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GEORGE MOORE 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 THE LIVING CHALICE 
 
 AIDS TO THE IMMORTALITY OF CERTAIN 
 PERSONS IN IRELAND 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 BY 
 
 SUSAN L. MITCHELL 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 DODD, MEAD & CO. 
 
 1916 
 
*(* 
 
 ^f^v 
 
 / /7 
 
TO 
 
 ".E" AND JOHN EGLINTON 
 
 WHO ALONE WERE TREATED MERCIFULLY 
 
 BY THE AUTHOR OF "AVE, SALVE AND VALE 
 
 AND WHO ARE THEREFORE NOT LIKELY 
 
 TO BE INDIGNANT AT THE ASSOCIATION OF 
 
 THEIR NAMES WITH THIS STUDY OF 
 
 GEORGE MOORE 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 George Moore might have cried with Walt 
 Whitman : " Do I contradict myself ? Very 
 well, I contradict myself. I contain multi- 
 tudes." He has paraded before us un- 
 abashed, in a multitudinous personality ; 
 ashamed of only one George Moore, the 
 little Catholic boy of that name who went 
 to confession. Yet why should he whose 
 whole life has been spent in making con- 
 fessions object to confession ? Perhaps it 
 was the privacy of the confessional that 
 affronted him, that so much good copy 
 should be wasted, poured into the ears of 
 unliterary priests, whose lips were sealed 
 and unable to retail all that valuable 
 material. Of course as a literary man he 
 would deny the Catholic George Moore, and 
 as I do not desire to wound him I will not 
 refer any more to this child who was so 
 likely a father to the man we know ; no 
 need to when we have Moore the pagan, 
 Moore the Protestant, Moore the artist, 
 Moore the realist, Moore the stylist, Moore 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 the patriot, Moore the anti-Irishman, Moore 
 the dramatist : all personalities which he 
 himself has revealed to us in the most en- 
 chanting fiction. I will come to each of 
 these personalities in turn, but I shall begin 
 with the only one of which he himself is not 
 the creator, the George Moore, minted in 
 Mayo, stamped somewhere towards the 
 middle of the last century with an unmis- 
 takable Irish birthright which he has never 
 been able to obliterate. 
 
 I have had great difficulty in collecting 
 any facts about this George Moore, prin- 
 cipally because the Celt is averse from facts, 
 and when I enquired certain things of those 
 who knew him intimately, I was swept off 
 my feet by a torrent of opinions. Mr. Moore 
 has always been a troubler of the waters of 
 opinion. Even in the matter of his age the 
 records do not help us. Doubtless the gods 
 who predestined him to immortality saw to 
 it that his beginnings were shrouded from 
 the measurements of time. Computing by 
 the light of mere mortality, we find recorded 
 in " Who's Who " that his first published 
 work, " Poems of Passion," appeared in 
 1878. As he must at least have known how 
 to read when these appeared, there is some- 
 thing to be said for dating his birth from 
 the early fifties, and we will proceed on that 
 assumption. 
 
 George Moore, then, was born perhaps in 
 10 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 1852, the eldest son of George Henry Moore, 
 of Moore Hall, in the county of Mayo, in 
 the province of Connaught in Ireland. 
 George Henry Moore was a distinguished 
 Irishman, and his life has been ably written 
 by his son. Colonel Maurice Moore. He 
 might be said to have been the founder of 
 the Independent Party in Irish politics, 
 but his political intelligence undoubtedly 
 did not descend to his son George. 
 
 George Moore, who describes with such 
 fidelity of detail the personal appearance of 
 the characters in his novels, should delight 
 in seeing himself portrayed by another 
 artist, and as this chapter purports to deal 
 with the outer George Moore, I will recall my 
 own first impressions. It was my lot to be 
 living in London when what calls itself the 
 Irish revival was surging there, for we must 
 not forget that London was the source of 
 that upsetting wave which draggled all our 
 crisp young feathers. To me, shortsighted 
 from my obscurity in midland Ireland, the 
 greatness of London was not in its literary 
 persons but in the city itself. It submerged 
 me, and I instinctively raised myself on 
 the shoulders nearest me. It was doubtless 
 luck for me that these shoulders belonged 
 to such as the Yeats, Martyn, Moore, Lady 
 Gregory, Ashe King, but at first I did not 
 know my luck. I thought that these people 
 were merely ornaments for the drawing- 
 
 11 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 room ; afterwards I realised they were orna- 
 ments for the world. 
 
