BOOK REVIEWS
A PORTRAIT OF GEORGE MOORE
A Portrait of George Moore in a Study of his Work. By John Freeman. 8vo. 250 pages. D. Appleton and Company. $5.
TAKING for granted that the biographer is affectionately predisposed, a portrait constructed from a man's work is the most justifiable and the justest sort of biography. In the effort to understand and exhibit Mr Moore's achievements and idiosyncrasies, Mr Freeman has been self-effacing, profound, and unhurried. One does not share every detail of his admiration, but his appreciation is never blind eulogy and now and again he is startlingly fearless in his aloofness, as when he says of Lewis Seymour and Some Women revised, that it is to him like a certain respectable brick building upon which was imposed "a new stucco front with an elaborate cornice above which the old roof still rose steep. The stucco was finished to look like stone, but the stone refused to look like stucco, and the building remains now a sad and haunting image of uncostly sham."
The more acute an artist is in recognizing perfection, the more alert he is in recognizing blemishes, but it is not to give a photographically accurate bad likeness that Mr Freeman is working. Few artists have chosen and developed a subject with a deeper affection or more insight. In the ingenious selection, moreover, of passages from Montaigne to stand at the beginnings of chapters as indices, we are much enriched—in the lines for instance, prefixed to Chapter II as applying to George Moore in Paris and to The Confessions of a Young Man, but we are warned by Mr Freeman to use discernment in distinguishing the fact from the fiction of these seemingly frank revealings, not however, that the fiction is false. "I often hazard upon certaine outslips of minde for which I distrust myself," says Montaigne, "and certaine verball wilie-beguiles, whereat I shake mine eares"; and although Mr Freeman
