Chapter V: Part 5

Mrs. Behn’s other tales show less originality, and are neither so attractive nor so valuable. They are short love-stories which, though not so radically and aggressively impure as her plays, are still tainted through and through by the prevailing grossness of the time. Like Mrs. Manley, Mrs. Behn makes mere physical appetite—the passion which “rages beyond the inspirations of _a god all soft and gentle_, and reigns more like _a fury from hell_”[18]—the turning-point of all her plots; like Mrs. Manley, she centres the entire interest of her narratives in the gratification, not in the influences, of this passion. Like Mrs. Manley, too,—and here the severest judgment might well pass unprotested,—she is as harsh and free-spoken as the most profligate of male cynics regarding the foibles of her own sex. Vain, selfish, salacious, intriguing, spiteful, her female figures, as a whole, are simply repulsive in their unqualified animality; and as we read of their lives and their doings, we no longer wonder at the open savagery of a Wycherley, or the undisguised contempt of a Congreve, in an age when a woman could thus write of women, without fear, almost without reproach. Finally, like Mrs. Manley, Mrs. Behn is ready at times to indulge not only in scenes of the utmost coarseness, but also in pictures of the most revolting brutality. An instance of this might be given from “The Fair Jilt”, where the unskilful execution of Tarquin is detailed with horrible minuteness. The best of these shorter stories is “The Lucky Mistake,” a tale written throughout with comparatively good taste. They are nearly all based on fact—many on direct observation; and this renders them, from a student’s point of view, interesting. But there is a great sameness in the incidents described, and on the side of characterization they are very weak indeed. The plots are all made up out of the same classes of material; and the men and women of any one story are hardly to be distinguished otherwise than by name from those of any other.

Footnote 18:

“The Fair Jilt.”

-----

* * * * *

And now, in returning to the question of the historic significance of the two writers into whose books—habitually allowed to stand undisturbed upon the library shelf—we have here rather rashly ventured to pry, we shall find, if I mistake not, that little remains to be said. Brief as our analysis of the heroic romances and the tales of Mrs. Behn and Mrs. Manley has necessarily been, it will, if it does not fail entirely of its purpose, suffice to mark the points of fundamental contrast between them. The nature and importance of the changes exemplified in these story-tellers of the Restoration will thus be made clear.

Hitherto, as we have seen, fiction had made little or no attempt to deal frankly with life. In other words, it had not as yet found its proper sphere. Purely a thing of the imagination, it had sought its subjects afar, proudly ignoring the common matters of the world—the joys and sorrows, the hopes and struggles of every-day humanity. The words which the author of a life of Sidney, prefixed to one of the early editions of the “Arcadia,” applies to that work, we might with equal fairness apply to almost the entire mass of fiction thus far written. “The invention is wholly spun out of the fancy,” he says. The scene was laid in some far-away dreamland, not the less remote and visionary because occasionally called by a familiar earthly name; the characters were swollen out to superhuman proportions, and were endowed with qualities that no mortal being has ever been known to possess; their adventures were on the face of them impossible; they thought, acted, talked as no man or woman had thought, acted, talked since the world began. Life and fiction stood entirely apart. The real world of tangible flesh and blood found for the time its only expression in the drama. In fiction there was as yet no human interest whatever.

With Mrs. Behn commenced the tendency to deal with life—to make the novel in some sense a reproduction of actual experience. We may regret that the special phases of the human comedy that she deliberately chose to write about, were only too often phases the least worthy of attention; that her interests were narrowed down, and her work crippled, by considerations of the most cramping and disastrous kinds; that she knew nothing of proportion and perspective, and little of the higher and finer developments of motive and character; that she could not see life steadily, and did not see it whole. But all this must not stand in the way of our insisting that she was one of the first writers of prose fiction—perhaps the first in England—to substitute the solid stuff of reality for the flimsy material of the imagination. Crude and partial as her observations were, she at least observed; sorry as are most of the results of her study of the world, she did study it at first hand—did hold the mirror up to nature. What she accomplished in thus opening up the field of the modern novel, what Mrs. Manley accomplished in following her lead, are matters, therefore, of sufficient importance to call for distinct recognition. We do not claim for the books of these two women any individual merit or interest. But when we lay aside one of their stories, bearing in mind the conditions of the time at which it was written, we realize that, artistically, if not always morally, they represent a step in advance; that it was by such work as this—poor and hopelessly dull as it may seem to us to-day—that the folios of La Calprenède and De Scudéri were overthrown, the way made clear for Defoe and Richardson, and the foundations of modern fiction firmly laid.

