My Contemporaries In Fiction Part 2

Bar Meredith, who is quite _sui generis_, and Rudyard Kipling, whose characteristics will be dealt with later on, Hall Caine has less of the mark of his predecessors upon him than any of his contemporaries. His work has grown out of himself. He has had a word to speak, and he has spoken it So far he has increased in strength with every book, has grown more master of his own conceptions and himself. In 'A Son of Hagar' he forced his story upon his reader in defiance of possibility; but no such blot on construction as the continued presence of a London cad in the person of a c.u.mberland man in the latter's native village has been seen in his more recent work. It is worth notice that even in this portion of his story the narrator shows no remotest sign of a disposition to crane at any of the numerous fences which lie before him. He takes them all in his stride, and the reader goes with him, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, protesting perhaps, but helplessly whirled along in the author's grip. This faculty of daring is sometimes an essential to the story-teller's art, and Hall Caine has it in abundance, not merely in the occasional facing of improbabilities, but in that much loftier and more admirable form where it enables him to confront the cataclysmic emotions of the mind, and to carry to a legitimate conclusion scenes of tremendous conception and of no less tremendous difficulty. In the minds of vulgar and careless readers the defects which are hardest to separate from this form of art are so many added beauties, just as the over-emphasis of a tragic actor is the very thing which best appeals to the gallery. But Hall Caine does not address himself to the vulgar and the careless. He is eager to leave his reputation to his peers and to posterity. With every year of ripening power his capacity for self-restraint has grown. When it has come of age in him, there will be nothing but fair and well. There has been no man in his time who has shown a deeper reverence for his work, or a more consistent increase in his command of it. His method is large and n.o.ble, in accord with his design. He has given us the right to look to him for better and better and always better, and it is only in the direction indicated that he can mend.

V.--LIVING MASTERS--RUDYARD KIPLING

I was 'up in the back blocks' of Victoria when I lighted upon some stray copies of the weekly edition of the 'Melbourne Argus,' and became aware of the fact that we had amongst us a new teller of stories, with a voice and a physiognomy of his own. The 'Argus' had copied from some journal in far-away India a poem and a story, each unsigned, and each bearing evidence of the same hand. A year later I came back to England, and found everybody talking about 'The Man from Nowhere,' who had just taken London by storm. Rudyard Kipling's best work was not as yet before us, but there was no room for doubt as to the newcomer's quality, and the only question possible was as to whether he had come to stay. That inquiry has now been satisfactorily answered. The new man of half a dozen years ago is one of England's properties, and not the one of which she is least proud. About midway in his brief and brilliant career, counting from his emergence until now, people began to be afraid that he had emptied his sack. Partly because he had lost the spell of novelty, and partly because he did too much to be always at his best, there came a time when we thought we saw him sinking to a place with the ruck.

Sudden popularity carries with it many grave dangers, but the gravest of all is the temptation to produce careless and unripe work. To this temptation the new man succ.u.mbed, but only for awhile. Like the candid friend of Lady Clara Vere de Vere, he saw the snare, and he retired. But at the time when, instead of handing out the bread of life in generous slices, he took to giving us the sweepings of the basket I wrote a set of verses, which I called 'The Ballad of the Rudyard Kipling.' I never printed it, because by the time it was fairly written.

Kipling's work had not merely gone back to its first quality, but seemed brighter and finer than before, and the poor thing, such as it was, was in the nature of a satire. I venture to write down the opening verses here, since they express the feeling with which at least one writer of English fiction hailed his first appearance.

I Oh, we be master mariners that sail the snorting seas, Right red-plucked mariners that dare the peril of the storm But we be old and worn and cold, and far from rest and ease, And only love and brotherhood can keep our tired hearts warm.

II We were a n.o.ble company in days not long gone by, And mighty craft our elders sailed to every earthly sh.o.r.e.

