Читать книгу The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter - Henri Murger - Страница 6

THE Bohemians described in this book have nothing in common with the Bohemians of boulevard playwrights, who have used the word as a synonym for pickpocket and murderer; nor are they recruited from the ranks of bear-leaders, sword-eaters, vendors of key-rings, inventors of “infallible systems,” stock-brokers of doubtful antecedents and the followers of the thousand and one vague and mysterious callings in which the principal occupation is to have none whatever and to be ready at any time to do anything save that which is right.

The Bohemians of this book are by no means a race of to-day; they have existed all over the world ever since time began, and can lay claim to an illustrious descent. In the time of the ancient Greeks (not to pursue their genealogy any further) there was once a famous Bohemian who wandered about the fertile land of Ionia trusting to luck for a living, eating the bread of charity, stopping of nights by hospitable firesides where he hung the musical lyre to which the “Loves of Helen” had been sung and the “Fall of Troy.”

As we descend the course of ages we find forerunners of the modern Bohemian in every epoch famous for art or letters. Bohemia continues the tradition of Homer through the Middle Ages by the means of minstrel, improvisatori, les enfants du gai savoir, and all the melodious vagabonds from the lowlands of Touraine; all the muses errant who wandered with a beggar’s wallet and a trouvère’s harp over the fair and level land where the eglantine of Clémence Isaure should still flourish.

In the transition period, between the Age of Chivalry and the dawn of the Renascence, the Bohemian still frequents the highways of the realm, and is even found in Paris streets. Witness Master Pierre Gringoire, for instance, friend of vagrants and sworn foe to fasting, hungry and lean as a man may well be when his life is but one long Lent; there he goes, prowling along, head in air like a dog after game, snuffing up the odours from cookshop and kitchen; staring so hard at the hams hanging from the pork-butcher’s hooks, that they visibly shrink and lose weight under the covetous gaze of his glutton’s eyes; while he jingles in imagination (not, alas! in his pockets) those ten crowns promised him by their worships the aldermen for a right pious and devout sotie composed by him for the stage of the Salle of the Palais de Justice. And the chronicles of Bohemia can place another profile beside the melancholy and rueful visage of Esmeralda’s lover—a companion portrait of jollier aspect and less ascetic humour. This is Master François Villon, lover of la belle qui fut heaulmière—poet and vagabond par excellence, with a breadth of imagination in his poetry. A strange obsession appears in in it, caused no doubt by a presentiment of a kind which the ancients attribute to their poets. Villon is haunted by the idea of the gibbet; and indeed one day nearly wore a hempen cravat because he looked a little too closely at the colour of the king’s coinage. And this same Villon, who more than once outstripped the posse comitatus at his heels, this roistering frequenter at the low haunts in the Rue Pierre Lescot, this smell-feast at the court of the Duke of Egypt, this Salvator Rosa of poetry, wrote verse with a ring of heart-broken sincerity in it that touches the hardest hearts, so that at sight of his muse, her face wet with streaming tears, we forget the rogue, the vagabond and the rake.

François Villon, besides, has been honoured above all those poets whose work is little known to folk for whom French literature only begins “when Malherbe came,” for he has been more plundered than any of them, and even by some of the greatest names of the modern Parnassus. There has been a rush for the poor man’s field; people have struck the coin of glory for themselves out of his little hoard of treasure. Such and such a ballade, written in the gutter under the drip of the eaves some bitter day by the Bohemian poet, or some love-song improvised in the den where la belle qui fut heaulmière unclasped her girdle for all-comers, now makes its appearance, transformed to suit polite society and scented with ambergris and musk, in albums adorned with the armorial bearings of some aristocratic Chloris.

But now begins the grand age of the Renascence. Michel Angelo mounts the scaffolding in the Sixtine Chapel and looks thoughtful as young Rafael goes up the staircase of the Vatican with the sketches of the Loggie under his arm. Benvenuto is planning his Perseus and Ghiberti carving the bronze gates of the Baptistery, while Donatello rears his marble on the bridge across Arno. The city of the Medici rivals the city of Leo X. and Julius II. in the possession of masterpieces, while Titian and Paul Veronese adorn the city of the Doges—St. Mark competing with St. Peter.

