Holmes the bohemian

 (This post is available in audio format here on Youtube.)

Bohemia, bordered on the North by hope, work, and gaiety, on the South by necessity and courage; on the West and East by slander and the hospital.”  --Henry Murger,   La Vie de Bohème    We often think of Sherlock Holmes as the epitome of the scientific mind, "a calculating machine," as Watson calls him. But Watson also acknowledges another side to Holmes: the Bohemian. Here's an excerpt from, aptly enough, A Scandal in Bohemia:

"...while Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature.

Another contribution from The Engineer's Thumb:

"I continually visited him, and occasionally even persuaded him to forego his Bohemian habits so far as to come and visit us." 

But was Holmes truly Bohemian?  Or is Watson tossing off the word carelessly, describing Holmes's aversion to society and nothing more? What does the term even mean, beyond its connotation of an anti-social bent? Let's dig in.

Bohemia

As any good Holmesian knows, Bohemia was not a real kingdom, at least not by the time Watson writes about it. It had expanded and contracted with the winds of fortune, incorporated by various tinpot dynasties. Through the years it was part of the Holy Roman Empire, the Habsburg Empire, the Austrian Empire, "passed around like a woman down south," as Elton John would say, only to emerge in 1918 as a province of the shiny new state of Czechoslovakia. The last crowned king of Bohemia (also Austrian emperor and a handful of other titles) was Ferdinand V, who abdicated the throne in 1848.

(Although in 1917, artists Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Drick, and John Sloane clambered to the top of Washington Square Arch, lit a bonfire, and declared that Greenwich Village had seceded, becoming the Republic of Bohemia. It didn't stick.)

But the truth is... Bohemia is a red herring. 

The Romani

Because the Bohemians Watson refers to who filtered into France in the 19th century and fired the French imagination were neither native Bohemians nor necessarily from Bohemia. They were the Romani (also known at the time as gypsies because they were supposed to have originated from Egypt, though the term has since fallen into disapprobation).

The French were taken with the exotic unconventional, nomadic lifestyle of the
Romani, whom they christened La Boheme. Especially taken were the young, hungry young artistic types who peopled Montmartre and the Latin Quarter. They sensed they had something in common with these invaders, surviving on a wing and a prayer, dressing in gladrags, not caring a sou's worth what society thought of them.  And they lived among them, cheek by jowl. 

Hugo introduced the world to the wild Romani dancer Esmerelda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame(1831). George Sand's Consuelo (1841) tells the story of a Romani singer. Prosper Merimee followed in 1845 with Carmen, the fiery Romani factory girl. The Romani were firmly planted in French mythology.

The Romani still hold a great allure for the French. Gitanes cigarettes, with their silhouette of a gypsy dancer on the package, are to the French as Marlboros are to Americans, marketed by latching onto the myth of the romantic gypsy rather than the romantic cowboy. Writers Jean-Paul Sartre and George Orwell were among them, while it was rumored that John Lennon smoked Gitanes in an effort to deepen his voice. In July 2016, the French government considered a ban on Gitanes because they were deemed "too stylish and cool." Sacre bleu!

But...the Romani are a red herring. 

La Boheme

Because it's not the Romani to which Watson is referring, but to those self-same unruly, ungovernable young French artists and artistic hangers-on who christened themselves la boheme, stealing the mantle away from the luckless Romani.

By 1845 Henri Murger was publishing a series of stories which would be adapted
into the play La Vie de la bohème, which would be turned into the novel  Scenes of a Bohemian Life (and later into the opera La Boheme and still later into the Broadway musical Rent). He appropriates the term bohemian in the very first lines of his preface to the book, and claims for them an illustrious lineage going back to the Greeks, including Shakespeare and Moliere among their tribe:

"Today, as in the past, any man who enters the arts, without any other means of existence than art itself, will be forced to pass by the paths of Bohemia."

He goes on to say:

"We will add that Bohemia only exists and is only possible in Paris." He was wrong on that score.

He says of true bohemians: 

"This Bohemia is like the others bristling with dangers; two chasms border it on each side: poverty and doubt."

But where did these ersatz Bohemians come from? Michelangelo and da Vinci were hired craftsmen, definitely not bohemians. What caused the rift between society and the artist? What caused the downfall of the artistic apprenticeship system which fueled the Renaissance? That may be too big a question to go into today, although its beginnings coincide with the end of the Napoleonic wars and the calcification of French art through the Salon system, which led to the independent ateliers.

Artists, who had depended on support from princely patrons and craft guilds, were now thrown on the mercies of an increasingly powerful middle class – they were forced to create a new identity which balanced the desire for creative freedom with the need to sell their wares in a new mass market. Bohemian antagonism toward the middle class could be seen as a case of biting the hand that feeds in order to retain one's sense of self-worth--but this takes us too far afield.

Crossing the Channel

When it crossed the Channel to England bohemianism was seen as more of a two-edged sword. After all, that famous dinner between J.M. Stoddart of Lippincott's magazine, Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde gave birth not only to the self-ostracizing bohemian Sherlock Holmes but the doomed aesthete Dorian Grey. The bohemians met the romantics head-on and produced the Pre-Raphaelites, who desired a return to the Middle Ages, at least as far as painting was concerned, and the aesthetes, who advocated a divorce between art and morality. What is Christina Rossetti's poem Goblin Market but a warning against the excesses of bohemianism?