Men of wors.h.i.+p, and dauntless soul, that feared nor sea nor sky; But G.o.d's hand stilled the valiant hearts, and the masters sail no more.

III And for awhile, though we be brave and handy of our trade, We sailed no master-galleon, but wrought in c.o.c.kboats all, Slight craft and manned with a single hand; yet many a trip we made, Though we but crept from port to port with cargoes scant and small.

IV But on a day of wonder came as.h.i.+ning on the deep, A royal Splendour, proud with sail, and generous roar of guns; She pa.s.sed us, and we gaped and stared.

Her lofty bows were steep, And deep she rode the waters deep with a weight of countless tons.

V Her rig was strange, her name unknown, she came we knew not whence, But on the flag at her peak we read 'The Drums of the Fore and Aft.'

And--I speak for one--my breath came thick and my pulse beat hard and tense, And we cheered with tears of splendid joy at sight of the splendid craft.

VI She swept us by; her master came and spoke us from the side; We knew our elder, though his beard was scarce yet fully grown; She spanked for home through churning foam with favouring wind and tide, And while we hailed like mad he sailed, a King, to take his own.

Some men are born rich, and some are born lucky, and some are born both to luck and riches. Kipling is one of the last. Nature endowed him with uncommon qualities, and circ.u.mstances sent him into the sphere in which those qualities could be most fortunately exercised. It seems strange that the great store of treasure which he opened to us should have been unhandled and unknown so long. His Indian pictures came like a revelation. It is always so when a man of real genius dawns upon the world. It was so when Scott showed men and women the jewelled mines of romance which lay in the highways and byways of homely Scotland. It was so when d.i.c.kens bared the c.o.c.kney hearth to the sight of all men. Meg Merrilies, and Rob Roy, and Edie Ochiltree were all _there_--the wild, the romantic, the humorous were at the doors of millions of men before Scott saw them. In London, in the early days of d.i.c.kens, there were hordes of capable writers eager for something new. Not one of them saw Bob Cratchit, or f.a.gin, or the Marchioness until d.i.c.kens saw them. So, in India, the British Tommy had lived for many a year, and the jungle beasts were there, and Government House and its society were there, and capable men went up and down the land, sensible of its charm, its wonder, its remoteness from themselves, and yet not discerning truly.

At last, when a thousand feet have trodden upon a thing of inestimable price, there comes along a newspaper man, doing the driest kind of hackwork, bound to a drudgery as stale and dreary as any in life, and he sees what no man has ever seen before him, though it has been plain in view for years and years. Through scorn and discouragement and contumely he polishes his treasure, in painful hours s.n.a.t.c.hed from distasteful labour, and at last he brings it where it can be seen and known for what it is.*

* I learn, on the very best authority, that Mr. Kipling regards his early and unrecognised days in India with much kindlier eyes than this would seem to indicate. It may be thought that, knowing this, I should amend or delete the pa.s.sage. I let it stand, however, with this note as a qualification, because I think it possible that he, like the rest of us, looks on the past through tinted spectacles.

It is only genius which owns the seeing eye. There are in Great Britain to-day a dozen writers of fine faculty, trained to observe, trained to give to observation its fullest artistic result; and they are all panting for something new. The something new is under their noses. They see it and touch it every day. If I could find it, my name in a year would sail over the seas, and I should be a great personage. But I shall not find it. None of the men who are now known will find it. It is always the unknown man who makes that sort of discovery. He will come in time, and when he comes we shall wonder and admire, and say: 'How new!