But now let us notice the suggestive circumstance that, like nearly all innovators, these first realists seriously overstepped the mark. In their early attempts to exchange Fairy Land for the actual world, we find too large a place given to fact, in the most hard and circumscribed sense of the word. In place of pure fancy, they sought to give absolute and undiluted reality; in place of a picture without existing counterpart, they strove to secure the detailed verisimilitude of a photograph. Indeed, for a time the aims and methods of fiction were almost entirely lost sight of. And it is easy to see how this unfortunate result was brought about. Weary of the conventionalities of the old romances, and of the shadowy heroes and heroines with whose tedious adventures and even more tedious disquisitions their pages were filled, the novelists of the Restoration made a bold endeavor to get back to the life with which they were familiar, and to deal with the world as they knew it to exist. But for the moment, there seemed only one way of doing this. Instead of fancy, they must have fact; instead of wandering off into the impossible, they must limit themselves to the things which had actually happened—which had really, in Charles Reade’s witty phrase, gone through the formality of taking place. Hence, for the present, the constructive work of the imagination—which some of us, in these days of so-called Naturalism, are still old-fashioned enough to hold essentially important—was almost entirely neglected. Nearly every story was statedly “founded on fact”; and the business of the novelist was practically reduced to the task of presenting, with but slight embellishment or rearrangement, specific occurrences in life. Thus we have an early example of the tendency, just now so conspicuous, towards what M. Brunetière has happily called “reportage” in literature. In the reaction against the school of heroic romance, the new story-writers, therefore, went to the other extreme. To take the materials of familiar existence and to reorganize them, thus producing a work of art which is at once all compact of truth and imagination, was for the time being beyond their ken. To their limited view, realism meant slavish reality.

It was only after this mistake had been made that the possibility of avoiding the airy unrealities of old romance, without being bound down to the skeleton facts of life, gradually became apparent. The discovery that a writer could be true to experience and human nature without necessarily reproducing actual events or photographing individual men and women, was the outcome of many experiments and much failure, and was at length hit upon in a half-blind and fortuitous way. It was only little by little that the element of acknowledged fiction was allowed to encroach upon the domain of truth; only little by little that people began to understand that the art of fiction and the art of lying are not one and the same, and that the boldest play of imagination in the treatment of life is not always to be associated with the distortion of reality. In the works of Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Behn we see the English novel stumbling painfully towards the comprehension of its own objects. We have reached firm ground, and that is a great achievement; for only when we move on firm ground is the novel possible. But the dead weight of the actual is too heavy for us; we cannot synthesize the results of experience; we gather observations, but we are unable to make artistic productions out of them. Thus, we have a “New Atalantis” (and the book is historically significant just for this reason) which is little more than a jumble of personal scandal, filled in with occasional false incidents and mendacious details; an “Oroonoko,” which is rather a fanciful biography than a tale; we have a “Wife’s Resentment,” a “Fair Jilt,” a “Lucky Mistake,”—stories all of which are based more or less exclusively on historic occurrences or on events that had come under the direct observation of the relaters.[19] Even where there is a lack of truth, the appearance of truth is still carefully preserved. Things which have not actually happened are nevertheless related as facts; real characters are put through unreal incidents; the novel is supposed to give history; fiction and falsehood are as yet confused.

Footnote 19:

Mrs. Manley, in her Dedication to Lady Lansdowne, says that her
stories have truth for their foundation—_i.e._, are based on fact.
Mrs. Behn calls her “Nun” a “true novel.”

-----

* * * * *

With this brief summary of the qualities and shortcomings of our two women-novelists, this little paper might properly close. But it may be interesting if, having carried our inquiry thus far, we add a paragraph about the way in which the rigid reality of the works at which we have been glancing grew gradually out into the genuine realism of the later novel.

Properly to understand this tendency towards an equilibrium between fact and imagination, we should turn aside to examine the profound influence exerted over the fiction of the time of the “Tatler” and the “Spectator.” But for our present purposes we shall find the movement forward clearly enough exemplified in the work of one man—the author of “Robinson Crusoe,” whose writings, therefore, we will take as our clue.

Beginning with the production of history, or semi-history, in which real characters, slightly exaggerated, move through real scenes, or through scenes to but small extent imaginary, Defoe proceeded little by little to import more of fiction into his narrative, to the detriment of the small substratum of truth still retained. By and by, he did no more than preserve the mere frame-work of history—as in “The Journal of the Plague Year” and the “Memoirs of a Cavalier,” in which most of the characters and many of the incidents are purely fictitious. After this, the remaining element of truth was gradually eliminated, and he reached the production of narratives of fictitious characters in fictitious settings and among fictitious scenes. “From writing biographies with real names attached to them,” says Professor Minto, in his Life of Defoe, “it was but a short step to writing biographies with fictitious names.” Even when that short step was taken, the artifices resorted to by him to preserve the apparent truthfulness of his narrations show us that he was by no means satisfied that it would be desirable to let matters of fact slip out of his work entirely. Though what he wrote was false, he still tried to palm it off upon the world as true. This makes the writing of Defoe more like lying than fiction, and goes far to explain the extraordinary minuteness of the circumstantial method adopted by him. But it marks, also, the transitional quality of his work. As Mr. Leslie Stephen has neatly put it, “Defoe’s novels are simply history _minus_ the facts.” Only in his latest works do we find this pseudo-history making way for fiction proper; and then we recognize in Defoe the distinct forerunner of the great novelists of the eighteenth century.

