wealth, popular applause, and the stamp of official approbation.  This Lewis Seymour still lives and paints modish London in rose-colour.  Moore’s irony would have entered the soul of a hundred “celebrated” artists if they had had any soul to flesh it in.  When he wrote this novel, one that shocked Mrs. Grundy, Moore was under the influence of Paris.  However, that masterpiece of description and analysis, Mildred Lawson in Celibates—­very Balzacian title, by the way—­deals with hardly anything else but art.  Mildred, who is an English girl without soul, heart, or talent, studies in the Julian atelier and goes to Fontainebleau during the summer.  No one, naturally, will ever describe Fontainebleau better than Flaubert, in whose L’Education Sentimentale there are marvellous pictures; also a semi-burlesque painter, Pellerin, who reads all the works on aesthetics before he draws a line, and not forgetting that imperishable portrait of Jacques Arnoux, art dealer.  Goncourt, too, has excelled in his impression of the forest and its painters, Millet in particular.  Nevertheless, let us say in passing that you cannot find Mildred Lawson in Flaubert or Goncourt; no, not even in Balzac, whose work is the matrix of modern fiction.  She is her own perverse, cruel Mooresque self, and she lives in New York as well as London.

In both Daudet and Maupassant—­Strong as Death is the latter’s contribution to painter-psychology—­there are stories clustered about the guild.  Daudet has described a Salon on varnishing day with his accustomed facile, febrile skill; you feel that it comes from Goncourt and Zola.  It is not within our scope to go back as far as Balzac, whose Frenhofer in The Unknown Masterpiece has been a model for the younger man.  Poe, Hawthorne, Wilde, and Robert Louis Stevenson have dealt with the theme pictorial.  Zola’s The Masterpiece (L’Oeuvre) is one of the better written books of Zola.  It was a favourite of his.  The much-read and belauded fifth chapter is a faithful transcription of the first Salon of the Rejected Painters (Salon des Refuses) at Paris, 1863.  Napoleon III, after pressure had been brought to bear upon him, consented to a special salon within the official Salon, at the Palais de l’Industrie, which would harbour the work of the young lunatics who wished to paint purple turkeys, green water, red grass, and black sunsets. (Lie down, ivory hallucinations, and don’t wag your carmilion tail on the chrome-yellow carpet!) It is an enormously clever book, this, deriving in the main as it does from Manette Salomon and Balzac’s Frenhofer.  The fight for artistic veracity by Claude Lantier is a replica of what occurred in Manet’s lifetime.  The Breakfast on the Grass, described by Zola, was actually the title and the subject of a Manet picture that scandalised Paris about this epoch.  The fantastic idea of a nude female stretched on the grass, while the other figures were clothed and in their right minds, was too much for public and critic, and unquestionably Manet did paint the affair to create notoriety.  Like Richard Wagner, he knew the value of advertising.