 I lived with the Yeats in Blenheim Road — 
 and what a lovely book I shall write some 
 day about that most companionable house- 
 hold. 
 
 To me the persons I met there were not 
 at first either intellects or notabilities, they 
 were mere society. After a little — being of 
 a mind with our old friend Prince Arthur of 
 the Tennysonian idyll — I "needs must love 
 the highest " when I saw it, I recognised 
 them and all their company for what they 
 were. So it came to pass that though of 
 small account myself, and not now even in 
 the memory of most of these — I was free of 
 a great company, and my mind, a little 
 overawed by W. B. Yeats, Martyn and 
 Lady Gregory and always inclined to levity, 
 fastened itself on a name that seemed to 
 give a lightsome mood to whosoever men- 
 tioned it, and I grew curious about Moore. 
 Yet when at the rehearsal of " Countess 
 Cathleen " in some dark by-way of London, 
 I was told he was present, I cannot recall 
 any form, only an irritation in the dusty 
 atmosphere. When next I met George 
 Moore it was in my own city Dublin, where 
 every brewer pleases and only literature is 
 vile, but I, who still trailed some of the 
 clouds of reverence that I brought with me 
 from London, looked at this man of wicked 
 
 12 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 books with an excitement that even irre- 
 verent DubHn could not damp. It occmTcd 
 to me to wonder at what age Satan brands 
 his votaries, as they told us in the Sunday- 
 school books and as I still believed, because 
 Moore, who everyone said was a very wicked 
 man, had the rosy face and innocent yellow 
 hair of young virtue, kindness was on his 
 lips, though his eyes were not quite so kind, 
 a little slow in following the lips. I had 
 met in London another yellow-haired writer, 
 but he was pale and pasty of complexion — 
 and Moore was not like Symons. No, he 
 was not like Symons ; it counted in his 
 favour. George Moore seemed to me then 
 to be a man of middle height with an egg- 
 shaped face and head, light yellow hair in 
 perpetual revolt against the brush, a stout 
 nose with thick nostrils, grey-green eyes, 
 remarkable eyes, a mouth inclined to pet- 
 tishness, lips thick in the middle as if a bee 
 had stung them. He had champagne shoul- 
 ders and a somewhat thick, ungainly figure, 
 but he moved about a room with a grace 
 which is not of Dublin drawing-rooms. 
 Afterwards, seeing George Moore in the 
 street, I found he was the only man in 
 Dublin who walked fashionably. The strange 
 word suits him ; perhaps he is the last man 
 of fashion in these islands. He wore an 
 opera hat. Nobody in Dublin wears an 
 opera hat, and, when Moore put it like a 
 
 13 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 crown upon his yellow head or crushed it 
 fashionably under his arm, it acted on 
 Dublin like an incantation. I remember 
 my own instantaneous homage. 
 
 This description I feel to be inadequate, 
 and I have summoned to my aid the folk- 
 lore of Dublin. Dublin is a crater of epithet, 
 and whenever George Moore is mentioned 
 out of the crater boil up such phrases as 
 " an over-ripe gooseberry," " a great big 
 intoxicated baby," " a satyr," " a boiled 
 ghost," " a gosling." I am not satisfied 
 with these descriptions, they are florid and 
 untidy, and all descriptions suffer in com- 
 parison with Moore's own perfect etching of 
 a portrait. He speaks in the latest of his 
 prefaces of his " sloping shoulders and long 
 female hands," with the feeling of a true 
 artist. True there are painted portraits of 
 George Moore. One by Miss Harrison in 
 which she has set her own benevolence on 
 her sitter's brow and her own candour in 
 his eyes. It is not her portrait, however, 
 which is most truly symbolic of Moore, but the 
 famous portrait by Manet. In my (borrowed) 
 copy of " Modern Painting," when I came 
 across in the essay on Manet the words " He 
 never painted anything that he did not 
 make beautiful," I found them underlined 
 by some waggish reader with a reference to 
 the number of the page on which the repro- 
 duction of the Manet portrait appeared ! 
 
 14 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 That portrait which is Hke nothing so much 
 as the human symbol of a high-explosive 
 shell. 
 
