II
Marie Bashkirtseff was descended from one of those well-guarded sections of society from whence nearly all the women have sprung who have taken any active part in the movements of their time during the latter half of our century. Hers was more than ordinarily happily situated. The two families from whose union she sprang, the Bashkirtseffs and Babanins, were both branches of old South-Russian nobility; but for some reason or other, which she appears never to have ascertained, the marriage between her parents was an unhappy one. They separated after having been married for a couple of years, during which time two children, a son and a daughter, were born, and her mother returned to her old home, accompanied by little Marie. Petted and spoiled by her grandparents, her mother, her aunt, and the governesses, who, even at that early age, were greatly impressed by her numerous talents and determined will, she spent the first years of her life on her grandparents’ property; but in May, 1870, the whole family went abroad, including the mother, aunt, grandfather, Marie, her brother, her little cousin, a family doctor, and a large retinue of servants.
For two years they wandered from place to place, staying at Vienna, Baden-Baden, Geneva, and Paris, and finally settling at Nice. It was there that Marie, who was then twelve years of age, began the journal, published after her death at four-and-twenty, which was to be her real life work.
She has bequeathed other tokens of her labor to posterity. They hang in the Luxembourg museum, in the division reserved for pictures by artists of the present day which have been purchased by the State. If we go into one of the smaller side rooms, we are suddenly confronted by a picture of dogs barking in a desert place; there is something so real and vivid about it that the rest of the State-rewarded industry seems pale and lifeless in comparison. A bit of nature in the corner attracts, while it makes us shiver; it is large, bold, brutal,—and what does it represent? Only a couple of street urchins talking to each other as they stand in front of a wooden paling. There is no doubt but that the influence of Bastien Lepage has been at work here. There is something that reminds us of him in the hot, gray, sunless sky; but there is also a certain Russian atmosphere about it that gives a dry look that contrasts strangely with the French landscapes. And where would Bastien Lepage get these contours? We have never seen lines more carelessly drawn, and yet so true; there is real genius in them. This picture is a primitive bit of Russian nature, child-like in its honesty, and the painter is Marie Bashkirtseff.
Near the door hangs a little portrait of a young woman dressed in fur. She has the typical Russian face, with thick, irregular eyebrows, from under which a pair of Tartar eyes look at you straight in the face with a curious expression. What can it be? Is it indifference, or defiance; or is it nothing more than physical well-being?
Among all the pictures painted by women that I have ever seen, I do not remember anywhere the temperament and individuality of the artist are revealed with greater force. The touch is so primitive, so uncultured in the best and worst sense of the word, that it surprises us to think that it is the work of a woman, half child, who belongs to the best society; it would seem rather to suggest the claws of a lioness.
Yet Marie Bashkirtseff was a thorough lady, not only by birth and education, but in her heart as well; she was a lady to the tips of her fingers, to an extreme that was almost absurd; she was not merely a fashionable lady, in the way that certain clever young men take a half ironical pleasure in appearing fashionable, but a lady in real earnest, with all the intensity of a religious bigot.
She had been educated by ladies, by a gentle and refined though rather shallow mother, by an aunt whose vocation seems to have consisted in self-sacrifice for others, a domineering grandmother, two governesses,—one Russian and the other French,—and an “angelical” doctor who lived in the house, and always travelled with them, and who seems to have become somewhat of a woman himself from having lived amongst so many women.
She was no more than twelve years old when she discovered that her governesses were insupportably stupid, and that the only thing that they understood was how to make her waste her precious youth. There was no time for that. She was already aware of the shortness of time, and it was her anxiety to make the most of it that afterwards hurried her short life to its close. She was possessed of an intense thirst for everything,—life, knowledge, enjoyment, sympathy. But although her grandfather had been “Byronic” in his youth, the family passed their lives vegetating with true Russian indolence; there was no help for it; she knew that nothing better was to be expected of them. And accordingly she hunted her governesses out of the house and took her education into her own hands. A tutor was engaged, and a list was made from which no branch of learning was excluded. The tutor nearly fainted with astonishment when it was shown to him, but he was still more astonished at Marie’s progress afterwards. Drawing was the only lesson in which the future great artist did not succeed; it bored her, and nothing came of it.
