Read Online Among the Bohemians by Virginia Nicholson - Free Book Online Page A

part of it, all part of the general plan I had of how to live.But oh, my dear, it was freedom, it really was, it was bliss.’

2. All for Love
    What is wrong with talking about sex? – What is wrong with sex
    outside marriage? – Why shouldn’t self-expression extend to the
    bedroom? – Is homosexuality wrong? – Must relationships be
    confined to members of the opposite sex, and the same class and colour?–
    Is marriage a meaningful institution? – Is there
    such a thing as free love?
    In a desert of Victorian values, Bohemia was an oasis where anti-permissive rules had no force.Sexual licence in an artistic environment was a powerful combination, both threatening and alluring, and part of the irresistible fascination for the general public of la vie de Bohème was the passionate abandon represented by Murger in his portrayal of that life, by Puccini in his opera of the book, and by George du Maurier in his best-selling love story Trilby (1894).
    In Trilby three young Englishmen (fairly well-heeled) go to Paris to play at being Bohemian.They adopt suitable camouflage – artistic berets and blouses – go in for interesting salad dressings, and generally disport themselves in the city of sin.The handsome one (rather disconcertingly named Little Billee) falls madly in love with a charming Irish laundry-maid, formerly an artists’ model, named Trilby, and is overjoyed when she agrees to enter an engagement.This ‘entente’ causes mayhem when Little Billee’s mother, Mrs Bagot, finds out.Mrs Grundy incarnate, she storms across the Channel, and when she discovers Trilby’s former profession, promptly intervenes and breaks up the relationship.Little Billee is grief-stricken:
    I want – her – her – her, I tell you – I must have her back … do you hear?… Damn social position… Love comes before all-love and art… and beauty… Good God!I’ll never paint another stroke till I’ ve got her back… never, never, never I tell you – I can’t and I won’t!…
    But Trilby is cast out, and takes up with Svengali, whose name has entered popular phraseology as the hypnotic magus with sinister powers.Trilby falls under his spell and takes the world by storm as a singer.She returns to Little Billee at the end when it is too late, and dies – but not before Mrs Bagot has had time to repent of her harsh words.
    This novel, which became a huge popular success, had all the elements most calculated to titillate an appreciative British readership.There was the ingénue heroine whose sexual downfall makes her a victim, dying a ‘tragic’ operatic death.There was the romance of the mysterious seducer, irresistibly ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ – Lord Byron, Casanova, Don Juan and the Marquis de Sade rolled into one.There was also studio life: ‘… happy days and happy nights, sacred to art and friendship… Oh, happy times of careless impecuniosity!’ This beguiling melodrama was to become a romantic prototype for a thousand aspirant Bohemians, appearing again and again in nostalgic memories of youth, like those of Viva King:
    I had long yearned for the sort of studio life described in Trilby. Walking alone in Chelsea, I would gaze up at the large windows and see myself among crowds of artists and musicians.There was little work going on in the studio of my imagination.It was mostly fun and conversation, with me a listener to all the intellectual talk, a spiritual helpmeet or Egeria of some great man.But I was Martha as well as Mary, ready in a day-dream to work myself to the bone to further the genius of the man I loved.I was a little dashed when Father described Trilby as ‘a boring book about three English prigs’, even though by now I had moved on to Murger’s Vie de Bohème…

Trilby, the romantic prototype
    In 1900s Bohemia we are in a time of wide-eyed romanticism.Little Billee, Viva King and their contemporaries now seem appealingly innocent, unworldly and unmaterialistic, but ‘Love comes