How true!' Why, in that very matter of Tommy Atkins, whose manifold portraits have done as much as anything to endear Kipling to the English people--it is known to many that in my own foolish youth I enlisted in the Army. I lived with Tommy. I fought and chaffed and drank and drilled and marched, and went 'up tahn' with him, and did pack drill, and had C.B. with him. I turned novel-writer afterwards, and never so much as dreamt of giving Tommy a place in my pages. Then comes Kipling, not knowing him one-half as well in one way, and knowing him a thousand times better in another way, and makes a n.o.ble and beautiful and merited reputation out of him; shows the man inside the military toggery, and makes us laugh and cry, and exult with feeling. There was a man in New South Wales--a shepherd--who went raving mad when he learnt that the heavy black dust which spoilt his pasture was tin, and that he had waked and slept for years without discovering the gigantic fortune which was all about him. I will not go mad, if I can help it, but I do think it rather hard lines on me that I hadn't the simple genius to see what lay in Tommy.

A good deal has been said of the occasional coa.r.s.eness of Kipling's pages. There are readers who find it offensive, and they have every right to the expression of their feelings. I confess to having been startled once or twice, but never in a wholly disagreeable fas.h.i.+on--never as 'Jude the Obscure' startled. Poor Captain Mayne Reid, who is still beloved by here and there a schoolboy, wrote a preface to one of his books--I think 'The Rifle Rangers,' but it is years on years since I saw it--in order to put forth his defence for the introduction of an occasional oath or impious expletive in the conversation of his men of the prairies. He pleaded necessity. It was impossible to portray his men without it. And he argued that an oath does not soil the mind 'like the clinging immorality of an unchaste episode.' The majority of Englishmen will agree with the gallant Captain. Kipling is rough at times, and daring, but he is always clean and honest. There are no hermaphroditic cravings after s.e.xual excitement in him. He is too much of a man to care for that kind of thing.

What a benefactor an honest laughter-maker is! Since d.i.c.kens there has been n.o.body to fill our lungs like Kipling. Is it not better that the public should have 'My Lord the Elephant' and 'Brugglesmith' to laugh outright at than that they should be feebly sn.i.g.g.e.ring over the jest-books begotten on English Dulness by Yankee humour, as they were eight or nine years ago? That jugful of c.o.c.kney sky-blue, with a feeble dash of Mark Twain in it, which was called 'Three Men in a Boat' was not a cheerful tipple for a mental bank-holiday, but we poor moderns got no better till the coming of Kipling. We have a right to be grateful to the man who can make us laugh.

The thing which strikes everybody who reads Kipling--and who does not?--is the truly astonis.h.i.+ng range of his knowledge of technicalities.

He is very often beyond me altogether, but I presume him to be accurate, because n.o.body finds him out, and that is a thing which specialists are so fond of doing that we may be sure they would have been about him in clouds if he had been vulnerable. He gives one the impression at times of being arrogant about this special fund of knowledge. But he nowhere cares to make his modesty conspicuous to the reader, and his c.o.c.ksureness is only the obverse of his best literary virtue. It comes from the very crispness and definiteness with which he sees things.

There are no clouds about the edges of his perceptions. They are all clear and _nette_, Things observed by such a man dogmatise to the mind, and it is natural that he should dogmatise as to what he sees with such apparent precision and completeness.

A recent writer, anonymous, but speaking from a respectable vehicle as platform, has told us that the short story is the highest form into which any expression of the art of fiction can be cast. This to me looks very like nonsense. I do not know any short story which can take rank with 'Pere Goriot,' or 'Vanity Fair,' or 'David Copper-field.' The short story has charms of its own, and makes demands of its own. What those demands are only the writers who have subjected themselves to its tyranny can know. The ordinary man who tries this form of art finds early that he is emptying his mental pockets. Kipling's riches in this respect have looked as if they were without end, and no man before him has paid away so much. But it has to be remembered here that in many examples of his power in this way he has been purely episodic, and the discovery or creation of an episode is a much simpler thing than the discovery or creation of a story proper, which is a collection of episodes, arranged in close sequence, and leading to a catastrophe, tragic or comic, as the theme may determine.

