“Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees By which he did ascend.”
“I shall be adjudged severe, perhaps,” says the poet and socialist deputy Clovis Hugues; “but I am of those who think that the sacrifice of the chevelure [long hair] is the most dangerous of concessions to the modern bourgeoisie.... In literature there is an affinity between the sudden disappearance of the familiar mane and the forsaking of the good comrades of the days of want. The transformation effected, one may still have much esprit, but one has ceased to be a good fellow. Beware, then, of the tribunes and the poets who establish relations with the garçons coiffeurs!”
I do not know that Bourget ever had any “chevelure” to leave in the hands of the Delilah of bourgeois respectability, but it would seem that he had sacrificed on the altar of his parvenu-ship the sincere soulfulness of which the “chevelure” as well as another thing may be the visible symbol, since he apparently has no sympathy or helping hand for his younger painter brother who is bravely struggling up to recognition against heavy odds.
Even the conceited “arrivés” of literature and the arts are entitled to a certain respect, especially when they have “arrived,” as has Bourget, by force of genuine talent and persistent work. However ridiculous the pretentious airs they assume, they are not cravens. They have left Bohemia, but they have left it with colours flying, with all the honours of war. As much cannot be said for the recreants,—called the “soumis” or, still more expressively, the “moutons,”—who have forsaken Bohemia, without the excuse of having “arrived,” from sheer pusillanimity, because they found its paths of hardship, struggle, and sacrifice too rugged in comparison with the easy highways of bourgeoisdom. Towards these one’s dominating sentiment can hardly be other than pity or contempt,—contempt, if they take greedily to the flesh-pots without regret at selling their souls to Mammon; pity, if they do regret.
Richepin, who knows this Bohemian world so well, has characterised the two varieties of “moutons.” Of the first (the unconscious “moutons,” so to speak) he says, “Having returned to the paternal roast, married their little cousins, and established themselves notaries in towns of thirty thousand inhabitants, they have the self-satisfaction of rehearsing before the fire their poor-artist adventures with the magniloquence of a traveller who describes a tiger hunt”; and of the others (the conscious “moutons”), “Wretchedly sad in the existence into which they have entered against their wishes, in the intellectual tombs to which they have consigned themselves, they slowly atrophy. The banal is particularly terrible in this,—that, if one returns to it after having been disgusted with it, it is to find it more banal still, and to die of it.”
Few of the Bohemians who have been intimately associated with the Quarter during the last twenty-five or thirty years have been able to make shift with their literature or their art alone. In order to keep body and soul together, most have been constrained to resort to compromises which are humiliating and disillusionising, but which are not necessarily demoralising, and which stop a long way this side of absolute surrender. Mallarmé taught English in the lycées nearly all his life, and conducted alone, during a short period, a journal entitled La Dernière Mode. Verlaine was long an employee of the Hôtel de Ville, had periods of teaching, and even tried his hand at farming. Edmond Haraucourt,[72] Camille St. Croix, Léon Dierx, Emile Goudeau, Canqueteau, and Trimouillat have been at one time or another petty functionaries. Nearly all have dabbled in journalism. The happiest compromise, however, the most independent form of dependence, so to say, has been hit upon by Jacques Le Lorrain, poet and author of L’Au Delà, who set up as a cobbler in 1896 in the rue du Sommerard, close by the Cluny Museum.[73]
It is no infrequent thing for the loyal Bohemian to “arrive” too late to profit by his success because his spirit has been imbittered or his constitution ruined by the hardships he has undergone.
“The maimed heart, the heart poniarded in this mute struggle for life,” says Jules Vallès in his Réfractaires, “cannot be taken out of the chest and replaced by another. There are no wooden hearts in the market. It remains there, bleeding, the poniard at its centre. Rich one day, famous, perhaps, these victims of obscure combats may perfume their sores if they will, sponge up the blood, wipe away their tears; memory will tear open the wounds, strip off the bandages. A word, a song,—joyous or sad,—will be enough to raise in these sick souls the phantom of the past.”