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To the Editor of The Idler.

Dear Sir: You will often hear it asserted by those who assume to speak with authority, that there is no longer any such thing as Bohemia in New York; that the Bohemians are scattered hither and thither and that their haunts are given over to seekers after sensation, sight-seers and the like. The seeming sophistication of those who speak thus is, more often than not, entirely sham, and is assumed by pert reporters for the daily press who wish, by appearing worldly, to divert attention from their patent callowness and youth.

There is, Sir, such a thing as Bohemia, and there are such people as Bohemians, and this I know to my sorrow, and the way in which I discovered this I shall presently relate. Bohemia, as I have found it, is not a place, but a state of mind and a manner of life. The Bohemians have a fixed abode no more than the Arabs of the desert or the wild tribes of Tartary. If one of their citadels is wrested from them by the invasion of the Philistines, they fall back upon another, and being, for the most part, unencumbered with Lares and Penates, they have no difficulty in finding another retreat in which they are soon as happy and content as in the one which they formerly occupied. They may be said to be a people without attachments (if we except the writs so called by those of the legal profession), and if they pay devotion to any god, I know not whom it may be, unless, indeed, Bacchus, who was always a roving deity, as like to be found in one spot as another, whose chief attributes are liberty and license, and whose rites, therefore, may be celebrated wherever his devotees are given the liberty of a place that has a license.

But do not let me, by the use of these terms, lead you to fall into the vulgar error that these Bohemians are people without conventions and who observe no rules of conduct, but act solely according to the whim of the moment, for indeed the contrary is the case. The Bohemians, Sir, are as jealous of their customs and conventions as any class of people, and they even have certain ideas of caste to which they adhere as rigidly as the most fanatical of the Hindus. To lose caste in Bohemia is like losing one’s “face” among the Chinese and results in ostracism quite as surely.

The customs and conventions of the Bohemians, as I shall presently show, are, in truth, very different from the customs and the conventions of what is known as “good society”; so that it is not surprising that those who have only, so to speak, touched upon the frontiers of this country of the imagination, should declare it to be a land of absolute freedom and of individualistic philosophy. Myself, when I first came among them, was as astonished and confused as Gulliver among the Houyhnhnms, for here I found everything turned about from the manner in which I was used to seeing it. That which I had been accustomed to consider worthy, I found here to be unworthy, and that which I had been taught to hold a fault I found here to be a virtue. I had been taught to admire thrift, but here I found it held to be the meanest of qualities. The Beau Ideal of a Bohemian I discovered to be the young man who is free with his purse and careless of his obligations. I found it a humorous thing to defraud one’s creditors but a shameful thing to deny one’s purse to a fellow Bohemian. I had been taught to be circumspect in my conversation with the ladies, but here I found them conversing upon all subjects with utter freedom and an entire lack of embarrassment. I had been used to admire innocence, but here I found that innocence was considered as ignorance and a subject for mirth or censure. Religion, patriotism, respect for established customs, reverence for those in power—all those things, in short, which had been so carefully impressed upon me at home, I found to be nowhere admired among these people.

To acquaint you briefly with the manner of my coming among these citizens: I fell among them by design and not, as you may have supposed, by accident. Possessed of some talent in a musical way and having something of a turn for original composition, I had secured a position in an orchestra in one of the local theaters. Though I had been brought up in the most orthodox manner by my father, who was a professor in a small New England college, I chafed under the restrictions of social life in my native village, where intellectual attainments were held in such high repute as to overshadow completely all natural talent and genius, and where a man was more respected for knowing Boethius than for knowing beans. I had neither taste nor inclination for pedagogy, but yearned with all my heart for the artistic life. I had, in short, a somewhat exaggerated attack of what is known as the artistic temperament, and finding that my own people considered music as a parlor accomplishment rather than a serious art, I was more than ever impatient of their narrow-minded Puritanism and more than ever determined to leave the little college town and all that it stood for, and to go out into the world to seek companionship with those who shared my own ideals and ambitions.

The final rupture with my people came when I announced to my father my intention of becoming a professional violinist, and he replied that if I were determined to disappoint his hopes of my future I might at least have hit upon something respectable, and not brought upon him the reproach of having a fiddler in the family. “I can only hope,” said he, “that you will be a total and abject failure in your misguided efforts, for if you were to succeed and I were to come upon your name flaunted in shameless fashion from the boards of some play-house, I should certainly die of mortification.” With these good wishes ringing in my ears, I packed my meager belongings, tucked my violin case under my arm and turned my back upon my native village and respectability, as I thought, forever.

A few weeks of playing in the orchestra at a theater convinced me that I had yet to seek the intellectual sympathy for which I left home. My fellow players, with one exception, were all phlegmatic Germans who played well enough, to be sure, but who appeared to be as devoid of spiritual aspirations and artistic appreciation as so many day-laborers. They worked at their music as a barber works at his trade, and when the evening’s task was done, they retired to a corner saloon where they drank beer, ate Limburger and talked politics like so many grocers. There was, as I have said, one exception; a young man like myself, who seemed to scorn the middle-class ideas and ideals of our companions and who never joined in the beer-drinking or the political discussions at the corner. This young man, said I to myself, has been here for some time, and he, if any one, should be able to direct me to the haunts of the true friends of art; he, of all these, is the only one fitted to act as my guide, philosopher and friend.

Timidly I approached him upon the subject nearest to my heart, and heartily he replied that not only could he introduce me into the free-masonry of art, but that he would do so the very next night. Accordingly, when the curtain fell the following evening, we set off at once and arrived shortly at a restaurant and café, upon the East Side, which was situated in a basement. A large wooden sign proclaimed it to be “Weinstein’s Rathskeller,” but my companion assured me that it was known to the elect as the “Café of the Innocents,” because those who came there were yet young and comparatively unknown in the world of art and letters.

