Hang the Radicals and Tories!
Give me hammocks, pipes and stories!
What's the use of all this wrangling,
Grammar and emotions mangling?
Up the river let's go angling.
Sweet are walks and swimming nice is,
Bring me lemon-squash and ices,
Bother that eternal Crisis!
I was called away to lunch in the middle of the attack of inspiration. Inspiration is of course very useful, but it has a way of suggesting words that won't rhyme, and luring you off into all sorts of false tracks. Moreover, it affords no help whatever in polishing. After lunch I set to work with renewed zeal, licking the lines into their present perfection. At last they were finished, and as I lit the gas to enable me to see to make a fair copy, I realised that the beautiful blue day was gone.
Yes, the busy bee is a fraud by the side of the irresponsible artistic butterfly.
Sims Reeves tells an amusing anecdote of Mario the singer. Being brought one Thursday night by an eminent composer to sing at a big fashionable party, he found so great a line of carriages in front of his own that it was past midnight ere he arrived at the door. The thought that it was already Friday, and that he was about to sing in a new house, whose hostess he did not even know, had already dismayed the superstitious singer. But when he saw the number on the door was 13, no power on earth and no amount of argument could induce him to enter. 'Ah, yes,' said the hostess, smiling pleasantly, when the composer explained, 'a very ingenious excuse, for which Mario ought to be grateful to you. Of course he was intoxicated, and after a long argumentation you at last persuaded him to go home.'
Poe was doubtless occasionally drunk; but think of the years of sober labour, of stooping over desks, that must have gone to make those wonderful tales! Which is the true Poe, the hard drinker or the hard worker? That the artist must get drunk is, indeed, the belief of certain schools of young men even to-day; but is it not based on the old eternal false-logic, that because some artists have got drunk, therefore to get drunk is to be artistic? It was Murger who invented the Bohemian artist, poor and gay and of an easy morality. 'Musette and Mimi!' says Sarcey. 'The image of those ideal beings shone on every man who was twenty-one about 1848. 'La Vie de Boheme' was youth's breviary-fifty years ago.' The great dramatic critic goes on to complain of the onslaught made upon him because he wrote against this 'idleness of disposition, this heedlessness for the morrow, this inclination to look for the day's tobacco and the quarter's rent from loans and debts rather than from honest work, this witty contempt for current morality.' But this is scarcely the teaching of the ever delightful book, which catches the spirit of youth and gaiety and irresponsibility wedded to artistic ardour as no other book has done before or since, and for which one might put in the plea that Charles Lamb made for the dramatists of the Restoration. Its world is only a pleasing fiction, and the ordinary rules of morality do not carry over into it. It is the East of Suez of literature, 'where there ain't no Ten Commandments, and a man may raise a thirst.' The real Bohemia, as Jules Valdes showed in 'Refractaires,' is a world of misery and discontent. Still more sordid is the English Bohemia expounded by Mr. Gissing in 'New Grub Street.' Mr. Robert Buchanan indeed writes as if there had been a Murgerian Bohemia in England in his young days. '
I dwelt in a city enchanted,
And lonely, indeed, was my lot; Two guineas a week, all I wanted,
Was certainly all that I got. Well, somehow I found it was plenty,
Perhaps you may find it the same, If-
With industry, hope, and an aim; Though the latitude's rather uncertain,
And the longitude also is vague, The persons I pity who know not the City,
The beautiful City of Prague!
This Bohemia will never disappear, because every generation of youth reconstructs it afresh, to migrate from it into the world of respectability above or the world of shame below. 'Qu'on est bien a vingt ans!' will always be a cry to fill the breast of portly respectability with tender regret. As Thackeray put it in that delightful poem, which is almost an improvement on Beranger:
With pensive eyes the little room I view,
Where, in my youth, I weathered it so long;
With a wild mistress, a staunch friend or two,
And a light heart still breaking into song;
Making a mock of life and all its cares,
Rich in the glory of my rising sun,
Lightly I vaulted up four pair of stairs
In the brave days when I was twenty-one.
What a pity that life is so stern and severe, that for the light morality of Bohemia somebody must pay, some life be wrecked! Nature fills us with youth and romance, but for her own purposes only. She is the great matrimonial agent, and heavy is the penalty she exacts from those who would escape her books, and extract from life more poetry than it holds. And so the beautiful roselight of Bohemia veils many a tragedy, many a treachery. Yet will the
She is dead now,
Ah, Clemence! When I saw thee last
Trip down the rue de Seine,
And turning, when thy form had pass'd,
I said, 'We meet again,'
I dreamed not in that idle glance
Thy latest image came,
And only left to Memory's trance
A shadow and a name.
That is how she affected even the Puritan Oliver Wendell Holmes. Yes, there is something in the Bohemian tradition that touches the sternest of us-not the roystering, dissolute, dishonourable, shady Bohemia that is always with us, bounded by the greenroom, the racecourse, the gambling club, and the Bankruptcy Court, but the Bohemia that is as unreal as Shakespeare's 'desert country near the sea,' the land of light purses and light loves, set against the spiritual blight that sometimes follows on pecuniary and connubial blessedness. For, after all, morality is larger than a single virtue, and Charles Surface is always more agreeable than Joseph or Tom Jones than Blifil, even when Joseph or Blifil is as proper as he pretends. And if Tom or Charles is a poet to boot, what can we not forgive him? The poet must have his experiences-be sure that nine tenths of them are purely of the imagination. For the other tenth-well, if Burns had been strictly temperate, 'the world had wanted many an idle song,' and we should not have celebrated his centenary so enthusiastically. The poet expresses the joy and sorrow of the race whose silent emotions become vocal in him, and it is necessary that he should have a full and varied life, from which 'nihil humanum' is alien. Mr. Barry Pain once wrote a subtle story, which only three persons understood, to show that a great poet might be an elegant egotist, of unruffled life and linen. If so, I should say that such a poet's genius would largely consist of hereditary experience; he would, in language that is not so unscientific as it sounds, be a reincarnation of a soul that had 'sinned and suffered.' But as a rule the poet does his own sinning and suffering, and catches for himself that haunting sense of the glory and futility of life which is the undertone of the modern poet's song, and which finds such magical expression in Heine's verses:
I have loved, oh, many a maiden kind,
And many a right good fellow,-
