MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF.
Miss Mathilde Blind, in the introduction to her animated and admirable translation of the now notorious ‘Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff,’ asks an exceedingly relevant question—namely, ‘Is it well or is it ill done to make the world our father confessor?’ Miss Blind does not answer her own question, but passes on her way content with the observation that, be it well or ill done, it is supremely interesting. Translators have, indeed, no occasion to worry about such inquiries. It is hard enough for them to make their author speak another language than his own, without stopping to ask whether he ought to have spoken at all. Their business is to make their author known. As for the author himself, he, of course, has a responsibility; but, as a rule, he is only thinking of himself, and only anxious to excite interest in that subject. If he succeeds in doing this, he is indifferent to everything else. And in this he is encouraged by the world.
Burns, in his exuberant generosity, was sure that it could afford small pleasure
‘Even to a deil
To skelp and scaud poor dogs like me,
And hear us squeal;’
but whatever may be the devil’s taste, there is nothing the reading public like better than to hear the squeal of some self-torturing atom of humanity. And, as the atoms have found this out, a good deal of squealing may be confidently anticipated.
The eclipse of faith has not proved fatal by any means to the instinct of confession. There is a noticeable desire to make humanity or the reading public our residuary legatee, to endow it with our experiences, to enrich it with our egotisms, to strip ourselves bare in the market-place—if not for the edification, at all events for the amusement, of man. All this is accomplished by autobiography. We then become interesting, probably for the first time, as, to employ Mlle. Bashkirtseff’s language, ‘documents of human nature.’
The metaphor carries us far. To falsify documents by addition, or to garble them by omission, is an offence of grave character, though of frequent occurrence. Is there, then, to be no reticence in autobiography? Are the documents of human nature to be printed at length?
These are questions which each autobiographer must settle for himself. If what is published is interesting for any reason whatsoever, be it the work of pious sincerity or diseased self-consciousness, the world will read it, and either applaud the piety or ridicule the absurdity of the author. If it is not interesting it will not be read.
Therefore, to consider the ethics of autobiography is to condemn yourself to the academy. ‘Rousseau’s Confessions’ ought never to have been written; but written they were, and read they will ever be. But as a pastime moralizing has a rare charm. We cannot always be reading immoral masterpieces. A time comes when inaction is pleasant, and when it is soothing to hear mild accents murmuring ‘Thou shalt not.’ For a moment, then, let the point remain under consideration.
The ethics of autobiography are, in my judgment, admirably summed up by George Eliot, in a passage in ‘Theophrastus Such,’ a book which, we were once assured, well-nigh destroyed the reputation of its author, but which would certainly have established that of most living writers upon a surer foundation than they at present occupy. George Eliot says:
‘In all autobiography there is, nay, ought to be, an incompleteness which may have the effect of falsity. We are each of us bound to reticence by the piety we owe to those who have been nearest to us, and have had a mingled influence over our lives—by the fellow-feeling which should restrain us from turning our volunteered and picked confessions into an act of accusation against others who have no chance of vindicating themselves, and, most of all, by that reverence for the higher efforts of our common nature which commands us to bury its lowest faculties, its invincible remnants of the brute, its most agonizing struggle with temptation, in unbroken silence.’
All this is surely sound morality and good manners, but it is not the morality or the manners of Mlle. Marie Bashkirtseff, who was always ready to barter everything for something she called Fame.
‘If I don’t win fame,’ says she over and over again, ‘I will kill myself.’
Miss Blind is, no doubt, correct in her assertion that, as a painter, Mlle. Bashkirtseff’s strong point was expression. Certainly, she had a great gift that way with her pen. Amidst a mass of greedy utterances, esurient longings, commonplace ejaculations, and unlovely revelations, passages occur in this journal which bid us hold. For all her boastings, her sincerity is not always obvious, but it speaks plainly through each one of the following words:
‘What is there in us, that, in spite of plausible arguments—in spite of the consciousness that all leads to nothing—we should still grumble? I know that, like everyone else, I am going on towards death and nothingness. I weigh the circumstances of life, and, whatever they may be, they appear to me miserably vain, and, for all that, I cannot resign myself. Then, it must be a force; it must be a something—not merely “a passage,” a certain period of time, which matters little whether it is spent in a palace or in a cellar; there is, then, something stronger, truer, than our foolish phrases about it all. It is life, in short; not merely a passage—an unprofitable misery—but life, all that we hold most dear, all that we call ours, in short.
‘People say it is nothing, because we do not possess eternity. Ah! the fools. Life is ourselves, it is ours, it is all that we possess; how, then, is it possible to say that it is nothing? If this is nothing, show me something.’
