George Moore's critical works occupy, as Helmut E. Gerber has noted, the crucial position between the essentially social and moral criticism of Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin, on the one hand, and the artistic elitism of T. S. Eliot and the strict formalism of John Crowe Ransom, on the other. His autobiographical writings offer subjective, but nonetheless intimate and incisive, views of the French Impressionist and Naturalist movements and of the Irish Renaissance. Yet Moore's nonfiction prose has been consistently ignored by critics and readers alike; the majority of his critical essays remain uncollected, and it is primarily as a protomodern novelist that Moore is known. This unfinished portrait of George Moore--one that would have dismayed him--is partially the result of the volume of Moore's work and partially due to the range and depth of his intellectual pursuits; he sought a grand synthesis of painting, literature, and social...