de
Boheme_, in its various sections, and a great number of shorter tales
and sketches, are thoroughly agreeable if not even delightful. Murger
has completely shaken off the vulgarity which almost spoilt Pigault, and
damaged Paul de Kock not a little. If any one who has not yet reached
age, or has not let it make him "crabbed," cannot enjoy Schaunard and
the tame lobster; the philosophic humours of Gustave (afterwards His
Excellency Gustave) Colline; the great journal _Le Castor_,[287] which
combined the service of the hat-trade with the promotion of high
thinking and great writing; and the rest of the comedy of _La Vie de
Boheme_ proper, I am sorry for him. He must have been, somehow, born
wrong.

[Sidenote: _Les Buveurs d'Eau_ and the Miscellanies.]

The serious Bohemia of the _Buveurs d'Eau_ (the devotees of High Art who
carry their devotion to the point of contemning all "commission" work
whatsoever) may require more effort, or more special predestination, to
get into full sympathy with it. The thing is noble; but it is nobility
_party per_ a very thin _pale_ with and from silliness; and the Devil's
Advocate has no very hard task in suggesting that it is not even
nobility at all, but a compound of idleness and affectation.[288] With
rare exceptions, the greatest men of art and letters have never
disdained, though they might not love, what one of them called "honest
journey-work in default of better"; and when those exceptions come to be
examined--as in the leading English cases of Milton[289] and
Wordsworth--you generally find that the persons concerned never really
felt the pinch of necessity. However, Murger makes the best of his
Lazare and the rest of them; and his power over pathos, which is
certainly not small, assists him as much here as it does _more_ than
assist him--as it practically carries him through--in other stories such
as _Le Manchon de Francine_ and _La Biographie d'un Inconnu_. And,
moreover, he can use all these means and more in handfuls of little
things--some mere _bleuettes_ (as the French call them)--_Comment on
Devient Coloriste_, _Le Victime du Bonheur_, _La Fleur Bretonne_, _Le
Fauteuil Enchante_, _Les Premieres Amours du Jeune Bleuet_.

With such high praise still allotted to an author, it may seem unfair
not to give him more room; and I should certainly have done so if I had
not had the other treatment to refer to. Since that existed, as in the
similar cases of Sandeau, Bernard, and pe