velyn Innes."

There are those who think the greatest excellence of Mr. Moore is as an
art critic, and that "Modern Painting" (1893) is his great book. Mr.
Moore himself says that "Esther Waters" (1894) is his only book that he
can read with admiration and content; and those particularly interested
in the Renaissance will hold out for "Evelyn Innes" or "The Lake"
(1905). To me "A Drama in Muslin" (1886) is the best story of Mr. Moore
in his earlier realistic manner and "The Lake" in his later manner, a
manner that is now wistful and now mellow, as in "A Drama in Muslin" his
manner is uniformly as hard as winter sunshine.

Mr. Moore is, as I said at the outset, a hard-working amateur in "A
Modern Lover"; three years later, in "A Drama in Muslin," he writes with
authority and insight; as he does, too, in "Parnell and his Island"
(1887), though here with scant sympathy; but it is not until "Evelyn
Innes" that he becomes deeply concerned with beauty of subject or beauty
of background, or, except at haphazard, possessed of any mastery of
style. "Evelyn Innes" is very well written,--in spots,--but "The Lake"
is of a wholeness of good tissue that is attainable only through an art
that has labored long and earnestly to achieve beauty. Had Mr. Moore
never recaptured his ancestral tradition, had he remained the writer
that Paris and London had made him, he had never written so finely as he
writes in "The Lake." An infancy and boyhood in Ireland; a youth in
London; the ten years from twenty-one to thirty-one in Paris; eleven
years of hard writing in London, years comparatively lean after those of
luxury that anteceded them, brought Mr. Moore at forty-two to a
knowledge of what was beautiful and significant in his home country. He
and Mr. Martyn were not many years apart when they began to write about
Ireland, but Mr. Moore had back of him not only ten years of writing,
but back of that ten years of living life as an art in Paris and his
attempts in the art of painting and his years of discussion of art in
the studios. Mr. Martyn, at home, had been more concerned with religion
and nationality and politics, and a shift to art as the principal career
of life after forty--"Morgante the Lesser" was no more than an incursion
into art, about as much of his life as a trip to Bayreuth--is only in
rare instances productive of results interesting to others than the
"artist." The difference in the achievements of the two men is not so
much t