“Farewell, ungenerous earth,
Cold sunshine, sorrows that flay!
Unseen, as a ghost in the gloom,
And lonely, I pass on my way.”
This song of despair, composed by Victor Escousse after a hollow success had filled him with pride which stifled him, is, or was at one time, the Marseillaise of all the volunteers of Art who went to inscribe their names on the martyr-roll of Mediocrity.
For ambitious vanity the posthumous apotheosis and requiem panegyrics possessed all the attraction that the precipice usually has for weak heads; many fell under the charm and thought that ill-luck was one-half of genius; many dreamed of the bed in a pauper infirmary at which Gilbert died, hoped that they too might become poets for a quarter of an hour before they died, and quite believed that these were necessary stages on the way to fame.
It is impossible to deal too severely with such immoral lies and murderous paradoxes; many a man has been drawn by them out of paths where he might have met with success, only to end miserably in a career where he is blocking the way of those who, having a true vocation, alone possess the right to enter upon it.
It is the preaching of such dangerous doctrines and the uncalled-for glorification of the dead which has brought into being the ridiculous race of the “misunderstood,” the lachrymose poets whose muse is always seen with red eyes and dishevelled hair, and all the mediocrities who cannot create anything and from the limbo of manuscript call the Muse a harsh stepmother and Art their executioner.
All really powerful minds have their word to say, and, as a matter of fact, say it sooner or later. Genius or talent do not come by pure accident; they are not there without reason, and for the same reason they cannot always remain in obscurity. If the crowd does not go to them, they find their way to the crowd. Genius is like the sun: everyone can see it. Talent is the diamond: it may lie out of sight in the shadow for a long while, but somebody always finds it. So it is pity thrown away to feel moved by the lamentations and twaddle talked by a class of intruders and worthless persons who thrust themselves into the domains of Art, Art itself opposing them, and who make up a section of Bohemia where idleness, debauchery, and toadyism are the general rule.
Axiom.—Unknown Bohemia is not a thoroughfare; it is a cul-de-sac.
In truth, it is a life which leads to nothing. It means brutalising want; intelligence is extinguished by it, as a lamp goes out for want of air; the heart is turned to stone by a savage misanthropy; the best natures become the worst. Anyone so unfortunate as to stay too long, to go too far to turn back, can never get out again; or can only escape by forcing his way out, at his peril, into a neighbouring Bohemia, whose manners and customs belong to another jurisdiction than that of the physiology of literature.
We may cite another—a singular variety. These are Bohemians who may be called amateurs. They are not the least curious kind. Bohemian life is full of attraction for their minds—to have doubts as to whether each day will provide a dinner, to sleep out of doors while the clouds shed tears of rainy nights, and to wear nankeen in December, would appear to make up the sum of human felicity. To enter that paradise they leave their home, or the study which would have brought about a sure result, turning their backs abruptly on an honourable career for the quest of adventures and a life of uncertain chances. But since the most robust can hardly cling to a mode of life which would send a Hercules into a consumption, they throw up the game before long, scamper back in hot haste to the paternal roast, marry their little cousin, set up as notaries in some town of thirty thousand inhabitants, and of an evening by the fireside they have the satisfaction of telling “what they went through in their artist days,” with all the pride of a traveller’s tale of his tiger hunt. Others plume themselves on holding out; but when once they have exhausted all the means of getting credit open to young men of expectations, they are worse off than genuine Bohemians, who, never having had any other resources, can, at any rate, live by their wits. We have known one of these amateurs, who, after staying three years in Bohemia and quarrelling with his family, died one fine morning and was carried in a pauper’s hearse to a pauper’s grave; he had an income of ten thousand francs!
Needless to say, these Bohemians have nothing whatsoever to do with Art, and they are the most obscure, amongst the most ignored, in unknown Bohemia.
Now for Bohemia proper, the subject, in part, of this book. Those of whom it is composed are really “called,” and have some chance of being among the “chosen” of Art. This Bohemia, like the others, bristles with dangers; it lies between the two gulfs of Anxiety and Want. But, at any rate, there is a road between the two gulfs, and it leads to a goal which the Bohemians may behold with their eyes until they can lay their hands upon it.
This is official Bohemia, so called because its members have given evidence to the public of their existence; they have made some sign of their presence in life other than the entry on the registrar’s page; in short (to use their own expression), they have “got their names up,” are known in the literary and artistic market; there is a sale, at moderate prices it is true, but still a sale, for produce bearing their mark.
To arrive at this end, which is quite definitely determined, all ways are good; and the Bohemian knows how to turn everything, even the very accidents by the road, to advantage. Rain or dust, shadow or sun, nothing brings these bold adventurers to a stand. Their very faults have virtues to back them. Ambition keeps their wits always on the alert, sounds the charge, and urges them on to the assault of the future; invention never slackens, it is always grappling with necessity, always carrying a lighted fuse to blow up any obstacle so soon as it is felt to be in the way. Their very subsistence is a work of genius, a daily renewed problem, continually solved by audacious feats of mathematics. These are the men to extract a loan from Harpagon and to find truffles on the raft of the Medusa. They can, at a pinch practise abstinence with all the virtue of an anchorite; but let a little good fortune come their way and you shall presently see them riding the most ruinous hobbies, making love to the youngest and fairest, drinking of the oldest and best. There are not windows enough for them to fling their money through. Then, when their last five-franc piece is dead and buried, they go back to dine at the ordinary of Chance, where a knife and fork is always laid for them; and preceded by a pack of cunning shifts, they go a-poaching in the preserves of every industry in the neighbourhood of Art, stalking from morning to evening that shyest of game known as the five-franc piece.
Bohemians go everywhere and know everything; sometimes their boots are varnished, sometimes down at heel, and their knowledge and the manner of their going varies accordingly. You may find one of them one day leaning against the chimney-piece of some fashionable drawing-room, and the next at a table in some dancing saloon. They cannot go ten paces on the boulevard but they meet a friend, nor thirty without coming across a creditor.
Bohemia has an inner language of its own, taken from studio talk, the slang of green-rooms, and debates in newspaper offices. All eclecticisms of style meet in this unparalleled idiom, where apocalyptic terms of expression jostle the cock-and-bull story and the rusticity of popular sayings is allied with high-flown periods shaped in the mould whence Cyrano drew his hectoring tirades; where paradox (that spoilt child of modern literature) treats common sense as Cassandra is treated in the pantomimes; where irony bites like the most powerful acid, and as those dead shots who can hit the bull’s-eye with their eyes bandaged. ’Tis an intelligent argot, albeit unintelligible to those who have not the key to it, and audacious beyond the utmost bounds of free speech in any tongue. The vocabulary of Bohemia is the hell of rhetoric and the paradise of the neologism.
Such, in brief, is Bohemian life—little known of the social puritan, disparaged by the puritans of Art, insulted by fearful and jealous mediocrity in every form, which cannot clamour forth lies and slander enough to drown the voices and the names of those who reach success through this forecourt of fame by yoking audacity to their talent.
It is a life that needs patience and courage. No one can attempt the struggle unless he wears the stout armour of indifference, proof against fools and envious attacks; and no one can afford to lose his pride in himself for a moment; it is his staff, and without it he will stumble