In the heroic couplets of Pope's pastoral poem, the role of the poet in shaping the "Description" is called to attention by that word itself; by "seem," which shows him engaged in interpretation; and most strongly by the line "Where Order in Variety we see" (its internal rhyme adding to its variety and unexpectedness). We readers see the multitudinous classes of things in the phenomenal world unified in a single design because the poet's rhymes are models of the way "tho' all things differ, all agree." In the closing pair of lines, the first proposes a definition of order in "the World"; the answering line defines the heroic couplet. Together they characterize the ideal of heroic poetry in rhyme, where, Pope wrote in "An Essay on Criticism," "The Sound must seem an Eccho," that is, a rhyme, "to the Sense" ("EC," 281).
The aesthetic of heroic rhyme agreed with the earlier ideal of symphonic rhyming in the sense that both assumed the existence of a grandly inclusive order in the phenomenal world and in language. Throughout this extended period, in spite of shifts in the hierarchy of kinds, English poetry accepted rhyme as the expressive instrument of some overarching, unifying authority. Even so, historical differences distinguished between the conceptions of rhyme so authorized. In the earlier period, proverbial rhymes were conceived as divinely given repositories of truth preserved and handed down in poems. In eighteenth-century heroic rhyme, the poet was accepted as an intermediary authority gifted in the art of finding adequate form in rhymes to express universal truths, a process Pope summed up in his famous maxim: "What oft was Thought, but ne'er so well Exprest" ("EC," 273).
In revolutions of English poetry rhyme has always been a charged issue, its defenders and attackers debating on one or the other side as to whether it fosters truth to nature in poetry or thwarts it. By the late 1700s dissatisfaction with heroic rhyme became a force in the revolution against what the makers of new poetry considered the all-inclusive artificiality of eighteenth- century verse. This revolt surfaced, and has done so intermittently ever since, in two forms. Edward Young, looking back to Paradise Lost as the ideal model of what Milton called its "English Heroic Verse without Rime," set an example along with Thomson's and Cowper's by eschewing rhyme altogether in long poems. 24 While Wordsworth followed this course, other poets of his time and later tried out rebellious experiments with variously new ways of rhyming.
To this point in the discussion it has been possible, with considerable simplification, to recognize and describe preferred forms of English rhymed poetry roughly from Gascoigne's generation to Pope's, and to extrapolate from them a common sense of language and its place in the world. To borrow from Clive Scott's description of French verse of comparable periods, poetry in English before the later 1700s was generally predicated on the assumptions that there is accessible to poetry "some underlying unity in the world," that "the relationship between signifier and signified is direct, unmediated, and unproblematic," that "semantic closure is perfectly achievable and truth utterable." 25
As these assumptions began to unravel--for the many complex reasons too often discussed to need summarizing here--the possibility of a new aesthetic with a dominant ideal of form in rhymed verse dwindled as well, and for the same reasons. Various poets experimented with new ways of rhyming that were informed by an assortment of literary and metaphysical attitudes and impulses, but showed a common interest in freeing poetry from the unnaturally strict regularity and the too predictable closure of the heroic couplet. That impulse encouraged, among several poets writing in the early 1800s who were influential throughout the century, the preference for paired end words that differ more than they agree in formal features and in lexical and grammatical meanings.
Loosening the likeness in sound between rhymed words was the most widespread form of revolt, a practice that rhymed poetry in English has not turned away from since. Blake set an early example in such pairs as "tomb":"come" and "lawn":"morn" that later poets expanded by enlarging the gap. Some examples are: Keats's "patiently":"sigh"; Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "fewer":"poor"; Emerson's "fell":"oracle"; Longfellow's "woods":"solitudes"; Dickinson's "indeed":"instead"; Swinburne's "love":"enough." Coleridge launched a different attack on heroic rhyme in his experiments with classical meters. By their admission of trisyllabic feet, they invited end rhymes mismatched in syllabic structure and placing of accent like "hospitality":"jealousy," and especially paired feminine with masculine rhymes: "unless":"loveliness"; "suddenly":"be." Keats tried out the curious effects of making the rhymed couplet straddle separate sentences: "Will trace the story of Endymion. / The very music of the name has gone."
Poets writing in traditional rhymes at least since the time of Shakespeare have occasionally allowed themselves prepositions as end words when they act as part of a verb in what linguists now call phrasal verbs or prepositional verbs. 26 Instances are: Shakespeare's "drinkes it vp":"cup"; Herbert's "creeps in":"sinne"; Milton's "bout":"drawn out"; Wordsworth's "passing by":"jeopardy"; Tennyson's "floated by": "high." For a considerable number of nineteenth-century poets this kind of grammatical formula offered an effective escape from the artificiality of diction they objected to in eighteenth-century poetry.
Browning heard in such phrases the authentic note of colloquial speech, particularly when the preposition stands out at the end of the line at some distance from the verb: "look backward for," "Telling ought but honest truth to." Hardy, above all, showed interest in such phrasal rhymes, using them to create a sense of a speaking voice coming through strictly ordered meters and rhyme schemes. He often ended lines with colloquial expressions like "worth living for," "found herself in," "know nothing of," "thought nothing of," of being specially useful for many of his poems by offering a rhyme with love that was neither trite nor trivial. Probably in large part because of Hardy's effective use of these phrases, Marianne Moore praised him as the master of the "unaccented terminal rhyme." 27
Shelley violated traditional rhyming practices by different and more radically subversive use of end rhymes made from prepositions and other parts of speech on Bysshe's list of words altogether excluded from serious rhymed verse: "the Particles An, And, As, Of, The, &c." As late as 1845, when the revolt against the heroic couplet could declare itself victorious, an encyclopedia article on grammar cited in the OED called particles "inferior Parts of speech." What made particles attractive to Shelley, it seems, was their potential--when not built into a phrasal or prepositional verb--for enjambing lines of verse. A word like of when part of a phrase acts as a modifier or intensifier of the verb preceding it, as in to make of (where of gives the verb phrase a different meaning from to make). When not part of a such a phrase, of has the function of connecting or relating, for instance in the love of God; it points forward to the word that must complete its significance. Hence these lines from Shelley:
The chasm in which the sun has sunk is shut
By darkest barriers of cinerous cloud,
Like mountain over mountain huddled--but
Growing and moving upwards in a crowd, 28
or these:
And still I felt the centre of
The magic circle there
Was one fair form that filled with love
The lifeless atmosphere. 29
My reading turned up fewer than a handful of such rhymes in Shelley's work. Other rare instances of lines enjambed by means of articles, conjunctions, and prepositions are sprinkled about in later nineteenth-century verse, particularly in poems by Christina Rossetti, Swinburne, and Hardy.
Gerard Manley Hopkins made a sort of quasi-mystical system that allowed inclusion of those parts of speech in rhymes. His idiosyncratic sprung rhythm encouraged various departures from traditional practices of syllabic structure and placing of accent. His equally personal ways of thinking about rhyme--that "any two things however unlike are in something like," that "all beauty may by a metaphor be called rhyme"--justified pairing words to any degree like in sound, however unlike in grammatical and lexical meaning: 30 "England":"and"; "the":"thee"; "or":"snowstorm"; "busy to":"unvisited"; "on":"Communion"; "of":"Love." Before the nineteenth century, these end rhymes would have been allowed only in humorous poems (though not in Pope's heroic satire).
Once the nineteenth-century experiments with wider distances between rhymed words in sound, syllabic structure, and accent grew familiar in the work of greater numbers of poets not otherwise much alike, those new rhymes could be taken seriously. More or less extravagant disagreements in these three features slowly began to be tolerated; they were expansions of traditional rhyme that did not destroy its conformity with our everyday patterns of thought and language. In the same period, rhymes like love:of were not so absorbed, as the reception of Hopkins, who died in 1889, to some degree reflects. His poems first appeared as a collected volume in 1918, but it was not until the mid-1930s that they were acclaimed, revealingly, as the work of a modern poet. This valuation was due in considerable part to his radical innovations in rhyme. On the basis of Hopkins's contributions to the movement toward allowing more extreme innovations in rhyming, T. S. Eliot in the mid-1930s in his introduction to a volume of poems by Marianne Moore, included Hopkins's work among what he considered at that time to be "the best contemporary poetry." 31
It is not altogether an exaggeration to say that the possibilities of rhyme were reconceived in 1916 when Marianne Moore in a poem with the arresting title "The Just Man And" used an end rhyme of "the" with "be." 32 Her first readers had good cause to respond with amused bafflement not only to the grammatically odd title, but to what they would have taken to be a radically unbalanced end rhyme that paired the most significantly charged verb in the English language with an article. We have evidence that even sophisticated readers of contemporary poetry, Moore's fellow poets, had much the same sort of initial response that on a lesser scale we have to the sentence "Love rhymes with of."
William Carlos Williams allied himself with Moore in sharing the overarching aims of "all the moderns" to "separate the poetry from the subject," to insist that "pure craftsmanship joins hard surfaces skilfully," and to do without "ex machina props of all sorts, without rhyme, assonance, the feudal master beat, the excuse of 'nature,' of the spirit, mysticism, religiosity, 'love,' 'humor,' 'death.'" 33 Still, even Williams, who believed that "Marianne Moore is of all American writers most constantly a poet," acknowledged the "incomprehensibility of her poems." 34 He complained that the "only help I ever got from Miss Moore toward the understanding of her verse was that she despised connectives," another feature of the modernist aesthetic. 35
Williams gave these accounts of his responses to Moore's poems in the early 1920s. In 1935, Auden made what he later called his "silliest critical blunder" when he "could not make head or tail" of the work newly gathered in Moore's Selected Poems. 36 Wallace Stevens, commenting on that volume, described its aesthetic as "new," its style as "unique," and Moore as a "complete disintegrator" and an "equally complete reintegrator." 37 Eliot, who edited the selection, introduced her as a poet of "original sensibility"--"Miss Moore has no immediate poetic derivations"--who "found her rhythm, her poetry, her appreciation of the individual word, for herself" ("I," xiv, ix, x). He praised her for "startling us into an unusual awareness" likely to cause "bewilderment" to the point where it would sometimes be "difficult to say what is the 'subject-matter'" of a poem ("I," x, xi). Stevens registered the same response when he said of Moore's poems, "Subject, with her, is often incidental." 38 Without admitting to the incomprehension that Williams and Auden openly confessed, Eliot's introduction implies that readers of Moore's poems must retrain their ways of thinking to understand the workings of her mind and language, as different from ours as the operations of "a high-powered microscope" ("I," x).
The formal feature of Moore's poems that Eliot thought readers would find most baffling, since he gave it most attention in his introduction, was her use of rhyme, "in itself an innovation in metric" ("I," xii). He began his lesson with a description of rhyme as it was practiced by poets writing in English before his generation:
In the conventional forms of rhyme the stress given by the rhyme tends to fall in the same place as the stress given by the sense. The extreme case, at its best, is the pentameter couplet of Pope. Poets before and after Pope have given variety, sometimes at the expense of smoothness, by deliberately separating the stresses, from time to time; but this separation--often effected simply by longer periods or more involved syntax--can hardly be considered as more than a deviation from the norm for the purpose of avoiding monotony. ["I," xii]
More recently, some poets contemporary with Moore and Eliot had made the modernist choice with Williams to dismiss rhyming altogether. Others had asserted their modernity with regard to rhyme by using it "here and there to make a pattern directly in contrast with the sense and rhythm pattern, to give a greater intricacy" ("I," xii). Although Moore publicly claimed to despise rhyme on principle, she was one of these (she owned a rhyming dictionary that she said was "indispensable"). 39
This rhyming against the pattern of sense and stress Eliot separated into two kinds, "heavy or light," saying that of "the light rhyme Miss Moore is the greatest living master; and indeed she is the first, so far as I know, who has investigated its possibilities" ("I," xiii). What he meant he illustrated partly by quoting the opening end rhymes of two stanzas from "The Fish" (a poem with a conventional-seeming title that turns out to be the grammatical subject of a sentence ending part way through the second stanza).
The innovative effects of Moore's kind of light rhyme, Eliot explained, were "sometimes obtained by the use of articles as rhyme words," as in the second stanza from which he quoted the lines
an
injured fan.
The barnacles which encrust the side
of the wave, cannot hide. . .
and from stanza four:
the
turquoise sea
of bodies. The water drives a wedge . . . ["I," xiii]
Both the words that initiate the rhymes in these two opening couplets would be called light because as articles they are regularly unstressed in a sentence and unaccented in verse.
