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 epoch would have been content to learn his
trade behind the counter of Dubois and Dupont, cloth merchants, and to
settle down into a peaceful home with Mademoiselle Dupont, now plied
the yard measure with disgust and yearned for an existence more worthy
of his "complicated state of mind." He was a perfect magazine of pent-up
emotions, ready to expire in a delirium of joy or an ecstasy of despair
after the manner of René and Werther. He was quite willing to love
Mademoiselle Dupont on the condition that she would lend herself to a
tempestuous passion, allow her hands to be bathed in tears for hours
together by her prostrate cavalier, receive folios of hysterical ravings
by the post, and dread the fatal dagger if she had smiled from her desk
at a customer. She was urged daily to fly to a brighter destiny upon
distant shores, and nightly trembled that the coming morning would find
Henri transfixed by his own poniard. It was impossible to be reasonable;
only a clod, dead to all beauty, could be so brutal. M. Louis Maigron,
who in his book, "Le Romantisme et les Mœurs," gives some very
remarkable instances of these aberrations in actual correspondence, says
very truly: "Une foule de 'cratères' ont alors superbement fumé au nez
des bourgeois." The Romantic ideal supposed a sensibility always
stretched to its utmost, _des âmes excessives_, as M. Bourget says,[3]
capable of constant renewal, and a consumption of emotional energy which
is irreconcilable with the laws of any organism. If a young man failed
for a moment to find food for melancholy broodings in the shortcomings
of society, he could always fall back for a good groan upon his own
insufficiencies of sensibility. Now, of course, the "feelings of
malediction" which afflicted the Henri Dubois are of small moment in
themselves. Time comfortably settled them down. It was the young men of
real sensibility and imagination, the coming poets and artists, in whom
the ravages of _le mal du siècle_ were more than a passing phase. The
boundless yearnings that found expression in such lines as these:
_Amour, enthousiasme, étude, poésie!_
_C'est là qu'en votre extase, océan d'ambroisie_
_Se noîraient nos âmes de feu!_
_C'est là que je saurais, fort d'un génie étrange,_
_Dans la création d'un bonheur sans mélange_
_Être plus artiste que Dieu_[4]--
could not but lead to a profound dissatisfaction with existence, which
Maxime du Camp in his reminiscences very happily describes:
"It was not only a fashion [he says], as might be believed; it was
a kind of general prostration which made our hearts sad, darkened
our thoughts, and caused us to see a deliverance in the glimpse of
death. You would have thought that life held in chains souls that
had caught sight of something superior to terrestrial existence. We
did not aspire to the felicities of paradise: we dreamed of taking
possession of the infinite, and we were tortured by a vague
pantheism of which the formula was never found.... The artistic and
literary generation which preceded me and that to which I belonged
had a youth of lamentable sadness, sadness without cause and
without object, abstract sadness, inherent in the individual or in
the period....
"Nobody was allowed to be without an _âme incomprise_; it was the
custom and we conformed to it. We were 'fatal' and 'accursed';
without even having tasted life, we tumbled to the bottom of the
abyss of disillusionment. Children of eighteen years, repeating
phrases gathered from some novel or other, would say: 'J'ai le
cœur usé comme l'escalier d'une fille de joie,' and one of
Pétrus Borel's heroes went to the executioner to say to him: 'I
should like you to guillotine me!' This did not prevent us from
laughing, singing, or committing the honest follies of youth; that
was also a way of being desperate; we imagined that we had a
satanic laugh, while we really possessed the fair joy of spring."
These exquisite sensibilities, when they were not turned back upon
themselves in black despair, roamed far and wide in search of new
sensations upon which to exercise themselves. This _exotisme_, as the
French have called it, is another of the most marked symptoms of
Romanticism. The time was ripe for its satisfaction. The French mind,
shut for so long in the formalism of the eighteenth century, now found
that there were innumerable new ways to _rêver la rêve de la vie_. The
men of learning who followed in Napoleon's wake renewed the interest in
archæology by their discoveries; the historical novels of Scott and the
history of Michelet revealed the full and generous life of earlier ages;
the forged poems of Ossian caused a perfect rage for Celtic mysticism;
and the bold lawless life of the East, with its tyrannous Ali Pashas and
its Greek patriots, shone out with a new splendour. An unsatisfied
longing for another age and another clime animated every young breast.
