[In the following essay, the critic favorably assesses stylistic aspects of A Story-Teller's Holiday.]

In [a two-volume] uniform edition of Mr. George Moore's works, Ulick and Sorocha has been revised and made an integral part of A Story Teller's Holiday. Both of these books have only appeared previously in limited editions. After Ulick and Soracha a new story has been added to this sequence of tales, which are connected by the pleasing convention that they are told either by Mr. Moore himself or by an Irish peasant "shanachie," or story-teller, when walking together in Ireland. The new story, that of "Dinol and Crede," though it is very short, rounds off the other stories, all of which represent aspects of much the same situation and much the same state of mind. They are, in fact, all about what the Florentines called the conflict of amor and castitas. But the elegant combat of pagan figures painted by Cosimo Rosselli conjures up a world wholly different from that of Mr. Moore's stories. The baffled or tragic loves of monks and nuns, or of other inhabitants of ancient Ireland, held by the peculiar Catholic and Irish conception of chastity suggest by no means so simple an opposition of arrow and shield. "De toutes les perversions sexuelles," it has been said, "la chasteté est la plus étonnante"; and chastity seen in this light, as a strange and pathetic variant of the normal, has for Mr. Moore a great fascination, so great that here it is the theme and the inspiration of many stories.

Yet Mr. Moore's interest in the theme is not that of a psychologist, and he does not wish to explain. It is enough for him that such a state of mind exists, and that he can distil from it a perfume—in fact that it is, though in no very obvious way, romantic.

A spiritual wife, I grant you, will not be understood by the ignorant and the stupid, but all men are not stupid and ignorant . . . and I think that there are many who will understand that there is great beauty in the story which came to me between sleeping and waking last night.

To perceive the beauty of anything, is, it would seem, the same thing as to understand it. But what is beauty to Mr. Moore? He does not find it, like the bolder novelists, in the heart of a problem in psychology where everything is, so far as possible, laid open and bare. He seems not to wish to disturb his contemplation of human relationships by coming over-near or grappling with them. He views them with almost as much detachment as if they were works of art. One must not see too much how things work, and everything must be left undisturbed to exhale its proper perfume. And so Mr. Moore tends to treat human beings and human ideals as Pater treated works of art; he appreciates them in that particular way which avoids explanation and even any comment that might interrupt the dream which they assist or of which they are the material. And so it is with this difficult and traditional conception of chastity; Mr. Moore appreciates it as if it were a recondite and sometimes a perverse work of art.

But human beings are restless, they move rapidly and are often robustly commonplace. And so there is a slight sense of strain in this appreciation while its human subjects have to be kept quiet. Hence comes Mr. Moore's style, slow and forcing all things to keep its pace. It is a style which can hold the commonest events of everyday life fast, so that it may not be taken for granted and that it too by a slow and deliberate inspection may be appreciated. When Mr. Moore comes upon some event or some detail not at all easy to treat as a work of art one is reminded of Henry James's use of slang words, which are placed with so much ingenuity after a long preparation that one is induced to believe that the author has naively come upon them for the first time, and that being new they have for him a new felicity. But there is not so much need of resetting the commonplace or the disturbing in stories of ancient Ireland, of "le cœur chaste" which St. François de Sales says is "comme la mer perle qui ne peut recevoir aucune goutte d'eau qui ne vienne du ciel." And yet Mr. Moore's style continues; that which is not commonplace is nevertheless set in as elaborate a setting as if it were, and the result is an added sweetness, a greater preciosity in the appreciation. But Mr. Moore is not St. François de Sales, and though sometimes he seems to be writing honeyed, if more subtle, paragraphs in praise of "la vie dévote," at other times he finds sweetness not only in the achievement of a monastic life, but also in deviation, or in temptation to deviate, from it. Then his style does find its proper uses, for the victory either of amor or of castitas is in this instance no full-blooded humanist conquest, but a faint and perverse peculation or a faint and perverse virtue. Even this could be fairly easily appreciated without so elaborate a mechanism as Mr. Moore's style, if it were viewed with the eyes of a determined aesthetic appreciator. But Mr. Moore, having at his disposal so perfect a mechanism, is quite rightly not content with a task only as hard as this. The temptations and the peculations are narrated in detail, and with detail if not the commonplace the undignified enters. Thus, even a story of ancient Ireland, even a traditional and romantic story of a traditional and historical state of mind, does provide some exercise for Mr. Moore's style and for the gymnastics of appreciation.