The fever of genius suddenly broke out with the violence of an epidemic in Italy, and the splendid contagion spread through Europe. Art, the Creator’s rival, became the equal of kings. Charles V. stoops to pick up Titian’s brush, and Francis I. waits on the printer Etienne Dolet, who is busy correcting the proofs (it may be) of Pantagruel.

In the midst of this resurrection of the intellect the Bohemian seeks, as heretofore, for the poorest shelter and pittance of food—la pâtée et la niche, to use Balzac’s expression. Clément Marot, a familiar figure in the ante-chambers of the Louvre, is favoured by the fair Diane, who one day would be the favourite of a king, and lights three reigns with her smile; then the poet’s faithless muse will pass from the boudoir of Diane de Poitiers to the chamber of Marguerite de Valois, a dangerous honour, which Marot must pay for by imprisonment. Almost at the same time another Bohemian goes to the court of Ferrara, as Marot went to the court of Francis I. This is Tasso, whose lips were kissed by the epic muse in his childhood on the shore at Sorrento. But, less fortunate than the lover of Diane and Marguerite, the author of Gerusalemme must pay for his audacious love of a daughter of the House of Este with the loss of his reason and his genius.

The religious wars and political storms that broke out in France with the arrival of the Medici did not stay the flight of Art. Jean Goujon, after discovering anew the pagan art of Pheidias, might be struck down by a bullet on the scaffolding of the Innocents; but Ronsard would find Pindar’s lyre, and with the help of the Plèiade found the great French school of lyric poets. To this school of revival succeeded the reaction, thanks to Malherbe and his followers. They drove out all the exotic graces introduced into the language by their predecessors’ efforts to acclimatise them in poetry. And a Bohemian, Mathurin Régnier, was one of the last to defend the bulwarks of lyric poetry against the assault of the band of rhetoricians and grammarians who pronounced Rabelais to be a barbarian and Montaigne obscure. It was the same Mathurin Régnier, the cynic, who tied fresh knots in Horace’s scourge, and made indignant outcry against his age with “Honour is an old-fashioned saint, and nobody keeps his day.”

In the seventeenth century the enumeration of Bohemia includes some of the best known names in literature under Louis XIII. and Louis XIV. Bohemia counts wits of the Hôtel Rambouillet among its members and lends a hand in the weaving of the Guirlande de Julie. Bohemia has her entrées at the Palais Cardinal and writes the tragedy of Marianne in collaboration with the poet-minister, the Robespierre of monarchy. Bohemia strews Marion Delorme’s ruelle with pretty speeches and pays court to Ninon under the trees in the Place Royale, breakfasting of a morning at the Goinfres or the Epée Royale, supping of nights at the Duc de Joyeuse’s table and fighting duels under the street lamps for Uranie’s sonnet as against the sonnet of Job. Bohemia makes love and war, and even tries a hand at diplomacy; and in her old age, tired of adventures, perpetuates a metrical version of the Old and New Testaments, signing a receipt for a living on every page till at length, well fed with fat prebends, she seats herself on a bishop’s seat, or in an Academical armchair founded by one of her chosen children.

’Twas in the transition period between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that two mighty geniuses appeared, whose names are always brought forward by the nations to which they belong in any literary rivalry. Molière and Shakespeare are two famous Bohemians, with only too many resemblances in their destinies.

The most famous names in the literature of the eighteenth century are likewise to be found in the archives of Bohemia; Jean Jacques Rousseau and d’Alembert (the foundling left on the steps of Notre Dame) among the greatest; and, among the most obscure, Malfilâtre and Gilbert, these two much overrated persons, for the inspiration of the one was only a pale reflection of the pallid lyric fervour of Jean Baptiste Rousseau, while that of the other was a blend of incapacity and pride, with a hatred which had not even the excuse of initiative and sincerity, since it was only the paid instrument of party spirit and party rancour.

And here we bring our rapid summary of the illustrious history of Bohemia to a close. We have purposely set these prefatory remarks in the forefront of this book, so as to set the reader on his guard against any mistaken idea of the meaning of the word “Bohemian” which he might perhaps be inclined to entertain before reading it, for the class whose customs and language we have herein endeavoured to trace makes it a point of honour to differentiate itself from those strata of society to which the name of “Bohemian” has long been misapplied.

