ss bed without
curtains. There were two windows in the room. One of them was flush
with the head of the bed, and the other was beyond its foot. A chest of
drawers stood between them. An observer, unless he had a special purpose
in it, would never have dreamt of writing down this bald detail. Nothing
comes of the statement of fact. Nothing hangs on the relative position
of the bed and the windows and the chest of drawers. Nothing happens
in the course of the story which justifies the flat and flavourless
statement. It is wholly without meaning, apart from the fact that it
affords rather a plain insight into the author's method of work. If a
child of three after visiting a strange bedroom were able to tell as
much about it as Mr. Moore has to tell about this apartment, his mother
would probably be proud of him, and his nurse would say that he was a
notice-taking little creature; but the critics would hardly hold him up
to admiration as an observer. Yet the child would tell us just as much
and just as little as Mr. Moore tells us in this particular instance.
It goes without saying that this is not a fair specimen of Mr. Moore's
faculty, but it is significant of his general literary knack. He makes
it his business steadfastly to jot down what he sees, and it is not
impossible that in the course of a long and laborious life a man might
in this way cultivate to a reasonable growth a turn for observation
originally less than mediocre; but it is not the natural observer's
method of seeing things, and it is not the natural artist's method of
presenting them. If the critics in this case were in the right we should
have to acknowledge an auctioneer's catalogue as a _chef d'ouvre_.

To the sympathetic reader it was evident from the first that Mr. Moore
was not greatly enamoured of his work for its own sake, and that he
chose his themes, not because of any imperative attraction they had for
him, but simply and purely for the use to which he could put them. His
choice of subject has always been the result of a deliberate search for
the effective. The mental process which gave rise to 'A Mummer's Wife'
is easily traceable. The domestic life of the class of people he made up
his mind to treat was as little known to him as to almost anybody, but
if properly handled it was pretty sure to make good copy. He must know
it first, however, and so he set himself to learn it. This is the Zola
method, but it is that method with a difference. The