Her inner life, meanwhile, is stirred with tumultuous passions. She is in love, as passionately and as truly in love as any matured woman. And, after all, this thirteen-year-old girl is a matured woman; she is more developed, more truly woman-like than the worn-out woman of three-and-twenty, who only lived with half her strength. The man whom she loves is a very distinguished Englishman, who had bought a villa at Nice, where he spent a few months with his mistress every year,—but this circumstance does not affect Marie in the very least; she is experienced in her knowledge of the world, and by no means bourgeois in her way of thinking. There is another reason, however, that causes her intolerable suffering,—the handsome English duke is too grand for her. She is troubled, not only because he pays her no attention at present, but because she thinks that he is never likely to esteem her sufficiently to wish to marry her, unless, indeed, she could do something to make herself a name, and become celebrated. Marie Bashkirtseff, accordingly, wishes to become celebrated. She would like to be a great singer, who is at the same time a great actress; she would like to have the whole world at her feet, including the duke, and be able to choose between royal dukes and princes, and then she would choose him. For a couple of years or more she lives upon this dream, studies, reads, cries, and suffers that unnecessary overplus of secret pain and anxiety which usually accompanies the development of richly gifted natures.
She has a lovely voice and great dramatic talent, but the former is not fully developed, and cannot be trained for some years to come. She buys cart-loads of books; but as there is no one to guide her choice, and her social intercourse does not diverge a hairbreadth outside her family and a small circle of friends, consisting chiefly of compatriots, it is only natural that her reading should be confined to Dumas père, Balzac, Octave Feuillet, and such literary tallow candles as Ohnet, and others like him. Her taste remains uncultivated, her horizon bounded by the family, and her knowledge continues to be a mixture of ancient superstitions combined with the newest shibboleths.
Her most familiar converse is between herself and her Creator, whom her imagination pictures as a kind of superior great-grandfather, very grand and powerful, and the only One in whom she can confide. To Him she lays bare her heart, beseeching Him to give her that which is a necessity of life to her, and she makes numerous promises, to be fulfilled only on condition that her prayers are granted; she respects what she conceives to be His wishes with regard to prayer and almsgiving, and overwhelms Him with reproaches if these are of no avail. And they are of no avail. Her voice, which has been tried and praised by the highest musical authorities in Paris, is being gradually undermined by a disease of the throat, and the duke marries; thus her hopes of becoming famous and of gaining a great love are gone, gone forever.
Those were the first and second cruel wounds wherewith life made its presence felt in this sensitive soul; they were wounds which never healed, and which imparted hidden veins of venom to the healthy parts of her being.
Does not this remind us of the fairy tale about wounds that never heal? Is not this just the way that the wounds made by Fate, or by human beings, in our souls continue to bleed forever? They are like tender places, which shrink from the touch throughout a lifetime, and wither if a breath passes over them. The more sensitive a person is, the more painful they are, and nothing is so easily wounded as a growing organism. The nerves have a good memory, better even than the brain, and there are some wounds received in youth and impressed during growth which seem to have been wiped out ages ago, till suddenly they present the appearance of a putrefying spot, a poisonous place, the point of disintegration of the entire organism. Or there may be something crippled in the person’s vitality. They live on, but one muscle, perhaps only a very small one, is strained and just a little out of order, and the soul is compelled to replace what the body lacks by means of extra exertion, which is afterwards paid for by excessive weariness.
There are some sluggish natures, especially among women, who exert their strength to the least possible degree, and do their work in a half-hearted manner. There are also souls which seem all aglow with the psychic and sensuous warmth of their natures, who carry the whole substance of their being in the hand, and who give themselves up entirely to the interest of what they are feeling and wishing for at the moment. Their path is strewn with fragments of their life, which fall off dead, and every stroke aimed at them hits the heart. Their soul has no covering to protect them from disappointment; neither have they the forgetful sleep of animals, wherein the body is at rest. But such natures are generally possessed of an endless supply of self-sustaining strength, which imbues them with the power to grow again; and although their wounds are plentiful, their germinating cells are plenteous also. The parts that are crippled remain crippled still, but new possibilities are continually developing in new directions.
