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.