some intellectual capacity and mental preparation, Henri Dubois often
took the further step from crying in the wilderness to enshrining his
laments in metre, being encouraged in this by the certain fact that
young men and true poets were indeed striking the Romantic harp to a new
and surprising tune. The poet was the real "homme supérieur" of the
time, not only in fancy but in fact. Henri accordingly proceeded another
stage towards sublimity by way of the faulty syllogism: "The poet has an
exquisite soul; I have an exquisite soul; therefore I am a poet." The
Romantics conceived the poet as a God-sent prophet. This was the
attitude, above all, of de Vigny; Lamartine and Sainte-Beuve adopted it
in their early days, and certain passages of Victor Hugo--for instance:
_O poètes sacrés, échevelés, sublimes,_
_Allez, et répandez vos âmes sur les cimes,_
_Sur les sommets de neige en butte aux aquilons,_
_Sur les déserts pieux où l'esprit se recueille,_
_Sur les bois que l'automne emporte feuille à feuille,_
_Sur les lacs endormis dans l'ombre des vallons!_
--show that he was not averse to it. So every youth who could rhyme
"âme" with "flamme" put on the aureole of a "poète échevelé," revelled
in the ecstasies of solitary contemplation, and sneered magnificently at
all who attended to business as soulless _épiciers_. 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_.
[Illustration: 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' famous _tête de poire_. "The fusillade of St.-Merry and the laws
of September were the _Bousingot's_ Waterloo. From the moment he was
forbidden to protest in a visible manner, and was deprived of his
insignia, his waistcoat, his stick, and his pipe with a pear-shaped
bowl, the _Bousingot_ had to retire. He became serious, an economist or
a humanitarian philosopher, and showed his revolt against society and
power by writing novels 'in which the idea predominated over the form.'
The novel with a tendency, that literary monstrosity, is the only legacy
left by the _Bousingot_ to the literature of the nineteenth century."[7]
In Balzac's wonderful gallery of portraits there is a picture of a
_Bousingot_. Raoul Nathan, the author, appears frequently in his
Parisian scenes, but his outlines are only elaborated in the little-read
"Une Fille d'Eve." There was something great and fantastic in his
appearance, as if he had fought with angels or demons. He was strongly
built, with a pocked face and a tanned complexion. His long hair was
always untidy, but his eyes were Napoleonic and his mouth charming. His
clothes always looked old and worn, his cravat was askew, his long,
pointed beard untended. The grease from his hair stained his
coat-collar, and he never used a nail-brush. His movements were
grotesque, his conversation caustic and full of surprises. His talent,
great but disorderly, had shown itself in three novels and a book of
poetry: he was critic, dramatist, vaudevillist. Jealous ambition led him
to embrace politics. Beginning at the extreme of opposition, he went
from Saint Simonism to republicanism and through all the stages to
ministerialism, being rewarded by a government appointment.
"Nathan offre un image de la jeunesse littéraire d'aujourd'hui, de
ses fausses grandeurs et de ses misères réelles; il la représente
avec ses beautés incorrectes et ses chutes profondes, sa vie à
cascades bouillonnantes, à revers soudains, à triomphes inespérés.
C'est bien l'enfant de ce siècle dévoré de jalousie ... qui veut la
fortune sans le travail, la gloire sans le talent et le succès sans
peine, mais qu'après bien des rébellions, bien des escarmouches,
ses vices amènent à émarger le budget sous le bon plaisir du
Pouvoir."
Balzac, we all know, was a little too ready to believe in the depravity
of human nature, particularly when men of letters were in question.
Moreover, he was profoundly antagonistic to the creed of the
_Bousingots_. His portrait of Nathan is distinctly ill-natured, but it
bears out the profound remark of Baudelaire, that if the Restoration had
developed in glory Romanticism would never have separated from it. In
another extravagant tirade (in "Béatrix") Balzac complains that the
Revolution of 1830 opened the flood-gates of petty ambition, and the
result of modern "equality" was that everybody did his utmost to become
conspicuous. This complaint was very largely true, but as far as the
_Bousingots_ are concerned Baudelaire puts the facts in a truer light.