But to follow this matter farther would take us beyond the due bounds, already somewhat transgressed, of our present study. As we may now see, the story of English fiction from the period of the Anglo-French romance to the time of Fielding and Smollett, is a long one, and we have undertaken to deal with only one chapter here—the chapter which tells of Mrs. Behn and Mrs. Manley, of what they did, and of what they failed to do. That finished, our task is at an end.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Glimpse of Bohemia

------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Glimpse of Bohemia

The Bohemia with which the following pages are concerned is not that inland country of Europe which Greene and Shakspere, to the indignation of all right-minded commentators, so generously endowed with a sea-coast. We must at once dismiss from our minds all thought of Prague and the Czechs; for the country into which we are about to offer a personally conducted excursion finds no place on our maps and no mention in our geographies. Our Bohemia is, in a word, none other than the Bohemia of Paris.

The confines and landmarks of this strange country have, fortunately for us, been authoritatively established. Bohemia, according to the painter Marcel, of whom we shall hear more anon, and who certainly knew well what he was talking about, is “bounded on the north by hope, work, and gayety; on the south by necessity and courage; on the west and east by calumny and the hospital.”[20] Yet it is just possible that these cryptic phrases may fail to convey to some readers any very definite geographical information; since even Rodolphe, to whom they were first addressed, is reported to have shrugged his shoulders and responded with a simple “Je ne comprends pas.” Hence, it may be well at the outset to attempt to describe, as succinctly as possible, the limits of that seductive land through which our road is now to lie.

Footnote 20:

“La Vie de Bohème,” act i., scene 8.

-----

This is far from being an easy task, however. Often as the word _Bohemia_ is used, in the broad sense here attached to it, so many writers have colored it with so many different shades of meaning, that, though we may understand vaguely its general significance, it seems well-nigh impossible to bring it satisfactorily within the terms of a strict definition. “Vive la Bohème!” cries George Sand, at the end of her novel, “La Dernière Aldini”; and “Vive la Bohème!” has found many an echo and re-echo in the pages of French literature, down to the present day, when it would seem that, as a free and independent country, Bohemia is practically disappearing from the face of the earth. But each one of the many explorers of this dark and mysterious corner of our modern world, has brought back with him his own report of the territory and its inhabitants; and these travellers’ stories by no means tally one with another. To some it has seemed to be peopled by the lowest classes of those who, as the phrase goes, live upon their wits; by beggars, petty swindlers of all descriptions, and men and women who, through idleness or misfortune, are unable to obtain a livelihood, we will not say in honest ways, but in any way that society chooses to recognize as honest. To others the population has appeared to be composed of those who follow undignified and precarious careers, as cheap-jacks, circus-riders, street-conjurers, acrobats, bear-trainers, sword-swallowers, and itinerant mountebanks of kindred descriptions. A third class of writers has made Bohemia a regular sink of society, the receptacle of all such outcasts and human abominations as Eugène Sue and his followers loved to depict; villains of the deepest dye—vitriol-throwers, house-breakers, assassins. While to a fourth group this same domain has been the land of literature and the arts, where philosophy and beer, music and debt, painting and hunger, criticism and tobacco-smoke, combine to make life picturesque and inspiring; a land the denizens of which either die of penury in the streets or the hospital, uncared for, unknown, or, living, at last take their rightful places in the front rank, among the painters, composers, and writers of their time.

Wherein these various critics agree, is in describing Bohemia as a country lying on the outskirts of ordinary society, and inhabited by those who cannot, or will not, yield to that society’s conventions—the failures or the incompatibles of decent modern civilization. It is hardly worth while to try to decide as to what particular portion of this vast and complex community has the best right to a name which has thus been used with great elasticity of meaning. It will be sufficient if we say at once that the phase of Bohemian life with which we here purpose to deal is not that reflected in the romances of Xavier de Montépin, Féval, or Sue. Our Bohemia is the Bohemia of art and letters; and, as our guide through this romantic region, we will take the man who has drawn its life for us with such marvellous power and vividness—Henri Murger, himself the representative Bohemian, alike in the struggles and lurid contradictions of his career, and alas! in his early and tragic death.

“To-day, as of old, every man who devotes himself to art, with
no other means of subsistence than art itself, will be forced
to tread the pathways of Bohemia. The majority of our
contemporaries who display the most beautiful heraldry of art
have been Bohemians; and, in their calm and prosperous glory,
they often recall, sometimes perhaps with regret, the time
when, climbing the green slopes of youth, they had no other
fortune, in the sunshine of their twenty years, than courage,
which is the virtue of the young, and hope, which is the
fortune of the poor. For the uneasy reader, for the timorous
bourgeois, for all those who can never have too many dots on
the _i_’s of a definition, we will repeat in the form of an
axiom: Bohemia is the probation of artistic life; it is the
preface to the academy, the hospital, or the morgue.”

