admits that "the display of shabby dissoluteness, of crude and plushy splendour" of the Confessions "illuminates a certain aspect of Moore's early work," he points out that it "is obviously remote from the diligence and aristocracy of his mind."
In Esther Waters, that wolf-lean, unforgettable romance, "the only English novel that treated a servant-girl seriously," we have George Moore, one would like to think, as his most unself-conscious self—if not, in a rôle which is his most magnificent assumption. He has produced an epic, a life cycle in bleakness, and despite his Paris skin so recently sloughed, not one tawdry sparkle attaches to it. "The most English of all novels," Mr Freeman says, "if Tom Jones and David Copperfield be added." As a line in George Moore's portrait, it is especially commemorative and is fittingly dedicated to Colonel Maurice Moore who called "the surrender of his brother to the stables, 'truly Irish carelessness'—a 'little kid of nine,' riding as he pleased about the country, until through the success of a horse named Master George, Master George was snatched from the horses and sent to school."
Of Hail and Farewell, the first volume of which appeared in 1911, Mr Freeman says one of George Moore's distinctions is to have "modified an old form so as virtually to turn it into a new one in his autobiographic writings; making grave things light, using mockery and malice for those intellectual revenges which the very kindest of us condone." He regrets "a dozen wanton pages" in Vale. "If it be urged," he says, "that you must take an author as he is, the answer is simple: Moore as he essentially is does not raise this offence. It comes from a spirit which he oddly fancies to be a spirit of moral and intellectual liberty. Such episodes signify a brief maddening failure of the artistic." Referring to Mr Moore's "subtle constructive surgery," he says, "It has been Moore's fortune and ours, that sitting opposite his friends, he has not simply torn them to pieces, but also put them together again—making them different perhaps, but making them whole." One especially admires the condensed: "romantic biography as well as romantic autobiography, and when all is said, it remains equally admirable and inexcusable."
Although verse rhythms and cadences are analysed to-day with great particularity, prose rhythms are no less important. One is influenced and somewhat overawed by Mr Freeman's analytic know-
