In the seventeenth century the enumeration of Bohemia includes some of the best known names in literature under Louis XIII. and Louis XIV. Bohemia counts wits of the Hôtel Rambouillet among its members and lends a hand in the weaving of the Guirlande de Julie. Bohemia has her entrées at the Palais Cardinal and writes the tragedy of Marianne in collaboration with the poet-minister, the Robespierre of monarchy. Bohemia strews Marion Delorme’s ruelle with pretty speeches and pays court to Ninon under the trees in the Place Royale, breakfasting of a morning at the Goinfres or the Epée Royale, supping of nights at the Duc de Joyeuse’s table and fighting duels under the street lamps for Uranie’s sonnet as against the sonnet of Job. Bohemia makes love and war, and even tries a hand at diplomacy; and in her old age, tired of adventures, perpetuates a metrical version of the Old and New Testaments, signing a receipt for a living on every page till at length, well fed with fat prebends, she seats herself on a bishop’s seat, or in an Academical armchair founded by one of her chosen children.
’Twas in the transition period between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that two mighty geniuses appeared, whose names are always brought forward by the nations to which they belong in any literary rivalry. Molière and Shakespeare are two famous Bohemians, with only too many resemblances in their destinies.
The most famous names in the literature of the eighteenth century are likewise to be found in the archives of Bohemia; Jean Jacques Rousseau and d’Alembert (the foundling left on the steps of Notre Dame) among the greatest; and, among the most obscure, Malfilâtre and Gilbert, these two much overrated persons, for the inspiration of the one was only a pale reflection of the pallid lyric fervour of Jean Baptiste Rousseau, while that of the other was a blend of incapacity and pride, with a hatred which had not even the excuse of initiative and sincerity, since it was only the paid instrument of party spirit and party rancour.
And here we bring our rapid summary of the illustrious history of Bohemia to a close. We have purposely set these prefatory remarks in the forefront of this book, so as to set the reader on his guard against any mistaken idea of the meaning of the word “Bohemian” which he might perhaps be inclined to entertain before reading it, for the class whose customs and language we have herein endeavoured to trace makes it a point of honour to differentiate itself from those strata of society to which the name of “Bohemian” has long been misapplied.
To-day, as in the past, any man who enters the path of Art, with his art as his sole means of support, is bound to pass by way of Bohemia. Those of our contemporaries who display the noblest shields in the chivalry of Art were most of them Bohemians once, and in the calm and prosperous glory of later life they often look back (perhaps with regret) to the days when they were climbing the green upward slope of youth, with no other fortune, in the sunlight of their twenty years, but courage (a young man’s virtue) and hope, the riches of the poor.
For the benefit of the nervous reader, the timorous Philistine, and that section of the public which cannot have too many dots on the i’s of a definition, we repeat in axiomatic form—
“Bohemia is a stage of the artist’s career; it is the preface to the Academy, the Hospital or the Morgue.”
Let us add that Bohemia neither exists nor can exist anywhere but in Paris.
Bohemia, like all ranks of society, comprises various shades and diverse species and subdivisions, which it may be worth while to enumerate and classify.
We will begin with Bohemia unknown to fame, by far the largest section of it. It is made up of the great clan of poor artists condemned by fate to preserve their incognito because for one reason or another they cannot find some little corner above the heads of the crowd, and so attest their own existence in Art and show by what they are already what they may be some day. A race of inveterate dreamers are they, for whom art is always a creed and not a craft, and enthusiasts by conviction. The bare sight of a masterpiece throws them into a fever; their loyal hearts beat high before anything beautiful: they do not ask to what school it belongs nor to what master. This Bohemia draws its recruits from among those young aspirants of whom it is said that “they give promise” as well as from those who fulfil the promise, yet by heedlessness, shyness, or ignorance of the practical, fancy that all is done when the work of art is finished and expect that fame and fortune will burst in on them by burglarious entry. These live on the outskirts of society, as it were, in loneliness and stagnation, till, fossilised in their art, they take the consecrated formulæ about “the aureole round the poet’s brow” as a literal statement of fact, and being persuaded that they shine in the shadow, expect people to come to look for them there. We once knew a little school of such originals, so quaint that it is hard to believe that they really existed; they called themselves disciples of “art for Art’s sake.” According to these simple and ingenuous beings, “art for Art’s sake” consisted in starting a mutual admiration society, in refraining from helping Chance, who did not so much as know their address, and waiting for pedestals to come to place themselves under their feet.
This, as everyone sees, is carrying stoicism to the point of absurdity. Well, let us assert it once more to be believed; in the depths of unknown Bohemia there are such beings as these, whose wretchedness demands a pitying sympathy which common sense is compelled to refuse; for put it to them quietly that we are living in the nineteenth century, that the five-franc piece is Empress of the human race, and that boots do not drop down ready varnished from the sky, and they will turn their backs upon you and abuse you for a Philistine.
Still, at any rate, their mad heroism is thoroughly carried out; they make no outcry, no complaint, submitting passively to the hard and obscure fate which they bring upon themselves. And for the most part they fall victims to the complaint which decimates them, a disease which medical science does not dare to call by its right name—Want. Yet many of them, if they chose, might escape the catastrophe that suddenly cuts them off at an age when life as a rule is only beginning. They need only make one or two concessions to the hard laws of necessity, which means they should learn to live in duplicate, to keep one life for the poet in them—the dreamer that dwells on the mountain heights where choirs of inspired voices sing together—and another for the labourer that contrives to provide daily bread. But this double life, which is almost always carried on in strong and well-balanced natures—indeed, it is one of their chief characteristics—is not often to be met with in young men of this stamp; while pride, a bastard sort of pride, makes them proof against all counsels of common sense. And so they die young, now and again one of them leaving some piece of work behind him for the world to admire at a later day; and if it had been visible before, the world would no doubt have applauded it sooner.
The battle of Art is very much like war in some respects. All the fame goes to the leaders, while the rank and file share the reward of a few lines in the order of the day; and the soldiers that fall on the field are all buried where they lie—one epitaph must do duty for a score of thousands.
In the same way the crowd always gazes at the man that rises above the rest, and never looks down into the underworld, where the obscure toilers are striving; they end in obscurity, sometimes without even the consolation of smiling over a piece of work completed, and so are laid away from life in a winding-sheet of indifference.
Another section of unexplored Bohemia is made up of young men who have been misled, by themselves or others. They take a fancy for a vocation, and urged on by a suicidal mania, die victims of a chronic attack of pride, idolatrous worshippers of a chimera.
And here may we be permitted a short digression.
The ways of Art, crowded and perilous as they are, grow more and more crowded every day, in spite of the throng, in spite of the obstacles; Bohemians in consequence have never been more numerous.
Among many reasons for this affluence we might perhaps dwell upon the following one.
Plenty of young men have been found to take seriously declamations as to unhappy artists and poets. The names of Gilbert, Malfilâtre, Chatterton and Moreau have been often, with no small imprudence and most unprofitably, made to sound abroad. People have taken the tombs of these