To-day, as in the past, any man who enters the path of Art, with his art as his sole means of support, is bound to pass by way of Bohemia. Those of our contemporaries who display the noblest shields in the chivalry of Art were most of them Bohemians once, and in the calm and prosperous glory of later life they often look back (perhaps with regret) to the days when they were climbing the green upward slope of youth, with no other fortune, in the sunlight of their twenty years, but courage (a young man’s virtue) and hope, the riches of the poor.

For the benefit of the nervous reader, the timorous Philistine, and that section of the public which cannot have too many dots on the i’s of a definition, we repeat in axiomatic form—

“Bohemia is a stage of the artist’s career; it is the preface to the Academy, the Hospital or the Morgue.”

Let us add that Bohemia neither exists nor can exist anywhere but in Paris.

Bohemia, like all ranks of society, comprises various shades and diverse species and subdivisions, which it may be worth while to enumerate and classify.

We will begin with Bohemia unknown to fame, by far the largest section of it. It is made up of the great clan of poor artists condemned by fate to preserve their incognito because for one reason or another they cannot find some little corner above the heads of the crowd, and so attest their own existence in Art and show by what they are already what they may be some day. A race of inveterate dreamers are they, for whom art is always a creed and not a craft, and enthusiasts by conviction. The bare sight of a masterpiece throws them into a fever; their loyal hearts beat high before anything beautiful: they do not ask to what school it belongs nor to what master. This Bohemia draws its recruits from among those young aspirants of whom it is said that “they give promise” as well as from those who fulfil the promise, yet by heedlessness, shyness, or ignorance of the practical, fancy that all is done when the work of art is finished and expect that fame and fortune will burst in on them by burglarious entry. These live on the outskirts of society, as it were, in loneliness and stagnation, till, fossilised in their art, they take the consecrated formulæ about “the aureole round the poet’s brow” as a literal statement of fact, and being persuaded that they shine in the shadow, expect people to come to look for them there. We once knew a little school of such originals, so quaint that it is hard to believe that they really existed; they called themselves disciples of “art for Art’s sake.” According to these simple and ingenuous beings, “art for Art’s sake” consisted in starting a mutual admiration society, in refraining from helping Chance, who did not so much as know their address, and waiting for pedestals to come to place themselves under their feet.

This, as everyone sees, is carrying stoicism to the point of absurdity. Well, let us assert it once more to be believed; in the depths of unknown Bohemia there are such beings as these, whose wretchedness demands a pitying sympathy which common sense is compelled to refuse; for put it to them quietly that we are living in the nineteenth century, that the five-franc piece is Empress of the human race, and that boots do not drop down ready varnished from the sky, and they will turn their backs upon you and abuse you for a Philistine.

Still, at any rate, their mad heroism is thoroughly carried out; they make no outcry, no complaint, submitting passively to the hard and obscure fate which they bring upon themselves. And for the most part they fall victims to the complaint which decimates them, a disease which medical science does not dare to call by its right name—Want. Yet many of them, if they chose, might escape the catastrophe that suddenly cuts them off at an age when life as a rule is only beginning. They need only make one or two concessions to the hard laws of necessity, which means they should learn to live in duplicate, to keep one life for the poet in them—the dreamer that dwells on the mountain heights where choirs of inspired voices sing together—and another for the labourer that contrives to provide daily bread. But this double life, which is almost always carried on in strong and well-balanced natures—indeed, it is one of their chief characteristics—is not often to be met with in young men of this stamp; while pride, a bastard sort of pride, makes them proof against all counsels of common sense. And so they die young, now and again one of them leaving some piece of work behind him for the world to admire at a later day; and if it had been visible before, the world would no doubt have applauded it sooner.

The battle of Art is very much like war in some respects. All the fame goes to the leaders, while the rank and file share the reward of a few lines in the order of the day; and the soldiers that fall on the field are all buried where they lie—one epitaph must do duty for a score of thousands.

In the same way the crowd always gazes at the man that rises above the rest, and never looks down into the underworld, where the obscure toilers are striving; they end in obscurity, sometimes without even the consolation of smiling over a piece of work completed, and so are laid away from life in a winding-sheet of indifference.