Thus writes Murger, in the preface to his immortal “Scènes de la Vie de Bohème,” and the words will be found to furnish a startling commentary about the kind of life with which his volume deals—a life made up of extraordinary contrasts; of dazzling dreams and the most sordid of realities; of hope alternating with despair; of high talents ruined by reckless excesses; of splendid promises defeated by the Fates; of brilliant careers cut short by premature death. “The true Bohemians,” continues this writer, who, more than any other, speaks as their accredited mouthpiece and historian, “are really the called of art, and stand a chance of being also the chosen.” But the country of their adoption literally “bristles with dangers. Chasms yawn on either side—misery and doubt. Yet between these two chasms, there is at least a road, leading to a goal, which the Bohemians can already reach with their eyes, while awaiting the time when they shall touch it with their hands.” But till such time shall come, even if it ever comes at all, the young enthusiast must turn a brave face upon all the troubles, the anxieties, the privations, the fears, the petty worries and distractions, by which his self-chosen career will be everywhere begirt. For those who have once set their feet in the alluring but perilous pathway, which will lead to fame or misery, to immortality or death, there must be no trembling, no hesitation, no looking backward with regretful eyes to the safe, though humble, beaten tracks which they have left below. They have dared to devote themselves, brain and soul, to art, in a world which cannot understand their aims, which sneers at their aspirations, which is very likely to leave them to starve, and will at best yield them only a grudging and tardy welcome. Hence, every day’s existence becomes for them “a work of genius, an ever-recurring problem.”[21] Nor is it surprising that, in the haphazard life which they are thus forced to lead, they should inevitably acquire those habits of carelessness, that easy-going morality, and often enough that want of settled purpose, which make them the black sheep of respectable society.

“If a little good fortune falls into their hands, they
forthwith begin to pursue the most ruinous fancies ... not
finding windows enough to throw their money out of; and then,
when the last écu is dead and buried, they begin again to dine
at the table d’hôte of chance, where their cover is always
laid; and to chase, from morning till night, that ferocious
beast, the hundred-sous-piece.”[22]

Footnote 21:

“La Vie de Bohème,” act i., scene 8.

Footnote 22:

_Ibid._

-----

Such is the tenor of their way; certainly not a noiseless one, nor one running through the cool, sequestered vale of life. Little wonder, then, that with all the frivolities and uncertainties of their journey, with all its physical hardships and moral perils, so few should survive their pilgrimage through Bohemia, or, when they finally reach a quieter resting-place, should have the heart to recount, with frankness and simplicity, their varied experiences in the probationary land.

Yet the Bohemians are a great race, and may boast a proud extraction. The founder of their illustrious family was none other than the great father of Western song, who, “living by chance from day to day, wandered about the fertile country of Ionia, eating the bread of charity, and stopped at eventide to hang beside the hearth of hospitality, the harmonious lyre that had chanted the loves of Helen and the fall of Troy.”[23] Descending the centuries to modern times, the Bohemian reckons his ancestors among the prominent figures of every great literary epoch. In the middle ages, the great family tradition is perpetuated among the minstrels and ballad-makers, the devotees of the gay science, the whole tribe of the melodious vagabonds of Touraine; while, as we pass from the days of chivalry to the dawn of the Renaissance, we find “Bohemia still strolling about all the highways of the kingdom, and already invading the streets of Paris itself.” Who does not know of Pierre Gringoire, friend of vagrants and foe to fasting? Who cannot picture him as “he beats the pavements of the town, nose in air, like a dog’s, sniffing the odors of the kitchens and the cook-shops”; and “jingling in imagination—alas, not in his pockets!—the ten crowns, which the aldermen have promised him for the very pious and devout farce he has written for their theatre in the hall of the Palais de Justice”? Who, again, does not recall Master François Villon, “poet and vagabond, _par excellence_,” whose ballads to-day may still make us forget the ruffian, the vagabond, the debauchee? These are names with strange power still over the imagination. And, when we come to the splendid outburst of the Renaissance, is it not to find ourselves face to face with men in whose veins the rich old blood was fierce and strong, with Clément Marot, and the ill-starred Tasso, with Jean Goujon, Pierre Ronsard, Mathurin Regnier, and who shall say how many more? Shakspere, and Molière, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and d’Alembert—these, too, the historian of Bohemia must include in his annals, to say nothing of the long line of great writers in England (whom Murger does not even allude to), by whom the name of Grub Street was made illustrious in the chronicles of the eighteenth century.

Footnote 23:

In this slight historic sketch of Bohemianism, we simply follow,
without comment or criticism, Murger’s original preface to the “Scènes
de la Vie de Bohème.”

-----

Two groups of Bohemians in Paris—where perhaps alone to-day artistic Bohemianism is still possible—have within more recent years made their voices heard and their influence felt in the literature and art of their time. The first was that which gathered about poor Gérard Labrunie, better known as Gérard de Nerval, the unfortunate young writer whose works have yet to reap their due appreciation, but whose translation of “Faust,” as Goethe told Eckermann, made the great German proud “to find such an interpreter.” That group was composed of such men as Corot, Chesseriau, Arsène Houssaye, Théophile Gautier, Jules Janin, and Stadler; the mere recital of whose names is enough. Shortly after this band was broken up—some, like Nerval, dying tragically and long before their time; others reaching high rank in the world of French letters—another famous _cénacle_ arose, the central figure of which was the prince of modern Bohemia, Henri Murger himself. Among those who toiled and suffered with him, we may make passing mention of Auguste Vitu, Schaune, and Alfred Delvau; but there were, of course, others, whose names are less familiar to the reading public of to-day, especially in this country. The romance of this second Bohemia has been written for us by Murger in the “Scènes de la Vie de Bohème”; and it is to the pages of this fascinating book that we purpose presently to turn. But to understand these aright, to appreciate their pathos and their comedy, to realize their intensity of meaning, we must first of all know something of the writer’s personality and career. I do not mean that it will be necessary for us to retell in detail the whole sad story of Murger’s life. But so much of his character and experiences find embodiment in this book of his, that we should miss half its charm and more than half its significance, if we did not, to begin with, make ourselves acquainted with at least the larger facts of his existence.

