Vie de Bohème: A Patch of Romantic Paris. Orlo Williams
Читать онлайн книгу.
This was a harmless enough delusion, but it became less harmless when combined with the idea that for the sake of experience the poet should abandon himself entirely to his passions. The great artist, indeed, has his own morality, but Victor Hugo's "Mazeppa" or Lamartine's stanza
Mais nous, pour embraser les âmes, Il faut brûler, il faut ravir Au ciel jaloux ses triples flammes: Pour tout peindre, il faut tout sentir. Foyers brûlants de la lumière, Nos cœurs de la nature entière Doivent concentrer les rayons, Et l'on accuse notre vie! Mais ce flambeau qu'on nous envie S'allume au feu des passions
were dangerous matchboxes in the hands of children. It was a fatality, too, that several poets of some merit died during these years of want or neglect. Gilbert, the satirist, expired in hospital, breathing piteous plaints, and Hégésippe Moreau, the poet of "La Voulzie," was equally unfortunate. Society can hardly be blamed for not supporting all its lyrically inclined members, but it was natural that the "poète échevelé" should smoulder with indignation at such disasters, and cheer the sentiments of de Vigny's drama "Chatterton" till his lungs gave out. It was still more of a fatality that certain other poets attained a momentary celebrity by committing suicide, leaving rhymed farewells to a stony-hearted society and a tedious life. To win fame by a pathetic death in a pauper's hospital, or to bid defiance to the world with a superb gesture of self-destruction, was a far too common ambition. Sainte-Beuve himself observed that "la manie et la gageure de tous les René, de tous les Chatterton de notre temps, c'était d'être grand poète et de mourir." A perfect epidemic of suicide was due to le mal du siècle, as M. Louis Maigron shows in his work that I have already cited. Among other strange stories he gives at length the confession of an old man who in his youth was president of a suicide club, formed in a provincial town by a set of romantic schoolboys as late as 1846. Happily the club was short-lived, but it resulted in the self-destruction of one of its most gifted members. In the letter with which he announced his coming death from Lucerne he wrote:
" … I have no precise reason to have done with life except the insurmountable disgust with which it inspires me. Chance of birth gave me a certain fortune; I am not denied an intelligence perhaps slightly above the common level; it would have been in my power to marry an adorable child: so many conditions of happiness, in the eyes of the vulgar. But my poor soul, alas, cannot content itself with them. Nothing can charm my heart any longer, 'mon cœur lassé de tout, même de l'espérance'; it will be closed, without ever having been opened."
He left his little library to the club, specially reserving for the president "Werther," "René," "Obermann," "Jacques," and the works of Rabbe. They were his breviaries, he said, covered as they were with notes that revealed all his soul.
The pose of pathetic despair was not, however, the only one in which the feeling of moral solitude showed itself. Another very common attitude was that of revolt against society, an aping of Mephistopheles, the fallen angel doomed to everlasting unhappiness, strong only in his disillusionment and his clear vision of the canker in the heart of every bud. The word "satanism" summed up this attitude: its breviaries were "Manfred" and Dumas' violent tragedy, "Antony." It rejoiced in the cult of the horrible, in Hoffmannesque dabblings in the supernatural, in pessimistic poetry like Gautier's "Tête de Mort," and such lines in his early sonnets as:
Mais toute cette joie est comme le lierre Qui d'une vieille tour, guirlande irregulière, Embrasse en les cachant les pans démantelés, Au dehors on ne voit que riante verdure, Au dedans, que poussière infecte et noire ordure, Et qu'ossements jaunis aux décombres mêlés.
Its effects, in society, were chiefly obtained by the satanic laugh. Gautier soon grew out of his satanic mood, Dumas was never anything more than a fine romancer, while Victor Hugo, Lamartine, and de Vigny were too lofty poets to indulge in such artificialities; but satanism deserves mention because it was a traditional business with one party in the romantic Bohemia—the party of the Bousingots.