Words of this category (articles, conjunctions, and prepositions to which modern grammarians have added demonstratives) are fundamentally different from the parts of speech traditionally allowed in rhyming. They have a function in relation to other words but no inherent signifying capacity: by themselves they refer to nothing. The problem they present to rhyming is not the proverbial difficulty of pairing apples and oranges, nor even apples and umbrellas, but something more like the challenge of comparing apples with D, which, like an or the, is a sign without what linguists call descriptive content. It is for these reasons as well as for their light stress that such words, described by Charles Tomlinson as "the humbler components of language," were for centuries denied the prominent position of end rhymes in serious verse. 40
Moore's way of undermining the ranking of grammatical parts that dictated traditional rhyming practice was to seem innocently unaware of it. In "The Fish" she slyly tucked her two stanzas beginning with the most subversive form of rhyme--"an":"fan" and "the":"sea"--among three other stanzas that are built in the same unconventional lineation and rhyme scheme but that play by traditional rules in being made out of acceptable parts of speech: "wade":"jade," "sun":"spun," "pink":"ink." Yet that grammatical distinction, which is the predication of our ordinary ways of thinking about the nature of language and how it works, is blandly ignored. Or it is swept out of sight by insistence on the agreement among these two forms of rhyme by exact repetition of their other than grammatical features.
The opening rhyme words in all five stanzas are notably similar in size. They are all constructed out of two, three, or four letters packaged in one syllable (letters and syllables are what Moore in "Poetry" partly meant by "the raw material of poetry") and arranged in the identical, distinctive pattern of lines. This makes a strong impression of a single, clearly shaped design repeated all down one page as spaced in Selected Poems. The emphasis on exact structural repetition works against the hierarchical differentiation and demotion of "an" and "the": these articles are among their equals. In some way that matters, this declaration defines the rhymes with satisfactory precision, clearing away the distortions imposed by convention, sifting the "genuine" from the "derivative" (to quote again from "Poetry").
The last three stanzas of "The Fish," all down the facing page in this edition, bring this suggestion of conceptual equality a little closer to the surface, it may be as a way of testing our progress toward recognizing what has not been said in words but red in their shape, structure, and arrangement (perhaps what Moore hinted by saying of her poems, or all poems, that "Form is synonymous with content--must be"): 41
All
external
marks of abuse are present on this
defiant edifice--
all the physical features of
ac-
cident--lack
of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
hatchet strokes, these things stand
out on it; the chasm-side is
dead.
Repeated
evidence has proved that it can live
on what cannot revive
its youth. The sea grows old in it.
The words that make up the opening rhymes in these stanzas (all departures from traditional rhyme following the directions of nineteenth-century experiments) do not closely mirror the look of those on the opposite page. They are made with anywhere from two-plus-hyphen to seven letters. Two are capitalized because they begin a sentence (not because lines of poetry used always to begin with capitals). One is followed by a period (marking the end of the sentence not coterminous with the stanza). Two are trisyllabic with the rhyme falling on the unaccented last syllable. One, "ac-/ cident," is broken off as if by accident but of course by design to make the components of the word fit the syllabic pattern of the lines.
These stanzas offer a potpourri of irregular rhymes in various forms all different both from the radical combinations of "an":"fan" or "the":"sea" and from the traditional pairs like "wade":"jade." Even so, their identical arrangement of syllables --without regard to where the accent falls--is the measure and proof of their common nature and their equality: any word or even any syllable (Moore once pointed out that "Everyone writes in syllables!") is raw material for rhyming. 42
The opening end rhymes in the last three stanzas of "The Fish" also have in common that they use a different kind of word from those in the first five stanzas. Besides being more complexly built out of more than one syllable, these longer words contrast with the semantic simplicity of the earlier rhymes, almost like ones in a children's book. We might be likely to describe "external," "ac-/ cident," and "Repeated" as words more conceptual, more explanatory, more weighted with meaning. These are all ways of describing them that make them seem more serious or dignified, deeper: certainly more so than "an" or "the," but also than "wade" or "fan" or "pink." And "dead."--its finality visibly red by the "." that constitutes one of its parts--is tempting to single out as the most important word in the poem.
But to give in to that temptation would be to disregard what Moore's repetition of her stanza form based on exact syllabic count does to her craftily chosen end rhymes. It equalizes them as if they were digits, and "mathematics" is one of the preferred terms Moore used to describe her syllabic verse. 43 Ranking words in a hierarchy of lexical meanings that makes "dead." more important than -"ed" (or "an" or "pink") is as distorting to an understanding of the nature and workings of rhyme as traditional grammatical snobbery. So is generic ranking. The trick of breaking off a syllable from the front of a word is pulled out of the bag of conventions associated with comic verse, but here the play with "ac- / cident" occurs in a context that is not comic, where it makes a serious point: the synonymity of form and content.
It seems that Moore's rhymes in "The Fish," matching words that belong to wholly unreconcilable parts of speech, are prized for their power to shock us. They can jolt us into new ways of thinking about rhyme and what it tells us about the nature of language and of poetry, making those concerns part of Moore's characteristically opaque subject-matter (along with such others as the unknowable mystery of the natural world, and its ways of overturning our sense of relations among time and space, outward and inward, surface and depth). "The Fish" seems to be leading us to see beyond, beneath, through the "external" conventions--their analogues may be worn-off "cornices"--that dictated centuries of rhyming practice. The particular lens "The Fish" implicitly offers as an instrument to focus our looking is the "Repeated / evidence" of its rhymes.
Another poem of Moore's brings end rhymes of the most iconoclastic kind into sharper focus by using them to open four of its five stanzas: "those":"echoes," "and":"hand," "a":"Persia," ["pear":"square,"] "to":"su-." Like "The Fish," the poem itself begins with what is called a run-on title: a phrase in the title space that starts a grammatical sequence in the text. In this instance it starts a series of phrases and clauses with no predicate but stopped by a period thirty lines later in the second to last line of the second to last stanza:
those various scalpels,
those
various sounds consistently indistinct, like intermingled echoes
struck from thin glasses successively at random--the
inflection disguised: . . . .
The close, multiple likenesses between the three words of the title and the first three words of the opening line--grammatical units in identical order made of identical demonstratives and adjectives modifying monosyllabic plural nouns--are signals that the phrases are to be read in apposition. As grammarians define the term, it means that these parallel phrases have the identical reference; what they refer to the first rhymed couplet points at. "Scalpels" and "sounds," themselves naming two classes of phenomena seeming as nearly resistant to comparison as the grammatical classes of "those" and "echoes," nevertheless both refer to, or are analogues for, rhyme. The rest of the long, incomplete sentence catalogues other entities: some "repeating . . . in reverse order," "all alike," "of uniform / and at the same time diverse, appearances." These phrases tell us the items listed have in common that they, along with "Scalpels" and "sounds," are references to, or are analogues for, rhymes.
In the last stanza, "these things" (the shift from "those" to "these" locating the listed items nearby where the reader can see them on the page) are collectively described as "rich / instruments with which to experiment; naturally." Uncharacteristically, Moore's poem comes close to explicitness here about what its subject-matter might be: experimental rhyming. What its experiments discover about words, language, poetry, and their relation to "things" in the phenomenal world, the poem expresses only implicitly, very often obscurely.
Collective terms given in the last stanza and in the catalogue preparing for it are unreliable in that they are not uniformly applicable to the items listed. For instance, "things" names a category that scalpels would usually be said to belong to (a more specific category would be "instruments"), but not sounds. We would ordinarily be more likely to call them by a term for intangible phenomena like effects. The inclusive description given in stanza three--"a collection of little objects"--would more emphatically exclude "sounds" because in our habits of speech object more strictly than thing refers to something we can see and touch, except in the grammatical sense of object. (That meaning, we shall see, comes close to the surface here.) The use of these ill fitting collective terms seems pointed when contrasted with the way similar classifications in "The Jerboa"--"small things," "little paired playthings"--are used to describe objects that all belong equally to those categories.
Even when exclusively visible and tangible things are listed together as analogues for rhyme, they do not all have littleness in common. In the sequence of "pear / and three bunches of grapes, tied with silver: your dress, a magnificent square / cathedral tower," the "square / . . . tower" is way out of scale in size with (though linked by sound to) "pear." Beyond that, none of the items except "pear" and "grapes" seems to have anything in common with the others as we ordinarily experience them, so we find no grounds for comparing them.
Other res for rhyme in the catalogue present a different kind of obstacle to comparison, compounded by the problems that Moore's characteristically idiosyncratic punctuation puts in the way of grammatical clarity. Some closely parallel phrases point to likenesses in form and meaning among various analogues for rhyme while they also intersect with other parallel phrases belonging to an altogether unrelated field and sometimes a different ontological sphere. Here is a set of examples from stanza two that shows this layering of parallels as if "successively at random":
your raised hand,
an ambiguous signature: your cheeks, those rosettes
of blood on the stone floors of French chateaux, with
regard to which the guides are so affirmative--those regrets
of the retoucher on the contemporary stone: your other hand, . . . .
The phrases "your raised hand," "your cheeks," "your other hand" (following "your hair," "your ears," "your eyes" in the first stanza) are closely drawn parallels between parts of the body "re- / peating . . . in reverse order" and rhyme. Then "your cheeks, those rosettes" seems to set up a different kind of parallel, not drawing on repetition of words, syntax, and semantic orientation, but on "intermingled echoes" of famous poems in the tradition epitomized by Robert Burns's "My love is like a red, red rose." The continuation in the next line of the clause begun by "those rosettes" pushes aside the conventional simile--your cheeks are like roses--and replaces it with an unexpected comparison joining things so remotely similar that the parallel is almost buried (as are the "lances all alike" that are "partly hid" by jeweled ornaments in stanza three).
In the final phase of layering, "those rosettes" is joined, by the rhyme it initiates, with "those regrets." The lexical incompatibility of these rhymed words is as difficult to resolve in its way as the grammatical disagreement between end words in the kind of rhyme represented by love:of (a pairing Moore used once, in "The Paper Nautilus"). The untraversable lexical distance between "rosettes" and "regrets" (which also bear no discoverable resemblance to other end words), points to the conclusion that the parallel depends solely on likeness of sound, absolutely independent of intelligibility.
Here the rhyme is used as a lens to bring into focus a modern and modernist view of language and its relation to the phenomenal world that Malcolm Bowie described as fundamental to work by French poets of Valéry's generation, who were Moore's older contemporaries:
Sound-system and sense-system are heterogeneous, and the mystical echoes which many nineteenth-century writers had heard traveling between them, and suggesting the existence between them of some unfathomable kinship, are heard no more. The relations between them are now a source of intellectual tension and excitement. 44
In Moore's poems, with special concentration in "Those Various Scalpels," they are also an encouragement to obliqueness.
The rhyme "those rosettes":"those regrets" diagrams in little the great divide between sound and sense, while the parallel between "Those Various Scalpels," and "those various sounds" does something else that the poem wants us to find primary. Or so it seems to suggest in the question straddling its last lines: "But / why dissect destiny with instruments which / are more highly specialized than the tissues of destiny itself?"
By describing the rhymes in the poem (including the one completed in the question itself where "which" echoes "rich / experiments") as "more highly specialized" than need be for discovering a new way of understanding rhyme, the closing question raises playful doubts about the necessity for the extravagant obliqueness of the poem's procedures. Its collective categories that seem not wholly applicable to what they describe, and its layering of parallels, analogues, comparisons to rhyme based on distant or obscure or undiscoverable likenesses, are "too highly specialized." The question hints at a simpler, primary understanding of the issues in the poem that the poem has not directly led us to, has "disguised," "hid," made "indistinct" or "ambiguous": all words sprinkled inconspicuously among the items in the catalogue. This obscured but basic understanding is discoverable in the opening rhyme words that end adjacent lines in each stanza, even though here the exaggeratedly uneven lengths of the coupled lines puts a wide distance between the rhymes so that their "echoes" are "indistinct."
As in "The Fish," the first member of each pair is a single word by itself constituting the line, so that it is isolated for scrutiny as if in the visual field of a microscope. When we look at the one seemingly ill-fitting instance of "pear," we can picture--cannot prevent ourselves from picturing--an object, much as it would be drawn on the page of a children's book with PEAR written below. When we stare through the lens at "those," "and," "a," or "to" we see only letters making a word. We may hardly be aware of its sound because the echo that calls attention to it takes so long to be heard. Still, because "pear" is placed in a sequence of other words of similar size and identical position doing the same work of rhyming, they are all understood to belong to a common category.
