Watson is a Bohemian too, even more Bohemian than Holmes
Watson, although almost a wallflower, tells us EXACTLY about HIS OWN BOHEMIAN SOUL in MUSG.
And he enjoys reading Murger's novel about Bohemian artists, perhaps finding himself reflected in it in STUD (when he was 25/26):
Let's turn to Gelett Burgess's definition of Bohemianism and see which of them it actually describes.
'To take the world as one finds it, the bad with the good, making the best of the present moment—to laugh at Fortune alike whether she be generous or unkind—to spend freely when one has money, and to hope gaily when one has none—to fleet the time carelessly, living for love and art—this is the temper and spirit of the modern Bohemian in his outward and visible aspect. It is a light and graceful philosophy, but it is the Gospel of the Moment, this exoteric phase of the Bohemian religion; and if, in some noble natures, it rises to a bold simplicity and naturalness, it may also lend its butterfly precepts to some very pretty vices and lovable faults, for in Bohemia one may find almost every sin save that of Hypocrisy. ...His faults are more commonly those of self-indulgence, thoughtlessness, vanity and procrastination, and these usually go hand-in-hand with generosity, love and charity; for it is not enough to be one's self in Bohemia, one must allow others to be themselves, as well. '
Everyone who is familiar with the Canon (and is not misleading by adaptations) shall ejaculate here: 'It might be a description of Watson!'
Watson lives a life as free as air in a street full of theatres, spend freely when he has money, and to hope gaily when he has none.
Watson is comfortable identifying himself as a lounger and an idler. He never considered finding a job or settling down before he met Mary Morstan (and captivated by a whirlwind love, impulsively became engaged to her within a few days), just guiding by his curiosity of the world, joining Holmes's investigations mostly out of personal interest rather than obligation (while it is Holmes's actual profession and practical livelihood), and then rendering those adventures and mysteries into literature through his own rose-tinted lens. Watson can't help letting his case reports drift into scenery and sentiment until Holmes finally tells him to leave out the poetry. All of them are an illustration of fleeting the time carelessly and living for love and art as the Canon offers.
Carelessness, procrastination with generosity fits just as well. Watson confesses that he is rather too lax and lazy as a doctor. He procrastinates until a certain trigger sparks the impulse to act, and he is carefree enough to be driven by mere 'love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life' and neglect his own practice whenever a case comes calling, also loose enough with money with his spirit of gambler that Holmes eventually keeps his chequebook under lock. But at the same time offers to break the law for Holmes without a second thought and never withholds sympathy from a client. It's close to a demonstration of Burgess's claim that these faults and virtues aren't separate traits but two faces of the same temperament.
Holmes, by contrast, is a stoic, stern, self-disciplined, hardworking, ambitious, and industrious man (all of these words are descriptions of Holmes in the Canon or synonyms of the original words) who tries to learn everything that makes him more efficient IN HIS WORK. His lifestyle is much more withdrawn and serious than Burgess's carefree Bohemian spirit (yet Watson is 'the same BLITHE boy as ever').
So the definition, read closely, seems to describe Watson far better than it ever describes Holmes. Which suggests something else worth sitting with: it may be precisely because Watson carries a Bohemian soul of his own, and is quietly rather taken with himself for it, that he projects that same temperament onto the friend he admires, reading Holmes's unconventional, self-chosen path as a kind of Bohemianism that was never really his. What looks like a portrait of Holmes may, in the end, be a portrait of Watson himself.
In RETI, Watson is midway through aesthetic describing Amberley's house, when Holmes cuts him off and tells him to leave out the poetry.
In HOUN, Watson tells us that Holmes has the crudest ideas of art.
Later, standing before the Baskerville portraits, Holmes remarks that Watson never grants him any feeling for art, and puts that down to jealousy over their differing tastes. He then demonstrates exactly what his own taste consists of, covering part of a painted face with his hand until the resemblance to a living suspect becomes obvious. That is the whole method on display: a portrait matters to him to the extent that it can be used to identify a face. Holmes evaluates art by how closely it matches reality, and probably would have had no patience for anything more avant-garde, abstract or experimental.
