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.”
III
Marie Bashkirtseff was not born an artist, with that stern predestination with which nature determines the career of persons with one talent. If her voice had not been destroyed during its development, she would in all probability have become one of those great singers whose charm lies not only in the outward voice, but in the indescribable fascination of a deep, strong individuality. Her journal, especially the first part, reveals an authoress with a rare psychological intuition, an understanding of human nature, a deep sympathy, a mastery of expression, and an early-matured genius, which are unsurpassed even among Russians, well known for the richness of their temperament. If this young woman, whose short life was consumed by a craving for love, had gained the experience she so greatly desired, where would the woman be found who could have borne comparison with her? Who like her was created to receive the knowledge whereby a woman is first revealed to herself, and is developed into the being who is earth’s ruler,—the great mother, on whose lap man reposes, and from whence he goes forth into the world? All that she had was original; it was all of the best material that the earth has to give; and therein lay the mystery of her downfall.
The backbone of her nature was that indomitable pride whereby a great character reveals the consciousness of its own importance. The lioness cannot wed with the house-dog. The same instinct which, in animals, marks the boundary line between the different species, determines in a still higher degree—higher far than the materialistic wisdom of our schools will allow—the attractions and antipathies of love. The iron law which compels healthy natures to preserve their distinction, prevented this girl from sinking to the level of the men of her own class, amongst whom she might have found some to love her. She tried it more than once, but it did not answer. Her exceptionable nature required a husband superior to herself. One or two such men might be found nowadays, who not only as productive minds, but also in the subtle charm of their manly characters, would have been the born masters of an enchantress such as Marie Bashkirtseff. But these men are not to be met with in the drawing-rooms and studios of Paris, nor yet in the Bois de Boulogne; not in St. Petersburg either, nor on the family estates of Little Russia, and she never got to know them.
This woman, who was born to become a great singer, a great painter, a great writer, born—before all else—to be loved with a great love, never learned to know love, and died without being great in any way, because she was enchained all her life long to that which was greater than all her possibilities,—a young girl’s infinite ignorance.
In spite of all the knowledge that she had acquired, in spite of all the probings of her sensitive nerves and sharp intellect, she remained always and in everything incomplete. It is one of the results of the incompleteness of which unmarried women are the victims, that they seek everywhere the complete, the perfected in man,—i.e., they seek for that which is only to be found in men who are growing old, and have nothing more to give; in whom there are no slumbering ambitions, and no hidden aspirations. She must have passed by, unheeding, many a young genius, who perhaps went to an inferior woman to satisfy the passion which might have proved to both of them an endless source of blessedness, health, and regeneration. She must have felt many a look rest upon her, arousing sensations which, to her white soul, were a mystery. For this girl, who had drunk deeply of the literature of her time, and who knew theoretically everything that there was to know, was yet unspoiled by a single trace of premature knowledge. The pages of her journal are innocent from beginning to end,—an innocence that is stupid while it is touchingly intact. Marie Bashkirtseff’s journal is not merely a contribution to the psychology of girls, it is a young girl’s psychology in the widest, most typical sense,—the psychology of the unmarried state, bequeathed by one who is ignorant to those who know, as her only memorial upon earth, but a memorial that will last longer than marble or bronze. She died young, but she had no wish to die. She took twelve years to write this book, and she wrote it on her travels, in the midst of her pleasures, in the midst of her work, in the despair of her loneliness, and in her fear when she shrank from death; she wrote it during sleepless nights, and on days passed in blessed abstraction in the beauties of nature. She always addressed the unknown hearers who were ever present to her imagination; she spoke to them so that, in case she should die young, she might live upon earth in the memory of the strangers who happened to read her journal. A “human document,” by a young girl, she thought, must be of sufficient interest not to be forgotten, and she promises to tell us everything connected with her little person. “All, all,—not only all her thoughts, but she will not even hide what is laughable and disadvantageous to herself; for what would be the object of a book like this, unless it told the truth absolutely, accurately, and without concealment?”