great French master
started with an inspired and inspiring scheme, his idea being no less
than to paint the society of an epoch from top to base, to present in a
series of books, the writing of which should fill his literary lifetime,
a completed portraiture of the whole people of his land and day. In the
course of such a labour as he had courageously appointed for himself,
many lines of special inquiry were necessarily indicated, but the
details for which he searched were all employed with an artistic
remorselessness in the building of that one great scheme of his, and
each successive book which left his hands was like one more nail driven
home and clinched for the support of his argument. Mr. Moore, as those
who are honoured by his personal acquaintance know better than those who
only read his books, resents with some warmth the obvious parallel which
has been drawn between Zola and himself; but he is a copyist of Zola's
method for all that, and but for Zola's influence would never have been
heard of on his own present lines. In the writing of the 'Mummers Wife'
the first obvious impulse came from Zola, It should be the writer's
business to discover a section of English life not hitherto
exploited--it should be his business to explore it with a minute
thoroughness--and it should, further, be his business to depict it as he
found it. To be thoroughly painstaking in inquiry, and without fear in
the exposition of facts discovered, were the aims before the writer. But
Mr. Moore forgot, as was inevitable in the circumstances, that no desire
for knowledge of things human is of real value without sympathy. He
followed the fortunes of a theatrical company touring in the provinces,
and though it is true enough that people who know that kind of life find
trivial errors here and there, it has to be admitted that on the whole
he gave a true and characteristic picture of the outside life of such a
community. How a certain class of theatrical people dress and talk, what
their work is, and what their outer ways are like, he has discovered
with infinite painstaking; but the fact remains that it is the work
of an outsider. He has never once got under the skin of any one of his
people, and this is true, because he was impelled to write about them,
not because they were human, and therefore endowed with all human
characteristics of hatefulness, and lovableness, and quaintness, and
humour, and vanity, and jealousy, but because he saw good