ision; they have
passages of high poetry. Old Mr. Innes, with his tiresome
preoccupations, his pedantic taste, his mediaeval musical instruments,
affects me exactly as an unrelenting idealist does in actual life. The
mystical Ulick has a profound charm; the Sisters in the convent, all
preoccupied with the same or similar ideas, have each a perfectly
distinct individuality. Evelyn herself, even with all her frank and
unashamed sensuality, is a deeply attractive figure; and I know no
books which so render the evasive charm of the cloistered life. But
George Moore has two grave faults; he is sometimes vulgar and he is
sometimes brutal. Evelyn's worldly lover is a man who makes one's flesh
creep, and yet one feels he is intended to represent the fascination of
the world. Then it does not seem to me to be true realism to depict
scenes of frank animalism. Such things may occur; but the actors in
such a carnival could not speak of them, even to each other; it may be
prudish, but I cannot help feeling that one ought not to have
represented in a book what could not be repeated in conversation or
depicted in a picture. One may be plain-spoken enough in art, but one
ought not to have the feeling that one would be ashamed, in certain
passages, to catch the author's eye. If it were not for these lapses, I
should put George Moore at the head of all contemporary novelists; and
I am not sure that I do not do so as it is. Do give them another trial;
I always thought you were too easily discouraged in your attempt to
grapple with his books; probably my admiration for them only aroused
your critical sense; and I admit that there is much to criticise.

Then there is another writer, lately dead, alas, whose books I used to
read with absorbing interest, George Gissing. They had, when he treated
of his own peculiar stratum, the same quality of hard reality which I
value most of all in a work of fiction. The actors were not so much
vulgar as underbred; their ambitions and tastes were often deplorable.
But one felt that they were real people. The wall of the suburban villa
was gently removed, and the life was before your eyes. The moment he
strayed from that milieu, the books became fantastic and unreal. But in
the last two books, By the Ionian Sea and the Papers of Henry Rycroft,
Gissing stepped into a new province, and produced exquisitely beautiful
and poetical idealistic literature.

Thomas Hardy is a poetical writer. But his rustic life,