To describe my sensations upon that evening, Sir, would require the pen of a Verlaine. My own poor efforts can never do them justice. I can make shift to express emotion upon the strings of my instrument, but when I exchange my bow for a pen my fingers become as thumbs and my emotions defy expression, so that I am as helpless as a six weeks’ infant plagued by a pin, and can no more make clear my meaning than a sign-painter could imitate Rubens.

Suffice it to say that I was overcome, charmed, enchanted! In stepping through the portals of that dingy East Side resort, I seemed to have stepped over the border-line that divides the world of the dull and the practical from the world of romance and desire. I had entered the land of dreams, the country of magnificent distances! I was as astonished as William Guppy would have been had he stumbled unwittingly into the rose garden of Hafiz. Here were men and women after my own heart; men and women who saw the world as a whole, unbounded by the petty lines of counties, states and nations. Here the names of the masters of art and literature were bandied about as familiarly as the names of our local professors were at home. Here were lights, here music, and here the good glad laughter of youth! Here were women—not the slim spinsters and prim matrons that I had known, but hearty healthy women who seemed to be alive. Ah, that was it—they were all, all of them, so much alive! Between their fingers they held, not knitting-needles, but dainty cigarettes! Here was wine, wit and winsomeness—a dangerous, a deadly combination for such as I!

Well, Sir, to be brief, I was enthralled. I grew so greedy of that atmosphere that I began to begrudge my work the hours that it called me away from such good company. Finally I exchanged my place at the theater for a position in the orchestra at the café. And so I came to live among the Bohemians and become one of them.

From the first I was enamored of the conversation of these stepchildren of Genius, and I soon began descending from the platform and mingling with the habitués of the place; for at Weinstein’s the only snobbery is of the Bohemian variety, and those who would blush to be seen dining with a prosperous bourgeois, were not at all averse to drinking with an humble member of the orchestra—for was not I, too, an artist? It was not long before I began to care more for talking of my art than for practising it, and all the time that I was playing I was impatient to be down among the tables enjoying the praise which my performance, or, as I am now inclined to suspect, the subsequent order for drinks, never failed to secure. Thus I ceased to practise and played no more except when I was at work.

Of course I did not come to realize all this in a moment.

It was some months before I woke from the daze into which I fell at the first. It came to me gradually as I began to make unpleasant discoveries. It was disconcerting to find that I had fled my own world to escape conventions only to come upon others, or rather upon the same lot, turned topsy-turvy. It annoyed me to find that to be accounted a true Bohemian one must hold only certain views, and those always opposed to the views of acknowledged authorities; that one must not dress too well, eat too well or drink too well. Which was not at all the same thing as saying too much. But this was by no means the most shocking of my disillusions. I soon learned that while the Bohemians are forever talking and thinking of success and wishing success for their friends, the moment one of them really succeeds he is no longer a member of the company; and for this reason it is said, with some truth, that there are no successful Bohemians. When one of them who has made a marked success intrudes himself into the old gathering place, he is given such a cold shoulder that he never ventures there again. A small triumph furnishes the occasion for a feast of congratulation, but a real “arrival” excites the whole company to sneers and innuendoes, so that such felicitations as are offered are bitter with envy. They have a sort of optimism of their own, but it is all a personal optimism. Each one hopes and believes that he will succeed, but each one believes and secretly hopes that the others will not. A cynical smile and a shrugging of shoulders is the tribute to the absent artist.

Well, Mr. Idler, the longer I remained among these people, the more I came to be of the mind of Alice in Wonderland, that though some may be marked off from the pack and may look like kings and queens, they are nothing but playing-cards after all.

But there was one young woman who held my waning interest and who bound me by sentimental ties to the life of which I now began to be somewhat weary. If I had not made her acquaintance I believe that I should long ago have left Bohemia and shaken the sawdust of Weinstein’s from my feet. She was a demure young person, a newcomer from the West, who was studying art. She seemed so different from the others, so fresh, so ingenuous, that I could not but believe her to be genuine. She smoked her cigarette and drank of the table d’hôte wine, it is true (she could do no less in the face of Bohemian convention), but she did it all with such a pretty air of youth and innocence as touched me greatly. For I was by now as strongly attracted by a quiet woman as I had formerly been by a lively one.

To spare you a tedious recital of my passion, I determined to ask her to marry me, thinking that she might arouse in me the old ambition to become a great musician—the ambition which my long sojourn in the Lotus land of Bohemia had all but killed. And so one night I put the question gently over our cups of black coffee, asking her, “Would you—could you—share with me my career?” Then, Sir, that happened which you will scarce believe. Yes, she said, she would be glad to share my career with me, but I must be under no misapprehension; she could not marry me; she already had a husband in the West; but inasmuch as she had not seen him in three years and had never found him very congenial in any case, he need not in any way interfere with our plans.

As you may imagine, I was thunderstruck. I concealed my confusion as best I might by pretending to choke upon a bit of cheese, and at the first opportunity I made my escape and sought the seclusion of my chamber where I faced my problem. I had striven to become a Bohemian, but I had been born a Puritan and there was a limit to my acquired unconventionality. I could not confess my prudery to the lady; could not ignore the incident. Therefore I have determined to accept the one course left open to me. I shall fly. I am now going out to pawn my fiddle and with the money I get I shall buy me a ticket to that little New England town where I first saw the light of day.

Others may seek for inspiration at the Café of the Innocents, but as for me, I am going where a modest young man may live in the protection of the old-fashioned conventions. I am going where I can be moral without being queer. I am going home. And so, Sir,

Farewell,

Timothy Timid.