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.’