Vie de Bohème: A Patch of Romantic Paris

La Bohème, c'est le stage de la vie artistique; c'est la préface de l'Académie, de l'Hôtel-Dieu ou de la Morgue.

MURGER: "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème."

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 passing 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 circumlocution, a new topic for the dullards, a new toy for the blasés. 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 passed 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." Nobody 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 embarrassingly 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 latitude 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 assumed 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 institution 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 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; 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 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. 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 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. 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 pass as enfants de Bohème. 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 prone 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 nobody 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 circumlocution, 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 hardship 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 glasses 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 Bohème, was the happiness of youth that would never return, its insouciance, its untrammelled companionships, the poetry of its first love, its gaiety and irresponsible humour, its courage, its ready makeshifts 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 assured 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.