Bourgeois-Bohemians

Abstract

Giacomo Puccini’s opera La Bohème opened in Manchester in April 1897 and transferred to Covent Garden in October. The trial of Oscar Wilde had taken place in May 1895, the same year as the publication of George Du Maurier’s Trilby. The opera and novel helped put one idea of the artist into popular circulation while the trial sent another to prison and into exile. In the wake of Wilde’s ‘dismal’ trial, said Ford Madox Ford, a brow-beaten and resentful public ‘simply steam-rollered out’ the remains of nineties’ aestheticism, inviting the ‘Typical English Writer’ and ‘Typical English critic’ to step into the void (Ford, 1921: 199, 39). ‘Poetry was finished’, declared Ford, and what followed, in the best of ‘those dark days’ was a devotion to the art of fiction and the social novel (200, 39). This was the era of late Henry James, Galsworthy, Bennett and Wells. And of Ford himself, though his family connections with the PreRaphaelites, and with James, Joseph Conrad, and subsequently with Ezra Pound and other younger artists, meant that he, quite uniquely, bridged the overlapping generations up to the First World War. Not until ‘Les Jeunes’, as Ford termed them, arrived upon the scene was there anything new, he said — only then to discover that this new, when it appeared in the person of Wyndham Lewis, saw fit to dump a couple of embarrassing old has-beens like Ford and Conrad. They were ‘Foûtou! Finished! Exploded! Done for!’ (Ford, 1932: 400).

A broad window from which an expanse of roofs, covered with snow is seen. At right, a stove. A table, a bed, a wardrobe, four chairs, a painter’s easel with a sketched canvas and a stool: scattered books, many bundles of papers, two candlesticks. A door in the centre and another at left. Rodolfo [a poet] is looking pensively out of the window. Marcello is working at his picture, ‘The Crossing of the Red Sea’, with his hands benumbed by the cold.

A crossroads. Where the streets meet a kind of square is formed: shops, vendors of every kind. To one side, the Café Momus… The crowd is large and varied: bourgeois, soldiers, maidservants, boys, girls, students, seamstresses, gendarmes, etc... The café is very crowded so that some bourgeois are forced to sit at a table out in the open.

(Puccini, 1983: 73, 96)