In estimating the value of any writer's work you must take his range into consideration. Kipling stretches, in emotion, from deep seriousness to exuberant laughter; and his grasp of character is quite firm and sure, whether he deal with Mrs. Hawksbee or with Dinah Shadd; with a field officer or with Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd; with the Inspector of Forests or with Mowgli. He knows the ways of thinking of them all, and he knows the tricks of speech of all, and the outer garniture and daily habitudes of all. His mind seems furnished with an instantaneous camera and a phonographic recorder in combination; and keeping guard over this rare mental mechanism is a spirit of catholic affection and understanding.

Finally, he is an explorer, one of the original discoverers, one of the men who open new regions to our view. A revelation has waited for him.

He is as much the master of his English compeers in originality as Stevenson was their master in finished craftsmans.h.i.+p.

VI.--UNDER FRENCH ENCOURAGEMENT--THOMAS HARDY

Within the last half-score of years an extraordinary impulse towards freedom in the artistic representation of life has touched some of our English writers. Thackeray, in 'Pendennis,' laments that since Fielding no English novelist has 'dared to draw a man.' Dr. George Macdonald, in his 'Robert Falconer,' whispers, in a sort of stage _aside_, his wish that it were possible to be both decent and honest in the exposition of the character of the Baron of Rothie, who is a seducer by profession.

Perhaps the most distinguis.h.i.+ng characteristic of Thackeray was, that he was a gentleman, and that his good-breeding and his manliness were essentially of the English pattern. Dr. Mac-donald's most intense impulse is towards purity of life, as an integral necessity for that communion with the Eternal Fatherhood which he preaches with so much earnestness and charm. That two such men should have felt that their work was subject to a painful limitation on one side of it is significant, but it is a fact which may be used with equal force as an argument by the advocates of the old method and the adopters of the new.

It is perfectly true that they felt the restriction, but it is equally true that they respected it, and were resolute not to break through it.

Their cases are cited here, not as an aid to argument on one side or the other, but simply to show that the argument itself is no new thing--that the question as to how far freedom is allowable has been debated in the minds of honest writers, and decided in one way, long before it came to be debated by another set of honest writers, who decided it in another.

There never was an age in which outspoken honesty was indecent. There never was an age in which pruriency in any guise could cease to be indecent. There never was an age when the fas.h.i.+on of outspoken honesty did not give a seeming excuse to pruriency; and it is this fact, that freedom in the artistic presentation of the s.e.xual problems has invariably led to license, which has in many successive ages of literature forced the artist back to restraint, and has made him content to be bound by a rigid puritanism. In the beat of the eternal pendulum of taste it seems ordained that puritanism shall become so very puritanic that art shall grow tired of its bonds, and that liberty in turn shall grow offensive, and shall compel art by an overmastering instinct to return towards puritanism.

It is France which has led the way in the latest protest against the restrictions imposed by modern taste upon art. It may be admitted as a fact that those restrictions were felt severely, for it is obvious that until they began to chafe there was no likelihood of their being violently broken. The chief apostle of the new movement towards entire freedom is, of course, Emile Zola. After having excited for many years an incredulous amazement and disgust, he is now almost universally recognised as an honest and honourable artist, and as a great master in his craft. n.o.body who is at all instructed ventures any longer to say that Zola is indecent because he loves indecency, or is pleased by the contemplation of the squalid and obscene. We see him as he truly is--a pessimist in humanity--sad and oppressed, and bitter with the gall of a hopeless sympathy with suffering and distorted mankind.

One English artist, whom, in the just language of contemporary criticism, it is no exaggeration to describe as great, has elected (rather late in life for so strong a departure) to cast in his lot with the new school. That his ambitions are wholly honourable it would be the mere vanity of injustice to deny. That his new methods contrast very unfavourably with his old ones, that he is lending the weight of his authority to a movement which is full of mischief, that in obeying in all sincerity an artistic impulse he is doing a marked disservice to his own art in particular, and to English art in general, are with me so many rooted personal convictions; but I dare not pretend that they are more. Mr. Hardy is just as sincere in his belief that he is right as I and others among his critics are in our belief that he is wrong. The question must be threshed out dispa.s.sionately and judicially, if it be faced at all. It cannot be settled by an appeal to personal sentiment on either side. But in the limits to which I am now restricted it is impossible to do justice to the discussion, and it would, indeed, be barely possible to state even the whole of its terms.