* * * * *

Henri Murger was born in 1822. His father, a Savoyard, moved to Paris either just before or just after his son’s birth; obtained a situation as janitor; and while attending to the demands of this position, carried on at the same time his trade as a tailor. Murger _père_ was a hard, severe, unsympathetic man, totally unable to understand his son’s early-developed literary propensities, and with no higher ambition in life than that of making a decent income by the exercise of his craft. His intention from the beginning was to bring young Henri up as an adept at shears and thimble, so that he might by-and-by turn out a hard-working, thrifty ninth part of a man, like himself. But Henri rebelled; and as his mother sided with him, having, as it would seem, some faith in the child’s talents, or perhaps only a womanly yearning to make a gentleman of him, the long struggle with paternal authority finally closed, though not without the breeding of bitterness, in his favor. The original scheme of training him to manual labor was abandoned, and he received such education as his parents could afford, which, after all, was poor enough.

While still a mere boy he entered the practical business of life through the narrow and dingy portals of a lawyer’s office; but like many another youth under similar conditions, the itch for verse was too strong for him, and he relieved with the inditing of stanzas the dry technicalities of the legal routine. Meanwhile, an academician, M. de Jouy, had taken a fancy to him; and through his influence, at the age of sixteen, he obtained an appointment as secretary to Count Tolstoï, a Russian diplomatist then resident in Paris. Forty francs a month represented the material advantages of this position; not a lordly remuneration, certainly, but acceptable enough, none the less; more especially as the duties, anything but cumbersome at the start, dwindled considerably with lapse of time and presently became almost nominal. With a small definite income to fall back upon, and plenty of leisure on his hands, Murger now began to give free scope to his literary impulses, passing his hours in the study of the poets, and making a humble start in his own productive career. But his good fortune was destined to be of short duration; for through a rather ludicrous misadventure his connection with Tolstoï was after a while brought to a sudden close. At that time he was engaged to furnish a certain amount of daily copy to one of the Parisian papers. It so chanced that during the Revolution of 1848 Tolstoï found it necessary to put his secretarial services once more into active requisition; and, what with getting off his daily supply of matter for the press and preparing dispatches for the Czar of all the Russias, the young man unexpectedly found his energies taxed to the full. One memorable day the functions of diplomatist and author unfortunately became entangled, and in his hurry and excitement he sent off his _feuilleton_ to the Russian Court and his dispatch to the “Corsaire.” With this ill-timed performance, Murger’s political career ignominiously ended, and—what was by far the most serious part of the matter—the monthly recompense of forty francs, which had seemed to him a veritable Peruvian gold-mine, ended also. Nor was this all. Ere this his mother had died, and with the cessation of her mediatorial influence, the feud between himself and his father had broken out afresh. Thus Murger was thrown entirely on his own resources, with nothing but his pen to look to for the means of support. His father peremptorily refused to have anything to do with him. “He contents himself with giving me advice,” wrote Henri to a friend, in a season of special tribulation, “and with insulting me whenever we meet.” And it is well known that one cannot live on advice, while insults, though more stimulating, are not a whit more nutritious.

It was at this point, then, that Henri Murger became a dweller in Bohemia. He was now one of those who, in his own words, have no other means of subsistence beyond that afforded by art itself; one of those described by Balzac, “whose religion is hope, whose code is faith in oneself, whose budget is charity.” Through nearly all the varied experiences of which he was afterwards to write with such wonderfully sustained graphic power, the young man himself now passed; through the days of careless idleness or strenuous exertion; through the nights of homeless wandering or furious dissipation; through all the grim poverty and suffering, all the doubt and restlessness, all the fierce fluctuations of assurance and despair, which presently went to the making of his book. Even while he had still been in receipt of Count Tolstoï’s allowance, things had sometimes gone hardly enough with him; for, needless to state, he was not of the thrifty or frugal kind, “Your friend,” he writes in a letter, as early as 1841, “has found the means of swallowing forty francs in a fortnight; but happily for him there are still forty sous left to carry him to the end of the month. His existence, then, has been during the past fortnight diversified with beefsteaks ... and Havana cigars”; while for the remaining two ill-omened weeks, recourse must be had to that “table d’hôte of chance” already referred to. With the discontinuance of this tiny but periodic dropping from the great Cornucopia of Providence, the beefsteaks and Havana cigars became less and less frequent apparitions in his life, and the famous inn which bears the “Belle Etoile” as its sign and trading token, found in him a pretty constant guest. To make his shoes last more than six months, and his debts forever, now became an urgent problem for him. Sometimes fortune would pay him a flying visit, and on such occasions he describes himself as being temporarily in possession of more money than he knows what to do with; but libraries, tailors, restaurants, cafés, theatres, Turkish tobacco-pipes, and friends, combined to help him over this perplexing difficulty with extraordinary ease and rapidity. Once, in the intense excitement of a sudden windfall, he went to bed and dreamed that he was the Emperor of Morocco and was marrying the Bank of France. But such seasons of miraculous plenty were few and far between, and visions of this extraordinary kind, when they came at all, were less likely to arise from repletion than from an empty stomach; for sometimes he was brought face to face with actual starvation. Now, he reports borrowing right and left from any acquaintance who had a franc to lend; now, again, “S—— is paying me the thirty francs he owes me, fourteen sous at a time.” So from month to month he struggled on, without seeming to get any nearer to the goal he had in view, or, in point of fact, to any goal at all; often tortured with physical pain and privation; often driven half-wild with despair; but, after the fashion of the true Bohemian, keeping always a brave heart, and a ready jest for the good friends who stuck close to him through all, and who would have been only too willing to help him in his need, but for the single unfortunate circumstance that they were as badly off as himself.

