For Mr. Moore, of course, had nowhere written except incidentally about anything except George Moore. To some this might appear a dubious axiom, in view of the circumstance that of these fourteen volumes no less than eight consisted of the earlier Realistic Novels,--as we used to hear them called, only yesterday, with a certain lowering of the voice,--wherein there is no explicit word as to George Moore. Yet, when seen in the entirety of the Carra Edition, I thought,--as I still think,--and when appraised as component parts of the one longish book which every sincere literary artist perforce composes, and of which his various publications are each a chapter, then these novels fall into their proper niche. George Moore in youth was exposed to, among other perils, the corrupting influence of "realism"; and here are some of the results, directly valuable to letters, in chief, as the record of a phase through which passed, long ago, George Moore. These books, to-day, rank somewhat with the extracts which Balzac gives you from the writings of his auctorial protagonists,--of Lucien de Rubempré, of Lousteau, of Canalis,--and which Balzac very sensibly presents not as literature _per se_, but as useful lights upon their partly taken from life and partly imagined author. So here, in depicting George Moore, does the compiler of the Carra Edition appear to illumine his subject with copious extracts from the novels of his hero, who, again, is partly taken from life. § 82 I must at outset confess that I find these novels are quaint reading now. They seem faded, and somewhat pathetically droll, and they a bit too aptly illustrate their writer's petted word _suranné_, the while that young George Moore toils conscientiously at a ruthless exposition of the race-track, or a depiction of the evils of drink, or is daringly describing the temptations of stage life. Yes; it really is rather quaint as long as George Moore is playing up to his then current Vizetellean advertisements, and turning out "studies of degradation mercilessly done," or is endeavoring to convince the unwary that "you are in a moral dissecting room, watching the demonstration of a brilliant psychological surgeon." But the first moment he spies a chance to let his characters, at some breathing-spell between their disasters and their fornications, fall into talk about academic or æsthetic matters which interest George Moore, then the style quickens and fancy gallops. And the puppets discourse for pages upon pages the heresies and petulancies and "studied disrespects" of George Moore, and all advances briskly, undrugged by any narcotizing "drops of story." By and by, to be sure, the ghost of Germinie Lacerteux or of Bel-Ami (though the Carra Edition tactfully omits _Mike Fletcher_) arises to coerce the apostle of candor--the whole-hearted devotee of candor, even then,--with its gibbers about realism. But in a while the young puppet-master is again playing truant from his art's imagined