Now, it is in these books, to my finding, that Mr. Moore has made perhaps his only but his ineffably interesting addition to creative literature; and has caused to move like a corporeal, breathing being of flesh and blood his one great character, George Moore. How lavishly that character repays attention by the parodist was shown but yesterday when, in _Heavens_--that most trenchant of volumes from which I have just quoted,--Mr. Louis Untermeyer wrote what is, actually, the very best and loveliest appreciation of George Moore yet given us by anybody outside the pages of Mr. Moore. Then, too, there is the Beerbohm parody, not anything like so good, of course, but still containing its really superb sentence,--"There are moments when one does not think of girls, are there not, dear reader?" This is the sentence which George Moore has not ever, quite, dictated to his secretary: but for some years now he has fluttered close to its perfection.... Yes, certainly, the character does lend itself to caricature. Yet I shall not here speak of the rôle's component oddities, nor prattle any word about the Nouvelle Athènes or the Celtic Renaissance. Nobody dare attempt in one chapter to sum up George Moore after seeing a fine artist give over a lifetime to the task. So I can but refer you to the Carra Edition, as to a longish book which is devoted entirely to this topic, with the rider that I have found nowhere volumes more engaging than are the best of these. One's human taste for the irrelevant provokes, of course, some natural speculation as to how little of this perverse, painstaking, fleering and inconsequential personality is based upon truth? What parsimonies in veracity, how much of self-denial, in short, has Mr. Moore at odd times woven into his scandal-mongering about George Moore? I grant that, from the reader's selfish standpoint, it does not matter; and that our general pleasure in the performance ought not to be dashed by anybody's lugging in the refrain of Edgar Allan Poe's most famous poem. For Casanova also, you will recall, indulged in the same sort of romancing; and secured his most admirable effects through mixing in some revelatory fiction with etymologically pure truth. Nor did Cellini write under affidavit.... Then too, to me, the George Moore of the Carra Edition suggests--with, to be sure, a difference,--that Thackeray who is really the main character of Thackeray's Collected Works, the Thackeray who is always interrupting his puppets, to edify you with the unaffected confidences of the author, as a shrewd and tolerant and tender-hearted man of the great world who, as we now know, existed nowhere outside these books. Just so, one tacitly assumes, Mr. Moore has given us George Moore as he, not wholly spurred by either moral or æsthetic criteria, would like to be: and, for one, I find--upon the whole, and if it a bit matters,--both his aspiration and his artistry to be commendable. In that unending literary shadow-show wherein "all