Vie de Bohème: A Patch of Romantic Paris. Orlo Williams
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comedies, or safely chained, as critics, to the careers of remunerative journals. Rebellion was impossible, for there was nothing to rebel against. Success depended more upon individual enterprise than common enthusiasm. There was nothing left, therefore, for the new generations of Bohemia but to fall back upon tradition. If there was no more certainty in ideals there was at least something definite in slouch hats and medieval oaths, in defying conventions of dress and accepted table manners. So the symbols of Romanticism became the realities of Bohemia after all that they symbolized was as lifeless as a cancelled bank-note. Further, the population of Bohemia lost that great asset in life, personal pride. Their predecessors of 1830 were arrogant, no doubt, but with the arrogance of an advance-guard in a desperate venture. There was no desperate venture now toward, and advance meant, not progress, but prosperity. The poorer brethren of art who peopled Bohemia were now, inasmuch as they were not prosperous, failures. They had no sense of intellectual achievement to keep up their courage, when such achievement was measured in gold. It was inevitable that their moral should be affected; the recklessness, which was formerly that of bravado, became that of despair, and a less reputable atmosphere grew up round Bohemia which has never been dispelled from its tradition.
Nevertheless, dead as the spirit was, the tradition of 1830 remained very strong, being kept alive not only by oral transmission, as all traditions are, but also by the art of the sturdy few who remained faithful to the uncompromising standard of disinterestedness in art which it implied. Gautier, Flaubert, Baudelaire, the de Goncourts, and a few others stood out unflinchingly against commercialism on the one hand and prosy doctrinairism on the other. Their struggle was not wholly effectual, but, so far as Bohemia is concerned, was important. After 1848, when everything had to have a social "purpose" and art for its own sake seemed dead, they sat down, like the Psalmist, by the rivers of Babylon and remembered Zion. From their regrets the legend of la sainte Bohème arose idealized and purified, and it was made immortal in pages of prose by Gautier and in de Banville's "Ballade de ses regrets pour l'an 1830." This legend, tinged as it already was with sentiment, spread to the public, by whom it was resentimentalized, a fact of which other authors, Murger included, were not slow to take advantage.
"Ils savaient tirer parti des ressemblances réelles entre la vie de Bohème et la vie de l'étudiant bourgeois au 'Pays latin' pour établir une confusion avantageuse, confusion qui est déjà manifeste dans les 'Scènes de la Vie de Bohème.' Chanter ainsi la Bohème c'était un peu chanter la jeunesse bourgeoise."[2]
If this be true, then Bohemia after 1848, when the public interest was purely absorbed in Socialistic reforms, lapsed once more into being a mere fringe on the student life, and, as such, equally negligible. Its classic days were over, never to return, for the society of Paris grew too large to be again convulsed by a purely artistic conflict. The leaders of the new Parnasse made a considerable sensation, but they founded, not a new Bohemia, but only another cénacle. History establishes the florescence and decline of the classic vie de Bohème beyond much doubt, for it went with the florescence and decline of a common spirit.
III
LE MAL DU SIÈCLE
I HAVE identified the classic period of Bohemia with the time of the Romantic victory. It was not then lighted by dim lanterns hung outside the door of every artistic idiosyncrasy, but reflected flamboyantly a general state of mind. I disclaim once for all the intention of adding another to the many studies of the Romantic movement, but in my aim of explaining the living reality out of which grew the tradition of la vie de Bohème I am compelled to dwell upon the turgid mental content of the early nineteenth century. The eccentricities of Bohemia were then but slight exaggerations of a universal spiritual ferment, though, after the good wine was made, a later and decadent Bohemia artificially reproduced the symptoms of a process that was formerly natural and necessary. Le mal romantique, le mal du siècle, are common phrases upon the lips of French critics, who to-day affect to treat with contempt what was, after all, a new Renaissance. Without adopting their attitude, it must be admitted that, inestimable as were its results, it was an alarming convulsion. The English took it in a milder and earlier form. Its most extreme manifestation, Byron and the "Satanic" school, was a thing of the past before 1830. But the French were thoroughly and virulently affected, and exhibited all the most violent symptoms.
We may best begin, perhaps, by looking at a particular "subject," to use a medical phrase, in the correspondence of J.-J. Ampère, son of the great scientist. The younger Ampère, after a violent adoration of Madame Récamier, who was old enough to be his mother, settled down into a most respectable and successful man of letters, and he was never in any sense a Bohemian. He was a well-educated and perfectly normal man, so that the ravages of le mal du siècle may be well judged when he writes to his friend, Jules Bastide, in 1820:
"My dear Jules, last week the feeling of malediction was upon me, round me, within me. I owe this to Lord Byron; I read through twice at a sitting the English 'Manfred.' Never, never in my life has anything I have read overwhelmed me as that did; it has made me ill. On Sunday I went to see the sunset upon the Place de l'Esplanade; it was as threatening as the fires of hell. I went into the church, where the faithful were peacefully chanting the Hallelujah of the Resurrection. Leaning against a column, I looked at them with disdain and envy."
Two months later Jules Bastide delivered his soul in a similar strain:
"I feel that the slightest emotions might send me mad or kill me. The evening of our parting I opened at random a volume of Madame de Staël and read the dream of Jean Paul. When I came to that terrible line, 'Christ, nous n'avons point de père,' a shudder seized me. An hour later I had a fever; it lasted a fortnight."
Another friend wrote to Ampère in 1824:
"All my ideas turn towards Africa. … Is it solitude that I seek in Africa? Yes, but it is not only that; it is the desert, the palm-tree, the musk-rose, the Arab! A romanesque and barbaresque future is what ravishes me."
In 1825 Ampère, then twenty-five years old, wrote to Madame Récamier:
"Return, for my life is no longer tolerable without you; my spirit is wholly employed in trying to support the emptiness of my days."
In these delirious passages are contained the most marked symptoms of the time, the satanic gloom that drew its inspiration from Byron, the nervous sensibility imitated from the heroes of Madame de Staël, Châteaubriand, and Sénancour, and the longing for a life of Oriental colour which found a later expression in Victor Hugo's poems. However, it would be unfair to put down this spiritual bouleversement to the influence of "René," "Obermann," "Werther's Leiden," or "Manfred." They became, indeed, the breviaries of the afflicted, but the cause of the affliction lay deeper in the reaction of the French nation after the Napoleonic wars. Napoleon's victorious campaigns drained France of its best blood and its best energies, leaving an inheritance of anæmia and neurasthenia to the next generation, without diminishing that feverish desire for glory, that determination to work one's will upon a passive world, which was the spirit of Napoleon's armies. Older and more settled people were content to reap the rewards of peace, but the young men, exalted by the exploits of their fathers, looked in vain for some channel in which to discharge their superfluous electricity. Under the restored Bourbons there was none. The fathers had had free play upon historic battlefields, the sons were cribbed and confined in the narrow bounds of everyday life. Moreover, the revolutionary wars had revealed vast, unexplored pastures to the French mind. New countries, languages, and literatures were brought into its view. The gorgeous East, in particular, seized upon the French imagination. The desert was vast and untrodden, the Arab was dignified and free, and under unclouded skies the primitive nobility of mankind revealed itself in splendour and space.
Here, then, is the root of le mal du siècle from which the divers symptoms sprang. Of these, perhaps, the most marked and most general was an exaggerated sensibility, a kind of melancholy madness. Young Henri Dubois, who at any other