Tolstoi or Walt Whitman! So indeed might the whole English literary revolt
have taken its rise under different and perhaps happier influences. But it
happened as it happened. And accidents are important. The accident of
having to turn to France for moral support colored the whole English
literary revolt. And the accident of going to Paris colored vividly the
superficial layers of George Moore's soul. This book partly represents a
flaunting of such borrowed colors. It was the fashion of the Parisian
diabolists to gloat over cruelty, by way of showing their superiority to
Christian morality. The enjoyment of others' suffering was a splendid pagan
virtue. So George Moore kept a pet python, and cultivated paganness by
watching it devour rabbits alive.

It was the result of the same accident which caused him to conclude--and to
preach at some length in this book--that art is aristocratic. It was the
proper pagan thing to say, as he does here--"What care I that some millions
of wretched Israelites died under Pharaoh's lash? They died that I might
have the Pyramids to look on"--and other remarks even more shocking and
jejune. It was this accident which made him write ineffable silliness in
this and other early volumes about "virtue" and "vice," assume a
man-about-town's attitude toward women, and fill pages with maudlin phrases
about marble, perfumes, palm-trees, blood, lingerie, and moonlight. These
were the follies of his teachers, to be faithfully imitated. If he had
first heard the news that the body is good from Walt Whitman, or that the
human soul contains lust and cruelty from Tolstoi, what canticles we should
have had from George Moore on the subject of democracy in life and art!

Deeper down, George Moore was already wiser than his masters. He was to
write of the love-life of Evelyn Innes, and the common workaday tragedy of
Esther Waters, with a tender and profound sympathy far removed from the
sentiments he felt obliged to profess here. This book is a young man's