Unhappily, Murger was, in one important respect, particularly ill-adapted for the kind of life into which he was thus driven. A man who trusts to his pen for daily bread should at least be a facile and ready writer, able to turn off indefinite quantities of copy in a given time, and willing to undertake the writing up of any subject upon which public interest may be temporarily aroused, and an article required. When literature becomes a business, the higher ambition to produce only good work must almost inevitably be subordinated to the lower and more practical aim of making the thing pay. Now, the difficulty with Murger was, that although literature was his livelihood, his regular trade and calling, he persistently refused to regard it mainly in that light—refused to sacrifice artistic excellence to temporary advantage, and to debase a sacred mission into mere routine work, the immediate, if not indeed the sole, object of which was to turn so much intellectual labor into so much food and clothing. He himself has remarked concerning one of his characters that, after the fashion of genius—a generalization which may or may not be partially true,—he had a tendency to be lazy. Murger was not exactly lazy; but he was whimsical and uncertain; his energies were not always under command; and he did not, with Anthony Trollope, put firmer faith in a piece of beeswax on the seat of his chair than in all the promptings of the divine afflatus. Like Goldsmith, he recognized that the conditions of his life rendered it impossible for him to pay court to the “draggle-tail Muses”; they would simply have left him to starve outright. So he turned to prose; but with prose things were nearly as bad. There were times when he could not and would not write—when the spirit was not upon him; and when he could not work as an artist, he would not work as a day-laborer or publisher’s drudge. And even when he was in full swing, his delicate taste, his almost morbid care in composition, his constant desire to do his best, prevented him from ever producing with the rapidity necessary to make the results really remunerative. Never, even under the greatest stress of circumstances, would he consent to write hastily, or allow his manuscript to leave his hands without what he conceived to be its proper share of thought and revision. Money to him was always the secondary consideration; even hunger had to wait, that the artistic sense might be satisfied. Rather than prove traitor to his lofty ideals, he would live for weeks on dry bread.

Thus he had more than the usual difficulty in making ends meet. But the misfortune did not stop there. A slow and exceedingly painstaking writer, he could produce but little in the normal hours of work; hence, the limit had to be frequently extended; and, for this purpose, recourse was had to the perilous aid of artificial stimulants. We now touch the saddest part of Murger’s sad story. He wrote at night, and generally in bed—a practice which he had probably adopted in days when fuel was a luxury beyond his reach;[24] and his work was almost invariably done with the assistance of strong and incessant potations of coffee. When the house was perfectly quiet, when darkness and silence had fallen over the city, then Murger, like Balzac, commenced the labors of the day. With these desperate measures, there can be little doubt that he began very early to undermine a constitution which had never been robust. The story of the habits thus formed, and of the tyranny they acquired over him, is a terribly tragic one, and might furnish a fearful warning to many a jaded brain-worker, did we not know that it is the everlasting law of human nature that no one shall profit by any one else’s experiences. “I am literally killing myself,” he writes to a friend. “You must break me of coffee. I count on you.” “There are nights,” he declares at another time, “when I have consumed as much as six ounces of coffee, and only end by convincing myself more than ever of my lack of power—and this, yes, this has lasted three months. So that at present I am broken down by the application of these Mochas.... And here I am still passing my nights drinking coffee like Voltaire, and smoking like Jean Bart.” As a direct consequence of these suicidal habits, he gradually contracted a terrible disease—known to medicine as “purpura”—which took him again and again to the hospital. Once, when the hand of sickness had smitten him with more than usual severity, he made a determined attempt to reform. He banished his coffee, and strove, by closing the shutters and lighting the candles, to trick himself into working, not of course by daylight, but simply during the day. But it was too late to inaugurate so radical a change. Ere long his nocturnal instincts reasserted themselves, and continued in full force to the end of his career. Doubtless, it is in the pathological conditions thus brought about, that we have to seek the explanation of the fearful restlessness which presently came to characterize him, and which earned for him the nickname of the Wandering Christian.

Footnote 24:

A story to the point is worth repeating here. When the playwright,
Barrière, went to him one afternoon to propose the dramatization of
the “Scenes of Bohemian Life,” he found Murger in his attic in the
Latin Quarter, in bed. It subsequently came out that a Bohemian
friend, having occasion to pay a business visit to some important
functionary, had borrowed his only pair of trousers, which had the
advantage of being a trifle better than his own; and Murger had to
remain in bed, with such patience as he could command, until they
should be restored.