The policy of _juste-milieu_ inevitably caused revolt among the
over-excited young men of the day. The _Bousingots_ were part of this
revolt, but the best of them had no thought of self-advancement. On the
contrary, the testimony of contemporaries goes to show that the saving
virtue of the Romantic Bohemia, _Bousingot_ and _Jeune-France_ alike,
was disinterestedness. Baudelaire says in extenuation of Pétrus Borel
himself: "He loved letters ferociously, and to-day we are encumbered
with pretty, supple writers ready to sell the muse for the potter's
field." Asselineau avers that if there was much of the ridiculous in
their excesses, there was nothing sordid. "They never talked of money,
or business, or position." The artist Jean Gigoux,[8] in regretting the
past, says that the _rapin_ of his later years, if better dressed, knew
less than those of his young days, and was greedy of honours and money,
things which the _rapins_ of old sincerely despised. Indeed, it is
impossible to read much about the Romantics of 1830, high or low,
aristocratic or Bohemian, without coming to the conclusion that they
were neither jealous nor mercenary. So the _Bousingots_--though some
rolled their eyes and knitted their brows "as if they would bully the
whole universe," others "fixed their dark glances on the ground in
fearful meditation," others, "gloomily leaning against a statue or
tree," threw "such terrific meaning into their looks as might be
naturally interpreted into the language of the witches in
'Macbeth'"[9]--did these things in all sincerity, with an ambition, not
to "get on," but to "do something."
We cannot, then, judge the classic _vie de Bohème_ in a true light
without taking into account this _mal du siècle_ which with its various
symptoms infected the greater part, certainly the more intelligent part,
of the younger generation. Many outlived the fever and smiled at its
remembrance; but at its height it was powerful. It was a healthy fever
in so far as it implied devotion to an ideal, _the_ ideal of true art,
which was then born again. Moreover, the ideal consumed in its fire many
pettinesses of the artistic soul, the commercialism of some, the haughty
vanity of others. Balzac's Lucien de Rubempré was not a true son of 1830
when he sold his independence to corrupt journalism, and Victor Hugo was
not only intriguing when he intoxicated young poets by flattering
letters. There was a true fellowship of art such as has not existed
since. The poet or artist whose name was in everyone's mouth did not for
that reason deny his friendship to one who had never published a line
or exhibited a picture. If a man had talent he was greeted as brother by
all his fellow-craftsmen, high or low. This common brotherhood inspired
by one ideal of art suffused and welded together Bohemia with a radiant
heat. Only when the radiance became dim did the mass grow cold and
crumble in pieces which retained but the semblance of a spark. Bohemia,
to change the metaphor, was not then a block of model dwellings, with
nothing in common but steel girders and a stone staircase, but it was a
corporation fed by common hopes and warmed at a common hearth. Its more
ridiculous defects--its vanities and morbid excitability, its violent
defiance of social convention, its passion for the exotic and the vivid,
its fits of melancholy and its uproarious rejoicings--were not
individual vices, but marks of a generation. Its grandeur and its
follies are traceable to a common source. Its greatest fault was not
extravagance, for that is a venial folly, but ignorance, which even
youth cannot wholly excuse. The seed of dissolution really lurking in
Bohemia was what Philibert Audebrand has truly called its _enfantillage
de l'esprit_.[10] In the flush of Romanticism the zealots neglected
those studies which give firmness to the mind. They rejected history and
philosophy; being young, they were not well read and they did not care
to become so. Foreign literature was a closed book to them, in spite of
their professed admiration for Dante, Goethe, Shakespeare, and Byron;
even of their own literature their knowledge was sadly defective. "Tout
bien vu," says M. Audebrand with a shake of the head, "ils n'avaient pas
d'autre docteur que la Blague." This cap will not fit all the heads, but
it has an undeniable texture of truth. When the first ebullition was
over, and the Bohemians of 1830 had departed from their joyful college
to spread its doctrines in a workaday world, they left nothing but a
tradition behind them. Their house had been built upon a light soil, and
the time had come to make new and solid foundations. But the tradition
did not include such wholesome industry, and Murger's generation, denied
the excitement and warmth of building, were content to sit down in the
hasty edifice to enjoy only the pastimes of their predecessors, stopping
up the ever-widening crevices, that let in a cold blast of public
opinion, with the unsatisfactory makeshift of _la blague_.