The young girl of whose silly, half-fancied love story I have made so much, was one of these natures. She was formed of the material out of which destiny either moulds women who become the greatest of their sex, or else casts them aside, discarded and broken. It generally depends upon some very trifling matter which of the two takes place. Marie was an exceedingly spoiled child when the first blow fell; but there was something lacking in her nature—a dead spot that revealed itself with the destruction of her voice—while her body was blossoming into womanhood. There was a dead spot somewhere without as well, something that lacked in life, else it were not possible to long so ardently and not obtain. There was something that gazed at her with evil, ghost-like eyes, causing her nerves to quiver beneath its icy breath. She was a brave girl. She did not complain, did not look back, but drew herself together, silent and determined. Her passionate love of work took the form of painting, and as she could not become a great singer, she meant to be a great painter. But a part of her being congealed and withered away; her young heart had expanded to receive a return of the love it had so freely given, and was left unsatisfied.
The years passed in much the same way as they had passed before for this spoiled child of fortune. A few people who were indifferent to her died, and others came who were no less indifferent. They travelled from Nice to Paris, and from Paris to Nice, but she was equally lonely everywhere. She had no playfellows, no girl friends, no school-room companions, and to life’s contrasts she remained a stranger. Her cousin Dina was the only one who was always with her, and she was the typical girl,—a pretty, good-natured nonentity. And thus, though always lonely, she was never alone. Wherever she went, her mother and aunt went with her, and wherever they did not go, Marie Bashkirtseff did not go either. In all her journeyings, she never received a single impression for herself alone; it was always reflected at the same moment in the sun-glasses of her aunt and mother, and never a word did she hear but was also heard by her duennas. No man was allowed within the circle of her acquaintance until he had first been judged suitable from a marriageable, as well as a social point of view. The female atmosphere by which she was surrounded paralyzed every other.
It was her destiny!
Life was empty around her, and in the void her excited nerves became even more and more centred upon her own ego. Her opinion of herself assumed gigantic proportions, and whatever there had been of soul grandeur in her nature was changed into admiration of self. And yet, in spite of all, this girl, who was undoubtedly a genius, never realized her own power to the full. The natural nobility of her feelings assumed a moral, bourgeois dress, and her young senses, which had manifested such a passionate craving at their first awakening, withered and grew numb.
She was sixteen when she experienced her second disappointment in love, and it became for her the turning-point of her inner life.
At her earnest request the family had gone to Rome. It was the time of the Carnival, and after the conventional life at Nice, the sudden outbreak of merriment in the Eternal City called forth a frivolous mood in every one. There was something delightful in the ease with which acquaintances were made, and the simple, straightforward manner in which homage was done. A young man makes love to Dina; he belongs to an old, aristocratic, Roman family, and is the nephew of an influential cardinal. Marie entices him away from her, and the young Italian falls a prey to the brilliant fascination and wild coquetry of her manner. He is dazzled by such aggressive conduct on the part of so young a girl, and the equivocal character of it spurs him on. He storms her with declarations of love, and Marie reciprocates his passion,—not very seriously perhaps, but her senses, her vanity, her pride, all are on fire. The young man communicates to her something of his habitual good spirits, and her head, no less than the heads of her mother and aunt, is completely turned at the prospect of such a distinguished parti. The family set to work in good earnest to bring matters to a climax, for which object they employ suitable deputies, while Marie persistently holds the legitimate joys of marriage before the face of her importunate lover. The Italian slips past these dangerous rocks with the dexterity of an eel. He knows what Marie and the house of Bashkirtseff, convinced as they are of the grandeur of their Russian ancestry, cannot realize,—that for him, the heir and nephew of the cardinal, no marriage will be considered suitable unless it brings with it connection with the nobility, or the advantages of an immense fortune; and in this opinion he fully concurs. The result is that they are always at cross purposes: he talks of love, she of marriage; he of tête-à-têtes on the staircase after midnight, she of betrothal kisses between lunch and dinner under the auspices of her family. When his allusions to his uncle’s disapproval of a marriage with a heretical Russian lady from the provinces do not produce any effect on the family other than indignation, expressive of their wounded feelings, he goes away, and allows himself to be sent into retreat in a monastery. While there, he ascertains that the Bashkirtseffs have left Rome and given up all desire to have such a vacillating creature for a son-in-law. They go to Nice, and no more is said about him until Marie persuades her family to return to Rome, where she meets him at a party, but only to discover that he loves her when there, and forgets her again the moment that she is out of sight. This was the second time that she had knocked at the door of life; and, as on the former occasion, Fate held back the joys which she seemed to have in store, only opening the door wide enough to let in the face of a grinning Punchinello.