Societies even were formed in provincial towns in which subscriptions
were pooled, and the winner of the lucky number drew the money to take a
voyage in Italy. The glories of Greece and the grandeurs of Rome, as
savouring of the classical, appealed only to a few; other eclectics fed
upon German mysticism and the fantastic weirdness of Hoffmann's
supernatural tales. A far greater number became Celts in imagination;
dressed in the dignity of outlawry and the garb of an Irish bard or a
Scotch chieftain, they defied the haughty English. Maxime du Camp, for
instance, wrote a poem in his school-days called "Wistibrock
l'Irlandais." "When I am depressed," he says in his reminiscences, "I
read it again, and there is no vexation that resists it." Anybody who
wishes to gain some idea of the _genre frénétique_, as Nodier called it,
in its Celtic dress will derive considerable entertainment from Pétrus
Borel's "Madame Putiphar." It is full of murders and intrigues and
tirades which foam at the mouth. The hero, Patrick FitzWhyte, falls in
love with Deborah Cockermouth, daughter of Lord and Lady Cockermouth,
the opening dialogue of whom upon the battlements is magnificent. My
lord, who is described as "one of those gigantic fungous and spongy
zoophytes indigenous to Great Britain," permits himself to address my
lady as "Saint-hearted milk soup!" After a good deal of clandestine
philandering and interminable translations of imaginary Irish ballads
the young couple elope to Paris, where Madame Putiphar (Madame de
Pompadour) seduces the heroine, and the hero after a series of dreadful
adventures is imprisoned in a loathsome dungeon in the Bastille, the
taking of which by the people of Paris is described with quite
astonishing force.
[Illustration: The Spirit of Romanticism]
Wild adventures, horrors and tragedies in any age were fondly dwelt upon
in comparison with the insupportable monotony of contemporary life; but
the Middle Ages made a stronger appeal than any. There was a perfect
mania for medievalism. Nothing pleased overwrought imaginations more
than to picture existence amid all the riot and magnificence of those
more spacious days. How they would have rattled a sword and clanked a
spur, how defiantly tilted their plume, how breathlessly loved and how
destructively fought! Why did they not live in the joyous time when
every minute brought an adventure instead of spilling one more drop from
the cup of _ennui_, and when a man shaped his own ends according to his
passions, throwing a curse to the poor and a madrigal to the fair? Then,
all their life was not grey. Splendour of colour with ample grace of
form decked out existence like a picture by Veronese. Costly satin vied
with magnificent brocade; all was a riot of velvet and purple dyes, fur
and old lace; drinking cups, worthy of giants, chiselled by a Cellini,
offered wine worthy of the gods; swords were masterpieces of the finest
Toledo; jewelled harness caparisoned fleet Arab horses; feasts were
Gargantuan, jests more than Rabelaisian; and all this wonderful wealth
of glittering colour was thrown into magnificent relief against the
solemnity of antique battlements and the sombre shadows of Gothic
architecture. This, apart from all innovations of dramatic form, was the
secret of the delirious popularity of "Hernani," "Lucrèce Borgia," "Le
Roi s'amuse," and the "Tour de Nesle," and of the craze for historical
novels, verses in baroque metres, slouch hats _à la Buridan_, velvet
pourpoints, daggers, mysterious draperies and massive chests, drinking
cups made out of skulls, and illuminated breviaries of which Gautier
makes such fun in "Les Jeunes France." To it we owe Balzac's splendid
"Contes Drolatiques," Lassailly's "Roueries de Trialph," and Roger de
Beauvoir's "L'Écolier de Cluny." Gautier in his early poems was as
romanesque as any of his "Jeune France," as those who know his early
poems must admit. "Débauche" is a frank orgy, and "Albertus" is a gem of
the Gothic, with its supernatural setting, the "fatality" of its hero,
the horror of its _dénouement_, the wild fantasy of its witches'
chamber, and its amorous wealth of descriptive detail in which old
fabrics, old furniture, swords, daggers, and hangings abound. Victor
Hugo, above all, was the chosen bard of the Gothic and the romanesque.
