Author : Columbia university New York. Department of Romance languages. Auteur du texte. The text displayed may contain some errors. The text of this document has been generated automatically by an optical character recognition OCR program.
A FTER in England, when the interlude of the influence of German culture was closing, a reawakened admiration for the French spirit and a desire to imitate the French forms and movements arose, but the introduction of naturalism into England came only when its scabrous corpse was being interred in France. While the trends were thus taking new shape, George Moore was not quiescent; though he had not yet decided how symbolism was to affect his writings, he produced a novel in from his temporary viewpoint.
The book in matter is banal, in treatment mediocre its story is merely the husband-quest of the daughters of a bourgeois Dublin family, but it was written in a style new to Moore. He had read A Rebours and been struck with the new horizons of power opened to him; he, like Huysmans, had seen the insufficiency of Zola's descriptive mechanics, shorn of all delicacy and nuance, when it was question of reproducing the subtle and poetic lustre of the world.
With a lumbering, unflavored touch, he contrives his similes, sometimes close in spirit to his model, sometimes far, as in this:. Continuing his description, two pages farther, he does once write down a Huysmans phrase: "purple was gathered like garments about the loins. Even for an amateur this catalogue is wretched; and too often in the book Moore degenerates into shoddy, careless similes, written without that spark which makes them breathe.
Moore never learned, as Huysmans early did, to avoid the use of 'like' and 'as' whenever possible; in this little device lies the secret of much of Huysmans's efficacy. Nor did Moore ever possess the good taste or sense of fitness that the French writer employed. Like crones in borrowed bonnets some are fashionable with flowers in the rotting window framesothers languish in silly cheerfulness like women living on the proceeds of the pawnshop; others-those with brass plates on the doors-are evilsmelling as the prescriptions of the threadbare doctor, bald as the bill of costs of the servile attorney".