Although "those," "and," "a," "to" cannot be included among "a collection of little objects" in the phenomenal sense, they can be objects in the grammatical sense--as Moore used the word in the title of her essay "Subject, Predicate, Object"--because they all belong, equally with "pear," to the category of word, and any word appreciated for itself, which Eliot praised Moore for doing, is a noun. In their own simple terms, "those," "and," "a," "to" lead us to read the title-sentence of this essay as stating the obvious: that "Love rhymes with of." must be understood to mean "the word love rhymes with the word of." What binds love and of together beyond their likeness of sound has nothing to do with their lexical and grammatical meanings, but everything to do with their common nature and status as words. Purely as words, stripped of all conventional misconceptions about them, they become nouns. Stevens was perhaps the first besides Moore among their contemporaries to recognize and use the ontological truth of this grammatical event in poems: he condensed it in his famous, playful, only seemingly obscure phrase "The the." 45
The primary understanding of language that Moore's radical rhymes lead to is more widely based even than the recognition that sound and sense are heterogeneous. In "Those Various Scalpels," her iconoclastic rhymes bring into sharp focus the unbridgeable ontological gap between words and the phenomena they point to "at random." What Williams said in his discussion of all true poems can equally describe the words that Moore's poems are made with: that they have "a separate existence uncompelled by nature or the supernatural." 46 Necessarily the rhymes they make do not echo some universal harmony but only their own phonetic effects, and the poet does not act in the poem as an intermediary authority who discovers the conjunction of language with phenomena of this world or beyond it.
The poet of "The Fish" is as rigorously excluded as grammar will allow, although the extravagantly strict arrangement and minute word play in the poem call attention to the suppressed poet's verbal feats. "Those Various Scalpels," implies the presence of an agent shaping the raw material of the poem by another of Moore"s inconspicuous scatterings of words with like associations: "struck," "sculptured," "sown," "set," "made," "tied," "Whetted." Beginning with "struck" in the opening lines, they hint at the work of an artisan skilled in using the tools of various trades. Simultaneously, the first stanza res the poet as a performer at a street fair, striking sounds "from thin glasses successively at random," publicly making private and precarious music.
Moore's small, simple opening rhyme words are ordinary, unspecialized verbal objects like "glasses": everyday things put to use as musical instruments. The tune they play fulfills the antipoetic ideals of modernism. Though "indistinct," creating what Sylvia Adamson described as the "illusion of a natural speech which falls into rhyme almost accidentally," 47 the "sounds" made by the artisan-street-performer-poet can be heard among the "highly specialized" experiments that are also a characteristic of modernist poems. Yet another of their defining features is their capacity to make fun of their own obscurity.
Elizabeth Bishop remembered that Marianne Moore "made contemporary poets self-conscious about their crudities, afraid to rhyme 'bone' with 'stone,'" and that once Moore congratulated her for the (Moore-ish) rhyme "antennae" with "many." 48 Auden admitted to having "stolen a great deal" from Moore, and by 1936 was himself rhyming love with of; Moore took amused notice that he was not "too fettered to use 'who,' 'he,' 'the,' or 'which,' as an end rhyme." 49 Richard Wilbur acknowledged having been "very charmed" by Moore's poetry and "undoubtedly influenced" by it, and the repeated evidence of James Merrill's rhymes makes it entirely likely that he learned from hers. 50 The examples of these and other strong poets following Moore have made her most vehemently anticonventional rhymes accessible for poets to use for their own, quite different, effects.
Something like this assimilation or accommodation has followed every revolution in rhyming. According to Henry Lanz, when the "classical rules are violated . . . so frequently that the poets' disregard for them can no longer be considered a mere license," then for "many poets licenses become rules. Out of the chaos of individual experiments new principles begin to arise." 51 A further dimension of this process is that when subversive rhymes become accepted practice among the poets whose influence defines the norms for their generation, then those rhymes have a different role in the production of meaning.
A sequence of couplets in Thom Gunn's "Memoirs of the World" can show this transformation of anticlassical rhyming, even of Moore's most radical, agrammatical type: of:love. The contrast in rhyming effects is sharpened because the passage from Gunn's poem bears some resemblance to "The Fish" in that it leads the reader to look into the depths at aquatic creatures seen like "cells" through the lens of a microscope:
I watch the cells swimming in concert
like nebulae, calm, without effort,
great clear globes, pink and white.--But look at
the intruder with blurred outline that
glides in among the shoals, colourless,
with tendrils like an anemone's
drifting all around it like long fur,
gently, unintelligently. Where
it touches it holds, in an act of
enfolding, possessing, merging love.
There is coupling where no such should be.
Surely it is a devil, surely
it is life's parody I see, which
enthralls a universe with its rich
heavy passion, leaving behind it
gorgeous mutations only, then night. 52
The distances here between words paired in end rhymes, their mismatchings in sound, structure, accent, lexical and grammatical meanings are as exaggerated as in many of Moore's experiments, but no particular attention is directed to the fact of their incompatibility. By contrast with Moore's extravagantly imbalanced line lengths, the largely even lineation of Gunn's couplets prevents the rhyme words from standing out to be specially noticed. They are meant to be taken for granted.
Adding to this leveling effect, the rhyme pairs in this passage are all without exception mismatched in their various ways as they are, for instance, in poems of Wilfred Owen, whereas Moore included instances of classical rhyming to call attention to the eccentricity of her experiments. Here even before the "cells swimming in concert" are disturbed in the second couplet-- "But look at / the intruder"--the word "concert" is inharmoniously joined with "effort." Irregular rhymes here are not "mutations"; they are the norm. Even "of":"love" is not distinguished in its oddity from a near rhyme like "concert":"effort," the kind Eliot described as merely a deviation from the classical model and not an overthrow of it. These differences in verbal treatment offer concrete explanations of our differences in response to the same types of anticlassical rhyming.
A more conceptual way of thinking about why we are not taken aback or baffled by Gunn's rhyming, as we can be by Moore's, is suggested in Clive Scott's statement that the rhyming practices of a culture or period can be seen as "continually endorsing the intellectual and emotional stance of an ideology." 53 What Moore's antitraditional rhymes express--that language and the phenomenal world coexist without intersecting, as parallels that never meet--has by now become so deeply embedded in the ideology of our culture and time that it is not held up to be questioned; Gunn's rhymes no longer need to proselytize about these issues.
Why, then, can we still be surprised and uneasily amused by Moore's rhymes built on the model of love:of? Besides the fact that they use every imaginable verbal means to startle, bemuse, and amuse their readers by their eccentric behavior, they are aided by circumstances of history and habit. Most readers of poetry even now are more familiar with, and therefore more at ease with, poems written over some four hundred and fifty years of traditional rhyming than with modernist and more recent poetry. According to Wilbur, "most poets who choose to rhyme, nowadays, are troubled about using easy rhymes and are embarrassed about using their own rhymes more than once." 54 Readers are more likely to be troubled by unfamiliar, anticlassical rhymes when they call attention to their departures from tradition.
Or to describe differently the roles of habit and history in shaping our responses to Moore's iconoclastic rhymes: our ideology is not easily compatible with what Marie Borroff described as our "naive or commonsensical account of the conceptual implications of our inherited parts-of-speech system." 55 The grammatical distinction between words in the separate and traditionally unequal classes that love and of belong to still has shaping power over our workaday understanding of language in relation to the things of this world. We still have an immediate, unexamined sense that the descriptive content of pear connects it with a piece of fruit, making it possible for us to conceive of them in relation to one another, which is what traditional rhyme teaches us to do. Whereas a is inherently empty of reference; in our hierarchical system of grammatical classes it could not legitimately be used in a rhyme with pear, which Marianne Moore vehemently insisted on doing, and Gunn might be quite likely to do without our noticing. It is tempting, but probably irresponsible, to think that this gap between our responses still shaped by inherited common sense notions and our contemporary ideology is implicitly acknowledged in Gunn's line, "There is coupling where no such should be."
Anne Ferry's most recent book, The Title to the Poem , won the Christian Gauss Prize of Phi Beta Kappa in 1997. Her new book, Tradition and the Individual Poem: An Inquiry into Anthologies, will be published in 2001, by Stanford University Press.
1. W. H. Auden, "Don Juan," in The Dyer's Hand (New York: Random House, 1962), 388.
2. T. V. F. Brogan, English Versification, 1570-1980 (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 77.
3. Jurij Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans. Ronald Vroon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977), 125.
4. Sir Philip Sidney, "An Apologie for Poetrie," in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. G. Smith (London: Oxford University Press, 1904), 1:196.
5. See W. K. Wimsatt, "One Relation of Rhyme to Reason," in The Verbal Icon (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), 157. In this classic article Wimsatt distinguished Alexander Pope's combinations of rhyme words from those of Chaucer, which belonged to a much earlier phase of English not yet fully emerged from inflectional grammar. Wimsatt's example of Chaucerian rhyming is a sequence from the Knight's portrait: "he," "worthynesse," "ded," "wildernesse," "kyndenesse," where the esse endings are close to what Aristotle called homoeoteleuton (identical or similar inflectional case endings). In contrast, Wimsatt characterized Pope's rhyme pairs as more widely differing in parts of speech or in function of the same parts of speech, in lexical meaning, and in syllabic structure, differences heightened by the reliance of Pope's couplets on parallel structure and epigrammatic point.
6. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 81.
7. Ibid. 79, 76-7. My essay copies the model of Susanne Woods, Natural Emphasis: English Versification from Chaucer to Dryden (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1984), 5, in following "the modern terminology" of stress to mean an inherent feature of the language and accent to mean the syllable emphasized metrically.
8. Thomas Campion, "Observations in the Art of English Poesie," and George Gascoigne, "Certayne Notes of Instruction," in Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2:331; 1:51.
9. Gascoigne, "Certayne Notes," 51.
10. See T. Walter Herbert, "The Grammar of Rhymes," Sewanee Review 48 : 368. For discussion of the sixteenth-century conceptions of the noun-substantive and the noun-adjective see Anne Ferry, The Art of Naming (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 55-61.
11. See Peter Levens, Manipulus Vocabulorum (Menston: Scolar Press, 1969).
12. Samuel Daniel, "A Defence of Ryme" in Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2:366.
13. Ibid.
14. Roman Jakobson, "Linguistics and Poetics," in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 82.
15. See Percy Adams, Graces of Harmony: Alliteration, Assonance, and Consonance in Eighteenth-Century British Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), 19.
16. G. S. Fraser, Metre, Rhyme and Free Verse (London: Methuen, 1970), 61.
17. George Gascoigne, "Gascoignes good morrow," in The Posies, ed. John Cunliffe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907), 55.
18. Hugh Kenner, "Pope's Reasonable Rhymes," ELH 41 : 78.
19. George Herbert, "A true Hymne," in The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 168. In "Jordan II" Herbert uses the verb to copy out instead of to write to describe the act of making a poem.
20. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, 80.
21. Edward Bysshe, preface to The Art of English Poetry (Monston: Scolar Press, 1968), n.p.; hereafter abbreviated AEP.
22. Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Criticism," in Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism, ed. E. Audra and Aubrey Williams (London: Methuen, 1961), 278-9; hereafter abbreviated "EC." Wallace Stevens confessed that once "I made 'breeze' rhyme with 'trees,' and have never forgiven myself. It is a correct rhyme, of course,--but unpardonably 'expected'" (Wallace Stevens to Elsie Moll, 19 August 1909, Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens [New York: Alfred Knopf, 1966], 157).
23. Alexander Pope, "Windsor-Forest," in Pastoral Poetry, 148-9.
24. See Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (Leeds: Scholar Press, 1966), 60: "Blank is a term of diminution; what we mean by blank verse, is verse unfallen, uncurst; verse reclaim'd, reinthron'd in the true language of the gods. . . . "
25. Clive Scott, The Riches of Rhyme (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 128.
26. See Randolph Quirk et al., A Grammar of Contemporary English (London: Longman, 1973), 815. All mentions of grammatical terms and definitions refer to this invaluable book.
27. Marianne Moore, "Memory's Immortal Gear," in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, ed. Patricia Willis (New York: Viking, 1986), 135. She also associated the use of the "unaccented rhymed syllable" with Longfellow and Whittier in "When I Was Sixteen," . Elizabeth Bishop in a memoir of Moore recorded that she confessed her early poems to have been "Just like Swinburne"; see "Efforts of Affection," in The Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984), 145. Swinburne liked to make rhymes with phrases like "longing to," "witness of," "woven of," "fashioned of," and paired "love" with "of" so often that it was described as one of his "favourite indolences" by B. de Selincourt, "Rhyme in English Poetry," in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, ed. John Bailey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921), 7:21.
28. Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Evening: Ponte Al Mare, Pisa," in The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), 654.
29. Shelley, "To Jane: The Recollection," in Complete Works, 669-70.
30. Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Christopher Devlin (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 123; The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphrey House and Graham Storey (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 102. For discussion of these and other statements about rhyme by Hopkins, see J. Hillis Miller, "The Univocal Chiming," in Hopkins: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1966), 89-116.
