uida has not missed weaving her Tyrian purples into
the exalted pattern of her romantic painters. And George Eliot. And
Disraeli. And Bernard Shaw--there is a painting creature in Love Among
the Artists. George Moore, however, has devoted more of his pages to
paint and painters than any other of the latter-day writers. The
reason is this: George Moore went to Paris to study art and he drifted
into the Julian atelier like any other likely young fellow with hazy
notions about art and a well-filled purse. But these early experiences
were not lost. They cropped up in many of his stories and studies. He
became the critical pioneer of the impressionistic movement and first
told London about Manet, Monet, Degas. He even--in an article
remarkable for critical acumen--declared that if Jimmy Whistler had
been a heavier man, a man of beef, brawn, and beer, like Rubens, he
would have been as great a painter as Velasquez. To the weighing
scales, fellow-artists! retorted Whistler; yet the bolt did not miss
the mark. Whistler's remarks about Mr. Moore, especially after the
Eden lawsuit, were, so it is reported, not fit to print.

In Mr. Moore's first volume of the half-forgotten trilogy, Spring
Days, we see a young painter who, it may be said, thinks more of
petticoats than paint. There is paint talk in Mike Fletcher, Moore's
most virile book. In A Modern Lover the hero is an artist who succeeds
in the fashionable world by painting pretty, artificial portraits and
faded classical allegories, thereby winning the love of women, much
wealth, popular applause, and the stamp of official approbation. This
Lewis Seymour still lives and paints modish London in rose-colour.
Moore's irony would have entered the soul of a hundred "celebrated"
artists if they had had any soul to flesh it in. When he wrote this
novel, one that shocked Mrs. Grundy, Moore was under the influence of
Paris. However, that masterpiece of description and analysis, Mildred
Lawson in Celibates--very Balzacian title, by the way--deals with
hardly anything else but art. Mildred, who is an English girl without
soul, heart, or talent, studies in the Julian atelier and goes to
Fontainebleau during the summer. No one, naturally, will ever describe
Fontainebleau better than Flaubert, in whose L'Education Sentimentale
there are marvellous pictures; also a semi-burlesque painter,
Pellerin, who reads all the works on aesthetics before he draws a line,
and not forgetting that imperis