Orlo Williams
Vie de Bohème: A Patch of Romantic Paris
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4057664562265
Table of Contents
II A FRINGE OF HISTORY: THE REVOLUTION OF 1830
IV PARISIAN SOCIETY—LE TOUT PARIS
I
LA VRAIE BOHÈME
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