nything more effective than the people in 'Esther Waters.' They are
clothed with an exactitude of detail which would do credit to Madame
Tussaud's exhibition in its latest development. They are carefully
modelled and coloured and posed. They are capital waxwork, and if the
author had only cared a little bit about them, they might have even that
mystic touch of life which thrills us in the finer sorts of fiction. It
is eternally true that the wounded is the wounding heart, and the mere
descriptive and analytical method not only misses the natural human
movement, but it is untrue in its results. Vivisection teaches
something, no doubt, but it does not bring a knowledge of the natural
animal. To get that knowledge you had better live with him a little, and
even love him a little, and teach him to love you. All the scientific
inquiry in the world is not worth--in art--one touch of affectionate
understanding.

Esther Waters is to go to a lying-in hospital, and thither goes her
author before her, bent on what he can picturesquely set down about
her surroundings. Her husband is to go to a hospital for consumption.
Thither goes the author, and sets down things seen and heard with the
wooden, conscientious precision of a bailiff's clerk. The conception of
things inquired into seems never to move him to interest, though one
is forced to believe that once, at least, he has narrowly escaped the
contagion of a great scene. Esther's illegitimate child is born, and
the mother, who has temporarily left him for his own sake, to accept a
position as wet-nurse, is inspired by a hungry maternal longing, which
drags her irresistibly from warmth and comfort to a poverty whose
bitterness has but a single solace--the joy of satisfied motherly love.
There are writers who have not a hundredth part of Mr. Moore's industry
who would have moved the reader deeply with such a scene. But, if Mr.
Moore feels at all, he is ashamed to show it. This mother-hunger is
apparently just as affecting a thing to him as the position of the
chest of drawers between the two windows--a fact made note of, and,
therefore, to be chronicled. Either the writer is content coldly to
survey this rage of passion, or he would have us believe he is so; and
in either case he misses the mark of the artist, which is, after all, to
show such things as he deals with as they truly are, and to seize upon
their inwardness. We do not ask for a slavering flux of sentiment, or
an acrobat