-----

It was only after his constitution had been shattered, and he had grown prematurely old, that Murger found his way out of Bohemia. The path into that land of glamour and enchantments had been easy enough, like the road to Avernus; the passage back again into the common world was in his case, as in the case of so many others, a steep and difficult one. But after months and years of toil and waiting, success came at last, and little by little he was able to break with tenacious old associations, and settle down to a more steady and regular routine of life. He established a connection with the “Revue des Deux Mondes”; and with a position now practically assured, took up his abode at Marlotte, near Fontainebleau. Here he had every chance of restoring his enfeebled health, and starting his career anew upon a different and a wiser plan. But the hour had gone by. A brief period of work and quiet happiness was brought to a close in January, 1861, when Henri Murger breathed his last in the house where he had already spent so many weeks of suffering—in the Hôpital St. Louis. He had not completed his thirty-ninth year.

* * * * *

Of the general work of Murger, this is not the place to speak. It is considerable in quantity, and much of it has substantial claim to critical attention; for his prose is finely wrought, and his lyrics—instance the superb “Chanson de Musette,” so highly but justly praised by Gautier,—are sometimes of rare purity and sweetness. But it is by the “Scenes of Bohemian Life,” and by these alone, after all, that Murger keeps his hold to-day upon the broader reading public. It has been said that he only wrote at his best when he was writing straight out of his own life. This is perhaps at bottom the reason why this one singular book possesses vitality far in excess of all his other productions. These may still be read with enjoyment, though in the tremendous stress of modern affairs, and with the ceaseless activity of the printing-press, they are more likely to be ignored by all but special students. But the “Scenes of Bohemian Life,” as Mr. Saintsbury has rightly insisted, take a permanent place in the literature of humanity. Here we may notice one more illustration of the curiously distorted judgments which authors often pass upon their own works. In later years he was accustomed to speak slightingly and almost petulantly of the volume which has carried his name over into a new generation; even, it is said, going so far as to affirm that “that devil of a book will hinder me from ever crossing the Pont des Arts”—that is, from entering the Academy, which was one of the unfulfilled ambitions of his life. But, in another and finer sense, it has placed his name among those of the Immortals.

We may now pass from the author to his volume, on the title-page of which he might well have written the famous _quorum pars magna fui_ of Virgil’s hero. “Murger, c’est la Bohème, comme la Bohème fut Murger,” was the declaration of one of his personal friends; and the stuff of his wonderful scenes, with all their extravagance and rollicking absurdity, with all their poignant pathos and whimsical humor, is, as we have said, stuff furnished by close observation and intimate experience, though the crude material is transmuted into gold by the secret alchemy of genius. It has been said that many of Murger’s chapters were actually written—in the French phrase, for which we have no satisfactory equivalent—_au jour le jour_; that he made the scenes of his Bohemian life into literature, so to speak, while they were still being enacted. To this effect Théophile de Banville reported that “that which was done by Rodolphe”—who, as we shall presently see, is generally to be identified with Murger himself—“during the month when he was Mademoiselle Mimi’s neighbor, has perhaps had no parallel since letters began. His days he passed in composing verses, sketching plots of plays, and covering Mimi’s hands with kisses as with a glove; but his daily bread was his _feuilleton_ for the ‘Corsaire,’ and as Rodolphe had neither money nor books to invent anything but his own life, each evening he wrote as a _feuilleton_ for the ‘Corsaire’ the life of that day, and each day he lived the _feuilleton_ for the next. It was thus that the morrow of I know not what quarrel, after the fashion of the lovers of Horace, Mimi, leaning on her lover’s arm, was bowed to in the Luxembourg by the poet of the ‘Feuilles d’Automne,’ and returned home quite proud to the _Rue des Canettes_; and that same evening Rodolphe wrote on this theme one of his most delightful chapters.”[25] This account of the connection between Murger’s book and his daily life, probably overstates the matter, or is to be accepted as approximately true only in regard to exceptional occurrences, like the one directly referred to. But that the substance of the volume was throughout furnished by experience is certain. The principal characters, and even some of the minor ones, have long since been traced back to their archetypes; the spots rendered famous by many a memorable scene—such as the Café Momus and the shop of the old Jewish bric-a-brac dealer, Father Médicis—are known to have actually existed in the old Latin Quarter, though in the evolution of modern Paris the historic landmarks have been swept away; while there is no question that in most of his stories Murger either drew immediately upon actual circumstances, or at least built his superstructure of fancy upon a very solid foundation of fact.

Footnote 25:

The passage in which reference is made to the meeting with Victor Hugo
will be found at the close of chapter xiv. of the “Scenes.” “After
lunching together, they started for the country. In crossing the
Luxembourg, Rodolphe met a great poet, who had always behaved to him
with charming kindness. For propriety’s sake, he was going to pretend
not to see him. But the poet did not allow him time; in passing, he
gave him a friendly recognition, and bowed to his young companion with
a gracious smile. ‘Who is that gentleman?’ asked Mimi. Rodolphe
replied by mentioning a name which made her blush with pleasure and
pride. ‘Oh,’ said Rodolphe, ‘this meeting with a poet who has sung so
well of love, is a good omen, and will bring luck to our
reconciliation.’” Banville’s statement of the way in which Murger fed
his fiction day by day upon the happenings of his own life, reminds us
somewhat of Mr. Robert S. Hichens’ grim and powerful story, “The
Collaborators.”