 George Moore's is a face dear to the 
 caricaturist and in itself at times a carica- 
 ture : the yellow hair, the fat features, the 
 sly smile, the malice, the vanity. But as 
 has been said to me, let someone begin to 
 discuss an idea and in a moment the con- 
 tours change, the fat shapelessness falls 
 away, the jaw lengthens, the bones become 
 visible, the eyes darken, the brows straighten, 
 a hawk-like keenness is in the look. One 
 does not caricature this Moore ; it is the 
 face of the thinker, the man who handles 
 ideas like a master. There is a duality in 
 Moore that at once repels and fascinates 
 and makes a study of him a delightful 
 adventure in characterisation. 
 
 I am not a great reader and rarely read 
 critically, but in my skimmings over fiction 
 I cannot recall any writer so continuously 
 implicated in his own work as George Moore. 
 The creative mind, following the highest 
 example, leaves its creatures once formed to 
 fend for themselves. They are most close 
 and cherished, an agony and a delight till 
 they have taken shape and started on their 
 own lives, then one feels them a part of 
 one's self no more, they are separate beings. 
 The child sets out to play his part in life. 
 That is, perhaps, why the writer who most 
 
 15 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 lays bare his soul in creation feels so little 
 intimacy, so little modesty, when his thought 
 confronts him later on the printed page. 
 It is no more bone of his bone, but, lord of 
 its own body, it has begun to form its own 
 ties. 
 
 George Moore does not seem to me to 
 create in this fashion. His production is 
 more like that of the banyan tree whose 
 own branches spring up into trees all round 
 it, never detaching themselves from their 
 parent, but in their many lives are one tree. 
 George in his many books is but one George, 
 he never loses sight of any of his selves in 
 any of his works, but returns continually 
 to write new prefaces to old books, re- 
 animating in turn each of his dead memories. 
 This is why I find it impossible to write 
 of George Moore's works apart from George 
 himself. Though I shall do my best as a 
 conscientious writer to examine the writings 
 severally, I know that I cannot hide from 
 him in his banyan grove, he will spring at 
 me from behind every one of his own 
 saplings ; although as a poet, in which 
 character I shall first consider him, he has 
 been more successful in concealing himself 
 than in any other. 
 
 16 
 
II 
 
 Mr. Moore, though never a penitent, has 
 confessed himself so abundantly in all his 
 work that his biographer's task should be 
 an easy one. If we examine the matter 
 closely, however, we shall see that while 
 Rousseau, eminent among confessors, made 
 confessions all about himself, Mr. Moore's 
 are largely about his friends. As a poet, 
 however, Mr. Moore presents few difficulties. 
 It is easy to understand how a young man, 
 heady with vanity and conscious of some 
 literary power, should first seek in verse a 
 medium of expression. He himself said 
 once : " Every young man of literary talent 
 has one volume of poems in him when he is 
 young ; the test of a poet is whether he can 
 still write poems when he is fifty ! " Judged 
 by this his own standard, Mr. Moore is not 
 a poet. He published two volumes of 
 poetry, " Flowers of Passion " in 1878, and 
 " Pagan Poems " in 1881. In neither of 
 these is there much more than competent 
 versifying. They are wanting in that sin- 
 cerity which is in nearly all his prose ; they 
 are artful and more than a trifle perverse. 
 But for this latter quality they might have 
 B 17 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 been written by any of those beneficed and 
 leisured clergymen whose elegantly bound 
 volumes of classically flavoured verse are 
 in so many eighteenth-century book collec- 
 tions. The patient cataloguer knows them 
 well, and knowing, yawns. In perhaps only 
 two poems of Mr. Moore's, " Ode to a Dead 
 Body" and "The Beggar Girl," is there a 
 hint of that sympathy which afterwards, 
 when he had found his real mode of expres- 
 sion as a novelist, made " Esther Waters " 
 the best of all his novels. 
 
 Mr. Moore is so interesting to a biographer 
 as a human being, as a novelist and as a 
 critic, why should I make any bones of dis- 
 missing his claims as a poet ? A story I 
 have been told of Mr. Moore's boyhood 
 makes an appropriate comment on his 
 verse. He chose as a treat for his tenth 
 birthday to be dressed up to resemble a 
 Greek of Syria. With an ornamental sword 
 and mounted on a grey pony with Eastern 
 trappings he was led around his father's 
 demesne to the wonder of the peasants. 
 His love of " dressing up " made him write 
 verse as it made him study painting. 
 
