with art rather than with life itself; and though Hugo, in the privacy of his room, doffed with relief that bourgeois symbol, the high linen collar, he was like a general in his tent drawing up that transcendental plan of operations, the preface to "Cromwell," which was to inspire his troops in their pioneering and shooting, in their whole bodily attack on the classic tradition. ”

“ The aristocracy threw off its sulks, the prosperous industrial conquered his diffidence, the pleasure-loving stranger found that all railways led to Paris. The old guard was overwhelmed, or rather would have been overwhelmed if not already well-nigh crumbled away. Men with clear heads and practical aims, who had only devoted their leisure to enjoyment, like Véron, Roqueplan, de Girardin, survived to retire with all the honours of war, forming small coteries for the cultivation of wit and good cheer, but shunning, instead of affronting, the public eye. ”

“ He could only have been a Bohemian at the price of dissipating all his capital, and that he could more easily do among the viveurs upon the boulevard.
Bohemia, then, was poor, which had the one excellent result of banishing from it all mercenary spirit. When there was so little money to be had in any case and there were so many other more glorious things to think about, there was no point in financial preoccupations. If one had a few coins one spent them in common with those who had none; if one's pockets were empty one went without and accepted the hospitality of others. ”

“ The privilege of amusement is open to everybody, but to see what Bohemia made of its privileges in that respect is, perhaps, to quicken it for the imagination by an extra spark.
Precisians might say that dress hardly comes under the head of amusements and that on certain views it is more properly included in the category of necessities or of nuisances. Yet there is no doubt that for all women—and for more men than would admit it—to be well dressed is an enjoyment, a term only differing from amusement by a smaller suggestion of possible frivolity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 Théophile Gautier or Gérard de Nerval? How did Bohemia arise, and how far was it, as Murger asserts, a necessary stage in the artistic life? ”