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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
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