I am forced to content myself, therefore, with a temperamental expression of opinion in place of a judicial one, pleading only that the arguments against me are recognised and respected, although I have no present opportunity of recapitulating and disputing them. It appears, then--to speak merely as an advocate _ex parte_--to us of the old school that an essential part of the fiction writer's duty is to be harmless.

That, of course, to the men of the cayenne-pepper-caster creed seems a very milky sort of proclamation, but to us it is a matter of grave moment. I have always thought, for my own part, that the novelist might well take for his motto the last five words of that pa.s.sage in 'The Tempest' where we read: 'This isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs, which _give delight and hurt not!_ Simple as the motto seems, it will be found to offer a fairly wide range. When Reade tilted against prison abuses and the abuses of private asyla, or when d.i.c.kens rode down on the law of Chancery as administered in his day, or when Thackeray scourged sn.o.bbery and selfishness in society, they were all well within the limits of this rule. We experience a delight which hurts not, but on the contrary is entirely tonic and inspiring, when Satire swings his lash on the bared back of Hypocrisy or cruel and intentioned Vice. We experience a delight which hurts not, but on the contrary freshens the whole flood of feeling within us, when a true artist deals truly with the sorrows and infirmities of our kind. To offer it as our intent to give delight and hurt not is no mere profession of an artistic Grundyism. It is the proclamation of what is to our minds the simple truth, that fiction should be a joyful, an inspiring, a sympathetic, and a helpful art. There are certain questions the public discussion of which we purposely avoid. There are certain manifestations of character the exhibition of which we hold to be something like a crime.

Mr. Hardy would plead, and with perfectly apparent propriety, that he does not choose to write for 'the young person.' But I answer that he cannot help himself. He cannot choose his audience. Fiction appeals to everybody, and fiction so robust, so delicate and charming as his own finds its way into all hands. When a man can take a hall, and openly advertise that he intends to speak therein 'to men only,' he is reasonably allowed a certain lat.i.tude. If he pitches his cart on the village green, and talks with the village lads and la.s.ses within hearing, he will, if he be a decent fellow, avoid the treatment of certain themes.

To take the most striking example:--In 'Jude the Obscure' Mr. Hardy deals very largely with the emotions and reasons which animate a young woman when she decides not to sleep with her husband, when she decides that she will sleep with her husband, when she decides to sleep with a man who is not her husband, and when she decides not to sleep with the man who is not her husband. Now, all this does not matter to the mentally solid and well-balanced reader. It is not very interesting, for one thing, and apart from the fact that it is, from a workman's point of view, astonis.h.i.+ngly well done, it would not be interesting at all.

Mr. Hardy offers it as the study of a temperament. Very well. It is an excellent study of a temperament, but it bores. The theme is not big enough to be worth the effort expended upon it. Here is an hysterical, wrong-headed, and confused-hearted little hussy who can't make up her mind as to what is right and what is wrong, and who is a prey to the impulse of the moment, psychical or physical. I don't think there are many people like her. I don't think that from the broad human-natural point of view it matters a great deal how she decides. But I am sure of this--that the more that kind of small monstrosity is publicly a.n.a.lysed and anatomised and made much of, the more her morbidities will increase in her, and the more unbearable in real life she is likely to become.

