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. A POET AND HIS POEM (_From “The Cosmopolitan” Magazine, September, 1907_)