Long before it was the fashion as it is to-day to write the biography of men during their lifetime Voltaire said: “We owe consideration to the living; to the dead we owe truth only.” He foresaw with remarkable keenness the danger of such endeavour; and to-day, overwhelmed with biographies of living subjects, we deplore the fashion. There are certain truths that no one likes to be told, but that is what we must insist upon from the biographical art: truth, and more truth. Man is not big enough to look at his contemporaries without partiality, and he must allow a voice to his likes and dislikes. For instance, it would have been as unwise for Mr. Alexander Woollcott to write anything in his biography of Irving Berlin that might have made the composer appear in a light less brilliant than that of semi-genius, as it would be for a newspaper editor to write articles against the policy of his newspaper. We must agree with Sir Sidney Lee that “no man has ever proven to be fit subject for biography until he is dead.”
Finally the main difference between autobiography and biography, a difference which is a résumé of these reflections, is that the former works from within outwards, while the latter works from without inwards; and the autobiographer is successful only in proportion to the self-absorption he reveals; his is a selfish and personal work. The biographer, on the other hand, is successful only in proportion to the self-effacement he shows.
Amiel is perhaps the best example of introspection that can be found in a diarist, as Proust is of the novelist. They and Barbellion, the author of The Journal of a Disappointed Man, lived within themselves, and the outside world was for them merely an abiding place. A contrast of great interest could be drawn between Amiel, Cellini and Rousseau. Amiel’s diary would be a model of introspection, Cellini would head the list of Memoir writers whose principal quality is to be found in the wholesomeness of their objectivity. He was no student of inner nature. Life for him was a great battlefield, where one could garner beauty and trophies, achieve triumphs of art, and at the same time kill those who stood in the way; Jean-Jacques would hold a place between these two; he sought interior motives and the explanation of his sentiments, but the life he led was not especially conducive to reasoning and internal debate. So his Confessions are as far above those of Cellini as above the Journal of Amiel, in quality, in form and in subject, and are still the best example of autobiography that has ever been published.
Facts are as necessary to autobiography as they are to biography. Even when they are tampered with, as Marie Bashkirtseff tampered with those of her life, they have their importance and interest and nothing that is true should be allowed to remain in the darkness. Olive Schreiner wrote, “There can be no absolutely true life of any one except written by themselves and then only if written for the eye of God.” Marie did not write hers for the eye of God, but it is the closest approach to a true life since Jean-Jacques’.
If a life is worth writing at all, no consideration of personal feeling or convention should deter the writer from setting down the facts; for on them truth, the greatest quality of art, is founded. Marie’s Journal is a work of art in the full sense of the word; it reveals a soul and a personality, it shows the extraordinary gift of its youthful author for writing, painting and music, but it also shows the disequilibrium of an imagination untutored and untrained.
It is doubtful if any Anglo-Saxon will ever parallel the feat of Cellini, of Rousseau, of Bashkirtseff. There is a vein of reticence in the emotional nature of the Anglo-Saxon that the publicity drill can not penetrate, save in exceptional instances and even then the hole is never large enough to permit the implantation of sufficient dynamite to explode both the conscious and the unconscious, and thus reveal the entire personality. The autobiographies of these three did reveal the entire personalities of their authors. Marie Bashkirtseff’s Journal, though fictional in execution, impresses the reader as containing more forced draught, than Cellini’s or Rousseau’s. Marie is romanticism itself and her imagination is the battleground on which there is a perpetual struggle between the real and the fanciful. Early in life she created a picture of herself and her ambition was to live up to it to the end. Reality was not æsthetical for her, and life without the æsthetic element was not tolerable, so she set up a stage and as she was to be the central figure upon it, she must be the most eloquent, the most colourful part, the undeniable centre of attention. She could accomplish her object only by distorting facts and by weaving around herself situations which are highly improbable, but which are self-revelatory despite their distortion.
Her desire was for fame and her cast of mind made the sham, the mediocre, the ordinary things of life as hateful to her as beef gruel is to one whose taste turns naturally and by cultivation to chartreuse. She was equal to her desire, and her mental keenness and her emotional avidity demanded material which would satisfy her. Not always finding it in her surroundings, she created it and made it part of herself.
She displayed mental hunger early in life and sought to find the thing that would appease it. Through her literary interest and tastes, which were the result of thought and not of ready-made judgment, Marie reveals her mental life—a conscious life and yet unconscious. She is forever reaching toward a goal which will fulfil her intellectual hopes, and in the effort of reaching she improved her mind, added to her artistic talent and enlarged her vision. The reader who accompanies her in her journey through life must feel the restlessness of her youth, the sincerity of her demand for death rather than nonentity, the tragedy of her soul too big for her body. The inequalities and contradictions of her character could never be brought into harmony, and finally the soul won. But it is not the Marie of whom one reads that is convincing, but the creator of that Marie—just as any writer, when he shows himself as the force behind his characters—is more real than these characters.
Behind all her stage settings, her literary effects, her hunger for fame and her conscious effort to act always as one would in public, and a carefully chosen public at that—there is the writer tense, at times bored, restless, enthusiastic and depressed, giving a picture of herself, of her own sublimely dissatisfied spirit. The picture is successful in its large lines and in its small details; it reveals a mentality more than an existence, but all Marie’s real life was lived unseen by the eye, and nothing would really be true of her that did not take its source and find its origin in her unconscious self.
Some parts of her Journal are essentially biographical, and they are not the most entertaining parts. She writes with sincerity and quietness of the period which she devoted almost exclusively to work and painting; she was real enough in those days, but we miss the Marie who was neither peaceful nor fulfilled. We still feel, when we see her at rest or when we see her at work before her easel, the bond of æsthetic achievement between the creator and the created, between the writer and the Marie of the Journal; but we miss the charm of the Marie who flirts, dances, goes to balls where she looks like a Greuze shepherdess, who captivates every man and outshines every woman in the world.