THEY wandered forth, linked hand in hand, THEY To watch their father's speeding sail, When lo! they saw it on the sand, A mer-baby-all pale and dead Left stranded by the ebbing tides, With seaweeds wreathed about its head, And silver fins upon its sides. They strove with many an artless wile Its eyes were closed as though in sleep, (His eyes as azure as the wave)— "We will not leave it here alone, But make for it a pretty grave, "Near where our little sisters sleep, Hard by the hedge where violets grow, Where mother often goes to weep They took it to their mother dear, She made for it a pretty bed All velvet-soft, with gathered moss, And set a sea-shell at its head, Because she dared not set a cross. And "Heaven grant, my babes" (said she), "If father sinks beneath the wave, The fish-tailed people of the sea VIOLET FANE. Marie Bashkirtseff, the Russian Painter.—II. N art, says Marie Bashkirtseff, you should not arrange, but choose and discover. Acting upon this theory she did not go in search of her subjects, but allowed the scenes of daily life to play upon her imagination. Some critics, as I have pointed out, reproached her for painting ugly, nay, repulsive scenes in preference to beautiful ones. The defect, if such it be, must be put down to her sur roundings. In her native land, the Ukraine, she would probably have depicted the steppe, with its vast horizon, the white cottage and its clustering cherry-trees, the rustic behind his plough, black-eyed peasant-girls singing by moonlight in concert with the nightingales. But the sights of Paris in the nineteenth century could hardly fail to perplex a sensitive artist to whom the poetry of the street revealed itself one day like an inspiration. The looks, the attitudes, the movement of passers-by, the suggestion of human tragedies intuitively guessed, the faces of mothers with little children, men drinking at a café, a girl leaning on a counter selling funeral wreaths with a smile on her lips, flashed this inner meaning on her; here was life as fit for the brush as when some great painter dips His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse." The first result of these studies was "The Umbrella," the picture of a girl of twelve in a ragged shawl standing impassive, with wind-blown hair, under an old umbrella of Gamp-like dimensions. The stolid face is noticeable for its pathos of unconscious suffering not unlike that we often see in the mute looks of animals, and the sturdy figure is drawn with great vigour and naturalness. "Jean et Jacques," exhibited at the Salon of 1883, is an admirable rendering of a certain sort and condition of boyhood. The elder, sucking a leaf between his lips as a make-belief cigarette, his cap stuck rakishly on the back of his head, and umbrella tucked under the right Half a dozen gamins, grouped in a dreary street partly blocked up by a wooden paling-nothing more. But the heads, the expressions, the attitudes of these lads are masterpieces of realism in art. There they stand with heads close together eagerly discussing some boyish game or trick, full of that "living life" which was one of Marie Bashkirtseff's favourite expressions, and which is perhaps the most characteristic quality of her personality and genius. These thin-legged, poorly-fed, badly-clothed boys, with their sharp wits and shifty looks, are just a piece of city life still warm and breathing translated into the language of art. The naturalness of the composition, the sincerity of the general effect, the truth and energy of the execution, the sense it gives us of latent force instinctively assimilating and combining the pictorial elements of common life-all this makes the "Meeting" a remarkable work on the part of a young girl of twentytwo who had only begun her life as an artist five years before. We might infer from the qualities which distinguish her that Mlle. Bashkirtseff excelled as a portrait painter. She has done nothing more successful and admirable than the likeness of Mme. P. B., her sister-inlaw, of Mlle. Dinah, of Prince Bojidar Karageorgewitch, of Mlle. de Canrobert; the two last-mentioned portraits, that of the Servian prince and of the young French lady, strike one as unmistakable renderings of individuality, the inner character revealing itself with extraordinary fidelity in every line and muscle of face and figure. original. She was also attracted to landscape painting, and one of her last and most beautiful compositions is a picture of spring at Sèvres, wherein she wished to express by line and colour the rush of the sap, the delicate modulations of green, the white and red apple blossoms, the mysterious fermentation of awakening life, all culminating in the figure of a peasant-girl half asleep on the grassy path under a fruit-tree. Her head pillowed on the left hand, the right arm hanging down in the abandon of complete repose, down to the feet encased in clumsy shoes, all express the sweet languor induced by the intoxicating air of spring.