My Contemporaries in Fiction by David Christie Murray

That salt of sincerity which saves 'Jude the Obscure' and 'Tess o' the D'Urber-villes' from being wholly nauseous, is absent from 'A Modern Lover' and 'A Drama in Muslin,' and its flavour is but faintly perceptible in 'Esther Waters. ' Except on the distinct understanding that Thomas Hardy and George Moore are bracketed here, for the sake of convenience, as being both 'under French encouragement,' it would be a gross critical injustice to couple their names together at all. It is not one man of letters in a hundred who has Mr. Hardy's mere literary faculty, which is native and brilliant, whilst Mr. Moore's has been painstakingly hunted for and brought from afar, and is, after much polishing, still a trifle dull. Mr. Thomas Hardy is distinctly one of those men who see things through an atmosphere of their own. Mr. George Moore has borrowed his atmosphere. The one is a man of genius as well as labour, and the other is a man of labour only.

It is very much of a pity that, a year or two ago, somebody's sense of Mr. Moore's position in the world of letters should have been very absurdly emphasised. It was solemnly advertised that a certain number of copies of a book of his might be had on large paper, with the autograph of the author. This was to be regretted, for Mr. Moore, in his own way, is worth taking seriously, whilst the trick is one of those which, as a rule, can only be played by the poorest kind of literary outsider. But that the author should have permitted himself to be thus made ridiculous is a characteristic thing, and one not to be passed in silence if we wish to understand him.