Now George Moore is far from being an Irishman in that sense—this prose poet who is at once mystical and gross. Yet he is a Celt, and lately he has developed a restless spirit, a desire to flee the Anglo-Saxon and his haunts. It is the “homing” instinct of the Celt—after forty years of age men of talent return to their tribe. And Mr. Moore is fast becoming an Irishman among Irishmen. Here is the newest incarnation of this feminine soul—perverse and feminine, he admits he is—which, waxlike, takes and retains the most subtle and powerful impressions. The readers of his early books knew him as a Shelley worshipper, then a digger among the romantic literature of 1830, finally a follower of Zola. So after Flowers of Passion (1877) we got Pagan Poems (1881), and with A Modern Lover (1883) began his prose trilogy, devoted to the young man. This was followed in 1884 by A Mummer’s Wife, Literature at Nurse (1885), A Drama in Muslin (1886), Parnell and His Island (1887), A Mere Accident (1887), Confessions of a Young Man (1888), Spring Days (1888), Mike Fletcher (1889), Impressions and Opinions (1890), Vain Fortune (1890), Modern Painting (1893), The Strike at Arlingford, a play (1893), Esther Waters (1894), Celibates (1895), Evelyn Innes (1898), The Bending of the Bough, a play (1900). He also collaborated in 1894 with Mrs. Craigie in a little comedy called Journeys End in Lovers’ Meeting, which was written for Ellen Terry, and Untilled Fields (1903). Mr. Moore was born in 1857, the son of the late George Henry Moore, M.P., of Moore Hall, County Mayo, Ireland. He was educated at Oscott College, near Birmingham, and studied art in Paris, so his expatriation was practical and complete. He once hated his native land and hated its religion. Yet I know of few writers whose books, whose mind, are so tormented by Catholicism. He may insult the church in A Drama in Muslin—one of the most veracious documents of Irish social history in the eighties—and through the mouth of Alice Barton. But, like the moth and the flame, he ever circles about the Roman Catholic religion. It would be unfair to hold a man responsible for the utterances of his characters, nevertheless there is a peculiarly personal cadence in all that Mr. Moore writes, which makes his problem, like that of Huysmans, a fascinating one. The George Moore of Mike Fletcher and the George Moore of Sister Teresa are very different men. Mike Fletcher, for me the first virile man in English fiction since Tom Jones, may please some critics more than Evelyn Innes turned nun, for of Mike you could not say in Meredith’s words: “Men may have rounded Seraglio Point; they have not yet doubled Cape Turk.” Mike never rounded Seraglio Point; while of Evelyn, you dimly feel that she is always “fiddling harmonics on the strings of sensualism.” Yes, George Moore is returning to the tribe; he is Irish; he is almost Roman Catholic—and the man is often more interesting than his books. Not to know them all is to miss the