“We must not look at goblin men,

The Goblin Market, by Hilda Koe, 1895

We must not buy their fruits:

Who knows upon what soil they fed

Their hungry thirsty roots?”

“Come buy,” call the goblins

Hobbling down the glen.

 George du Maurier's cautionary Trilby is set in gay Paree but populated by young English expatriates and the innocent Irish laundry girl Trilby, victim of the villainous, mesmerizing Svengali. 

As for Holmes, his chosen profession as well as his predilection for solitude set him apart from any larger Bohemian movement. Law enforcement, even in Holmes's selective application of the practice, shows a marked preference for order. 

There is an inherent tension between Holmes's bohemian streak and his vocation, which seeks to preserve the bourgeois ideal of order, a dichotomy which at times leads Holmes to uncouple order from law. His contempt for the letter of the law and disdain of its officials, the outsider status conferred on him by the mantle of bohemianism, affords him an objective lens to view the peccadilloes of humankind.

Art or Artifice?

So if bohemianism goes hand-in-hand with the artist, beset by poverty and doubt, does Holmes qualify under this rubric? We must call to mind the hardships Holmes faced at the beginning of his career. He needed Watson then not to be his Boswell, but to split the rent on his new digs at 221B. As Murg puts it:

 "Their daily existence is a work of genius, a daily problem that they always manage to solve with the help of audacious mathematics."

From The Speckled Band: 

"... for, working as he did rather for the love of his art than for the acquirement of wealth, he refused to associate himself with any investigation which did not tend towards the unusual, and even the fantastic."

From Copper Beeches: 

“To the man who loves art for its own sake,” remarked Sherlock Holmes, tossing aside the advertisement sheet of The Daily Telegraph, “it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived." 

The cry of "art for art's sake" is repeated several times in the Holmes stories, and it's a cry which originated with the bohemians.

Science or Art?

Does Watson consider Holmes's work an art or a science? There is variance in his descriptions. In A Study in Scarlet he characterizes of the practice of surveillance as:

That’s an art which every detective should be an expert at. There is no branch of detective science which is so important and so much neglected as the art of tracing footsteps. 

Turning again to A Study in Scarlet, Watson opines:

 “You have brought detection as near an exact science as it ever will be brought in this world.”

But immediately throws the issue into confusion by adding:

"He was as sensitive to flattery on the score of his art as any girl could be of her beauty."

And compounds the muddle by stating:

"Like all other arts, the Science of Deduction and Analysis is one which can only be acquired by long and patient study, nor is life long enough to allow any mortal to attain the highest possible perfection in it."

"Exact science" is, I suppose, what we would call today "hard" science. Physics, as opposed to psychology. Chemistry opposed to sociology: the "squishy" sciences. Perhaps art, or some arts at least, fall short of science? Every science starts out as an art. Does an art graduate to a science when its methods are fully systematized, when variables have been replaced by hard numbers? 

Perhaps by art Watson really means artifice, not in its present-day connotation of fakery, but in its older sense of craftsmanship.Let's recall that Isaac Newton was the alchemist who systematized physics. Perhaps this is what Holmes has in mind when he says, in Abbey Grange:

"I propose to devote my declining years to the composition of a textbook, which shall focus the whole art of detection into one volume."

--reminding us of his beginnings as a detective, outlined in The Musgrave Ritual:

"I waited, filling in my too abundant leisure time by studying all those branches of science which might make me more efficient."

Perhaps experience has taught him that detection is more art than science. 

Pseudo-Bohemian

"Not that I am in the least conventional in that respect myself. The rough-and-tumble work in Afghanistan, coming on the top of a natural Bohemianism of disposition, has made me rather more lax than befits a medical man." 

Watson is a bohemian, once removed.  In a Study in Scarlet, he says:

 "I had no idea how long he might be, but I sat stolidly puffing at my pipe and skipping over the pages of Henri Murger’s “Vie de Bohème." 

Aha! The bohemian catechism. Watson, true to his writerly nature, would rather comprehend experience through the pages of a book than on the streets.

Holmes was no hermit. He was constantly on the streets, interacting with every class of society, though usually under an assumed identity, which seemed to free him--certainly with women domestics. He courted them, while Watson sat at home reading a book--or writing. Who was the hermit?

Perhaps Holmes and Watson were bohemian, but Doyle wasn't. He was a keen cricketer, a failed politician, a family man. Holmes rejected a knighthood; Doyle never would. Did Doyle live vicariously through Holmes or was he finally fed up with his slovenly bohemian habits, enough to murder him, and, when that failed, keep trying to retire him? He effectively retired Holmes in 1903 (though not stories about him) seemingly unwilling to continue his adventures beyond the Victorian era. Perhaps that was why Holmes and Watson never associated with Doyle socially.

So if Holmes is a citizen of Bohemia, it's with this qualification: Bohemia is a nation of one (or perhaps two, when he lets Watson up into his treehouse.) We can perhaps imagine him carousing with his fellow bohemians only when masked, and on a case. Perhaps Holmes can only unmask when masked.

For more on Holmes and masks, see my post A Master of Disguise.