Yet, looking back into history, how little is known of the great men and women who decorate its pages!
We know where Jean d’Arc was born; we know she saved the French armies from defeat; but never has it been written where she went to school, and little or nothing is known of her family, of the mother who produced her, of the father who brought her up a heroine. Oliver Cromwell had a wife, yet what do we know of her? George Washington was one of the greatest warriors of his day, yet we know little of the private life of the Father of America.
I have always felt this lack of personal knowledge of our own great ones. Only recently have biographers realised the true scope of their task. Until the intimate story of Victor Hugo was published, some few years ago, how little we knew of the man who wrote three times as many words as there are in the Holy Bible!
This is somewhat of a digression, but one justified perhaps by the considerations involved. If the great and successful deeds of men of genius make entrancing reading, how much more absorbing can be the tale of their spiritual struggles and “mental fights”?
And with her graduation from the art school—she was entitled to enter the Beaux Arts but never did—the real struggles of the lonely, temperamental child who was Sarah Bernhardt began. Though she did not know it, a war of impulses was going on within her soul.
There was her great, her undoubted talent for painting and sculpture, which her teachers were convinced would soon make her a great personage. There was her budding dramatic talent which she was only beginning to suspect. There was her fundamental morbidity, that would plunge her into moods during which she dreamed of and longed for death. There was the craving of her turbulent nature for the peace and tranquillity investing the life of a cloistered nun. There was her inherited unmorality—I know of no other word with which to describe it—which was for ever tugging at her and endeavouring to drag her down into the free-and-easy existence led by her mother. There was her maiden heart, starving for affection. There was her delicate health, which made prolonged effort impossible. And lastly there was her iron will, inherited probably from her father.
A phrase in one of the pathetic writings of Marie Bashkirtseff comes to my mind: “At the age of fourteen I was the only person remaining in the world; for it was a world of my own that could be penetrated only by understanding, and no one, not even my mother, understood.”
How could the frivolous nature of Julie Van Hard have comprehended the deep waters that ran within the soul of her unwanted child?
Julie would be enormously vexed at Sarah’s seeming dullness. When she had said something particularly witty—and Julie was witty according to the humorous standards of the period—and Sarah did not smile, Julie would cry: “Oh, you stupid child! To think that you are mine...!”
Not even Sarah’s achievements in the school of painting could convince Julie that she had not given birth to a child of inferior mentality. For what success Sarah had with her pictures, Julie took credit to herself.