 It will not surprise anybody who has 
 read Mr. Moore's verse to learn that his 
 favourite poets are Shelley and Swinburne. 
 His two volumes are a whole whispering 
 gallery full of echoes. It is amazing to see 
 a man who began by so servile an imitation 
 
 18 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 of other men develop the astonishing origin- 
 ahty of " Ave, Salve and Vale." 
 
 As well as these two volumes of poems, 
 Mr. Moore collaborated with a friend in 
 " Martin Luther," a tragedy in blank verse. 
 I have been told that a literary friend in 
 Dublin once asked him about " Martin 
 Luther." He instantly sprang from his chair 
 and clutching his flaxen locks walked fran- 
 tically about his room wailing : " What 
 have I ever done to you that you should 
 remind me of this thing ? " It is so difficult 
 to get a copy of this work to-day that I am 
 tempted to believe Mr. Moore bought up 
 the copies himself and destroyed them. 
 
 Every now and then when he was in 
 Dublin Mr. Moore would discover a new 
 poet and try him on the stony silence of 
 John Eglinton. His faith in Swinburne was 
 somewhat shaken by the steady refusal of 
 the Irish school of poets to see more in 
 him than eloquent emptiness. " Flowers of 
 Passion," however, fetches up to £8 from 
 collectors, and will continue to go up in 
 price no doubt, in spite of this chapter. 
 
 19 
 
Ill 
 
 Nobody in Irelanti has ever seen any of 
 Mr. Moore's paintings except "^," to 
 whom he once shyly showed a head, remark- 
 ing that it had some " quahty." "^ " 
 remained silent. 
 
 20 
 
IV 
 
 When I come to speak of Mr. Moore as a 
 critic I have nothing but my mother wit 
 to guide me. As to the intrinsic value of 
 his criticism, I have not the knowledge 
 which would enable me to gauge it. This 
 defect of mine has always been a great 
 trouble to me, though Mr. Balfour wrote 
 encouraging words to such as I when, after 
 profound examination into the question of 
 criteria, he decided there were none save 
 personal preference. Should I be timid in 
 following where so intrepid a thinker has 
 led the way ? 
 
 Mr. Moore wrote " Impressions and 
 Opinions " in 1890, and " Modern Painting " 
 in 1893. To many people these books of 
 criticism are by far the most interesting of 
 his work. He has a great deal to say about 
 writing and painting and he is so interested 
 in both these arts that he compels our 
 interest. He knows why he likes a painter 
 or a writer and he tells us why with all the 
 skill of language he possesses. Nobody 
 does this quite in Mr. Moore's way, because 
 very few people bring such a momentum of 
 personality to bear upon their writing. At 
 
 21 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 the moment I can think of no writer about 
 writers to compare him with, except Chester- 
 ton, and I am aware that it is an unfair 
 comparison and exposes at once the lack in 
 Mr. Moore's writing. Mr. Chesterton is 
 indeed a shower of star dust rather than a 
 star, yet if that shining dust of epigram had 
 an organic unity he might be one of the great 
 writers of the world. He has been brushed 
 by the wing of genius, and Mr. Moore, whose 
 altars are never cold — for he has made many 
 a burnt offering — has never been able to 
 lure the winged ones his way. 
 
 Yet his art as a writer is a genuine art. 
 But while his writing about writers is always 
 very interesting, his writing about painting 
 is a different and a greater thing. I explain 
 it to myself this way. He married his art 
 as a writer and settled down comfortably 
 enough beside her for life, he will never 
 leave her, he would be lost without her. 
 Painting he loved, but did not marry. It 
 was an unrequited love. All the ardour of 
 h s youth went out to her. He worked hard 
 in her service but she would have none of 
 him. All he knows of romance is on that 
 side of his nature. This warms us as we 
 read his '' Modern Painting." We know as 
 he writes about painting that his adoring 
 eye is still on the palette which will never 
 do his bidding. He loved those colours, he 
 knew all they could do for others but they 
 
 22 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 never glowed for him. Hence every sen- 
 tence he writes about pictures he rolls upon 
 his tongue, it is a sweet morsel, and he gives 
 us with full justice every particle of its 
 flavour. That one should smell the paint 
 in these sentences is not wonderful. Some- 
 one told me that Mr. Moore said he loved 
 the smell of oil paint better than the smell 
 of flowers. Where one disagrees with Mr. 
 Moore's criticism — and who agrees with any- 
 one's criticism ? — is perhaps, as has been said 
 to me, because he cares more for art than 
 nature and for painting than for art. 
 
