ledge of the values and harmonies of Mr Moore's prose. The adjective "staccato" is used in objection, whereas one not a classicist would say the staccato sentence is permissible as expressing spontaneously positive sentiment; and although one perceives Mr Moore's evolution and feels that his later work is "characterized by a new cunning," of the so-called "unfortunate" early work, one would say merely that the early lacks the subtlety and elegance of the later. As Mr Freeman says, Mr Moore's art is "a thing of clarification and effusion" like "a Corot landscape": "The movement of the prose, the undulations never wandering past control, the unheightened and unlapsing phrasing, the colour and the quietness, the simplicity, the depth, the brightness—all these, the mere names of qualities, as trees are mere names of mysteries, are the artist's rendering in his proper medium of that which his youth has breathed, and which was in his veins before consciousness awoke." Any writer of strong personality is a stylist, the style varying from the stereotyped in rhetoric and sentiment as the personality varies. Moreover, as Mr Moore himself says, "the impersonality of the artist is the vainest of delusions" and in this portrait it would seem that George Moore the man of letters and George Moore the man, are identical. In the artist as in the man, we have the same "intricate simplicity," the same incapacity for indifference, the adhering to prejudice, the same haiteur and subservience; for as Mr Freeman says, "His temptation has not been to court the world but to shock it, a subservience as illseeming as any compliance"; he has indeed "redeemed portraiture from gentleness and made butchery a pleasure"—the same individual who "would not care to leave Max on 'Servants' lying about in his house, for fear that if a servant read in it she might think it superior and inconsiderate." "Too much absorbed in observing and remembering life, to be interested in moral ideas," he is yet according to Mr Freeman, interested in religion—"in the personal aspect of it"; exercising sobriety and moderation, yet with unreserve of judgement, revealing "thoughts which most of us rebuke into snake-like stillness," he "is equally isolated by his virtues and his faults."
One feels with Mr Freeman very heartily that Avowals is Mr Moore's Odyssey. Defining these "serenely nimble conversations" as "a kind of acute innocent thinking aloud," he perceives "an ease, a vivacity, a brilliance and a simplicity" in them; stressing
