to model all upon the tentative and wavering progression of a long and thin and frail and flesh-tinted angle-worm.... But at this point I desist from tapping at the typewriter keys; and I re-read what I have just said in--upon the whole--depreciation of Mr. Moore. And every word of it seems to me quite true. Yet it lacks that fine frank ring of amateurishness without which literary dicta are as nothing; and I appear somehow to have lapsed into the professional accent of the luckless being who makes a business of reviewing books. Now, this accent I can only describe as that of one speaking from an eminence, which it is not at all necessary to have attained. It is the accent which implies that you may by and by, should other more important interests permit, take a Saturday afternoon off, and write a literary masterpiece of the same genre in which the discussed writer has, you benignantly allow, done his poor best during the last year or so. It is the accent with which the eunuch advocates birth control, strongly every month in The Dial, and weekly in The New York Times Book Review.[10] It is, in fine, an unlovable accent. So I lament this accent, even in the moment that I protest it voices here--rather sniffishly, if you will,--the truth. I have endeavored to speak, I repeat, with all possible moderation. But that accent very certainly has crept in,--perhaps because I am here dealing with "realism," perhaps because of some occult underlying envy of these books' handsome physical appearance. It may be I am thinking the Biography ought to be issued thus, instead of George Moore's novels. I am sure I do not know.... In any event, I reflect that Balzac, also, does not always, nor indeed as a rule, ascribe to his auctorial heroes the gift of writing especially well; that the samples which Balzac, also, presents from the novels of an imaginary author do not pretend to be fine literature; and that Mr. Moore, in preparing this Carra Edition, had thus the shield of weighty precedent.... § 86 The going, even so, is immeasurably better when we come, as now, to the consistently important books, to _The Confessions of a Young Man_, _Avowals_, _Memoirs of My Dead Life_, _Conversations in Ebury Street_, and to the _Hail and Farewell_ trilogy. For here Mr. Moore is candidly, and without any vain pretence of ascribing real weightiness to anything else, expressing his own nervous reactions to painting and books and to the best examples of human thought and anatomy, and here he has turned most potently to ensnaring us with "nets woven of curious stuffs,--of a singer's corset-lace, a forgotten dream, a strand of honey-colored hair, a phrase from Walter Pater, moonlight on a pillow in Orelay, a scrap from the Catechism translated by Verlaine, hopes, and aspirations, and, here and there, a faint and not too secret shame."