31. T. S. Eliot, introduction to Selected Poems by Marianne Moore (New York: Macmillan, 1935), xii; hereafter abbreviated "I." I have chosen to quote Moore's poems exclusively from this edition because in it work of her modernist period was introduced to a larger public, and because she had not yet begun her radical program of revising them. The two poems quoted and discussed extensively in this essay, "The Fish" and "Those Various Scalpels," are on pages 32-3, 57-8.
32. Margaret Holley, The Poetry of Marianne Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 22.
33. William Carlos Williams, "Marianne Moore," in Imaginations (New York: New Directions, 1971), 312, 315.
34. Williams, "Spring and All," in Imaginations, 145, 101.
35. Williams, "Marianne Moore," 313.
36. W. H. Auden, "Nevertheless," in New York Times Book Review, 15 October 1944, 7; idem, "Marianne Moore," in Dyer's Hand, 296.
37. Wallace Stevens to T. C. Wilson, 25 March 1935, Letters, 278-9; and Wallace Stevens to Ronald Lane Latimer, 5 November 1935, Letters, 290.
38. Wallace Stevens, "A Poet That Matters," in Opus Posthumous, ed. Samuel French Morse (New York: Knopf, 1957), 249.
39. Bishop, "Efforts of Affection," in Collected Prose, 138-9.
40. Charles Tomlinson, introduction to Marianne Moore: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1969), 8.
41. Moore, "Subject, Verb, Predicate," in Complete Prose, 505.
42. See Holley, The Poetry of Marianne Moore, 89.
43. See Linda Leavell, Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 68.
44. Malcolm Bowie, Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 24.
45. See "The Man on the Dump," in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), 202.
46. Williams, "Marianne Moore," 314.
47. Sylvia Adamson, "Literary Language," in The Cambridge History of the English Language, ed. Suzanne Romaine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 4:624.
48. Bishop, Collected Prose, 140, 139.
49. Auden, "Nevertheless," 20; Moore, "W. H. Auden," in Complete Prose, 460.
50. Conversations with Richard Wilbur, ed. William Butts (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990), 21.
51. Henry Lanz, The Physical Basis of Rime (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1931), 89.
52. Thom Gunn, "Memoirs of the World," in Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), 142.
53. Scott, The Riches of Rhyme, 103.
54. Richard Wilbur, The Cat Bird's Song: Prose Pieces 1963-1995 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997), 187.
55. Marie Borroff, Language and the Poet: Verbal Artistry in Frost, Stevens, and Moore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 91.
The bohemian as a social stereotype first found definition on the pages of Parisian popular magazines sometime around the mid-1840s. 1 Associated with the carefree and impoverished existence of artists on the fringes of middle-class life, the bohemian gained a surprising degree of symbolic importance among his contemporaries. Indeed, he came to be seen as the first embodiment of the artist of modernity and the privileged interpreter of aesthetic truths in contemporary society. 2 Although the social and personal aspects of the bohemian way of life have become clichés, the cultural meanings and implications of the phenomenon remain full of contradiction. 3
These contradictions were already apparent in Henri Murger's Scènes de la vie de bohème, a series of amusing vignettes about artistic life in the Latin Quarter that was published serially in Le Corsaire-Satan between 1845 and 1849 and was to serve as a model for all later depictions of the bohemian type. Bohemians, Murger wrote in the 1851 preface to his book, "are not a race of today, they have existed in all climes and ages, and can claim an illustrious descent," from Homer, through Michelangelo, Molière and Shakespeare, all the way to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 4 As legitimate heirs to all great artistic traditions of the past, bohemians were, Murger implied, ahistorical res, embodying transcendental artistic values. Murger, however, did not stop at this point but proceeded to make a further, seemingly contradictory, claim. The bohemian was not only the timeless artist but also a quintessentially modern social type whose activities were defined by the new commercial realities of the cultural marketplace. Unlike his romantic predecessors, whom Murger dismissed as "obstinate dreamers," the true bohemian was a successful professional and artistic entrepreneur who had learned to create publicity for his products and to negotiate the cultural marketplace for his own advantage (Sb, 34). Bohemia was, Murger insisted, not a permanent way of life but rather a period of apprenticeship, a transitional phase in the young artist's life that, like any business venture, could lead to financial success and social recognition but also to ruin and bankruptcy. In Murger's words, bohemia was merely a preface before "the Academy, the Hotel de Dieu, or the Morgue" (Sb, 34).
Historians and theorists of bohemianism have tended to perpetuate these seemingly incompatible interpretive frames through which Murger originally explained the meaning of bohemia to his contemporaries. Like Murger, contemporary commentators have oscillated between visions of the bohemian as a creator of transcendental art and as a characteristic product of capitalist modernity. The first position has been argued by literary historians like Matei Calinescu and Gene Bell-Vilada, who have identified bohemians with the invention of l'art pour l'art and a protomodernist aesthetic that would eventually lead to modern abstraction. 5 On the other side, Walter Benjamin has claimed that the true significance of the bohemian lay within the tensions of capitalism, which radicalized the modern artist but also transformed him into a cultural commodity bought and sold in the marketplace. 6 The historian Jerrold Seigel also has seen the bohemian as a product of bourgeois modernity, though he placed the emphasis on the social rather than the economic aspects of his function. For Seigel, the bohemian should be regarded as a liminal re who acted out the inner contradictions of bourgeois individualism and helped reconcile modern society's opposing needs for social order and self-expression. Pierre Bourdieu, too, has stressed the role of the capitalist marketplace in the emergence of bohemia, but he also has argued that the bohemian found a modus vivendi with capitalism by creating an independent intellectual field and becoming a pioneer of aesthetic autonomy or l'art pour l'art in the modern world. 7
As valuable and suggestive as these visions of the bohemian are in themselves, they fail to provide a fully contextualized, historically specific image of the bohemian. They lack convincing empirical or theoretical connections between the social spaces that the bohemian inhabited and the aesthetic function that he fulfilled in modern society. The bohemian as social type appears detached from, if not in direct conflict with, the bohemian as aesthetic creator. In other words, what seems absent in contemporary theories of bohemia is the cultural middle ground that could connect the social and the aesthetic dimensions of the bohemian and thus reestablish the historical specificity and concreteness of the re.
I will argue that the missing cultural image of the bohemian preceded the social and aesthetic types by almost a generation and needs to be sought in a radical artistic subculture that emerged in the late-1820s and early-1830s and defined itself in opposition to bourgeois modernity. Curiously, historians and theorists of bohemia have tended to underplay the importance of this early bohemian moment, regarding it as simply an immature version of a later phenomenon depicted in Murger's imaginative work. There are a number of reasons for this critical neglect of the cultural origins of bohemian identity. Perhaps most obvious is the uncertainty surrounding its name. It was not until the late-1840s, thanks in large part to Murger's popular stories, that the word "bohemian" came to be associated exclusively with artistic life in modern societies. Before Murger, "bohemia" had a number of nonaesthetic meanings, long-forgotten by later ages. The word "bohemian" could refer to gypsies, who were thought to have originated in Bohemia, to socially marginal urban types with uncertain sources of livelihood, as well as to colorful members of the criminal underground depicted in melodramas. 8 However, once the concept of bohemia found its permanent definition as an artistic identity in the late-1840s, it was frequently applied retrospectively to the 1830s. 9
A more important reason for the relative oblivion surrounding the re of the cultural bohemian of the 1830s is its subversive implications for later interpretations of aesthetic modernism. Ultimately, the cultural bohemian is incompatible with ideas about the modernist artist that gained increasing importance from the latter half of the nineteenth century on. Indeed, he problematizes the very notion of social and aesthetic autonomy, long considered central to the identity of the modernist artist. As I hope to show in the following pages, the bohemian of the 1830s emerged from a complex reworking of themes and images common in early-nineteenth-century popular culture. 10 Bohemian identity was symbiotically linked to popular romanticism and the melodrama, which were losing ground to more respectable, bourgeois artistic forms by the early 1830s. The image of the bohemian as a theatrical performer who reenacted and eventually reaestheticized the subversive forms of popular culture is obviously incompatible with the traditional vision of the bohemian as the producer of high culture and canonical art that began with Murger.
What were the historical preconditions that explain the emergence of the cultural bohemian? What were his characteristic features? What were the sources of his vision of modernity and how did he implement them within the historical world? My attempt to answer these questions is based on a historically informed phenomenology that returns to the early sources of bohemianism with the intention of contextualizing them and retrieving their original meanings. This is, in many ways, a traditional historical undertaking that is deeply concerned with the meaning of texts and their relationships to contexts. 11 It is also unconventional, however, in the sense that I define the nature of both contexts and texts in fundamentally different terms from traditional intellectual history. Instead of assuming the context to be an objectively given social or political space within which the texts find a stable set of meanings, I see context as a mediated cultural realm that is itself in need of interpretation. 12 The texts of my investigation also take on a different aspect once they are defined as cultural, rather than social, phenomena. I see the bohemian self as a collective rather than an individual identity that acquired its meanings from performative gestures enacted within the generic conventions of specific cultural forms. Thus, my exploration of the historical trajectory of the cultural bohemian will carry me from the world of the romantic drama, the melodrama, and the comédie-Vaudeville all the way to the allegorical romance.
It is no accident that the earliest appearance of the bohemian as a cultural re was in the context of a theatrical scandal that transgressed social and cultural norms and shocked all of Paris. The "Battle of Hernani," as the event came to be called, is worth recounting in some detail since it represents the first time the bohemian appeared as a public re in French cultural life and illustrates the ways this re was interconnected with the problematic of the romantic drama. The battle took place on the opening night of Victor Hugo's Hernani, scheduled to be performed at the Théâtre Française on 28 February 1830. 13 The controversial play was eagerly awaited by Parisian audiences, who saw the event as a showdown between romanticism and classicism and as an apotheosis of the battle between the moderns and the ancients that had been raging for at least two decades. 14 Seats were sold out for opening night weeks ahead, and Hugo was bombarded by requests for complimentary tickets by such luminaries as Benjamin Constant, Adolphe Thiers, and Prosper Mérimée, who had been unable to obtain tickets at the box office. Fearing that Hernani might become the occasion for political turbulence, the progovernment paper La Quotidienne warned, "However great importance the performance of 'Hernani' may have for the republic of letters, the French monarchy cannot be concerned about it." 15
What, in fact, occurred during the opening night of Hernani was a different kind of scandal from what the audience had anticipated. The real outrage of the evening hinged not on the innovations of Hugo's play but on his youthful followers, who gathered to support the romantic dramatist against his classicist foes. According to Hugo's account of the event, his own actions helped transform the performance of Hernani from an aesthetic controversy of predictable outcome into a cultural scandal of major proportions. This innovation had to do with the author's decision to forgo the well-established custom of hiring professional clappers to ensure the success of his play and to rely on his own unpaid supporters among the students and artists of the Latin Quarter. When reproached for the foolhardiness of this venture, Hugo responded that a new art form needed a new audience that would resemble the play and that this new audience was to be found among "the young people, poets, painters, sculptors, musicians, print makers etc." who would come to support the play of their own free will ("VH," 456).
