naturalism--culminated in Amalie Skram, this off-shoot of the Gallic
race. Compared with her, Fru Leffler and Fru Ahlgren are good little
girls, in their best Sunday pinafores; Frau von Ebner is a maiden aunt,
and George Eliot a moralizing old maid. All these women came of what is
called “good family,” and had been trained from their earliest infancy
to live as became their position. All the other women whom I have
sketched in this book belonged to the upper classes, and like all women
of their class, they only saw one little side of life, and therefore
their contribution to literature is worthless as long as it tries to
be objective. Naturalism is the form of artistic expression best suited
to the lower classes, and to persons of primitive culture, who do not
feel strong enough to eliminate the outside world, but reflect it as
water reflects an image. They feel themselves in sympathy with their
surroundings, but they have not the refined instincts and awakened
antipathies which belong to isolation. Where the character differs from
the individual consciousness, they do not think of sacrificing their
soul as a highway for the multitude, any more than their body--_à la_
Lucie--to the _commune bonum_.
V
_A Young Girl’s Tragedy_
I
It seldom happens that a genuine confession penetrates through the
intense loneliness in which a person’s inner life is lived; with
women, hardly ever. It is rare when a woman leaves any written record
of her life at all, and still more rare when her record is of any
psychological interest; it is generally better calculated to lead one
astray. A woman is not like a man, who writes about himself from a
desire to understand himself. Even celebrated women, who are scarce,
and candid women, who are perhaps scarcer still, have no particular
desire to understand themselves. In fact, I have never known a woman
who did not wish, either from a good or bad motive, to remain a _terra
incognita_ to her own self, if only to preserve the instinctive
element in her actions, which might otherwise have perished. There
is also another reason for this reticence. A woman does not live the
inner life to anything like the same extent as a man; her instincts,
occupations, needs, and interests lie outside herself; whereas a man
is more self-contained,--his entire being is developed from within.
Woman is spiritually and mentally an empty vessel, which must be
replenished by man. She knows nothing about herself, or about man, or
about the great silent inflexibility of life, until it is revealed to
her consciousness by man. But the woman of our time--and many of the
best women, too--manifests a desire to dispense with man altogether;
and she whom Nature has destined to be a vessel out of which substance
shall grow, wishes to be a substance in herself, out of which nothing
can grow, because the substance wherewith she endeavors to fill the
void is unorganical, rational, and foreign to her nature. The mistake
is tragic, but there is nothing impressive about it; it is merely
hopeless, chaotic, heart-rending; and because it is chaotic in itself,
it creates a void for the woman who falls into it,--a void in which she
perishes. The more talented she is, and the more womanly, the worse
it will be for her. And yet it is generally the talented woman who is
most strongly attracted by it, and man remains to her both inwardly and
outwardly as much a stranger as though he were a being from another
planet. What can be the origin of this devastating principle at the
core of woman’s being? Among all the learned and celebrated women whom
I have attempted to depict in this book, there is not one in whom
it has not shown itself, either in a lasting or spasmodic form; but
neither is there one who did not suffer acutely on account of it. How
did it begin in these women, who were so richly endowed, whose natures
were so productive? Was it developed by means of outward suggestion? Or
does it mark a state of transition between old and new? It is possible
that it is not found only amongst women, but that there is something
corresponding to it in men. I shall return to this subject afterwards.
Of all the books which women have written about themselves, I
only know of two that are written with the unalloyed freshness of
spontaneity, and which are therefore genuine to a degree that would
be otherwise impossible; these are Mrs. Carlyle’s diary and Marie
Bashkirtseff’s journal. The contents of both books consist chiefly
of the cries of despair which issue from the mouths of two women who
feel themselves captured and ill-used, and are consequently tired
of life, though they do not know the reason nor who is to blame.
Mrs. Carlyle was an imbittered woman, unwilling to complain of, yet
always indirectly abusing, that disagreeable oddity, Thomas Carlyle;
he was an egotistical boor, who required everything and gave nothing
in return, and was certainly not the right husband for her. The two
books stand side by side: one is the writing of a discontented woman
of a much older generation, whose long-suppressed wrath, annoyance,
and indignation, combined with bodily and spiritual thirst, resulted
in a nervous disease; while the other is far more extraordinary and
difficult to comprehend, as it is the writing of a young girl who is
rich, talented, and pretty, and who belongs entirely to the present
generation of women, since she would be only thirty-four years of age
were she living now. Both books are confessions _d’outre tombe_, and
they are both the result of a desire to be silent,--a desire not often
felt by women.
Mrs. Carlyle maintained this silence all her life long towards her
husband, and it was not until after her death that he discovered, by
means of the diary, how little he had succeeded in making her happy;
his surprise was great. Marie Bashkirtseff also maintained silence
towards an all too affectionate family, consisting of women only.
They both possessed a strength of mind which is rare in women, and
it was owing to this that they did not confide their troubles to any
one; theirs was the pride that belongs to solitude, for they had
neither women friends nor confidants, and it was only when they were
no longer able to contain themselves that some of their best and worst
feelings overflowed into these books,--in Mrs. Carlyle’s case in a few
bittersweet drops, but with Marie Bashkirtseff they were more like a
foaming torrent filled with thundering whirlpools, with here and there
a few quiet places where the stream widens out into a beautiful clear
lake, and thin willows bend over the still waters. The one felt that
she had not developed into a full-grown woman by her marriage; the
other was a young girl who never grew to be a woman; but both are less
interesting on account of what they tell us than on account of that
which they have not known how to tell. Marie Bashkirtseff’s book, which
in the course of ten years has run through almost as many editions, is
especially interesting in the latter respect, and is a perfect gold
mine for all that has to do with the psychology of young girls.
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.