-----

* * * * *

The heroes of the “Scenes of Bohemian Life” are four in number. To each member of the strange group—the “Quatuor Murger,” as it came to be called—we will yield the honor of a separate paragraph or two of characterization.

First we have Alexandre Schaunard, who, though he cultivates “the two liberal arts of painting and music,” devotes the larger part of his attention to the latter, and is indeed particularly engaged at the time when we make his acquaintance, in the composition of an elaborate symbolic symphony which might almost be said to anticipate some of the crazy theories of more recent doctrinaires, representing as it does “the influence of blue in the arts.” This strange production had a real existence, and its originator in the book has been identified with Alexandre Schaune, who also drove an artistic tandem with much enthusiasm for a season, though he subsequently forsook Bohemia and adopted a more profitable career in the toy-making business. He and Murger became acquainted in 1841, lived together at one time in the closest intimacy in the Rue de la Harpe, and remained friends till the latter’s death. Schaune survived among “new faces, other minds,” till 1887, and only a short time before he died published some memoirs which contain many matters of interest for the Murger student. He bore among his companions the nickname of Schannard-sauvage, and in Murger’s original manuscript the name was so written—Schannard. By a printer’s error, however, the first _n_ was turned into a _u_, and the historian thought well, in reading the proof, to let the blunder pass.

Schaunard in the book is specially distinguished among his acquaintances for having raised borrowing to the level of a fine art. By dint of many careful observations and delicate experiments he has discovered the days when each one of his friends is accustomed to receive money, and thus, following the periodic ebb and flow of the financial tide, spares himself the trouble and annoyance of appealing to the generosity of those who, at the given moment, are likely to be in as low water as himself. Having, furthermore, “learned the way to borrow five francs in all the languages of the globe,” the painter-musician is able, as a rule, to keep pretty firmly on his feet. By a critical friend he was once described as “passing one half of his time in looking for money to pay his creditors, and the other half in eluding his creditors when the money has been found.”[26] But it should be remembered that this calls for some discount as a friend’s judgment, and likely, therefore, to be a trifle over-colored; and it is but doing justice to Schaunard to say that, towards the immediate companions who had come to his rescue from time to time, he behaved upon a more honorable plan. To facilitate, and at the same time to equalize so far as possible, the “taxes” which he levied, he “had drawn up, in order of districts and streets, an alphabetical list containing the names of all his friends and acquaintances. Opposite each name was inscribed the maximum sum which, having regard to their state of fortune, he might borrow from them, the times when they were in funds, their dinner-hour, and the ordinary bill of fare of the house. Beside this list, Schaunard kept in perfect order a little ledger, in which he entered the amounts lent to him, down to the minutest fractions; for he would never go beyond a certain figure, which was within the fortune of a Norman uncle whose heir he was.[27] As soon as he owed twenty francs to an individual, he closed the account, and liquidated it at a single payment, even if for the purpose he had to borrow from others to whom he owed less. In this way he always kept up a certain credit, which he called his floating debt, and as people knew that he was accustomed to pay when his personal resources permitted, they willingly obliged him when they could.”

Footnote 26:

This passage, like sundry others already cited, is taken from the
dramatization of the “Scenes of Bohemian Life,” which was, as we have
seen, made by Murger in collaboration with Théodore Barrière, and was
extremely successful. It differs in many particulars from the book,
the scattered scenes of which are reduced to coherence and unity, but
the male characters preserve their general traits.

Footnote 27:

The “Norman uncle” very possibly stands for Schaune’s father, the
toy-manufacturer, to whose business he presently succeeded.

-----

Schaunard plays his part to the amusement, if not always to the edification, of the reader in many delightful episodes in the “Scenes.” It is through his misadventures with his landlord that the establishment of the club is largely, though indirectly, brought about; it is he who paints the provincial Blancheron’s portrait in fancy dressing-gown, while Marcel goes off to dine with a deputy in his—the said Blancheron’s—coat; it is he, again, who is hired by an Englishman to play the piano from morning till night, as a means of getting even with an actress living near by, whose parrot and shrill declamation combined, have proved rather too much for even British nerves,—a transaction out of which, we need scarcely add, the _virtuoso_ made a good deal more money than he did from his famous symphony. On the whole, however, of the four friends with whose doings our volume is mainly occupied, Schaunard is by far the least attractive figure. He is coarse and morose; has a harsh, rasping voice; is apt to be put out about trifles; sometimes treats his male friends with scant courtesy; and has an unpleasant habit of employing, with his more intimate associates of the other sex, Captain Marryatt’s _argumentum ad feminam_—in other words, of conversing with them occasionally through the medium of a stout cane. Poor Phémie—the melancholy Phémie—had every right more than once or twice to complain of the strength and efficacy of his logic; nor were matters made very much better for her, we may opine, when, after one of their quarrels, he gave her in grim joke, and as a keepsake, the stick with which he had addressed to her so many telling remarks.