Another section of unexplored Bohemia is made up of young men who have been misled, by themselves or others. They take a fancy for a vocation, and urged on by a suicidal mania, die victims of a chronic attack of pride, idolatrous worshippers of a chimera.

And here may we be permitted a short digression.

The ways of Art, crowded and perilous as they are, grow more and more crowded every day, in spite of the throng, in spite of the obstacles; Bohemians in consequence have never been more numerous.

Among many reasons for this affluence we might perhaps dwell upon the following one.

Plenty of young men have been found to take seriously declamations as to unhappy artists and poets. The names of Gilbert, Malfilâtre, Chatterton and Moreau have been often, with no small imprudence and most unprofitably, made to sound abroad. People have taken the tombs of these unfortunate persons for pulpits from which to preach about the martyrdom of Art and of Poetry.

“Farewell, ungenerous earth,

Cold sunshine, sorrows that flay!

Unseen, as a ghost in the gloom,

And lonely, I pass on my way.”

This song of despair, composed by Victor Escousse after a hollow success had filled him with pride which stifled him, is, or was at one time, the Marseillaise of all the volunteers of Art who went to inscribe their names on the martyr-roll of Mediocrity.

For ambitious vanity the posthumous apotheosis and requiem panegyrics possessed all the attraction that the precipice usually has for weak heads; many fell under the charm and thought that ill-luck was one-half of genius; many dreamed of the bed in a pauper infirmary at which Gilbert died, hoped that they too might become poets for a quarter of an hour before they died, and quite believed that these were necessary stages on the way to fame.

It is impossible to deal too severely with such immoral lies and murderous paradoxes; many a man has been drawn by them out of paths where he might have met with success, only to end miserably in a career where he is blocking the way of those who, having a true vocation, alone possess the right to enter upon it.

It is the preaching of such dangerous doctrines and the uncalled-for glorification of the dead which has brought into being the ridiculous race of the “misunderstood,” the lachrymose poets whose muse is always seen with red eyes and dishevelled hair, and all the mediocrities who cannot create anything and from the limbo of manuscript call the Muse a harsh stepmother and Art their executioner.

All really powerful minds have their word to say, and, as a matter of fact, say it sooner or later. Genius or talent do not come by pure accident; they are not there without reason, and for the same reason they cannot always remain in obscurity. If the crowd does not go to them, they find their way to the crowd. Genius is like the sun: everyone can see it. Talent is the diamond: it may lie out of sight in the shadow for a long while, but somebody always finds it. So it is pity thrown away to feel moved by the lamentations and twaddle talked by a class of intruders and worthless persons who thrust themselves into the domains of Art, Art itself opposing them, and who make up a section of Bohemia where idleness, debauchery, and toadyism are the general rule.

Axiom.—Unknown Bohemia is not a thoroughfare; it is a cul-de-sac.

In truth, it is a life which leads to nothing. It means brutalising want; intelligence is extinguished by it, as a lamp goes out for want of air; the heart is turned to stone by a savage misanthropy; the best natures become the worst. Anyone so unfortunate as to stay too long, to go too far to turn back, can never get out again; or can only escape by forcing his way out, at his peril, into a neighbouring Bohemia, whose manners and customs belong to another jurisdiction than that of the physiology of literature.

We may cite another—a singular variety. These are Bohemians who may be called amateurs. They are not the least curious kind. Bohemian life is full of attraction for their minds—to have doubts as to whether each day will provide a dinner, to sleep out of doors while the clouds shed tears of rainy nights, and to wear nankeen in December, would appear to make up the sum of human felicity. To enter that paradise they leave their home, or the study which would have brought about a sure result, turning their backs abruptly on an honourable career for the quest of adventures and a life of uncertain chances. But since the most robust can hardly cling to a mode of life which would send a Hercules into a consumption, they throw up the game before long, scamper back in hot haste to the paternal roast, marry their little cousin, set up as notaries in some town of thirty thousand inhabitants, and of an evening by the fireside they have the satisfaction of telling “what they went through in their artist days,” with all the pride of a traveller’s tale of his tiger hunt. Others plume themselves on holding out; but when once they have exhausted all the means of getting credit open to young men of expectations, they are worse off than genuine Bohemians, who, never having had any other resources, can, at any rate, live by their wits. We have known one of these amateurs, who, after staying three years in Bohemia and quarrelling with his family, died one fine morning and was carried in a pauper’s hearse to a pauper’s grave; he had an income of ten thousand francs!

