Page:Red (1925).pdf/150

 own Wessex Poems. George Moore was a painter in his youth, and it was while he was studying art in Paris that he imbibed much of the atmosphere that is so essential a part of his books. To this phase of his life we owe such works as The Confessions of a Young Man and Memoirs of My Dead Life, but could such a passage as the description of the trees in A Story-Teller's Holiday have been written by any one but a painter? I hardly think so. Holbrook Jackson tells us that Bernard Shaw as a boy never wanted to write. He wished to draw, and Michelangelo was his boyish ideal. Gautier had the intention of becoming a painter when he