Hugo's calculation that he could rely on the loyal support of the hundreds of students, artists, and intellectuals who idolized romanticism was not mistaken. The defense of Hernani was organized by his young adherents with all the skill and precision of a military campaign. Key followers like Gérard de Nerval, Théophile Gautier, and Petrus Borel acted as organizers who generated lists of recruits among their acquaintances in the Latin Quarter and made sure that they showed up on opening night. Inside the theater, they scattered in small groups in the pit and the galleries and acted as coordinated cheering squadrons for the play. They countered every hiss from the audience with louder applause, and the commotion in the audience rivaled in interest the actual drama being performed on stage. As one of the reviewers of the play commented the following day, "The spectators were on the same plane as the actors on the stage and they performed as epileptics." 16 The success of Hernani was ensured by the fourth act, and between the fourth and fifth acts, Hugo was approached by the representative of a publishing house, offering to publish the play for the sum of 6,000 francs. The deal was concluded and signed at a nearby tobacco vendor's, and Hugo received the 6,000 francs in cash on the spot. 17
During the next four months following the scandalous first night (there was to be a run of forty-five performances), the young romanticists continued their organized defense of Hernani, which had become a sacred cause. Writing eight years after the performance, Gautier remembered Hernani as a mock-heroic battlefield on which
the champions of romanticism and the athletes of classicism clashed and fought with all the unparalleled fury and passionate ardor that only literary antagonism can provoke; each verse was taken and retaken in assault. One evening, it was the romanticists who lost a speech, the next, they recaptured it and the classicists, beaten, brought to another line a formidable artillery of hisses, bird calls, screeches, and the combat was re-engaged with even more spirit. 18
From the perspective of forty years later, Gautier was to provide an even more revealing evaluation of the significance of the Battle of Hernani. The opening night, Gautier recalled, was "the greatest event of the century, since it represented the inauguration of free, youthful, and new thought on the debris of old routine." It was the battle "of youth against decrepitude, of long hair against baldness, of enthusiasm against routine, of the future against the past." The visual contrast between the youthful defenders of romanticism and its balding opponents was, for Gautier, a living panorama of the state of contemporary culture. "It was sufficient to cast one's gaze on this public," he illustrated, "to be convinced that this was no ordinary occurrence; what was at stake here were two systems, two parties, two armies, it is no exaggeration to say, two civilizations, who hated each other cordially." 19
Gautier's hyperbolic account accurately conveys the hidden agenda of the Battle of Hernani. The real significance of the mock-heroic battle was, it turns out, not the triumph of romanticism over classicism, which was a foregone conclusion by 1830, but the transformation of the long-standing aesthetic conflict into a more modern cultural antagonism, that of artist versus bourgeois, bohemian versus philistine. The Battle of Hernani witnessed the emergence of radical artists as a recognizable, collective presence in public life. It represented the first enactment of the bohemian identity in modern culture. The theatrical scandal also saw the crystallization of the concept of the philistine, a term that referred to a newly self-assertive middle class that assumed the mantle of classicism and came to serve as the defender of transcendental values, Christian morals, and social stability in contemporary literary life.
We have become so habituated to the seeming inevitability of the antagonism between bohemian and bourgeois that we fail to ask why it emerged at the particular moment it did and why it took the forms that it did. To say that the bohemian artist was the natural antagonist of the bourgeois, its radical "Other," is, in a sense, a tautology that does not explain the historical particularity of the re. If the bohemian is to be understood as a cultural phenomenon in his own right, he has to be seen in terms of his own agendas, his own version of self and modernity that was calculated not only to shock the modern bourgeois but also to provide a radical alternative to his vision.
This alternative vision cannot be found in any literary text or ideological tract produced by members of bohemia. It was, rather, performed through gestures, clothes, lifestyle, and interior decoration. 20 The bohemian acted out his opposition to philistine modernity, above all, by dressing up in outrageous costumes. Extravagant clothing and appearance played, in fact, a central symbolic and ideological role in the confrontation between the young romanticists and their opponents at the Battle of Hernani. Their striking costumes distinguished Hugo's followers not only from the classicists but also, significantly, from the older generation of romanticists who dressed according to formal bourgeois conventions. Victor Hugo's bemused description of the appearance of his young supporters on the opening night of Hernani provides telling proof of how clothing redrew cultural boundaries, not only between romanticists and classicists but also, implicitly, between romanticists and bohemians. "From one o'clock onward," Hugo recounts,
the numerous pedestrians of the rue Richelieu saw a growing band of wild and bizarre characters, bearded, long-haired, dressed in every fashion except the reigning one, in pea jackets, Spanish cloaks, waist coats à la Robespierre, in Henri III bonnets, carrying on their heads and backs articles of clothing from every century and clime, and this in the midst of Paris and in broad daylight. The bourgeois were stopped short in their path, stupefied and indignant. M. Théophile Gautier was a particular insult to their eyes, in a scarlet satin waistcoat and thick long hair cascading down his back. ["VH," 460]
Gautier, too, makes special mention of the important role that costume played in the activities of the young romanticists. They were convinced, he writes, that the evening that was to inaugurate "free, youthful, and new thought on the debris of old routines" needed to be celebrated "with an appropriate toilette, some costume, splendid and bizarre, that would honor the master, the school and the play" (Hr, 79). The champions of the future took pride, Gautier assures us, in not looking like notaries and modeled themselves on characters from Renaissance paintings, romantic dramas, and Gothic novels. Even those who could not afford the expense of satin, velvet, and military braid necessary to duplicate their visions of Rubens or Velasquez still managed to look colorful and romantic in makeshift costumes. Of all the imaginative outfits of the evening, Gautier's red satin waistcoat, meticulously tailored for the occasion, seemed most successful in capturing the spirit of provocation and eccentricity that was the essence of the event. It became not only the symbol of the Battle of Hernani but of Gautier's entire career. As he remarked ironically in his reminiscences,
if the name of Théophile Gautier is pronounced in front of a Philistine, even if he had never read a line of verse or prose of mine, he will know of me by the red waistcoat that I wore on the opening night of Hernani. . . . This is the image that I leave for posterity. My poems, my books, my articles, my trips to foreign lands will be forgotten; but people will remember my red waistcoat. [Hr, 77]
In order to understand the serious symbolic and ideological implications of these seemingly frivolous gestures, it is necessary to extend our analysis beyond the Battle of Hernani to the broader landscape of Parisian artistic and intellectual culture. 21 The fashion for beards, long hair, and historical costumes did not begin with the Battle of Hernani but went back to around 1827, when artists and intellectuals began for the first time to dress up in clothes that affronted the conventional dress code of the bourgeoisie. 22 Young men were to be seen everywhere sporting Venetian outfits from the sixteenth century, Polish military uniforms from Brandenburg, Hungarian hussars' mantles, oriental robes of all kinds, which were worn as markers of artistic identity and personal distinction. 23 The young artists in historical costumes carefully distinguished themselves from the fashionable dandies or "lions" of the time, who dressed according to the latest fashion imported from England. 24 After 1830, the taste for exotic costumes among young people became so pervasive that visitors to Paris invariably commented on it as a central feature of the city's cultural landscape. Frances Trollope, writing of Paris in 1835, repeatedly returns to the spectacle of the "jeune gens de Paris" (young people of Paris) who were visible everywhere and whose gestures were seen by everyone as "something great, terrible, volcanic, and sublime." 25 The theatricality of these costumes prompted another visitor in 1835 to comment, "One would have thought that certain of the newer plays had sent out their characters into the street." 26
So deep-seated was the association between eccentric historical costumes and the modern artistic life that it was still echoed in popular definitions of social types that became prevalent in the 1840s. In obvious reference to the fashion of the previous decade, we find the following definition of the "Man of Letters" in the multivolume encyclopedia of urban social types, published in 1842 under the title of Les Français peints par eux-mêmes: "The man of letters wants to transform himself and to appear like the resuscitated inhabitant of another century. . . . One can thus encounter the hairstyle of Saint-Louis in the omnibus, the beard of Henri III on the railway, and the hat of the Duke de Guise in the restaurant." 27
The same fantastic tastes that prevailed in the clothing of the modern man of letters could be found in his furnishings.
The literary celebrity has attempted the grotesque rehabilitation of the furniture of the Middle Ages . . . and soon every man of letters had his domed chest, his worm-eaten table with clawed feet, his shelves supported by gargoyles. Ancient platters, ancient frames, ancient chairs, ancient porcelains, ancient tapestries were the delight of the innovators of the age, and the fanatical partisans of progress surrounded themselves with daggers, halberds, clamors and armored plates, transformed into the inoffensiveness of decorations. 28
Why did the young romanticists choose to enact their opposition to bourgeois modernity through the literal embodiment of medieval, and more generally, exotic images? What were the cultural and ideological implications of their carnivalesque performances? The dominant approach to this question has generally taken a political and ideological turn. It has been argued convincingly that young artists who idolized the medieval world were motivated by historical nostalgia, by a regressive desire to return to an originary golden age that had been lost to modernity but still haunted it.
This view was already put forward by the journalist Delecluze, who, as early as 1832, raised the question of why young artists grew beards and sported long hair as gestures of identification with the Middle Ages. He suggested that the young generation found it necessary to return to the Middle Ages in order to "retrieve the correct path that was abandoned by the writers and artists of the so-called Renaissance under Francis I and of classicism under Louis XIV." Contemporary medievalism, in Delecluze's view, was thus a philosophic and ideological repudiation of the Enlightenment and a reactionary search for a spiritual home in the distant past. As he concluded, "long beards sported by isolated men in a population without beards are sure proof of a desire on their part to restore, to regenerate, some old custom or ancient tastes that had been worn out by time." 29
Plausible as this explanation is on the surface, it becomes problematic on closer examination. In the first place, the young bohemians were neither authoritarian, nor religious, nor hierarchical in orientation; they were, on the contrary, irreverent, antimoralistic, and transgressive. In the second place, no literal relationship existed between their medievalism and an empirically or politically defined past. They appropriated their vision of the middle ages not from history books and archives but from Gothic novels, fashionable romances, romantic dramas, and melodramas, whose colorful images saturated the world of popular culture. 30 In the context of the time, one has to conclude that their stylized medievalism represented not so much a conservative repudiation of the modern world as a polemical gesture of support for the popular forms of modern urban culture. Through these gestures, bohemians signaled that they were opposed not so much to modernity in general but to a particular bourgeois manifestation of modern culture that was in the process of emerging in the 1830s.
The testimonials of the bohemians themselves unmistakably reinforce this interpretation. Arsène Houssay, for instance, a member of Gautier's early circle, explained that their outlandish costumes signaled their "common revolt against all prejudice, I might say against all laws." 31 Characteristic of their group, wrote Maxime du Camp some years later, was "a general repudiation of acceptable habits and common customs," especially those of the "abhorrent bourgeois." 32 His scarlet waistcoat, claimed Gautier, represented a "symbolic protest against the grayness of modern life" (Hr, 79).
In order to understand the full implications of these subversive gestures, we need to regard them as manifestations not of reactionary politics but of an essentially modern cultural phenomenon that anticipated the radical youth movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The sociologist Dick Hebdige has entitled these movements "spectacular subcultures" since they create collective and personal identity through public spectacle and performance. 33 Their defining feature is the ability to invest objects, gestures, everyday practices with subversive meanings and thus to invent "style." It is through "style" that subcultures disrupt the "authorized codes through which the social world is organized and experienced" and thus bring into doubt the implicit values and moral norms of the majority. In this sense, all subcultures pose "symbolic challenges to a symbolic order" (S, 91, 92). Subcultures represent more than mere gestures of defiance or rebellion against the established order, however. The broader significance of these movements, according to Hebdige and others, derives from their links to the often hidden or unacknowledged contradictions of mainstream society. Spectacular subcultures act out the latent ideological, economic, and cultural tensions that exist in the larger culture as a whole. Theirs is, in Hebdige's words, "a coded response to changes affecting the entire community" (S, 80).
The bohemian subculture of the 1830s was also an integral part of a broader social and ideological conflict that found its most concrete and visible incarnation in the realm of the theater. Gautier was ultimately referring to this phenomenon in his reminiscences of the Battle of Hernani when he claimed that the antagonism between artist and bourgeois represented not merely aesthetic disagreements but ideological and cultural incompatibilities that implied nothing less than the clash of two civilizations. On the one side was romantic drama and its ancestor, the melodrama, which embodied a distinctly populist and dynamic conception of modernity still deeply anchored within the ethos of the French Revolution; on the other side was, not classicism, but the comédie-Vaudeville, which represented a more respectable, bourgeois cultural ethic triumphantly claiming ground by the 1830s.
The meanings of bohemianism were coded in terms of these theatrical conflicts, but its historical fate was also intricately tied to their eventual outcome. At this point, therefore, it is necessary to broaden our analysis from the actual phenomenon of bohemianism to the cultural context within which it took shape. The changing world of French popular drama, and in particular the melodrama, provides the keys to the eventual fate of the cultural bohemian.
The melodrama has moved to the forefront of literary and critical debates during the past two decades since the publication of Peter Brooks's groundbreaking The Melodramatic Imagination. 34 This recent body of research has essentially transformed the image of the melodrama from a vulgarized and unsophisticated popular genre into the essential prototype of all later forms of modern popular culture, including the novel. In light of these recent interpretations of the melodrama, the bohemians' symbolic identification with the genre becomes understandable.
There seems to be a consensus in the literature that early-nineteenth-century melodrama was the cultural heir of revolutionary politics and the tangible embodiment of modern experience. This is fully supported by such contemporary texts as the Traité du mélodrame, an anonymous tract of 1817 that spelled out most of the salient meanings and characteristics of the melodrama for the age. "It is sufficient to note in the interest of the chronology of art," wrote the author, "that the first plays that were an emanation of this divine substance [the melodrama] attained their success during the revolution. Great political convulsions have this characteristic that they inject into the spirit a kind of inner anguish which devours it and even when the storm passes, the anguish remains." 35
The melodrama was, however, more than a simple reflection of the political turbulence of the revolution. It was also a therapeutic response to it, providing, according to our theorist, comfort and intensity of experience to the suffering individuals who lived through the terrible convulsions of the age. "Where would we be," he queried, "if the emotional needs for plenitude that the revolution had awakened within us had not found a means of satisfaction in the Melodrama?" (Tm, 41) The new art, he continued, was a luminous presence for contemporary humanity that "enlightens those with the least discerning eyes; warms the most luke-warm temperaments; regenerates the most arid imagination . . . [and] satisfies all tastes, enchants both sexes, and captivates all ages" (Tm, 7).