* Just as we are going to press we learn that one of Marie Bashkirtseff's pictures has, for the first time, found its way to Russia; and that, too, in a manner most flattering to the young artist. For it has been bought by the cousin of the Czar, the Grand by comparison. She describes how at the piano she would gradually glide into unknown combinations of sound-enchantments of music such as might be heard in an opium-eater's dreams. Time was too limited to reproduce the beauty of things. "No one," she exclaims, "no one, it seems to me, loves everything as much as I do. The fine arts, music, books, men and women, dress, luxury, noise, silence, laughter and tears, love, melancholy, humbug, the snow, the sunshine; all the seasons, all atmospheric effects, the silent plains of Russia, and the mountains round Naples; the frost in winter, autumn Duke Constantine Constantinowitsch, not only a distinguished connoisseur, but something of a painter and poet himself. The Grand Duke has made choice of the picture called "Spring," painted at Sèvres in April, 1884; and it is now to be found in his gallery at the Marble Palace, which contains several works of the highest merit. rains, spring and its caprices, calm summer days, and beautiful nights bright with stars. I would see, possess, love it all; be absorbed in it and die, since I must, in two years or in thirty, die happily in analysing this final mystery, this end of all, or this divine beginning." Alas! she lived so quickly that she might well say, "I am like a candle cut in four, and burning at all ends." She herself had often felt that such a nature as hers could not last, and she had frequently coquetted with Death. But she started back in horror when she felt his touch laid on her young glowing life, just when the opulent gifts of her nature were fully unfolding themselves. Yet she was the despair of her doctors, who called her the most insubordinate, the most exasperating of patients. For in spite of cold and fever, of repeated attacks of chronic bronchitis and laryngitis and of impending consumption, she persistently disregarded the simplest laws of health. The fits of recurrent deafness tried Mlle. Bashkirtseff far more than the illness by which it was produced. "Such an affliction may be bearable to an old man or woman," she cries, "but can one get used to such misery in the hey-day of youth when one is madly in love with life?" Considering Marie Bashkirtseff's thirst for existence in its thousandfold manifestations, it was unlikely that love, the most powerful of all, should not be included in her experience. She is greatly preoccupied with it in her diary, and often negatively, denying that she ever can have experienced or is likely to experience that passion in its deepest sense. But these protests have a suspicious ring, accompanying as they do the name of an artist who was always in her thoughts during the last year or two of her life. However it would be indiscreet, if not impertinent, to try and discover how much of the girl's boundless admiration for Bastien-Lepage was due to his work, how much to his personality. She herself would perhaps have been puzzled to distinguish between the two. "He is not only a painter," she says, "he is a poet, a psychologist, a metaphysician, a creator. No one has ever dived more deeply into the realities of life than BastienLepage; nothing is more lofty, more admirably human than his work. . . . The idea of his coming made me so nervous that I could do nothing. It is absurd to be so impressionable. He is excessively intelligent, but not so brilliant in conversation as Saint Marceaux. was tongue-tied, could not say a single good thing, and when he started an interesting topic, could hardly reply or follow his terse phrases, as quintessential as his painting." In the reaction from this mood the proud girl takes herself to task for her exaggerated enthusiasm, only due, as she says, to a master genius such as Wagner. She even asserts that there is a natural antagonism between the painter and herself, and that his presence acts like a check upon her. This does not prevent her from entertaining the idea of going to the opera so that it may reach Bastien's ears that she has looked beautiful. But to what end, she asks, laughing at herself, since it would be too absurd to care for him personally? I But when sickness had laid them low an invincible attraction drew these two beings together. Pride, shyness, reserve vanished and seemed to leave them clinging to each other with the unquestioning trust of children left alone in a dark night. Bastien-Lepage fell ill first, and Marie went almost daily with her mother to sit with him. These visits proved so delightful that she began to dread his recovery, which would put a stop to them. How touching is the description of one of their many meetings at this date which I quote from her diary! "The great painter is better. He takes his beef-tea and his egg before us; his mother gets it all herself to prevent the servants from entering. She waits upon him and he takes it all quite naturally, and accepts our service without remonstrances. He is surprised at nothing. In speaking of his looks some one remarks he should have his hair cut, whereupon mamma says that she used to cut her boy's hair when he was little, and her father's when he was ill. Would you like me to cut yours?' she asks, 'I bring luck.' "We laugh, he consents, and mamma begins the operation. She performs it to every one's satisfaction. I wanted also to have my clipping, but the creature said that I was sure to make a mess of it, and I revenge myself by comparing him to Samson and Delilah, my next picture. He laughs at this, which encourages his brother to propose that he shall also have his beard cut. Émile's hands tremble a little as she goes to work slowly as if performing some religious ceremony. Bastien's features look quite changed when it is done. He no longer looks ill and changed. His mother utters little cries of joy "I see him again, my boy, my dear little boy, dear child!' "What a good woman she is, how simple, how