Of course, this is not the time to attempt an estimate of his complete work, for who may say what fresh outbursts, what new imprudences in black and white, we may expect? He has paid his respects to his fellow countrymen, and is heartily despised by all camps, political, religious, artistic. He has belittled the work of Lady Gregory, Yeats, and Edwin Martyn, and has rather patronised John M. Synge; the latter, possibly, because Synge was "discovered" by Yeats, not Moore. Yet do we enjoy the vagaries of George Moore. I only saw him once, a long time ago, to be precise in 1901, at Bayreuth. He looked more like a bird than Yeats, though his beak is not so predaceous as Yeats's; a golden-crested bird, with a chin as diffident as a poached egg, and with melancholy pale-blue eyes, and an undecided gait. He talked of the Irish language as if it were the only redemption for poor unhappy Ireland. In Vale there is not the same enthusiasm. He dwells with more delight on his early Parisian experiences--it is the best part of the book--and to my way of thinking the essential George Moore is to be found only in Paris; London is an afterthought. The Paris of Manet, Monet, Degas, Whistler, Huysmans, Zola, Verlaine, and all the "new" men of 1880--what an unexplored vein he did work for the profit and delectation of the English-speaking world. True critical yeoman's work, for to preach impressionism twenty-five years ago in London was to court a rumpus. What hard names were rained upon the yellow head of George Moore--that colour so admired by Manet and so wonderfully painted by him--in the academic camp. He replied with all the vivacity of vocabulary which your true Celt usually has on tap. He even "went for" the Pre-Raphaelites, a band of overrated mediocrities--on the pictorial side, at least--though John Millais was a talent--and for years was as a solitary prophet in a city of Philistines. The world caught up with Moore, and to-day the shoe pinches on the other foot--it is George who is a belated critic of the "New Art" (most of it as stale as the Medes and Persians), and many are the wordy battles waged at the Café Royal, London, when Augustus John happens in of an evening and finds the author of Modern Painting denouncing Debussy in company with Matisse and other Post-Imitators. Manet, like Moore, is "old hat" (vieux chapeau) for modern youth. It's well to go to bed not too late in life, else some impertinent youngster may cry aloud: "What's that venerable granddaddy doing up at this time of night?" To each generation its critics. II