mysteries of life which nature is continually unfolding. The artist's
mission is to reveal to us the visions he alone has been vouchsafed to
see, and to reveal them so that the revelation is a creation. The men
and women he is introducing to us must be as real and as living to us
as they are to him. That is what George Moore has done in "Celibates"
and that is why I say he is an artist.

"Celibates" consists of three stories--two of women and one of a man.
Mildred Lawson and John Norton are celibates by nature. Agnes Lahens
is a celibate from environment and circumstance. Each of the three is
utterly different from the other, and yet all are alike in that they
are the products of a modern civilization. Mildred and John are
without that compulsive force which is known as the sexual passion. If
they have it at all, it has been diluted by tradition and so-called
culture into a mere sensation. Agnes's passion is an arrested one, so
that what there is of it is easily diverted into an expression of
religious aspiration.

Mildred Lawson would be called a born flirt. She is pretty, charming,
and talented; but she is cold, unresponsive, selfish, and futile. She
is also eminently respectable after the English middle-class manner.
She has ambition, but she lacks the will-power to school herself and
the determination to accomplish. She is rich in goods but very poor in
goodness. She is often moved profoundly by beautiful thoughts and
uplifting emotions of which she herself is the pleasing, pulsating
centre; but her soul is negative, so that her spiritual states
evaporate when the opportunity is given her for transforming them into
acts. She never gets anywhere. She is self-conscious to a degree and
unstable as water. After breaking one man's heart and deadening the
hearts of three other men, she finally accepts an old and rejected