a liberal allowance—­and writes, writes, writes, writes ... talking to his fellow lodgers, to the stupid servant who brings him his meals, and getting the materials for future books out of them.  A candid record of these incidents, interwoven with eloquent self-analysis, keen and valid criticism of books and pictures, delightful reminiscences and furious dissertations upon morality, the whole story is given a special and, for its time, a rare interest by its utter lack of conventional reticence.  He never spares himself.  He has undertaken quite honestly to tell the truth.  He has learned from Paris not to be ashamed of himself.  And this, though he had not realized it, was what he had gone to Paris to learn.

He had put himself instinctively in the way of receiving liberalizing influences.  But it was, after all, an accident that he received those influences from France.  He might conceivably have stayed at home and read Tolstoi or Walt Whitman!  So indeed might the whole English literary revolt have taken its rise under different and perhaps happier influences.  But it happened as it happened.  And accidents are important.  The accident of having to turn to France for moral support colored the whole English literary revolt.  And the accident of going to Paris colored vividly the superficial layers of George Moore’s soul.  This book partly represents a flaunting of such borrowed colors.  It was the fashion of the Parisian diabolists to gloat over cruelty, by way of showing their superiority to Christian morality.  The enjoyment of others’ suffering was a splendid pagan virtue.  So George Moore kept a pet python, and cultivated paganness by watching it devour rabbits alive.

It was the result of the same accident which caused him to conclude—­and to preach at some length in this book—­that art is aristocratic.  It was the proper pagan thing to say, as he does here—­“What care I that some millions of wretched Israelites died under Pharaoh’s lash?  They died that I might have the Pyramids to look on”—­and other remarks even more shocking and jejune.  It was this accident which made him write ineffable silliness in this and other early volumes about “virtue” and “vice,” assume a man-about-town’s attitude toward women, and fill pages with maudlin phrases about marble, perfumes, palm-trees, blood, lingerie, and moonlight.  These were the follies of his teachers, to be faithfully imitated.  If he had first heard the news that the body is good from Walt Whitman, or that the human soul contains lust and cruelty from Tolstoi, what canticles we should have had from George Moore on the subject of democracy in life and art!

Deeper down, George Moore was already wiser than his masters.  He was to write of the love-life of Evelyn Innes, and the common workaday tragedy of Esther Waters, with a tender and profound sympathy far removed from the sentiments he felt obliged to profess here.  This book is a young man’s attempt to be sincere.  It is the story of a soul struggling to be free from British morality.  It is eloquent, beautiful, and at times rather silly.  It is a picture of an epoch.