Taken together, the two scenes reinforce each other quite naturally. Holmes's sense of the aesthetic seems to end at verisimilitude, at whether a picture matches its subject or a description matches the facts, and anything not doing that kind of representational work barely registers to him as art at all. Extend that a little further than the text ever does, and it is not hard to imagine how he would receive something built deliberately not to resemble anything, whether Symbolism or Suprematism or any of it.
Watson, meanwhile, is the one who wants to immerse himself in the scene and simply take everything all in his perception, the same instinct that has him lingering over the beauty unveiled by his sensitivity while letting his imagination soar free until Holmes asks him to stop. Nor does Watson let that "verdict on art" pass without some quiet pushback of his own.
The way he records Holmes's self-justifying line about mere jealousy reads less like agreement than a raised eyebrow, the doctor noting privately that recognizing a family resemblance is not quite the same thing as having an eye for painting.
Watson's artsy perception and Holmes's practical in perception is evidental everywhere. Just compare the style they write!
My previous letters and telegrams have kept you pretty well up-to-date as to all that has occurred in this most Godforsaken corner of the world. The longer one stays here the more does the spirit of the moor sink into one's soul, its vastness, and also its grim charm. When you are once out upon its bosom you have left all traces of modern England behind you, but on the other hand you are conscious everywhere of the homes and the work of prehistoric people. On all sides of you as you walk are the houses of these forgotten folk, with their graves and the huge monoliths which are supposed to have marked their temples. As you look at their grey stone huts against the scarred hillsides you leave your own age behind you, and if you were to see a skin-clad, hairy man crawl out from the low door, fitting a flint-tipped arrow on to the string of his bow, you would feel that his presence there was more natural than your own. The strange thing is that they should have lived so thickly on what must always have been most unfruitful soil. I am no antiquarian, but I could imagine that they were some unwarlike and harried race who were forced to accept that which none other would occupy.
All this however, is foreign to the mission on which you sent me, and will probably be very uninteresting to your severely practical mind. I can still remember your complete indifference as to whether the sun moved round the earth or the earth round the sun. Let me, therefore, return to the facts concerning Sir Henry Baskerville.
The coachman, a hard-faced, gnarled little fellow, saluted Sir Henry Baskerville, and in a few minutes we were flying swiftly down the broad, white road. Rolling pasture lands curved upwards on either side of us, and old gabled houses peeped out from amid the thick green foliage, but behind the peaceful and sunlit country-side there rose ever, dark against the evening sky, the long, gloomy curve of the moor, broken by the jagged and sinister hills.
The wagonette swung round into a side road, and we curved upwards through deep lanes worn by centuries of wheels, high banks on either side, heavy with dripping moss and fleshy harts-tongue ferns. Bronzing bracken and mottled bramble gleamed in the light of the sinking sun. Still steadily rising, we passed over a narrow granite bridge, and skirted a noisy stream, which gushed swiftly down, foaming and roaring amid the grey boulders. Both road and stream wound up through a valley dense with scrub oak and fir. At every turning Baskerville gave an exclamation of delight, looking eagerly about him and asking countless questions. To his eyes all seemed beautiful, but to me a tinge of melancholy lay upon the country-side, which bore so clearly the mark of the waning year. Yellow leaves carpeted the lanes and fluttered down upon us as we passed. The rattle of our wheels died away as we drove through drifts of rotting vegetation - sad gifts, as it seemed to me, for Nature to throw before the carriage of the returning heir of the Baskervilles.
