It seems, in fact, only yesterday that both the books and the decolleté "sport shirt" of Blasco Ibáñez were the height of fashion, and _The Young Visiters_ was a perdurable production. And now, in really literary circles, they tell me, the sublimities of M. Maeterlinck are no longer spoken of in lowered tones, but rather with raised eyebrows; Stevenson has become just a working model for writers upon the art of selling the short story; and even Mr. Kipling has passed into the _götterdämmerung_ of being praised by Mrs. Gerould.[9] Thus suddenly their fame is made a vain and doubtful good, and the shining gloss of all their glories is vaded, in the bright prime of such impeccant prosateurs as Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad and Marcel Proust: and it is salutary to reflect that Sir Rabindranath Tagore and O. Henry, they also, were once upon a time immortal for several months.... Well, and just so, in the departed youth of this George Moore, in the perverse Victorian 'eighties and 'nineties,--when, as Mr. Moore now puts it, "we were all cowed by the spell of realism, external realism,"--did many persons regard Zola and Flaubert and Maupassant and Huysmans with a seriousness which the considerate dare not wager that posterity will emulate, when it comes to appraising us and our own literary idols. --All of which seems rather Mooreishly digressive. It would be perhaps a neater adhesion to the point succinctly to note here that, with the addition of some peculiarly delightful prefaces, the books which Vizetelly & Co. used to advertise as Mr. George Moore's Realistic Novels--listing them, one finds, with an invidious separateness from those of the firm's publications which, The Sheffield Independent was wont to guarantee, "may be safely left lying about where the ladies of the family can pick them up and read them,"--have, in preparing these books for this Carra Edition, been rewritten throughout, alike with a view of stylistic improvement and of, as it is rather handsomely phrased, "returning from the conventions of _Vanity Fair_ and _The Small House at Allington_ to those that inspired the writing of Shakespeare's plays and the Bible." Mr. Moore, at last at ease in the exclusive company of one thousand subscribers only, can now speak freely without bothering about such finicking contemporaneous notions of delicacy and indelicacy as, we now learn, had until the printing of this Carra Edition somewhat hampered him. And for the rest, even in their most tedious passages of brilliant psychology, Mr. George Moore's Realistic Novels really do remain interesting, as relics. Yet there perhaps I underrate these novels, which may be taken as interesting from quite other points of view. Mr. Moore is, for example, so convincingly the great prose artist everywhere in manner and gesture that we are rather generally apt to overlook his frequent omission to be anything of the sort in his writing.... § 84