Few writers have attempted to describe the state of a young girl’s mind on such occasions, when a thousand cherished hopes are instantaneously charred as though struck by lightning, and, worse still, all that she had wished for becomes hateful in her eyes, and the shame of it assumes a gigantic scale, and continues to increase, though maybe at the cost of her life. Men have no suspicion of this, and they would find it hard to understand, even supposing that they were given the opportunity of observing it. They grow up amid the realities of life; a girl, in the unreal. The disappointments which a man endures are real ones, and unless he is a fool, he is in a position to form an approximate valuation of his own importance. With a girl it is different; her opinion of herself is exaggerated to an extent that is quite fantastical and altogether unreal, and this is especially the case when her education is of a strictly conventional character, and has been conducted mainly by women. The preservation of her purity is the foundation of her creed, but she is not told, nor does she guess, wherein this purity consists, nor how it may be lost; and consequently she imagines that it can be lost in every conceivable way,—by a mere nothing, by a pressure of the hand, but in any case by a kiss. This kiss Marie Bashkirtseff had actually given and received, and after it she had been forgotten and despised! That kiss branded her in secret all her life. She never forgot it.
This is not the only consequence of the change from the real to the unreal which takes place when the outer world casts its reflection in the mirror of a young girl’s soul. Every girl has an exaggerated idea of the value of the mystic purity of her maidenhood in the eyes of men; and when she makes a man happy by the gift of herself, she imagines that she has given him something extraordinary, which he must accept on bended knee. What words can describe the humiliation which she feels if he does not set a sufficiently high value on the gift, or if he thrusts it aside like a pair of old slippers that do not fit! All girls are silly to a certain extent, even the cleverest; and the girl who is not silly on this point must have lost something of her girlish modesty.
In the case of Marie Bashkirtseff, a part of her being was blighted after her encounter with the Italian, and she never entirely recovered from the effects of it. This, her first acquaintance with a man, was so full of racial misunderstandings and others besides, that it destroyed her faith in man, as indeed it is doomed to be destroyed sooner or later in every girl with a strong individuality and healthy nature. And for her, as for many another, followed the lifeless years into the middle of the twenties, when a new and very different faith begins to show itself as the result of wider views of life and internal changes. But with her this faith never came. Her vitality gave way too soon. Those dead years which must inevitably follow upon an all too promising and too early maturity, leaving a young woman apparently trivial and devoid of any true individuality of character, and which often last until the thirties, when the time comes for a new and greater change,—those years with Marie, as with many another “struggling” girl, were filled with an unnatural craving for work.
She wanted to be something on her own account, as an individual. She compelled her mother and aunt to go with her to Paris, where she could go to Julian’s studio, which was the only one for women where painting was taught seriously. The working hours were from eight to twelve, from one to five.
But she worked longer. This spoiled child, who had never known what it meant to exert herself, was not satisfied with eight hours of hard labor. She works in the evenings as well, after she comes home; she works on Sundays; she is dead to the world, and with the exception of her daily bath, she renounces every luxury of the toilet, and succeeds in condensing into two years the work of seven. One day Julian tells her that she must work alone, “because,” he says, “you have learned all that it is possible to teach.”