Mr. Hardy's labour in this particular is a direct incentive to the study of hysteria as a fine art amongst such women as are natively p.r.o.ne to it. One of the gravest dangers which beset women is that of hysterical self-deception. The common-sense fas.h.i.+on of dealing with them when they suffer in that way is kindly and gently to ignore their symptoms until the reign of common-sense returns. To make them believe that their emotions are worthy of the scrutiny of a great a.n.a.lyst of the human heart is to increase their morbid temptations, and in the end to render those temptations irresistible. The one kind of person to whom 'Jude the Obscure' must necessarily appeal with the greatest power is the kind of person depicted in its pages, and the tendency of the book is unavoidably towards the development and multiplication of the type described. This is the only end the book can serve, apart from the fact that it does reveal to us Mr. Hardy's special knowledge of a dangerous and disagreeable form of mental disorder, But it is not the physician's business to sow disease, and any treatise on hysteria which is thrown into a captivating popular form, and makes hysteria look like an interesting and romantic thing, will spread the malady as surely as a spark will ignite gunpowder. This at least is not a mere matter of opinion, but of sound scientific fact, which no student of that disorder which Mr. Hardy has so masterfully handled will deny. In this respect, then, the book is a centre of infection, and that the author of 'A Pair of Blue Eyes' should have written it is matter at once for astonishment and grief. That is to say, it is a matter of astonishment and grief to me, and to those who think as I do. There is a large and growing contingent of writers and readers to whom it is a theme for joyful congratulation. It is one of the rules of the game we are now playing to respect all honest conviction.

Of Mr. Hardy, from the purely artistic side, there is little time to speak. On that side let me first set down what is to be said in dispraise, for the mere sake of leaving a sweet taste in the mouth at the end. Even from his own point of view--that lauded 'sense of the overwhelming sadness of modern life' which captivates the admirers of his latest style--it is possible to spread the epic table of sorrow without finding a place upon it for sc.r.a.ps of the hoggish anatomy which are not nameable except in strictly scientific or wholly boorish speech.

But it seems necessary to the new realism that its devotee should be able to write for the perusal of gentlemen and ladies about things he dared not mention orally in the presence of either; so that what a drunken cabman would be deservedly kicked for saying in a lady's hearing may be honourably printed for a lady's reading by a scholar and a sage.

It was once thought otherwise, but I am arguing here, not against realism _per se_, but against the inartistic introduction of gross episodes. Every reader of Mr. Hardy will recognise my meaning, and the pa.s.sage in my mind seems gratuitously and unserviceably offensive.

To come to less unpleasing themes, where, still expressing disapproval, one may do it with some grace, one of the few limitations to Mr. Hardy's great charm as a writer lies in his tendency to enc.u.mber his page with detail. At a supremely romantic moment one of his people sits down to contemplate a tribe of ants, and watches them through two whole printed pages. In another case a man in imminent deadly peril surveys through two pages the history of the geologic changes which have befallen our planet. Each pa.s.sage, taken by itself, is good enough. Taken where it is, each is terribly wearisome and wrong.

I do not know that any critic has yet recorded Mr. Hardy's singular limitations as to the invention of plot. Speaking from memory, I cannot at this moment recall a novel of his in which some trouble does not circle about a marriage licence, and I can recall many instances of going to church to get married and coming back single. That, indeed, is Mr. Hardy's _piece de resistance_ in the way of invention, and it crops up in one book after another with a helpless inevitable-ness which at last grows comic.

But here we can afford to have done with carping, and can turn to the much more grateful task of praise. I do not think it too much to say that Mr. Hardy has studied his own especial part of England, has made himself master of its landscape, its town and hamlet life, its tradition and sentiment, and general spiritual atmosphere, to such triumphant effect as to set himself wholly apart from all other English writers of fiction. His devotion to his own beloved Wess.e.x has brought him this rich and merited reward--that he is the recognised first and final master of its field. His knowledge of rustic life within his own borders is beautifully sympathetic and profound. His impression of the landscape in the midst of which this life displays itself is broad and n.o.ble and alive. His literary style is a thing to admire, to study, and to admire again. All worthy readers of English fiction are his debtors for many idyllic happy hours, and many deep inspirations of wholesome English air. And if, at the parting of the ways, we wave a decisive farewell to him, we are not unmindful of the time when he was the best and dearest of our comrades, and we leave him in the certainty that, whatever path he has chosen, he has been guided in his choice by an ambition which is entirely honourable and sincere.

