Not that I think I left this to the second day. Very probably I lost no
time in going to the office of the Saturday Press, as soon as I had my
breakfast after arriving, and I have a dim impression of anticipating the
earliest of the Bohemians, whose gay theory of life obliged them to a
good many hardships in lying down early in the morning, and rising up
late in the day. If it was the office-boy who bore me company during the
first hour of my visit, by-and-by the editors and contributors actually
began to come in. I would not be very specific about them if I could,
for since that Bohemia has faded from the map of the republic of letters,
it has grown more and more difficult to trace its citizenship to any
certain writer. There are some living who knew the Bohemians and even
loved them, but there are increasingly few who were of them, even in the
fond retrospect of youthful follies and errors. It was in fact but a
sickly colony, transplanted from the mother asphalt of Paris, and never
really striking root in the pavements of New York; it was a colony of
ideas, of theories, which had perhaps never had any deep root anywhere.
What these ideas, these theories, were in art and in life, it would not
be very easy to say; but in the Saturday Press they came to violent
expression, not to say explosion, against all existing forms of
respectability. If respectability was your ‘bete noire’, then you were a
Bohemian; and if you were in the habit of rendering yourself in prose,
then you necessarily shredded your prose into very fine paragraphs of a
sentence each, or of a very few words, or even of one word. I believe
this fashion prevailed till very lately with some of the dramatic
critics, who thought that it gave a quality of epigram to the style; and
I suppose it was borrowed from the more spasmodic moments of Victor Hugo
by the editor of the Press. He brought it back with him when he came
home from one of those sojourns in Paris which possess one of the French
accent rather than the French language; I long desired to write in that
fashion myself, but I had not the courage.
This editor was a man of such open and avowed cynicism that he may have
been, for all I know, a kindly optimist at heart; some say, however, that
he had really talked himself into being what he seemed. I only know that
his talk, the first day I saw him, was of such a sort that if he was half
as bad, he would have been too bad to be. He walked up and down his room
saying what lurid things he would directly do if any one accused him of
respectability, so that he might disabuse the minds of all witnesses.
There were four or five of his assistants and contributors listening to
the dreadful threats, which did not deceive even so great innocence as
mine, but I do not know whether they found it the sorry farce that I did.
They probably felt the fascination for him which I could not disown, in
spite of my inner disgust; and were watchful at the same time for the
effect of his words with one who was confessedly fresh from Boston, and
was full of delight in the people he had seen there. It appeared, with
him, to be proof of the inferiority of Boston that if you passed down
Washington Street, half a dozen men in the crowd would know you were
Holmes, or Lowell, or Longfellow, or Wendell Phillips; but in Broadway no
one would know who you were, or care to the measure of his smallest
blasphemy. I have since heard this more than once urged as a signal
advantage of New York for the aesthetic inhabitant, but I am not sure,
yet, that it is so. The unrecognized celebrity probably has his mind
quite as much upon himself as if some one pointed him out, and otherwise
I cannot think that the sense of neighborhood is such a bad thing for the
artist in any sort. It involves the sense of responsibility, which
cannot be too constant or too keen. If it narrows, it deepens; and this
may be the secret of Boston.