Upon the cover of the English translation of this young artist’s
journal is displayed Gladstone’s judgment that it is “a book without a
parallel.” That is not very high praise, certainly; it may be said of
many books which the judicious would “willingly let die”; and in this
case the judicious will hope that a parallel work may be long denied to
the taste that craves it. The book from cover to cover is distinctly
unwholesome. It has the merit of candor; its frankness is appalling.
Yet one can not help suspecting the quality of that frankness. Did
this young girl, who began at twelve, and for a dozen years—almost
to the day of her death—poured into her journal her heterogenous and
undigested thoughts, fancies and feelings with a view to publication
and a hope of fame as a result of it—did she after all make as honest
a record as she doubtless supposed herself to be doing? It will hardly
seem so to one who has written much for publication.
Such a one may justly enough distrust, although he can not altogether
reject, the evidences of the text, which are necessarily studied and
interpreted in the light of the text itself; but knowing something
of the conditions of literary composition he will be slow to believe
that the young diarist could at the same time remember and forget that
she was writing to be read. Nor will it seem to him that his doubt if
she put down all that came into her head is too hardy an assumption
of knowledge of how Russian young women think and feel. Something
doubtless must be allowed for individual character and disposition
in this case as in another, but then, too, one must be permitted to
remember that even a Russian young woman of more or less consuming
self-consciousness and sex-consciousness is merely human, belonging
to the race which daily thanks its Maker for not putting windows in
breasts. Even a Russian maiden with a private method of estimating
her intellectual importance who should write _all_ her thoughts would
probably be invited to stay her steps toward the Temple of Fame long
enough to make acquaintance of the police.
But if the diarist has not written down all her thoughts and
feelings, how can the reader be quite sure that she has accurately
reported those of them that she professes to give?—how that they are
not afterthoughts, some of them, at least, evolved in the process of
revision for the press? I do not know if upon this point there is any
other than internal evidence and the probabilities; my reading in the
somewhat raw and raucous literature of the subject has not been quite
exhaustive. The internal evidence and the probabilities point pretty
plainly to revision of the text, for which the reader might have been
more grateful if it had been more thoroughly made. Much of the book, in
truth, might advantageously have been revised out of existence—much of
what is left, I mean.
Marie Bashkirtseff was born in 1860 and died of consumption in 1884.
She was given a good education and knew some of the advantages of
travel. Having a love of art—which she mistook for ability to produce
works of art—she became a painter and by dint of study under the
spur of vanity performed some fairly creditable work which, while
the fashion of reading her journal was “on,” commanded fair prices
and brought gladness and sunshine into the homes of good Americans
of long purses and short schooling. She was perhaps rather more than
less successful in painting than in expounding the excellences of the
paintings of others. In such criticism as she gives us in her journal
one does not detect any understanding. “This is not art; it is Nature
herself”; “the face is real; it is flesh and blood”—such judgments
as these are sprinkled all through the book, recalling the dear old
familiar jargon of the “dramatic critics” of the newspapers; “Jonesmith
was no longer himself but Hamlet”; “Brown-Robinson completely
identified himself with his rôle, and it was Julius Cæsar himself that
we saw before our eyes.” The crudest and most meaningless form of art
criticism is to declare the representation the thing represented, and
poor Marie Bashkirtseff seldom goes further in accounting for her
adoration of the works of such masters as Bastien-Lepage, Corot and
Duran.
There must have been something engaging in the girl, for she seems
to have acquired the friendship of such men, and to have retained
it. Her account of those last days when she and Bastien-Lepage—each
with a leg in the grave, like a caught fox dragging its trap—caused
themselves to be brought together to compare the ravages of their
disorders in silence is pathetic with the pathos of the morgue. One
would rather have been spared it. It leaves a bad taste in the memory
and fitly concludes a book which is morbid, hysterical and unpleasant
beyond anything of its kind in literature—“a book without a parallel.”
It enforces and illustrates a useful truth: that when suffering from
internal disorders one can not afford to turn oneself inside out as an
exercise in literary calisthenics.
1887.