Besides his dramas, his "Odes et Ballades" were in the mouth of every
child who could pay four halfpence for an hour's luxury in the _cabinet
de lecture_; and schoolboys would declaim for hours in antiphon such
passages as the invocation of "La Bande Noire":
_O murs! ô créneaux! ô tourelles!_
_Remparts! fossés aux ponts mouvants!_
_Lourds faisceaux de colonnes frêles!_
_Fiers châteaux! modestes couvents!_
_Cloîtres poudreux, salles antiques,_
_Où gémissaient les saints cantiques,_
_Où riaient les rires joyeux!_
_Églises où priaient nos mères,_
_Tours où combattaient nos aïeux!_
or the frenzied descriptions of the witches' dance in "La Ronde du
Sabbat," or lines from "La Chasse du Burgrave"--which even Hugo called
"un peu trop Gothique de forme"--or with a
_Çà, qu'on selle,_
_Ecuyer,_
_Mon fidèle_
_Destrier._
_Mon cœur ploie_
_Sous la joie_
_Quand je broie_
_L'étrier_
proclaimed their attendance at the "Pas d'Armes du Roi Jean."
The star of the Gothic and the medieval was indeed high in the heavens,
but it paled before the full sun of Araby and the East. Napoleon had
dreamed of a Mohammedan empire, and before his dream could fade Navarino
and Missolonghi fired men's minds again. Victor Hugo was also the
champion of Oriental rhapsody. Even in 1824 he had seen the
possibilities of Oriental colour in French verse, when he wrote "La Fée
et la Péri," a poem in which the Peri, who stands for romanticism, says:
_J'ai de vastes cités qu'en tous lieux on admire,_
_Lahore aux champs fleuris, Golconde, Cachemire,_
_La guerrière Damas, la royale Ispahan,_
_Bagdad que ses remparts couvrent comme une armure,_
_Alep dont l'immense murmure_
_Semble au pâtre lointain le bruit d'un océan._
His collection of poems entitled "Les Orientales" was published in 1829
and took Paris by storm, provoking passionate enthusiasm and equally
passionate protest. In the preface he asserts that Orientalism is a
general preoccupation. "The colours of the East have come, as if
spontaneously, to impress themselves upon all his [the poet's] thoughts
and all his musings; his musings and his thoughts have become, in turn,
and almost without his willing it, Hebrew, Turkish, Greek, Persian,
Arabic, even Spanish, for Spain, too, is the East." There are fine poems
in "Les Orientales"--"Les Djinns," for instance, will always be
famous--but it is impossible to read the volume through to-day without
considerable amusement, so very full-blooded are they. There are lofty
apostrophes to Byron and the Greeks, followed by dreadful tales of
Turkish cruelty, gruesome ballads like "La Voile," in which four
brothers kill their sister, epigraphs like "O horror! horror! horror!"
