this charm above the weight of the critical opinions expressed. Certain it is that the imaginative inventive realism of the conversations, the drawing-room quality, native grace, and candid speculation take precedence in one's mind, of other merits, the paraphrase of Defoe having the qualities of Defoe himself—preciseness without apparent effort to be precise, the effect of discursiveness unrehearsed—the holding power of prose reduced to its lowest terms. "Robinson Crusoe, the most English of all books," says Mr Moore: "We are islanders, Crusoe was one. Our business is the sea. Crusoe was constantly occupied going to and fro from a wreck. We are a prosaic people, what the French would call terre à terre. Nobody was more terre à terre than Crusoe." One finds an enigma in Mr Moore's indifference—professed indifference perhaps one should say—to Henry James. The word envy as applied to James's attitude to A Modern Lover seems fantastic; as for his "unresponsiveness to the imagination of others," suggested by Mr Freeman in this connexion, one is bewildered when one remembers James in his letters struggling to catch the reflection of his correspondents' thought in every query. On the other hand, there is the justness of Mr Moore's admiration for Hawthorne, the apt characterization of Zola's mind as "a coarse net through which living things escape," and the aesthetic soundness of his prejudice against Tolstoi in his assertion that "Tolstoi writes with a mind as clear as an electric lamp, a sizzling white light, crude and disagreeable." Mr Moore succeeds in seeming "unaware of conventional appreciations"; undependable as a critic—inspired as an appreciator of those writers with whom he is in sympathy.
With regard to Héloïse and Abélard, named as one of Mr Moore's supreme achievements, we are less tempted to speak in the superlative than in the instance of Avowals—dependable and absorbing as all of Mr Freeman's comments are. We feel perspicacity in the contrast between Pater's interpretation of Abélard and Mr Moore's: "'true child of light'—Pater's phrase"; "those sins, that thwarted passion, that-pride, that madness of mind and body—the features of Moore's portrait," and we relish Mr Freeman's ingenious assertion that while "it would be untrue to say that George Moore has given you the Abélard of the letters, it is true that he has given you something at least of the Abélard whose passions were abjured and lamented by the Abélard of the letters"; most
