And how does it all end, the psychic adventures of this Wagner singer turned nun, this woman who “discovered two instincts in herself—an inveterate sensuality and a sincere aspiration for a spiritual life”? She loses her voice, like her mother, and after relinquishing all idea of escaping from the convent—not a well-developed motive—she settles down to teaching voice and piano. Sir Owen Asher no longer troubles her; Ulick Dean has evaporated, or perhaps crumbled to dust, like an unheeding Brann if he had touched the early shores of real life. No one from the outside world visits her but Louise, Mlle. Helbrun, the Brangaene of her Tristan and Isolde days. To the evanescent bell booming of their distant past goes the conversation of the friends. It is not so depressingly real, not so moving, as the last words of Frédéric Moreau and Deslauriers in the coda to L’Education Sentimentale,—that most perfect of fictions,—but is melancholy enough. “Our fate is more like ourselves than we are aware,” and in the last analysis Evelyn’s fate suits her. As a singer she talked too much like a music critic; as Sister Teresa, too much like a sophist in a nun’s habit. She was from the start a female theologian. Her conscience was more to her than her lovers. She was never quite in earnest, always a little inhuman, and I for one can contemplate with equanimity her immurement until her final “packing up” for death and its dusty hypnotism. After reading the story I was tempted to repeat Renan’s remarks on Amiel,—quoted by Ernest Newman in his Wagner,—“He speaks of sin, of salvation, of redemption, and conversion, as if these things were realities.” I wonder if Mr. Moore did not feel that way sometimes! But the book is full of brainstuff. It is also a book with a soul. In it George Moore’s art is come to a spiritual and consummate blossoming. After reading such a passage of sustained music as the following I am almost inclined to make an expiatory pilgrimage to the drab city on the Liffey, to make of Dublin a critic’s Canossa; and in the heated, mean streets, and in sable habiliments of sorrow, beat my breast without Mr. Moore’s abode, crying aloud, “Peccavi.” But would I be forgiven for all that I have said about the noble, morbid, disquieting, and fascinating art of George Moore, the Irish Huysmans? Here is a passage executed with incomparable bravura. Ulick Dean speaks:—