The origin of the term Bousingot has been a matter of dispute among French writers. Philibert Audebrand in his memoir of Léon Gozlan says it was invented by that brilliant journalist to satirize the young republican enthusiasts of 1832 in the Figaro. Charles Asselineau in his "Bibliographie Romantique" says that after some hilarious souls had been arrested for singing too loudly in the streets "Nous avons fait du bousingo"—bousingo being the slang for "noise"—it became a popular designation for the more furious Romantics. The matter seems to be settled more or less in Asselineau's manner by a passage in the letter written by Philothée O'Neddy to Asselineau after the publication of the "Bibliographie Romantique" to give a more correct account of the second cénacle. He asserts that there never were any self-styled Bousingots, but that after the arrest of the hilarious revellers the affair got into the newspapers and the term remained as a bourgeois hit at the Romantics. The proper spelling of the word was bouzingo, and Gautier exclaimed one day: "These asses of bourgeois don't even know how bouzingo is spelt! To teach them a little orthography several of us ought to publish a volume of stories which we will bravely call 'Contes du Bouzingo.'" The suggestion was thought a happy one, and the book was even advertised as imminent, but it was never written. Gautier's promise of a contribution was afterwards redeemed in "Le Capitaine Fracasse," but Jules Vabre's famous treatise "Sur l'incommodité des commodes" did not progress beyond the title. In common parlance, however, the name remained Bousingots, and its general meaning was quite clear. Just as the Gothic frenzy made the party of Jeune-France, who were the Christian-Royalist section of the Romantics, so the political agitation, combined with the feeling of antagonism to society, made the Bousingots. The meaning became subsequently enlarged to express all the extravagances of the Romantics, their idealization of the artist and their disorderly ways; but this extension was illegitimate. Literature and poetry were, it is true, the preoccupation of the more prominent Bousingots, but their distinctive mark was a profession of ultra-democratic views and manners. The leader of them all was the mysterious Pétrus Borel,[6] whom I have already mentioned as the author of "Madame Putiphar." His other chief work was a volume of poems entitled "Rhapsodies." The young men of 1830 worshipped him as the coming champion before whom the star of Victor Hugo was ingloriously to wane. They were grievously disappointed. After the first crisis of le mal du siècle his inspiration faded away, and he died an obscure officiai in Algeria. Baudelaire, in "L'Art Romantique," says of him:
"Without Pétrus Borel, there would have been a lacuna in Romanticism. In the first phase of our literary revolution the poet's imagination turned especially to the past. … Later on its melancholy took a more decided, more savage, and more earthy tone. A misanthropical republicanism allied itself with the new school, and Pétrus Borel was the most extravagant and paradoxical expression of the spirit of the Bousingots. … This spirit, both literary and republican, as opposed to the democratic and bourgeois passion which subsequently oppressed us so cruelly, was moved both by an aristocratic hate, without limit, without restriction, without pity, for kings and the bourgeoisie, and by a general sympathy for all that in art represented excess in colour and form, for all that was at once intense, pessimistic, and Byronic; it was dilettantism of a singular nature, only to be explained by the hateful circumstances in which our bored and turbulent youth was enclosed. If the Restoration had regularly developed in glory, Romanticism would have never separated from the throne; and this new sect, which professed an equal disdain for the moderate party of the political opposition, for the painting of Delaroche or the poetry of Delavigne, and for the king who presided over the development of le juste-milieu, would have had no reason for existing."
Charles Asselineau fills up the picture. The Bousingot, he says, was as rough and cynical as the Jeune-France was dandified and exquisite, and showed genius in discovering at once the plastique of his idea. In contrast to the extravagant luxury affected by the medievalists, he adopted the manners of the people in habits and dress, smoking clay pipes and drinking the "petit bleu" of low pot-houses. Instead of raving about cathedrals, he spent his ingenuity in devising bitter satires against the king and his officers or fresh settings in caricature for Louis'