Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Thursday, 31 August 1882

I wept over the last pages of the book — the death of the great, the sublime Maryx.
Now I should get someone to read it — I wish the little American were here, or Tony. I cannot keep my impressions to myself, I must... But that is beside the point. I am drawing my Magdalene; I have a model who is admirable for it — besides, I have seen the face I need, three years ago, and this woman has exactly those features and even that intense, terrible, desperate expression. I believe this book has dealt the final blow; I dream of nothing but clay and marble — yet I have this painting to do and I will struggle on. Only I have in my head so many beautiful things to do — in sculpture, needless to say. What charms me in painting is life, is modernity, the movement of the things one sees — but how to say it?... Apart from being desperately difficult, almost impossible... it does not move one! Nothing in painting has touched me as Bastien-Lepage's Joan of Arc has — for there is in it that indefinable something mysterious, extraordinary... A feeling understood by the artist, the perfect, intense expression of a great inspiration.
In short... He went and found there something great, human, inspired and divine all at once — what it truly was, in essence, and what no one had understood before him.
What has been done with the Joan of Arcs! Good heavens, my mother's cross! It is like the Ophelias and the Marguerites! He is working on an Ophelia — it will be divine, I am sure. As for Marguerites — humble me — I have a plan to do one... For there is a moment to catch... As with Joan of Arc... It is the moment when the girl — not the opera Marguerite in her fine cashmere gown, but the village girl, or small-town girl, simple, [Crossed out: illegible] do not laugh, human — if you understand you do not laugh — when the girl, untroubled [sic] until then, returns to her garden after meeting Faust and stops, eyes half downcast, looking into the distance, half astonished, half smiling, half pensive, feeling stir within her something new, unknown, charming and sad... Those hands barely hold the prayer-book, on the verge of letting it fall.
For this I shall go to a small German town and do it next summer... But good heavens, what have I done this whole summer? Nothing! Besides, I could perhaps not execute it just now, and Marguerite can wait still.
But my painting... It is so beautiful, so sublime to do. Would it not be better to wait another year to have better command of the means of execution...
Oh, I am mad — I should be learning grammar and I think of nothing but writing poems.
I ought to go to the studio every day until three o'clock and then model for three or four hours.
That is the truth of the matter. And why do I not do it? Why is it so in this world?...
It is true that beings less capable than I permit themselves to paint pictures — but they are those who have arrived and can go no further; I am not strong but I can become so; and I have the consolation of being at the beginning, for after all I have not been working in all for five years. And Robert-Fleury the father spent four years drawing before touching colour, and how many have spent two years on plaster and years on drawing. And I draw well, and I am beginning to paint not badly, and there is in what I do some life — it speaks, it looks, it lives... Well then? Nothing — work... Only I do not see my greatness in painting... That is to say...
I am troubled, I no longer know... I am troubled...
O madwoman! Above all one must know one's craft — for if... To begin with I am not explaining myself well; I said that thinkers in painting are eighth-rate technicians... Perhaps... But the thought, the beauty and the philosophy of painting lie in the execution, in the exact comprehension of life... To seize life with tones that sing — and all true tones sing. Anyone or anything exactly reproduced is a masterpiece, because it is life itself; and then there are in addition the great inspirations, like Bastien's Joan of Arc — but otherwise a simple portrait can be a model work, for it is a human being, living, with everything that moves it, everything it feels, its eyes, its flesh... I am not making myself understood...
As for sculpture — do you suppose there is no execution in it? Well, hardly — there is more; there is creation... Yes, the deceptions of line and colour are wretched preoccupations; [Crossed out: one] executes, one is skilled in sculpture — but one is a different kind of good: one creates. It is truth — the real, entire, genuine being to which, if you are an artist, you first communicate life! A thought, an intimate or mysterious or grand meaning, if you are moved and if you have the sacred fire. There is material labour in both — but in sculpture it is simpler, nobler, more... honest, if I may put it so... In short, one can put into it that spark, that supreme mystery of something that is in you, that is Divine and that I cannot put into words... In sum, from whatever angle one looks at it.