Behind the excessive rhetoric lies a suggestive historical assessment of the function of the melodrama in postrevolutionary culture that only recently has been taken seriously by literary scholars. The melodrama satisfied the newly awakened taste for public excitement and passionate spectacle that originally had been nourished by revolutionary events. But it also provided a language and ideology that could explain the meaning of these events and make transparent to ordinary citizens the hidden workings of the modern world. Ultimately, the melodrama was an object lesson in revolutionary justice, transposing onto the plane of private life the abstract moral and ideological values of revolutionary politics. It demonstrated the cosmic struggle between the forces of good and evil as it played out within the realm of individual consciousness. It affirmed the inevitable triumph of individual innocence, perseverance, and steadfastness against the evil machinations of tyrants and villains. In Peter Brooks's words, the melodrama articulated "simple truths and relationships" and "the cosmic moral sense of everyday gestures." 36
Equally significant was the unambiguously democratic and universal nature of the new art form. It spoke in a populist style that appealed to both the poorest and most uneducated classes as well as the to the middle orders, providing them with a common vocabulary and common images for conceptualizing the nature of modern cultural experience. This experience was given shape through formulaic characters and plot structures that required little or no knowledge of the sophisticated conventions of the classic theater. The stock characters of the melodrama, writes the treatise, consisted of "a buffoon, a tyrant, an innocent and persecuted woman, a knight, and . . . some domesticated animals" (Tm, 9). The tyrant, who embodied absolute corruption and pure evil, was "placed in the melodrama to try the patience and virtue of his victims" (Tm, 14). After much suspense and the extremes of vicissitude, the outcome of the melodrama was a foregone conclusion: "the tyrant will be killed at the end of the play, virtue will triumph, and the knight will marry the innocent and unhappy woman, etc." (Tm, 10).
The melodrama was the characteristic expression of modernity since it gave voice to the emotions of ordinary people who faced the tribulations of a destabilized historical world. At its core, it contained a radical ethic of individual emancipation that was subversive of traditional social order and political authority. The melodramatic hero and heroine were invariably of uncertain birth and ambiguous social status, and they ultimately triumphed over illegitimate power, personified by the villain or the tyrant. It is true that at the end they often regained an exalted social position from which they had been unjustly deprived, but the significance of their actions, nevertheless, resided in their personal fortitude and inner reserves of strength rather than their external resources. The central truth of the melodrama revolved around the sanctity of individual consciousness and interiority--defined in terms of virtue, patience, perseverance, sensibility, and honesty--which prevailed over external misfortune and evil. The virtuous knight was ultimately the incarnation of the new individual born of the French Revolution. He was the self-conscious citizen and the sentimental hero in one, who "carries the civil code in his pocket and a sword in his hand, so that he may learn on the one count what he must defend on the other" (Tm, 72).
For young bohemians concerned with the emancipation of passion, imagination, and artistic liberty, the appeal of the melodramatic tradition is not surprising. Gautier devoted a significant part of his critical oeuvre to the actors, actresses and, impresarios of the melodrama and admitted at one point to a deep inner identification with the great pioneers of the tradition. "O Guilbert de Pixéricourt! O Victor Ducange!" he exclaimed, "Misunderstood Shakespeares, Goethes of the Boulevard du Temple, with what pious care, with what filial respect . . . we have studied your gigantic conceptions, forgotten by the previous generation!" 37 In a tribute to his friend, the melodramatist J. Bouchardy, Gautier made a similar point, "What gave strength to Bouchardy was his profound seriousness, his unshakable conviction. He believed that he had succeeded in discovering the modern formula in art; and those who have this conviction are truly happy because they communicate with others and dominate their public" (Hr, 161).
Gautier and his fellow bohemians saw in the melodrama the heroic epic of modernity. It represented the quintessentially modern form of imagination that had been the first to repudiate the tyranny of classical tragedy and comedy and had opened the path to a truly modern form of cultural expression. In this sense, the melodrama embodied the hidden, populist roots of romanticism and helps explain the deepest reasons for the bohemians' defense of romanticist art. 38 Their aesthetic affinities were permeated with philosophic and ideological implications having to do with the meaning of modernity itself. For these aesthetic affinities to crystallize into a distinct cultural stance, however, something more was needed than inner sympathy. Social and aesthetic pressures that brought into question, and eventually made irrelevant and outdated, the cultural values of the melodrama had to develop within the larger culture.
The changes became apparent from the late-1820s in the form of public calls for a more sober theatrical tradition based on an ethic of prudence and moral responsibility. "The time is not far off," intoned a reviewer in the ro in 1831, "for a reaction to set in against the overflow of the marvelous and the fantastic in favor of common sense." 39 During the 1830s, it became increasingly fashionable to decry the violence and vulgarity of the melodrama. As Frances Trollope put it in 1835, no doubt echoing her French hosts, the melodramas performed at the Porte St. Martin contradicted "that universal diffusion of knowledge" that was the characteristic trait not only of the French but also of the civilized world in general. 40 By the 1840s, the melodrama had acquired the reputation of being an exclusively lower form of entertainment that lacked artistic merit. In the words of the journalist Jules Janin, the melodrama was characteristically loaded "with events, accidents, sudden changes of fortune, revolutions, deaths, births, terrors, and convulsions of every kind, to please the taste of their habitual spectators." 41 Not only was the melodrama aesthetically discredited but it also became morally suspect as well, being seen as the chief source of violence among working-class youths. Janin established a direct link between the melodrama and the criminal population of Parisian jails, who had "at an early age frequented those immoral shops, where comedy and melodrama, sell, for the lowest possible sum, their lessons of infamy and vice" (AP, 211).
The discredited world of the melodrama was symbolically opposed by a new kind of theatrical spectacle, the comédie-Vaudeville, that had been growing in popularity since the 1820s. The comédie-Vaudeville was unambiguously identified with the newly rich and increasingly respectable commercial middle classes. It appealed, wrote Jules Janin, to the "intermediate world" between the masses and the aristocracy and found its most enthusiastic support on the "neutral ground" of "the Chaussé d'Antin and finance" (AP, 203). A caricature of Henry Monnier's, published in 1831 in the humor magazine La Caricature, presents the supporters of the new theater in less circumspect terms, as the very incarnation of philistinism ( 1). Under the title "Théâtre du Vaudeville" are depicted four substantial and unfashionably dressed res chatting in the foyer of the theater. The two men on the left seem to be engrossed in business negotiations, a distinctly stout and unattractive woman looks on with interest, and a hatted male re in a garish striped vest stares out at the spectacle around him with apparent suspicion and disapproval. A more unlikely audience for aesthetic appreciation or refined judgment could not be imagined.
The plots of the comédie-Vaudeville were constructed to appeal to such audiences. They were characterized by close fidelity to contemporary life, by an ethic of prudence and pragmatism, and above all by a kind of moral Puritanism that was becoming a dominant feature of bourgeois life. The Vaudeville succeeded in being relevant, entertaining, and morally uplifting at the same time. Unlike classical tragedy, pointed out Lady Sydney Morgan, a shrewd observer of the contemporary Parisian scene, the new theater did not demand the kind of "profound and reflective attention" that an aristocratic audience "who had passed the morning in idleness" could provide. The Vaudeville was amusing and practical and, thus, perfectly suited to the needs of "a merchant who has spent the day in the counting-house, or to the lawyer who is jaded with attendance in the courts." 42
The acknowledged master of the new genre was the playwright Eugène Scribe, variously characterized as the Christopher Columbus of middle-class culture, the dramatist of the everyday and the conventional, or simply, the arch-Philistine. 43 The epithet that all would have agreed on, however, was "the greatest amuser of the age" (AP, 206). According to Lady Morgan, Scribe's comedies "drew crowded audiences, assembled to laugh equally at the classicists and romanticists, whose opinions and disputes were exhibited with much humor and truth" (F, 2:68). After attending one of Scribe's plays about the unhappy consequences of a young girl marrying against the wishes of her father, she commented approvingly:
Not all the tragedies of all the classical dramatic writers of France could draw such fast-falling and unconscious tears, such natural half-stifled sobs, as this piece excited the night we first saw it at the Theatre de Madame. Yet nothing can be imagined of more ordinary occurrence, than the consequences of a marriage in which temporary inclination is gratified at the expense of reason and propriety. We witness such things every day, and they form part of the stock-pieces of our table talk. The effect, however, makes it appear miraculous that such material should have remained unworked and unappreciated. [F, 2:70-1]
The popular enthusiasm surrounding Scribe's plays strongly recalls the reception of the melodrama earlier in the century. Indeed, the comédie-Vaudeville could lay claim to being a quintessentially modern genre for much the same reasons as the melodrama. Like the melodrama, it was a "realistic" and therefore a "modern" form of theater since it, too, focused on contemporary events and experiences and appealed to individual sentiments and emotions. Moreover, the comédie-Vaudeville, too, had broken from the formal rules of classical comedy, established by Molière and others, and had invented a truly contemporary form of entertainment in tune with the needs of the age.
Yet the Vaudeville's vision of modernity, its social and ideological truths, were of a fundamentally different nature from those of the melodrama or the romantic drama. The melodrama identified the modern with dynamic change and an eschatological politics; the Vaudeville, with stability and middle-class values. The melodrama defined the innermost truths of individuality in terms of passion, emotional and physical excess, and the struggle against injustice; the Vaudeville saw the exemplary modern self in terms of moderation, common sense, and conformity to social norms. The heroes of the melodrama were placed in an allegorical universe of historical adversity and were engaged in a cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil; the characters of the comédie-Vaudeville functioned in realistically conceived drawing rooms and country estates and were concerned with the daily conflicts of social life. Even the marriage ceremony with which both the melodrama and the comédie-Vaudeville formulaically concluded had different moral implications. In both cases, it is true, social harmony was reestablished through the affirmation of the role of the domestic family. In the case of the melodrama, however, this social harmony rested on the valorization of the autonomous, moral self, while in the Vaudeville, it rested on the collective values of the social hierarchy. As Janin perceptively put it, a Scribe play did not end with the girl of obscure birth who marries the great lord, but, on the contrary, "takes in hand the defense of the opposite opinion, and writes the Mariage de Raison, to prove that the son of a general would be very foolish to marry the daughter of a soldier" (AP, 208).
The ultimate significance of the comédie-Vaudeville lay in its ability imaginatively to define a collective vision of the modern that was relevant for the age, to reinvent a pattern of social and personal ideals that resonated with the experiences of a middle-class, commercial civilization. This phenomenon, however, went hand in hand with the inevitable devalorization of the melodrama and the romantic drama, whose vision of the modern came to be associated with either social degradation or irrelevance. Honoré Daumier, the great chronicler of the age, depicted this development in his caricatures of the 1840s. One drawing, from 1846, "À la Porte Saint-Martin," identifies the melodrama with an unsavory audience of hulking shapes out of whose midst rises an emaciated, ape-like re, transfixed in a hypnotic trance, whose gaze is directed to the stage ( 2). A second lithograph from 1833 entitled "Le Vaudeville et le Drame" depicts a parallel process of devaluation, associated this time with the romantic drama ( 3). 44 The top panel of the drawing, obviously referring to the Vaudeville, shows an enraptured audience with vivid gestures, mouths half-open in admiration or amusement, and handkerchiefs in hand to wipe away tears of empathy. The bottom panel, dedicated to the Drame, paints a sea of nodding heads, bored faces, and occasionally horrified expressions that convey a collective mood of alienation and indifference. [Begin Page 366]
The Vaudeville's growing popularity among the respectable middle classes cannot be separated from the fate of bohemianism as a cultural phenomenon. The triumph of the Vaudeville and the decline of the melodrama and the romantic drama signaled the erosion of the social spaces that had defined and given legitimacy to the bohemian's heroic vision of modernity. The new theatrical tradition could lay claim to being more up-to-date, more truly expressive of contemporary life, than the romantic drama and the melodrama. In the eyes of the mainstream, it had become the legitimate embodiment of the culture of modernity. This undeniable fact undermined, if not the emotional appeal of the colorful and heroic world of the melodrama, certainly its viability as a direct model for bohemian performance and parodic echoing.