To deride life is indeed foolish. Prosperous people are apt to do so, whether their prosperity be of this world or anticipated in the next. The rich man bids the poor man lead an abstemious life in his youth, and scorn delights, in order that he may have the wherewithal to spend a dull old age; but the poor man replies:
‘Your arrangements have left me nothing but my youth. I will enjoy that, and you shall support me in a dull old age.’
To deride life, I repeat, is foolish; but to pity yourself for having to die is to carry egotism rather too far. This is what Mlle. Bashkirtseff does.
‘I am touched myself when I think of my end. No, it seems impossible! Nice, fifteen years, the three Graces, Rome, the follies of Naples, painting, ambition, unheard-of hopes—to end in a coffin, without having had anything, not even love.’
Impossible, indeed! There is not much use for that word in the human comedy.
Never, surely, before was there a lady so penetrated with her own personality as the writer of these journals. Her arms and legs, hips and shoulders, hopes and fears, pictures and future glory, are all alike scanned, admired, stroked, and pondered over. She reduces everything to one vast common denominator—herself. She gives two francs to a starving family.
‘It was a sight to see the joy, the surprise of these poor creatures. I hid myself behind the trees. Heaven has never treated me so well; heaven has never had any of these beneficent fancies.’
Heaven had, at all events, never heard the like of this before. Here is a human creature brought up in what is called the lap of luxury, wearing purple and fine linen, and fur cloaks worth 2,000 francs, eating and drinking to repletion, and indulging herself in every fancy; she divides a handful of coppers amongst five starving persons, and then retires behind a tree, and calls God to witness that no such kindness had ever been extended to her.
When Mlle. Elsnitz, her long-suffering companion—‘young, only nineteen, unfortunate, in a strange house without a friend’—at last, after suffering many things, leaves the service, it is recorded:
‘I could not speak for fear of crying, and I affected a careless look, but I hope she may have seen.’
Seen what? Why, that the carelessness was unreal. A quite sufficient reparation for months of insolence, in the opinion of Miss Marie.
It is said that Mlle. Bashkirtseff had a great faculty of enjoyment. If so, except in the case of books, she hardly makes it felt. Reading evidently gave her great pleasure; but, though there is a good deal of rapture about Nature in her journals, it is of an uneasy character.
‘The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is amongst the lonely hills,’
do not pass into the souls of those whose ambition it is to be greeted with loud cheers by the whole wide world.
Whoever is deeply interested in himself always invents a God whom he can apostrophize on suitable occasions. The existence of this deity feeds his creator’s vanity. When the world turns a deaf ear to his broken cries he besieges heaven. The Almighty, so he flatters himself, cannot escape him. When there is no one else to have recourse to, when all other means fail, there still remains—God. When your father, and your mother, and your aunt, and your companion, and your maid, are all wearied to death by your exhaustless vanity, you have still another string to your bow. Sometimes, indeed, the strings may get entangled.
‘Just now, I spoke harshly to my aunt, but I could not help it. She came in just when I was weeping with my hands over my face, and was summoning God to attend to me a little.’
A book like this makes one wonder what power, human or divine, can exorcise such a demon of vanity as that which possessed the soul of this most unhappy girl. Carlyle strove with great energy in ‘Sartor Resartus’ to compose a spell which should cleave this devil in three. For a time it worked well and did some mischief, but now the magician’s wand seems broken. Religion, indeed, can still show her conquests, and, when we are considering a question like this, seems a fresher thing than it does when we are reading ‘Lux Mundi.’
‘Do you want,’ wrote General Gordon in his journal, ‘to be loved, respected, and trusted? Then ignore the likes and dislikes of man in regard to your actions; leave their love for God’s, taking Him only. You will find that as you do so men will like you; they may despise some things in you, but they will lean on you, and trust you, and He will give you the spirit of comforting them. But try to please men and ignore God, and you will fail miserably and get nothing but disappointment.’
All those who have not yet read these journals, and prefer doing so in English, should get Miss Blind’s volumes. There they will find this ‘human document’ most vigorously translated into their native tongue. It, perhaps, sounds better in French.
One remembers George Eliot’s tale of the lady who tried to repeat in English the pathetic story of a French mendicant—‘J’ai vu le sang de mon père’—but failed to excite sympathy, owing to the hopeless realism of Saxon speech. But though better in French, the journal is interesting in English. Whether, like the dreadful Dean, you regard man as an odious race of vermin, or agree with an erecter spirit that he is a being of infinite capacity, you will find food for your philosophy, and texts for your sermons, in the ‘Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff.’