This novelist’s attitude towards Wagner’s music is well expressed in John Norton, the second of the three tales in that uncommonly strong book called Celibates. Here is another self-revelation:— Wagner reminds me of a Turk lying amid the houris promised by the Prophet to the Faithful—eyes incensed by kohl, lips and almond nails incarnadine, the languor of falling hair and the languor of scent burning in silver dishes, and all around subdued color, embroidered stuffs, bronze lamps traced with inscrutable designs. Never a breath of pure air, not even when the scene changes to the terrace overlooking the dark river, ... minarets and the dome reflected in the tide and in a sullen sky, reaching almost to the earth, the dome and behind the dome a yellow moon—a carven moon, without faintest aureole, a voluptuous moon, mysteriously marked, a moon like a creole, her hand upon the circle of her breast; and through the torrid twilight of the garden the sound of fountains, like flutes far away, breathing to the sky the sorrow of the water-lilies. And in the dusky foliage, in which a blue and orange evening dies, gleams the color of fruit—dun-colored bananas, purple and yellow grapes, the desert scent of dates, the motley morbidity of figs, the passion of red pomegranates, shining like stars, through a flutter of leaves, where the light makes a secret way. And through all the color and perfume of twilight, of fruit, of flowers, cometh the maddening murmur of fountains. At last the silence is broken by the thud of an over-ripe fruit that has suddenly broken from its stalk.... Now I am alive to the music, all has ceased but it; I am conscious of nothing else. Now it has got me; I am in its power; I am as a trembling prey held in the teeth and claws of a wild animal. The music creeps and catches, and with cruel claws and amorous tongue it feeds upon my flesh; my blood is drunken, and, losing grasp upon my suborned soul, ... I tremble, I expire. II SISTER TERESA Brainstuff is not lean stuff; the brainstuff of fiction is internal history, and to suppose it dull is the profoundest of errors.—GEORGE MEREDITH. What makes Moore’s case so peculiarly his own is his unlikeness to our preconceived notion of an Irishman. No man of genius resembles his countrymen; so we find Burke, Swift, George Moore, with few of the characteristics ascribed to Irishmen and wits. They were and are not jolly world lovers, rollicking sports of the sort Lever loved to paint. Tom Moore and his rose-water poetry, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and his glossy smartness, hit the popular notion of what an Irish poet, playwright, and man of letters should be.