valiant Klephtes, houris, scimitars, and all the catalogue which the
poet himself gives in "Novembre":
_Sultans et sultanes,_
_Pyramides, palmiers, galères capitanes,_
_Et le tigre vorace et le chameau frugal;_
_Djinns au vol furieux, danses des bayadères,_
_L'Arabe qui se penche au cou des dromadaires,_
_Et la fauve girafe au galop inégale._
_Alors éléphants blancs chargés de femmes brunes,_
_Cités aux dômes d'or où les mois sont des lunes,_
_Imams de Mahomet, mages, prêtres de Bel ..._
Then, as if Victor Hugo did not whip the passions enough, Alfred de
Musset lent a hand in the hurly-burly with his "Contes d'Espagne et
d'Italie," which made the young maniacs frantically demand:
_Avez-vous vu dans Barcelone_
_Une Andalouse au sein bruni?_
_Pâle comme un beau soir d'automne!_
_C'est ma maîtresse, ma lionne!_
_La marquesa d'Amaëgui._
Delacroix, too, was sending the critics into ecstasies of rage with his
vivid Eastern scenes and the horrors of his "Massacre of Scio." The
ideas of the young men with inflamed sensibilities seethed in turbulent
disorder. To be in the movement they had to have at least a poniard and
a narghile, a medieval cloak and an Oriental divan. Those with money to
spare decorated their rooms like sombre Gothic manors, those with no
money enriched their conversations with a wealth of medieval diction. No
make-believe was too ridiculous to shut out the actual place and time in
which they lived. Balzac's novel "La Peau de Chagrin," which has won a
celebrity far beyond its merits, is most unmistakably marked with the
frenzies of 1830. His revelling in the supernatural, the massed effects
of careful detail in the description of the curiosity shop where the
wild-ass skin hangs, the wild riot of the orgy, the terrific excesses in
which Valentin ruins his life, the duel and the horrible end, are just
as much the _genre frénétique_ as anything by Pétrus Borel. The hero,
Valentin, is simply a type of his time, and his tirade on taking the
supernatural skin is hardly an exaggeration:
"Je veux que la débauche en délire et rugissante nous emporte, dans
son char à quatre chevaux, par delà les bornes du monde, pour nous
verser sur des plages inconnues! Que les âmes montent dans les
cieux ou se plongent dans la boue, je ne sais si alors elles
s'élèvent ou s'abaissent, peu m'importe! Donc, je commande à ce
pouvoir sinistre de me fondre toutes les joies dans une joie. Oui,
j'ai besoin d'embrasser les plaisirs du ciel et de la terre dans
une dernière étreinte, pour en mourir. Aussi souhaité-je et des
priapées antiques après boire, et des chants à réveiller les morts,
et de triples baisers, des baisers sans fin dont la clameur passe
sur Paris comme un craquement d'incendie, y réveille les époux et
les inspire une ardeur cuisante qui les rajeunissent tous, même les
septuagénaires!"
As for the "orgy," it was so much a fashion that Gautier in his "Les
Jeune France" scores a delightful hit with the story of a society of
young men who combine for a colossal feast, in which various sections
follow out in exact detail the descriptions of orgies given by their
favourite novelists and the end is a farcical confusion.
Building castles in Spain is a fascinating pastime, but the ingenuities
of imagination cannot entirely shut out the individual from his
surroundings. From 1820 to 1830 the young man of France was continually
running against the sharp corners of the world and receiving the elbow
prods of his fellow-men. Exalted by his excited sensibility, he
conceived at once a contempt and a hatred for the insensibility of
society, which produced in him a feeling of moral superiority and
solitude. This abnormal vanity, shown in the deification of "l'homme
supérieur" and a proud contemplation of his social outlawry, is a third
marked symptom of _le mal du siècle_.[5] It broke out in several
different forms. One was a romantic worship of energy and strong will,
as typified by the career of Napoleon. Given these qualities, a man
could rise from the lowest depths to impose his wishes on the world.
However, self-styled supermen have invariably found their theories
rebellious to practical application, and Henri Dubois, if he started
upon a Napoleonic path, soon discovered that society selects its "homme
supérieur" when it wants him, and that uncalled-for aspirants receive
the point of its toe. He reserved his superiority, therefore, more
usually, for less material manifestations and conflicts. His rare
spirit, susceptible to all "the finer shades," stood mournfully but
prudently on high, scorning the base, unfeeling throng below it, and
calling out through space for kindred spirits to cherish. "My friend,
take care of yourself," writes young Ampère to his friend. "Obermann
cries to us, 'Keep close together, ye simple men who feel the beauty of
natural things.' Let us help one another, all of us who suffer." So
Henri Dubois and his friends suffered and helped one another, shedding
pints of tears and being just as ridiculous as they could be.