kind, how full of devotion to the great man who is her son!" Though much of Mlle. Bashkirtseff's time was spent by her in a sick-room, she by no means neglected her painting. She had begun her studies for the picture to be called "The Street.” Speaking of it in her diary she says: "An historical picture! A subject of everyday life would be worth as much, the merit of which should consist in the subtler study of character. A seat on the Boulevard des Batignolles, or even Avenue Wagram, have you noticed that? With the view of the passers-by? All that that bench contains? What novels! what dramas! The outcast with his furtive look, one arm thrown across the rail, the other resting on his knee. The woman with the child on her lap. The grocer's boy who has sat down to enjoy his little daily paper. The workman asleep, the philosopher or the desperate man gloomily smoking. I see too many things, perhaps. And yet look well about five to six in the evening. There are such different moments in life! Sometimes one really sees nothing in it at all, and sometimes . . . I begin to love everything again! everything around me! It is like a rising tide, and yet there is nothing to be glad of. Well, never mind, even from my decease I shall manage to extract some exquisite and delightful sensations." More touching, inore terrible than the saddest chapter of some thrilling romance are the instinctive struggles of this gifted creature to win the leaf from fame's laurel crown before fate shall have overwhelmed her. "To die," she cries in agony, "oh, my God, to die without leaving anything behind me! To die like a dog, as a hundred thousand women have died whose name is hardly graved on their tombstone!" And in spite of pain and weariness she went on with her studies for her picture of "La Rue." At five o'clock one misty autumn morning, so as to avoid the traffic of the day, she went in a cab to make sketches for the scene she wanted to paint. There she would remain for several hours, conscious all the while that a chill taken, in the state her lungs were in, must prove mortal. "But," she exclaims impatiently, "I may take cold in going for a walk; people who don't paint die all the same. Enfin. In spite of her strong will she was often forced to leave off work in the middle of the day, overcome by irresistible drowsiness. But when her design was fairly begun, the photographs of the street taken, the canvas placed on the easel, everything prepared, in short, she says pathetically, "All is ready. It is only I who am missing." Indeed, she was very ill. Much worse than Bastien, who came in his turn to sit with and cheer her. Too weak himself to walk, he was carried to her room on the shoulders of his devoted brother. There, reclining on couches or propped up in easy chairs, the two young invalids would be near each other and still eagerly discuss their art. One day Bastien had come instead of taking advantage of the beautiful weather to go for a drive in the Bois de Boulogne. Marie Bashkirtseff lay on the sofa in a flowing gown of ivory plush with billows of soft lace intermingling every tint of white. The artist's grey eyes, "eyes which had seen Joan of Arc" as she expressed it, dilated as he looked at her. All the passion of the painter to hold fast what is beautiful flickered up for the last time as he saw the deep-set sombre eyes, the sensitive nostrils that had the quiver of a horse of the steppes, that glitter of golden hair above the pale and ardent face. "Oh," he exclaimed, moved by a sudden impulse, "oh, if I could only paint!" "And I!" she adds. "Finis the picture of the year." The pen fell from Marie's nerveless fingers. Here the diary breaks off abruptly, and the life faithfully recorded therein ended a few days afterwards on the 31st of October, 1884. October, 1884. She had always lived by steam, and she died in the same breathless manner, still at an age when, as she said, "C we find an intoxication in death itself." Shortly before this, Marie Bashkirtseff had recorded in her diary: "I dreamed that a coffin had been placed on my bed, and they told me it contained the body of a young girl. And the coffin shone like phosphorus in the night." Even thus through the night of death shines the sleepless soul of this marvellous girl, filling us at once with sorrow and hope-sorrow for her who was fated to perish as one among the inheritors of unfulfilled renown; hope of what others of our sex may accomplish in the near future, who start more completely equipped for the struggle of existence entailed by all high achievement. For Marie Bashkirtseff truly said: "Work is a fatiguing process, dreaded yet loved by fine and powerful natures, who frequently succumb to it. For if the artist do not fling himself into his work as unhesitatingly as Curtius did into the chasm at his feet, or as the soldier leaps into the breach, and if when there he does not toil with the energy of the miner beneath the earth, if, in short, he stays to consider difficulties instead of overcoming them like those lovers of fairyland who triumph over ever-fresh difficulties to win their princesses-his work will remain unfinished and die still-born in the studio. The general public may not understand, but those who are of us will find in these lines a stimulating lesson, a comfort and an encouragement." MATHILDE BLIND. [I am indebted to M. Ludovic Baschet, of Paris, for his kindness in lending me three drawings ("The Umbrella," "A Statuette," and "Spring") used in the course of Miss Blind's article.—ED.] |