VII.--UNDER FRENCH ENCOURAGEMENT--GEORGE MOORE

That salt of sincerity which saves 'Jude the Obscure' and 'Tess o' the D'Urber-villes' from being wholly nauseous, is absent from 'A Modern Lover' and 'A Drama in Muslin,' and its flavour is but faintly perceptible in 'Esther Waters.' Except on the distinct understanding that Thomas Hardy and George Moore are bracketed here, for the sake of convenience, as being both 'under French encouragement,' it would be a gross critical injustice to couple their names together at all. It is not one man of letters in a hundred who has Mr. Hardy's mere literary faculty, which is native and brilliant, whilst Mr. Moore's has been painstakingly hunted for and brought from afar, and is, after much polis.h.i.+ng, still a trifle dull. Mr. Thomas Hardy is distinctly one of those men who see things through an atmosphere of their own. Mr. George Moore has borrowed his atmosphere. The one is a man of genius as well as labour, and the other is a man of labour only.

It is very much of a pity that, a year or two ago, somebody's sense of Mr. Moore's position in the world of letters should have been very absurdly emphasised. It was solemnly advertised that a certain number of copies of a book of his might be had on large paper, with the autograph of the author. This was to be regretted, for Mr. Moore, in his own way, is worth taking seriously, whilst the trick is one of those which, as a rule, can only be played by the poorest kind of literary outsider. But that the author should have permitted himself to be thus made ridiculous is a characteristic thing, and one not to be pa.s.sed in silence if we wish to understand him.

Consulting the critics, one of the first things we find about Mr. Moore is that he is an observer. As a matter of fact, that is absolutely what he is not. He is so far from being an observer that he is that diametrically opposite person, a man with a notebook. The man who amongst men of letters deserves to be ranked as an observer is he who naturally and without effort sees things in their just place, aspect, proportion, and perspective. The man who is often falsely described by the t.i.tle which expresses this faculty is a careful and painstaking soul, who is strenuously on the watch for detail, and who takes much trouble to fill his pages with it.

Let me offer a concrete ill.u.s.tration. In 'Esther Waters' Mr. Moore is curiously and meaninglessly emphatic in his description of a certain room in which the heroine of his action sleeps. Esther, we are told, slipped on her nightdress and got into bed. It was a bra.s.s bed without curtains. There were two windows in the room. One of them was flush with the head of the bed, and the other was beyond its foot. A chest of drawers stood between them. An observer, unless he had a special purpose in it, would never have dreamt of writing down this bald detail. Nothing comes of the statement of fact. Nothing hangs on the relative position of the bed and the windows and the chest of drawers. Nothing happens in the course of the story which justifies the flat and flavourless statement. It is wholly without meaning, apart from the fact that it affords rather a plain insight into the author's method of work. If a child of three after visiting a strange bedroom were able to tell as much about it as Mr. Moore has to tell about this apartment, his mother would probably be proud of him, and his nurse would say that he was a notice-taking little creature; but the critics would hardly hold him up to admiration as an observer. Yet the child would tell us just as much and just as little as Mr. Moore tells us in this particular instance.

It goes without saying that this is not a fair specimen of Mr. Moore's faculty, but it is significant of his general literary knack. He makes it his business steadfastly to jot down what he sees, and it is not impossible that in the course of a long and laborious life a man might in this way cultivate to a reasonable growth a turn for observation originally less than mediocre; but it is not the natural observer's method of seeing things, and it is not the natural artist's method of presenting them. If the critics in this case were in the right we should have to acknowledge an auctioneer's catalogue as a _chef d'ouvre_.