IV
PARISIAN SOCIETY--LE TOUT PARIS
The events of the time, the spiritual exaltation of young France, and
the _éclat_ of the Romantic struggle gave to Bohemia a definite
position. This position was accentuated by the smallness of Parisian
society. The diversity and complexity of life in a great modern city are
such that, even if all other obstacles were swept away, this alone would
still make it impossible for Bohemia to rise again. Bohemians must live
where rents are low--on the outer circumference, that is, of a city. In
the larger capitals of Europe the inner circle, which contains the
commerce and luxury, the hurry and bustle, has extended enormously in
the last fifty years or so. The increase of middle-class prosperity has
thrown far back the alleys and mean houses, to give place to
"residential" districts; the easiness of modern travel has brought vast
hotels and a constant foreign population; shops and theatres fill
immeasurably more space. Bohemia is driven to the extremities of the
spider's web, so that, in Plato's phrase, it is no longer one, but many.
It would be absurd to imagine a solid cohort formed from Hampstead,
Chelsea, and Camden Town, to say nothing of Wimbledon or Hampton Court,
for the purpose of forcing some "Hernani" upon the London public (or its
newspaper critics). Public opinion can hardly be corrected when the
agents of correction are forced to disperse in the last motor omnibus.
Moreover, this extension of the inner circle has made its inhabitants
less susceptible to sudden assaults. Unconventional demonstrations have
upon it no more effect than the poke of a finger upon an india-rubber
ball. The interests of Bohemia, even if this circle be not entirely
indifferent to them, are only a fraction of its multitudinous
preoccupations, which include the fluctuations of the money market, the
results of athletic contests in all parts of the globe, the progress of
foreign wars, the crimes and railway accidents of the week, the
development of aviation, and the safest method of crossing the street.
Bohemia can no longer be pointed to and felt by society as part of
itself, and when this is the case the name is nothing but a metaphor.
Speaking of the year 1841, Baudelaire in "L'Art Romantique" says:
"Paris was not then what it is to-day, a hurly-burly, a Babel
inhabited by fools and futilities, with little delicacy as to how
they kill time. At that time _tout Paris_ was composed of that
choice body of people who were responsible for forming the opinion
of the others."
[Illustration: Les Champs Elysées]
The glory of Bohemia rests partly on this fact. During Louis Philippe's
reign this state of society, comparable in some respects with the
ideal polity of the Attic philosophers, was, it is true, being disrupted
from within. The balance of power between wealth of gold and fecundity
of ideas was gradually changing--a change of which Balzac is the
immortal epic poet. Yet, though the power of a Nucingen was increasing,
and Paris was about to start on its new prosperity as the
pleasure-ground of Europe, this precious _tout Paris_ lasted till the
reign was over. Paris was small, in extent, in population, in the number
of those who formed its opinion. Of its actual compactness as a city I
shall speak in a later chapter; suffice it now to say that the
boulevards of Montmartre and Montparnasse bounded it on the north and
south, that the Champs Elysées was still a wilderness, and that outside
the fortifications lay open country. The population about 1835 was only
714,000; railways were hardly beginning, factories only tentatively
being erected. The working classes were chiefly engaged in commerce or
_petits métiers_, and the heights of Ménilmontant smiled as green and as
free from slums as the Champs Elysées were free from luxurious hotels.
The passing foreign population, though there was a certain number of
English attracted by cheap living, was almost negligible. Brazilians and
Argentines, Germans and Americans were hardly to be seen; even French
provincials walked delicately instead of forming, as they do now, the
chief _clientèle_ of the Parisian theatres. _Le tout Paris_ was,
therefore, a nucleus within a circle of three segments--the middle
class, the aristocratic families, and Bohemia.
The middle class, though the most numerous, was only potentially
important at the time. Politics and money-making were its only
preoccupations. It was divided, of course, into an infinity of grades,
all of which may be illustrated from characters in Balzac's "Comédie
Humaine." There were the bankers and usurers from the Du Tillets down to
the Samanons, the successful merchants like Birotteau, the world of
officials so accurately described in "Les Employés," the judges like old
Popinot, and all the men of law from a Desroches down to his youngest
clerk. Some were as sordid and bourgeois as the Thuilliers, others
luxurious debauchees like the Camusots and Matifats, others, like the
Rabourdins, fringed upon the _beau monde_. The sons of men enriched and
decorated by Napoleon formed perhaps the cream of the middle class, and
of these Balzac has given his opinion in describing Baron Hulot's son,
who plays so large a part in "Cousine Bette":