Bohemian Club

“ The club had been founded late in the eighties, and although it endured less than ten years, it still lives in the minds of newspaper and literary men as one of the most remarkable of Bohemian clubs. It had its rooms in the rear of a little saloon, conducted by Henry Koster in “newspaper alley,” as Calhoun Place was more generally called, near the buildings of the Chicago News and the Chicago [43] Herald, and it somehow gathered to itself many of the clever men of Chicago who were writing for the press, and a few intimate spirits in other lines of work, but of sympathetic spirit. ”

“ MY CONNECTION WITH THE AUTHORS’ CLUB When we came back from the United States in 1891, besides our wide American circle, most of whom were in the habit of frequently visiting England in the season, we soon found ourselves in the heart of a Bohemian society, which met almost daily at one or other club or reception. Receptions had become the order of the day among London literary people, artists and actors. ”

“ There is a Bohemian, in white kid gloves and a white cravat, sitting in his opera-stall, and he whispers to his companion to order a Welsh rabbit and a pint of half-and-half for him at the Club. Some Bohemians are drinking claret at the Wellington, and others are sleeping among the vegetable baskets under the tarpaulins in Covent Garden Market. Bohemian No. one has just [300] won a hundred pounds at écarté. Bohemian No. two has just pawned his great-coat. A Bohemian has just gone home to read Plato, and take a basin of arrow-root for supper. ”

“ This club was called “Stanvoy Spolkn Ctenárskeho,” the Wilson Bohemian Library, and was instituted by the Bohemian settlers of central Kansas, chiefly farmers and mechanics. It was done with cheerful enthusiasm and rare unanimity, and the library, though small in the beginning, grew to hundreds of volumes, furnishing entertainment and instruction of a far nobler kind than card playing. The rules of the club were printed by the Slavie, a Bohemian paper of Racine, Wis. Membership fee was one dollar, payable on entrance into the club; the dues were ten cents a month, payable quarterly. ”

“ The Bohemian people are fond of the theatre and theatrical performances. At about the time that the Reading Society was organized, they started an association for the purpose of giving theatrical performances in the Bohemian tongue. The plays given were popular and successful, and on many occasions there was displayed splendid histrionic talent among the members of this dramatic club. Their performances were always clean, instructive, and educational. Today we have in Cedar Rapids two large dramatic associations whose performances are a credit to our city and its people. ”

“ Each member is allowed but two cards of admission.
Another Bohemian New York club is the Lambs. The funds to pay off a mortgage of 36,000 dollars on the club-house in West Thirty-sixth Street were raised in a highly characteristic manner. For the space of one week a company consisting entirely of stars—actors, musicians, and authors—formed themselves into a minstrel troupe and toured through eight cities, with the result that they made 67,000 dollars. ”

“ As might be expected from an organization bear ing the name of Rieger, the Rieger Club has lent all its weight to the movement for Bohemian independence. Its members are largely men obrn or educated in America and to the enthusiasm of the Bohemian they add American energy and push. ”

“ The boys in Camp Sherman organized a Czechoslovak Club for the purpose of spreading knowledge about their race among the soldiers, and each member pledges to contribute one dollar a year to the Bohemian National Alliance. ”

“ It always wears a gay and inviting appearance, with café tables set under fine old oaks, but precisely at four, summer afternoons, the leader of its military band lifts his baton and launches some crashing prelude, and the noisy company instantly stills and with nervously tapping fingers and glowing eyes abandons itself to that music passion which is the deepest and most intense expression of the Bohemian temperament. ”

“ All the year round there were public balls given in Paris, at which the Bohemian was in his element, giving rein to his inventive humour, his high spirits, and his gift of seductive gallantry. During the first few years after 1830, the golden age of Bohemia, the balls at the Opéra were the most frequented, especially in the days of the carnival. There masks and dominoes covered dancers of every rank in society, for even the femme du monde slipped in unbeknown to her husband. ”

“ In the first place, it brought the more joyous festivities of tout Paris and the riotous celebrations of Bohemia into greater relief; and, in the second, the men of the aristocracy, like the Duc d'Aulnis, were driven to find distraction and amusement in a gayer world into which their own womankind was debarred from penetrating. It was they who formed a certain section of tout Paris; they were the viveurs, the dandies, the young bloods of the newly founded Jockey Club, the members of the petit cercle in the Café de Paris, who joined hands with what may be called la haute Bohème. ”

“ It is not a book to be placed unwarily in the hands of the young and tender; parts of it are exaggerated, parts may be wished away, but, when all has been said, it remains, not the picture of la vie de Bohème at its best and brightest, but the classic expression of the Bohemian spirit—a frank confession, not the pseudo-pathetic souvenir of a prosperous greybeard. Its pages are among those rare ones in the world's library that have caught and held for a moment the intangible freshness, the poetry, and the gaiety of youth. ”