Needless to say, these Bohemians have nothing whatsoever to do with Art, and they are the most obscure, amongst the most ignored, in unknown Bohemia.

Now for Bohemia proper, the subject, in part, of this book. Those of whom it is composed are really “called,” and have some chance of being among the “chosen” of Art. This Bohemia, like the others, bristles with dangers; it lies between the two gulfs of Anxiety and Want. But, at any rate, there is a road between the two gulfs, and it leads to a goal which the Bohemians may behold with their eyes until they can lay their hands upon it.

This is official Bohemia, so called because its members have given evidence to the public of their existence; they have made some sign of their presence in life other than the entry on the registrar’s page; in short (to use their own expression), they have “got their names up,” are known in the literary and artistic market; there is a sale, at moderate prices it is true, but still a sale, for produce bearing their mark.

To arrive at this end, which is quite definitely determined, all ways are good; and the Bohemian knows how to turn everything, even the very accidents by the road, to advantage. Rain or dust, shadow or sun, nothing brings these bold adventurers to a stand. Their very faults have virtues to back them. Ambition keeps their wits always on the alert, sounds the charge, and urges them on to the assault of the future; invention never slackens, it is always grappling with necessity, always carrying a lighted fuse to blow up any obstacle so soon as it is felt to be in the way. Their very subsistence is a work of genius, a daily renewed problem, continually solved by audacious feats of mathematics. These are the men to extract a loan from Harpagon and to find truffles on the raft of the Medusa. They can, at a pinch practise abstinence with all the virtue of an anchorite; but let a little good fortune come their way and you shall presently see them riding the most ruinous hobbies, making love to the youngest and fairest, drinking of the oldest and best. There are not windows enough for them to fling their money through. Then, when their last five-franc piece is dead and buried, they go back to dine at the ordinary of Chance, where a knife and fork is always laid for them; and preceded by a pack of cunning shifts, they go a-poaching in the preserves of every industry in the neighbourhood of Art, stalking from morning to evening that shyest of game known as the five-franc piece.

Bohemians go everywhere and know everything; sometimes their boots are varnished, sometimes down at heel, and their knowledge and the manner of their going varies accordingly. You may find one of them one day leaning against the chimney-piece of some fashionable drawing-room, and the next at a table in some dancing saloon. They cannot go ten paces on the boulevard but they meet a friend, nor thirty without coming across a creditor.

Bohemia has an inner language of its own, taken from studio talk, the slang of green-rooms, and debates in newspaper offices. All eclecticisms of style meet in this unparalleled idiom, where apocalyptic terms of expression jostle the cock-and-bull story and the rusticity of popular sayings is allied with high-flown periods shaped in the mould whence Cyrano drew his hectoring tirades; where paradox (that spoilt child of modern literature) treats common sense as Cassandra is treated in the pantomimes; where irony bites like the most powerful acid, and as those dead shots who can hit the bull’s-eye with their eyes bandaged. ’Tis an intelligent argot, albeit unintelligible to those who have not the key to it, and audacious beyond the utmost bounds of free speech in any tongue. The vocabulary of Bohemia is the hell of rhetoric and the paradise of the neologism.

Such, in brief, is Bohemian life—little known of the social puritan, disparaged by the puritans of Art, insulted by fearful and jealous mediocrity in every form, which cannot clamour forth lies and slander enough to drown the voices and the names of those who reach success through this forecourt of fame by yoking audacity to their talent.

It is a life that needs patience and courage. No one can attempt the struggle unless he wears the stout armour of indifference, proof against fools and envious attacks; and no one can afford to lose his pride in himself for a moment; it is his staff, and without it he will stumble by the way. Delightful and terrible life, which boasts its conquerors and its martyrs, on which no one should enter unless he has made up his mind beforehand to submit to the ruthless law: væ victis.

H. M.