According to Dick Hebdige, subcultural styles become reincorporated into mainstream culture in two different ways: they are either transformed into fashion or are redefined as deviant or exotic behavior. In the case of bohemianism, both processes came into play. By the middle of the 1830s, bohemian medievalism was becoming fashionable among the well-to-do and the stylish. To be au courant meant wearing clothes that suggested some medieval or fanciful motif, often taken from current theatrical productions, and to furnish one's home with heavy, ornate pieces suggestive of medieval images. 45 At the same time, however, bohemians became objects of satire in mainstream journals, which both exaggerated their eccentricity and deflated their seriousness. Probably the best-known of these humorous parodies of bohemianism was a series of articles published in the ro in late 1831 under the title of "Jeune-Frances." Bohemians were singled out in these articles for their artistic pretentions, their bizarre clothes, and their exotic tastes in food and interior decoration. The typical Jeune France, wrote the anonymous journalist, had a tendency to "weep at romantic verses, go into convulsions before primitive colors, faint at the sound of free verse, and fall dead before the sight of pure vermilion." 46 Moreover, he deliberately rejected the costumes of ordinary people: "On the contrary, he would blush to be like others. But he stands up for the common man because the common man is spontaneous, unpolished, dramatic, straightforward, colorful, and bearded." 47 The dwelling of the Jeune France was also presented as a mixture of fantasy and morbid exoticism, with stuffed crocodiles hanging from the ceiling, preserved fetuses adorning the mantle piece, and hammocks used in place of beds. 48 Even in his culinary tastes, the Jeune France was bizarre, showing a preference for "boar's head, wild roe steak, peacocks with large wings, cologne, confiture dishes and drinking bowls." In this, as in everything else, the Jeune France was driven by the dictates of fantasy over taste or good sense, which allowed "metaphor to triumph over appetite." 49
In 1833, Gautier wrote a rebuttal to these articles in a series of parodic short stories entitled Les Jeunes-France. As parodies of parodies, Gautier's stories were a brilliant counter- offensive that used conscious exaggeration to deflate the original attack and to deflect its ridicule from the young artists back on the philistine critic. But Gautier's humorous saga about the eccentricities of his protagonists had more far-reaching implications as well. It provided an unusually acute analysis of the erosion of the bohemian project within the context of bourgeois modernity. Les Jeunes-France was ultimately an exploration of the fate of imagination when placed under the harsh glare of common sense. It represented a tragi-comic revelation of the incompatibility of the bohemian gesture with the dominant bourgeois version of modernity.
The problem found one of its most ironic expositions in the short story "Onuphrius," which focused on the tribulations of a typical bohemian as seen through the eyes of a philistine. Onuphrius, we are told, was "Jeune France and a passionate romantic" who had shoulder length hair, dressed in a dark mantle worn in a Dantesque manner, and was fatally addicted to novels, chivalric tales, mystic poetry, and other fantastic literature. 50 Given such unwholesome nourishment, Onuphrius eventually lost his mental stability, developing a tendency to morbid imaginings. By the end of the story, the young artist had succumbed to madness and the incapacity to distinguish fact from fantasy, reality from dream. The moral lesson to be derived from Onuphrius' sad fate was spelled out with mock-serious didacticism, "By becoming a spectator of his own existence, Onuphrius forgot those of others, and the ties that attached him to the world broke one by one." 51
This cautionary tale about the pseudo-dangers of romantic imagination obviously mocked the fashionable moralism and pragmatism of the comédie-Vaudeville that routinely cautioned against anything that was extreme, unconventional, and impractical. Just as importantly, however, it exposed the fragility of the romantic gesture itself, which inexplicably lost its inner pathos and vitality when viewed through the alien lenses of practical life. The conclusion of Onuphrius was that the search for fantasy and enchantment, if undertaken in the naïve spirit of the Jeunes France, withered into eccentricity, narcissism, and even pathology in the context of the world of the Vaudeville.
An even more serious peril, however, lay in the ability of the world of the Vaudeville to appropriate the forms of the romantic gesture and to transform them in its own image. Gautier explored this possibility in his short story, "Celle-ci et celle-là" (The latter and the former), a parodic account of the romantic hero's futile, and eventually ludicrous, search for passion and heroism in the modern world. The protagonist, Rodolph, decided to realize his aspiration for emotional intensity through the acquisition of a mistress, whose characteristics were meticulously modeled on the pattern of the melodrama or the romance. Rodolph's choice fell on a fashionable married woman, only referred to as Madame de M., whose Spanish beauty recalled Hernani's heroine and immediately captivated the young bohemian. Sexual conquest of Madame de M. served only to dissipate the illusion of romance and ended up provoking in Rodolph an even more acute sense of boredom and a deeper dissatisfaction with everyday life.
This tale about the impossibility of recuperating the conventions of the romance in contemporary life was ultimately an allegory about conflicting visions of modernity embodied in the melodrama and the comédie-Vaudeville. The protagonist failed in his search for fulfillment not because of some unique personal flaw within himself or in his mistress but because of the historic impossibility of the enterprise in which he was involved. Under modern conditions, Gautier implied, the heroic gestures of the romance and the melodrama were inevitably transformed into drawing-room farce. Thus, Rodolph not only failed to become a romantic hero but found himself metamorphosed into a character from the comédie-Vaudeville. "There was," he mused after his all-too-easy seduction of Madame de M., "absolutely nothing artistic in the scene that has just been played, and far from making a fifth act of a play, it is worthy of being represented in a vaudeville; he was angry with himself for having so badly dealt with such a beautiful subject, and for having failed to bring passion into such a promising situation." 52
Rodolph's story concluded with the decision to turn away from the dazzling but illusory attractions of Madame de M. toward the real charms of Mariette, his pretty servant girl who had long loved him. The shift in Rodolph's erotic investment indicated a major cultural reorientation as well, involving the repudiation of exotic fantasy in the interest of everyday experience. The heroic ethic of the melodramatic tradition finally was admitted to be an unattainable dream, which first turned into the sham of bourgeois comedy and then into the pretensions of middle-class high culture. Rodolph's exemplary story, Gautier informed his readers, needed to be read as a modern morality tale in which the futile aspirations for romantic transcendence were finally abandoned for the tangible joys of sober reality.
Gautier's parodic short stories in Les Jeunes-France marked the exhaustion of the bohemian project as a performative subculture. The bohemian attempt to assume the exotic costumes and social roles of the melodramatic hero and thus to transform everyday life into heroic adventure had proven ineffectual in the face of social reality. As Gautier ruefully admitted in an unusually self-revelatory aside, he and his generation had been mistaken in placing such confidence in symbolic actions. They had to accept the fact that "an individual equipped with a beard, a moustache, hair à la Raphael, several daggers, a man's heart, and a slightly olive complexion, was not necessarily superior in attractiveness to a fat grocer, greasy, freshly shaven, and daily guillotined by his cravat." 53
The ultimate implication of Gautier's observation was the acceptance of the nonidentity between life and art. It meant the final rupture with the totalizing impulses of romanticism and the melodrama, which had tried to heal the fragmentation of modernity through aesthetics. If the melodrama and romanticism had tried to create identity between life and art through "interiority and sentimentality," bohemianism attempted the same task through the aestheticization of life. 54 The failure of this project, however, did not mean the end of bohemianism as a cultural force. It simply marked the beginning of its transformation and reincarnation in forms more appropriate to the changed circumstances of the modern world.
The separation between life and art found concrete realization in Gautier's personal life in 1836, when he abruptly ended his bohemian existence and accepted a post as permanent collaborator at the first mass circulation newspaper in France, Emile de Girardin's La Presse. 55 For the rest of his life, Gautier would have a double identity: as a poet of exquisite, but little-read verses, and as a journalist of influence, known for his theater reviews, salons, literary essays, and travel accounts. 56 Gautier was not the only bohemian of the 1830s to assume an important position within the cultural establishment of the July Monarchy and the Second Empire. Many other members of the early bohemian circle became successful theatrical directors, newspaper editors, literary reviewers, or industrial entrepreneurs. Others, however, failed to translate their early artistic enthusiasms into successful careers and either died early or dropped out of sight.
As the social existence of the former bohemians became either marginalized or integrated within the cultural or financial establishments, the identity of the modern artist also came to be redefined as an autonomous aesthetic self removed from the compromising pressures of ordinary life. Perhaps no one did more to articulate this new ideal than Gautier himself, whose Mademoiselle de Maupin has become a classic text of nineteenth-century aestheticism. 57 The origin of Gautier's aesthetic parable was almost certainly based on an actual historical personage, a certain Madelaine d'Aubigny, who dressed as a man, fought duels, and had all kinds of adventures before dying in a convent in 1707. The cross-dressing heroine of popular legend found incarnation in a successful novel of 1829, Henri de Latouche's Fragoletta, 58 and it is probable that Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin was a reworking and a parody of this popular work. 59 What is certain, however, is that Gautier's version of the story had more complex and far-reaching implications than the original. Indeed, it succeeded in systematically transforming the bohemian themes of the early 1830s into a new aesthetic formula that spoke to the deepest cultural and ideological needs of a postromantic generation. For this reason Mademoiselle de Maupin became a key cultural document of the age that was celebrated by contemporaries as different as Baudelaire and Balzac and was cited by the critic Sainte-Beuve as a "bible of romanticism." 60
What did Gautier and his generation mean by aesthetic autonomy or l'art pour l'art? 61 What were the cultural and historical implications of this theory, frequently identified with Gautier's remark in the preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin that "nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless"? 62 A close reading of Mademoiselle de Maupin makes it apparent that Gautier's theory of l'art pour l'art had little to do with classical philosophic discourses on aesthetic autonomy, first articulated in Germany in the late eighteenth century and subsequently popularized in France through Victor Cousin's lectures on aesthetics. 63 Gautier's novel was concerned not so much with the philosophical problems of aesthetics as with the cultural dilemma of the contemporary artist who had lost the ability to differentiate himself from a commercialized, philistine modernity. The ultimate achievement of Gautier's creative vision was to give voice to a new definition of the modern artist, which represented a more up-to-date, more autonomous version of the cultural bohemian.
It is far from fortuitous that this project found expression in Mademoiselle de Maupin through the conventions of the allegorical romance rather than through theatrical performance. The stylistic shift marked a new mode of perception, a new kind of relationship to the world, indicative of the former bohemians' disenchantment with direct cultural activism. Modern allegory frequently has been associated with a fragmented and alienated universe where the identity of self and the world had been irreparably severed and where only traces of sacred values and collective meanings remained. 64 As Walter Benjamin put it, "allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of time." 65 The allegorical mode of thought is, thus, concerned with the articulation of elevated or esoteric truths that no longer form an integral part of mainstream life. This broader cultural definition of allegory is implicit in the name itself. According to Ralph Flores, "allegory" unites the meaning of allos, other; with agorevein, to speak in the market place. It, thus, means, "to speak of 'other'--sacred, secret, special--things in a profane, political place." 66
How did Mademoiselle de Maupin function as aesthetic allegory? How did it transform the increasingly esoteric truths of the bohemian artist into a modern form of sacred speech promulgated in the secular marketplace? In order to answer these questions, the novel needs to be subjected to a more serious and systematic analysis than its fanciful contents would seem to warrant. 67 Literary critics have remarked on the generically heterogeneous nature of Mademoiselle de Maupin, which mixed the conventions of the sentimental novel, the picaresque, and the romantic theater in a seemingly indiscriminate manner. 68 These diverse styles, however, were organized around a more ancient literary genre, that of the religious quest or allegorical journey, and this form defined the underlying cultural meanings of the narrative. The hero of this quest, the chevalier d'Albert, was the bohemian artist, identified by his love for unconventional costumes, his addiction to novels and travel stories, and his longing for passionate adventure. Like his fictional predecessors in Les Jeunes-France, d'Albert, too, began his journey in the frivolous setting of Paris drawing-room comedy where he first met and courted his mistress, Rosette. He ended, however, in the fantastic world of a Gothic chateau, whose balustrades and artificial moats designated not so much the concrete theatrical world of the melodrama as the disembodied realm of imagination that d'Albert attained only after the failure of external sight and the awakening of internal vision.