“ They were Bohemians at heart, carrying the more pardonable disorders of Bohemia into less exacting circumstances, spending their gifts and their money without a thought, luxurious, venal, insatiable. Their type is to be found to-day in the rich mercantile, especially Jewish, society of all large cities; but in Paris of the thirties and forties they were more powerful and more conspicuous. Though they could never hope to enter the Jockey Club, they were hail-fellow-well-met with the viveurs of blue blood ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 his view these advantages are leisure, travel, reading, and conversation. His estimate is different from that of the Philistine, who sets his heart on the lower advantages of riches, sacrificing leisure, travel, reading, and conversation, in order to have a larger house and more servants. But how, without riches, is the Bohemian to secure the advantages that he desires, for they also belong to riches? There lies the difficulty, and the Bohemian’s way of overcoming it constitutes the romance of his existence. In absolute destitution the intelligent Bohemian life is not possible. ”

“ Powell, “it is one of London’s merriest Bohemian dance clubs. The male members are all artists, sculptors or literary men, and the female members are all girls who earn their own living—mannequins, secretaries, artists’ models and girl journalists. It is screamingly amusing. [89] Quite Bohemian and yet high select, isn’t it, Harry?” ”

“ Not half as much individuality in the name as in the man. I remember him because he had a straw hat on.”
The burlesque production which had served as material for my Sunday article saw the light for the first time on the following Monday night. There being no other theatrical novelty in New York that night, the town—represented by the critics and the sporting and self-styled Bohemian elements—was there. The performance was to have a popular comedian as the central figure, and was to serve, also, to reintroduce a once favourite comic-opera prima donna, who had been abroad for some years. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I spent the afternoon and evening in the Park, dined at Lyons’ Popular Café (it must be remembered that I was not yet a Bohemian, and consequently owed no deference to the traditions of the order) ; and returned at nine o’clock to the Manresa Road. Once more I drew blank. A barrel-organ played cake-walk airs in the middle of the road, but it played to an invisible audience. No bearded men danced can-cans around it, shouting merry jests to one another. Solitude reigned.
I wait. The duel continues. What grim determination, what perseverance can these Bohemians put into a mad jest! ”

“ Few modern giants have possessed the strength ascribed to the seven-feet men of old, and such an athlete as the Bohemian would have been worth a visit. The theatre was filled, therefore, for the first time that season; but when the overture had been performed, and the occupants of the gallery were beginning to testify impatience, Elliston appeared before the curtain, looking grave and anxious, as on such occasions he could look to perfection. Evincing the deepest emotion, he informed the expectant audience that the perfidious Bohemian had disappointed him, and had not arrived. ”

“ Of those who have died, two at least have honor and literary consideration to-day; of those who lived, some have obtained celebrity, and all a reasonable measure of success. Mürger's Bohemians would have called them Philistines. But they have started a tradition that will survive from generation unto generation; a tradition of delusion so long as the glamour of poetry, romance, and adventure hang around the mysteriously attractive personality of a Bohemian. Ever since then New York has had, and always will have, the posing Bohemian and his worshippers. ”

“ Among the newspaper clippings received by the Bohemian National Alliance there was one from a small town in the State of New York; it possesses considerable human interest. Two Bohemian musicians who came originally from Prague, had been making a living in this up state town for about two years by giving music lessons. A Bohemian in this neighborhood was a sight more rare than a hippopotamus. When war broke out, suspicion was turned against the poor musicians who were known to have come from Austria and therefore were presumably German emissaries. ”

“ Surely there are plenty of bouncing girls and inky fellows still, just as there were respectable God-fearing men of letters and fine ladies even in the roaring forties. I doubt if Bohemia was ever so amusing as Mr. Buchanan imagines now, and I suspect the bouncing girls were "gey ill to live with." What is true in the immortal Bohemian myth, what appeals to the universal human instinct, is the eternal contrast between the dreams and aspirations of youth and the sobrieties of success and middle age. ”

“ The Bohemian Section is awaiting some reform in this question from the convention.
One of the features of the Bohemian Socialist movement is the organizing of gymnastic associations, where both boys and girls are active members. This organization of young people is a recruiting station for Bohemian branches. It takes care of children from six years up for physical development, and when they reach the age of 18 years they become party members. In this way the Bohemian Socialist movement lays a strong foundation for spreading Socialism among the youth. ”

“ It [Pg 115] was a real “honeymoon”—the full moon which shone on this love duet from over the shrubbery of coloured canvas. The hearts of the audience went out to them, and all was well.
But no one could say what sort of reception was in store for “The Owls’ Roost.” This “roost” was a picture from the life of the clubs which I have already described as the principal resorts of Bohemia. Now, the “Savages”—the members, that is, of the Savage Club—as well as the frequenters of the Garrick, the Fielding, and the Arundel, were all there in force. How would they take this caricature of themselves? ”

“ 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. ”