Sir Owen Asher—he may be one side of George Moore himself—is well painted in the beginning, but the colors soon fade. He is a bore, with his agnosticism, his vanity, and his lack of backbone. He treated Evelyn too delicately. A lusty reproof is what the young woman most needed. Her churchly, sentimental vaporings would then have been dissipated, and she might have thrown a clock at her admirer’s head. Such things have been known to happen in the life of a prima donna. Sir Owen starts a Wagnerian Review. Could Mr. Moore have meant the Earl of Dysart? Ulick Dean is said to be drawn partially from Yeats, the mystic; but the music criticism sounds to me very like the doughty Runciman’s. There is a manager with a toothache, who is almost funny, and there is a rehearsal of Tannhäuser, in which the question of cuts is discussed. Here is a sentence that reveals the depth of Mr. Moore’s knowledge of music:— “According to Mr. Innes, Bach was the last composer who had distinguished between A sharp and B flat. The very principle of Wagner’s music is the identification of the two notes.” Why? In the name of the Chromatic Fantasia, why? I confess I am rather tired of convent scenes. The best I ever read in latter-day novels is in Mathilde Serao’s Fantasy. Mrs. Craigie, in The Schools for Saints, “does” a convent, and now Moore. The Roman Catholic problem, too, is overdone. Mrs. Humphry Ward, in her polemical pamphlet which she calls a novel, Helbeck of Bannisdale, indulges in numerous speculations of the sort. George Moore loves the rich trappings and the pomp of ceremonial in the church. But its iteration is an artistic mistake. Indeed, his book goes off into mid-air in the latter half. The first is fascinating. The discussion of the various schools of singing is valuable, and while at no place does he exhibit the marvellous virtuosity displayed by d’Annunzio in his exposition of Tristan and Isolde, there are many jewelled pages of descriptive writing. The book is permeated with all manners of pessimism from Omar to Schopenhauer, and life is discussed from the viewpoints of the ascetic and the epicurean. Mr. Moore is an artist. His vision is just, and he is a better workman than he was; his sense of form is matured, although his faults of construction are easily detected. He has caught the right atmosphere; he is still master of moods, and he has attempted and nearly succeeded in spilling out the soul of a singer for our inspection,—the soul of the selfish, ambitious prima donna, for there is no denying that Evelyn, despite her tender conscience, was selfish and a fascinating creature, mastered by every passing whim, and a woman utterly incapable of developing mentally without masculine assistance. Mr. Moore, then, has given us the type of the opera singer, and I forgive him pages of solemn-gaited writing. Alas! that it should be as he writes. But it is. He says some things that go very deep, and there are many exquisite touches.