As with most religious quests, d'Albert's story, too, was organized around a narrative of obstacles and emotional difficulties that the hero needed to surmount in order to reach his true identity as aesthetic hero. The catalyst and the symbolic center of these obstacles was the mysterious re of Mademoiselle de Maupin, who made her appearance only after the romance between d'Albert and Rosette had settled into a stalemate and the couple had moved to the idyllic setting of Rosette's Gothic chateau. Appearing in the guise of a youthful and athletic knight who, nevertheless, radiated female beauty, Madelaine/Theodore was a true androgyne, who united "the body and soul of a woman [and] the spirit and strength of a man" (MM, 330). For d'Albert, she immediately assumed the aspect of ideal beauty that he had always sought but did not find in modern life. Yet, she did not function in the narrative as the traditional symbol of transcendental beauty. As the focus of accelerating sexual rivalry between d'Albert, who loved her as a woman, and Rosette, who saw her as a man, Mademoiselle de Maupin was a force of destabilization who brought into question all existing social conventions, moral norms, and sexual identities. The principle of beauty that she represented was based on the unstructured energies of life rather than the idealized vision of traditional art. 69
For d'Albert, the love of absolute beauty, which was experienced as sexual attraction to a man, created a shattering moral and psychological crisis. It was the beginning of a journey beyond good and evil whose stages were associated with social isolation, moral degradation, and psychological self-loss. As his crisis deepened, d'Albert's re became explicitly allied with the villain of melodrama, who had also been driven by obsessive lust and illicit sexual passion. Unlike the melodramatic villain, however, d'Albert's experience of evil had a positive outcome. It resulted in his eventual rebirth as aesthetic hero who merged the identities of knight and villain into a new kind of self that was defined not by stable social and moral truths but by the self-generating energies of creativity. The moment of integration was symbolized by a night of passion with Mademoiselle de Maupin, who revealed herself to be a woman only to disappear from d'Albert's life forever. The physical possession and loss of Mademoiselle de Maupin brought to an end d'Albert's aesthetic quest. Having gained initiation into the secrets of absolute beauty, he could become the spokesman of the esoteric truths of art in a secular and utilitarian world where they had become alien realities.
The aesthetic self, which constituted the final goal of d'Albert's allegorical journey, was clearly a reincarnation of the melodramatic hero, whose passion and energy had been internalized as imaginative truth. It signaled the transformation of the melodramatic self into an aestheticized form of avant-garde identity that, for the first time, effectively differentiated the true artist of modernity from the mere bourgeois entertainer. This gesture was ideologically laden even though it explicitly repudiated direct politics. For in resurrecting the theatrical genre of the melodrama, the aesthete was doing more than simply creating distinctions between himself and bourgeois forms of art. He was also reaffirming the Promethian promise of an earlier moment of cultural modernity that was increasingly being pushed to the periphery of modern life. Paradoxically, even while looking backward to the outdated tradition of the melodrama, the aesthetic self became the pioneer of a more thoroughly modern form of subjectivity than was available to the bourgeois self. Liberated from the external pressures of moral conventions and social conformity, the aesthete was in a position to valorize the hedonistic pleasures of beauty and passion, as well as the critical potential of irony and self-reflexivity. He was, above all, empowered to affirm and protect the autonomy of the creative self in the face of the encroaching conformism of modern life in ways that the cultural bohemian had been unable to do.
The autonomy of the aesthete was far from being absolute, however. It had, in fact, little to do with the popular myths of aesthetic autonomy perpetuated in the late nineteenth century and already visible in Murger's preface to Scènes de la vie de bohème. The modern artist, as Gautier and the cultural avant-garde of the 1830s conceived of him, was neither a re of transcendental aesthetic authority possessing the mantle of canonical high art nor the quintessential professional inhabiting an autonomous intellectual field. He was, rather, a speaker of parables and allegories whose task was to translate the esoteric truths of aesthetic experience within a secular and desacralized world. His role as allegorist made the modern artist both distinct from and yet an integral part of the modern marketplace. He had the ability to proclaim the absolute superiority of art over other commodities but not the power to prevent its ultimate transformation into the image of the commodity.
Gautier explored the paradoxical implications of this situation through an ironic parable with which he concluded his preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin. The parable contextualized his aesthetic project and marked out the complex role that the modern artist was to assume within the increasingly commodified cultural marketplace of the nineteenth century. Assuming for the last time the role of the cultural bohemian, Gautier launched an impassioned diatribe against the commercial medium of the mass-circulation newspaper that had interposed itself between "the artists and the public" and had destroyed the possibility of genuine aesthetic experience and expression (MM, 51). Rejecting this inauthentic world, Gautier conjured up an alternate environment for the public presentation of Mademoiselle de Maupin. The publication of his novel would be proclaimed, he wrote, by "twenty-four mounted heralds, in the livery of the publisher, with his address on their backs and breasts" (MM, 53). Bearing banners with the title of the novel embroidered on them, each herald would be preceded by a drummer and a kettle-drummer who would cry out the publication date of the novel and the excellent qualities of its author. This colorful spectacle, recalling an idealized medieval marketplace, and, indirectly, the world of the melodrama, was obviously meant to suggest the inherent superiority of Gautier's novel over other commodities being advertised on the pages of the mass-circulation newspaper. Indeed, he humorously predicted, his unique form of publicity would awaken so much interest in his novel that it would "sell five hundred copies a minute," "new editions would appear every half-hour," and "a picket of municipal guards would have to be posted at the door of the shop, controlling the crowd and preventing any disturbance" (MM, 53). With this projection, Gautier deflated and deheroicized his own narrative, acknowledging the ultimate futility of his attempt to elevate his aesthetic truths above the world of the newspaper. The creations of the modern artist could not be differentiated absolutely from other commodities. In the final analysis, their aesthetic beauty was only a form of exoticism whose function was to increase their desirability in the marketplace not to separate it from other commodities. His advertising strategies for Mademoiselle de Maupin turned out to be, he confessed, only slightly superior to "a three-line announcement in the Debats and the Courier Français, between the elastic belts, the crinoline collars, the feeding-bottles with incorruptible teats, Regnault paste and cures for the toothache" (MM, 53).
Yet Gautier's final message about the imminent fate of his novel in the modern marketplace was not one of defeat. Mademoiselle de Maupin's formal, if not substantive, superiority over other commodities was preserved by its ability to draw on the aura of medieval romance and glamour. Its status as a work of art was guaranteed by its association with a more colorful, aesthetically superior world, unavailable to ordinary commodities. In a sense, Gautier's parable pointed to a dual context for the modern work of art. Its social and economic context was unalterably determined by the laws and conditions of the cultural marketplace, but its cultural context was still anchored within the world of the melodrama, recreated and reaestheticized by the imagination of the modern artist.
The history of nineteenth-century aesthetic modernity would be determined by the dialectical interaction between these two different contexts that represented different aspects of modernity. The social and economic contexts were to be sources of homogenization and commodification, where the lines of demarcation between the work of art and the commodity were inevitably erased, while the cultural context was to be the source of differentiation and aesthetic distinction, where these lines were incessantly redrawn and recreated. Significantly, historians of aesthetic modernism have found it difficult to acknowledge this dynamic and essentially paradoxical aspect of artistic creation in the modern world. Striving for clarity and stability in their depictions of the modern aesthetic project, they have tended to present it as either an integral part of the commercial market place; or as an autonomous creative act disengaged from modern life. 70 What has consistently remained invisible in their analysis of modernism is the unstable cultural middle ground that both linked the avant-garde artist to certain forms of radical popular culture and also helped to differentiate him from ordinary commercial activities.
Yet the act of integrating the re of the modern artist within a specifically cultural, as well as a social and aesthetic, context opens up interesting possibilities for modernist studies. Methodologically, it allows us to see modern aesthetic identities as essentially historical creations whose contents change over time along with other manifestations of modern life. Politically, it helps clarify the long-standing uncertainty about the relationship of the avant-garde artist to modernity by highlighting his strategic alliances with forms of urban popular culture that opposed bourgeois modernity from the Left rather than the Right. Finally, conceptually, it helps us deheroicize and concretize the re of the modern artist who was a master of disguises and masquerades that both mirrored and purified aspects of ordinary culture.
The bohemian self had been the first and possibly the most colorful of these masquerades that would define the modernist artist in the course of the nineteenth century. It is, perhaps, for this reason that his image has remained so firmly fixed in the popular imagination as the stereotype of the modern artist. As popular stereotype, the bohemian was to have a long and continuous history, from Murger's popular Scènes de la Vie de bohème, which became the hit of the Parisian theater season in 1849; through Puccini's La Bohème, first performed in Milan in 1896; all the way to Rent, the contemporary version of the bohemian legend transposed to the New York of the 1980s. Behind all these images, there continue to hover the charismatic res of the first bohemians who used costume and lifestyle to define a cultural alternative to bourgeois modernity.
For practicing artists, however, the bohemian gesture, in both its direct and aestheticized forms, was a passing historical phenomenon that was becoming anachronistic by the end of the July Monarchy. "In 1848," wrote Albert Cassagne, "bohemia no longer constituted the avant-garde of artists; it was rather an arrière-garde, outmoded and in disarray, painfully following the lead of others." 71 The invention of the cultural forms of the new avant-garde of the 1850s was the task of a younger generation of artists who would use the image of the popular flâneur as the alter ego of the modern artist. This, however, is a different story with a distinct cast of characters and a new version of a performative public space.
Mary Gluck is Associate Professor of History at Brown University, where she teaches European intellectual and cultural history. Author of a monograph on Georg Lukacs and His Generation, she has published on the problems of modernism and avant-gardism.
* This article is part of a larger project that explores the genesis of such typologies of the modern artist as the bohemian, the flâneur, the decadent, and the primitive within the changing context of nineteenth-century Parisian popular culture. I would like to thank the Print Department of the Boston Public Library for permission to publish the images that accompany this article and for their efficient technical assistance in duplicating the images. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
1. See Anne Martin-Fugier, Les Romantiques: res de l'artiste 1820-1848 (Paris: Hachette Litteratures, 1998).
2. The literature on bohemianism is enormous, but on the whole tends to be anecdotal and descriptive rather than analytic. For the most important historical synthesis of nineteenth-century bohemianism, see Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life 1830-1930 (New York: Penguin Books, 1986). For a literary account of the popular roots of bohemianism, see Marilyn R. Brown, Gypsies and Other Bohemians: The Myth of the Artist in Nineteenth-Century France (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1985).
3. See Jacques Lethève, Daily Life of French Artists in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Hillary E. Paddon (London: Allen and Unwin, 1972); and Pierre Labracherie, La Vie quotidienne de la bohème littéraire au XIXe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1967).
4. Henry Murger, preface to Scènes de la vie de bohème, with an introduction by Loic Chotard (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 34; hereafter abbreviated Sb.
5. See Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987); and Gene H. Bell-Villada, Art for Art's Sake and Literary Life (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996). For the most important late-nineteenth-century expression of this position, see Maurice Spronck, Les Artistes littéraires: Études sur le XIXe siècle (Paris: Calman Levy, 1889).
6. See Walter Benjamin, "The Boheme," in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: New Left Books, 1973), 11-34.
7. See Pierre Bourdieu, "The Conquest of Autonomy: The Critical Phase in the Emergence of the Field," in The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 47-112.
8. See Amédée Achard, "Le Bohémien," in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, Province, vol. 1 (Paris: L. Curmer, 1841). Between 1840 and 1842, Daumier published a series of caricatures about disreputable urban types, entitled "Les Bohémiens de Paris," which used bohemianism in the sense of socially marginal types with uncertain sources of livelihood. A reviewer of Daumier's album of caricatures made clear this common understanding of the word:
One finds in this album the debris of all social positions, classes and ranks: the man of letters side by side with the dog catcher, the former lawyer next to the political refugee, the imperial prefect with the clothes merchant. It is a resumé of all hazardous occupations, the history of those who await in Paris the manna of chance, it is the dregs of society, drawn by a hand both vigorous and sensitive [Charivari, 28 June 1843, quoted in Loys Deltiel, Le Peintre-Graveur Illustré, vol. 27 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1969)].
See also the popular melodrama by Adolphe Dennery and Eugène Grangé, Les Bohémiens de Paris (Paris: Imprimerie d'André Dondey-Dupré, n.d.).
9. In 1866, for example, the critic Sainte-Beuve referred to the contrast between the "Bohème Galante" of the 1830s and Murger's more plebian bohemia of the 1850s. The latter, he argued, were characterized by a hand-to-mouth existence while the former by "the exalted enthusiasm for the old Gothic masters . . . the contempt for mediocrity, the horror of the commonplace and the vulgar, and the feverish ardor for renewal" characteristic of the earlier bohemians (Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux Lundis [1866], quoted in Loic Chotard, introduction to Sb, 9).
10. For an analysis of a similar symbiosis between urban mass culture and the early-twentieth-century primitive artist, see my "Interpreting Primitivism, Mass Culture and Modernism: The Making of Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy," New German Critique (spring/summer 2000).
11. For the classic definition of contextual intellectual history, see Quentin Skinner, "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas," in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, James Tully, ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 29-67.