All day to-day the rain poured down, rustling on the ivy and dripping from the eaves. I thought of the convict out upon the bleak, cold, shelterless moor. Poor fellow! Whatever his crimes, he has suffered something to atone for them. And then I thought of that other one - the face in the cab, the figure against the moon. Was he also out in that deluge - the unseen watcher, the man of darkness? In the evening I put on my waterproof and I walked far upon the sodden moor, full of dark imaginings, the rain beating upon my face and the wind whistling about my ears. God help those who wander into the Great Mire now, for even the firm uplands are becoming a morass. I found the Black Tor upon which I had seen the solitary watcher, and from its craggy summit I looked out myself across the melancholy downs. Rain squalls drifted across their russet face, and the heavy, slate-coloured clouds hung low over the landscape, trailing in grey wreaths down the sides of the fantastic hills. In the distant hollow on the left, half hidden by the mist, the two thin towers of Baskerville Hall rose above the trees. They were the only signs of human life which I could see, save only those prehistoric huts which lay thickly upon the slopes of the hills. Nowhere was there any trace of that lonely man whom I had seen on the same spot two nights before.
As I walked back I was overtaken by Dr Mortimer driving in his dog-cart over a rough moorland track, which led from the outlying farmhouse of Foulmire. He has been very attentive to us, and hardly a day has passed that he has not called at the Hall to see how we were getting on. He insisted upon my climbing into his dog-cart and he gave me a lift homewards. I found him much troubled over the disappearance of his little spaniel. It had wandered on to the moor and had never come back. I gave him such consolation as I might, but I thought of the pony on the Grimpen Mire, and I do not fancy that he will see his little dog again.
While Holmes writes this:
My case was practically complete, and there was only one small incident needed to round it off. When, after a considerable drive, we arrived at the strange old rambling house which my client had described, it was Ralph, the elderly butler, who opened the door. I had requisitioned the carriage for the day and had asked my elderly friend to remain within it unless we should summon him. Ralph, a little wrinkled old fellow, was in the conventional costume of black coat and pepper-and-salt trousers, with only one curious variant. He wore brown leather gloves, which at sight of us he instantly shuffled off, laying them down on the hall-table as we passed in. I have, as my friend Watson may have remarked, an abnormally acute set of senses, and a faint but incisive scent was apparent. It seemed to centre on the hall-table. I turned, placed my hat there, knocked it off, stooped to pick it up, and contrived to bring my nose within a foot of the gloves. Yes, it was undoubtedly from them that the curious tarry odour was oozing. I passed on into the study with my case complete. Alas, that I should have to show my hand so when I tell my own story! It was by concealing such links in the chain that Watson was enabled to produce his meretricious finales.
Colonel Emsworth was not in his room, but he came quickly enough on receipt of Ralph’s message. We heard his quick, heavy step in the passage. The door was flung open and he rushed in with bristling beard and twisted features, as terrible an old man as ever I have seen. He held our cards in his hand, and he tore them up and stamped on the fragments.
At this moment we saw the man himself. His head showed above the edge of the cliff where the path ends. Then his whole figure appeared at the top, staggering like a drunken man. The next instant he threw up his hands, and, with a terrible cry, fell upon his face. Stackhurst and I rushed forward—it may have been fifty yards—and turned him on his back. He was obviously dying. Those glazed sunken eyes and dreadful livid cheeks could mean nothing else. One glimmer of life came into his face for an instant, and he uttered two or three words with an eager air of warning. They were slurred and indistinct, but to my ear the last of them, which burst in a shriek from his lips, were “the lion’s mane.” It was utterly irrelevant and unintelligible, and yet I could twist the sound into no other sense. Then he half raised himself from the ground, threw his arms into the air and fell forward on his side. He was dead.
My companion was paralysed by the sudden horror of it, but I, as may well be imagined, had every sense on the alert. And I had need, for it was speedily evident that we were in the presence of an extraordinary case.
Whose sentences carry more literary sensitivity? Whose have the truer Bohemian pulse?
Remember: the Holmes we meet on the page was never Holmes himself. He is Holmes as Watson chose to render him, already passed through one artist's eyes.
I know that Holmes is also an artist by nature, but his art is performing art for a pragmatic purpose, while Watson's is one of quiet submission to whatever moves him or inspires him.
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