 " Impressions and Opinions " are very 
 much Moore weighted with all his sincere 
 and unreasonable personality ; serious and 
 reverent as in the Balzac article where he 
 helps us to look just for an instant into that 
 million - peopled brain ; in the impressions 
 of Turgenieff, Verlaine, Zola, the Two 
 Unknown Poets, full of as keen a scent for 
 literature as the foxhound for the fox. That 
 he does not always " kill " is part of the 
 charm of our Moore as a critic, he allows 
 himself to be deflected from his object as 
 in the Zola article by a very deliberate ill- 
 temper, and in the Turgenieff article by 
 the pettishness that makes him sell his 
 Dostoevsky for a foolish epigram. In " Mum- 
 mer Worship " he enjoys himself, as we all 
 do when dignifying our personal anti- 
 pathies by the name of opinions we give 
 
 23 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 our public " a piece of our mind." The 
 articles on " the Salon Julien " and " De- 
 gas," the " Rencontre in a Salon,'''' " the 
 New Pictures in the National Gallery " 
 really should belong to "Modern Painting" 
 and are as at home there as Moore himself 
 in the company of oil tubes and easels. 
 
 It has been said to me of Mr. Moore that 
 he had enough credulity to make him a 
 bishop, but that he met Manet before he 
 met Christ and that to Manet he has given 
 all he knows of worship. However orches- 
 trated his art criticism, however various the 
 instruments he employs, whatsoever painters 
 he writes about, one theme runs through 
 all the essays — Manet. One doxology ends 
 them all : " Glory be to Manet, to the most 
 potent squeezer of the fat oil tube, to the 
 last manufacturer of quality in oil painting." 
 
 And one understands it so well. Mr. 
 Moore's romantic devotion to painting, his 
 long effort to use colour, that real under- 
 standing and appreciation of what it could 
 do that is most certainly revealed in every 
 article he wrote about painting, and his 
 pathetic failure to do anything he wanted 
 with it 1 No lover ever poured his unre- 
 quited love in sonnet with more passion 
 than Mr. Moore in these essays has sung his 
 unrequited love of oil paint ; this love 
 that even affected his politics and made 
 him a traitor to the reigning house in 
 
 24 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 England because they did not possess a 
 Manet among them. Manet could do all 
 things with paint. What a god ! He calls 
 his essays, " Whistler," " Corot," " Ingres," 
 "Chavannes," "Millet," "Monet," "De- 
 gas " ; he might have called them all 
 " Manet," so much do we surmise behind 
 all his great archetype. His " Modern 
 Painting," with its many essays, sings the 
 Benedicite Omnia Oyer a of the god Manet. 
 
 One suspects that he did not jump into 
 this worship of Manet all at once, but that 
 his love for the unpopular Manet was a 
 reaction from a love of some popular painter 
 like Dore. His ardour is that of the convert. 
 I have been converted and I know. 
 
 That Mr. Moore's art criticism has a 
 devastating quality at times is illustrated 
 in his " Modern Painting " by the article 
 on the Victorian Exhibition. It is not so 
 much a consideration of the art as the 
 explosion of a mine under it. In conversa- 
 tion this devastating quality was happily 
 illustrated when he visited a friend who had 
 an immense picture by Sargent of three 
 ladies seated amid high-class furniture. It 
 was hung in the dining-room, but during 
 dinner George never lifted his eyes to look 
 at it. " You have not looked at my Sargent, 
 Mr. Moore," his hostess at last said. " No," 
 said George, " I was afraid you would speak 
 about it. I don't like it. But I have just 
 
 25 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 been talking to somebody who saw it at the 
 Academy and who admires it tremendously." 
 '' Would he like to come here and see it 
 again ? " asked his hostess. " No, I don't 
 think you would like him to come," said 
 Moore. "You see, he is my greengrocer. 
 He likes pictures and he talks about them 
 to me when I go to pay my bills. ' Oh, Mr. 
 Moore,' he said, ' wasn't it a beautiful pic- 
 ture ? Here were the young ladies on the 
 sofa and you knew the footmen were on 
 the stairs handing up the young gentlemen, 
 and they were drinking champagne all day 
 long. It was real high life.' And that is 
 exactly what I think of the picture," con- 
 cluded George ; " it's just the greengrocer's 
 idea of high life." 
 
 Mr. Moore's genuine love for art was the 
 tie that bound him to many strange associ- 
 ates ; it was the basis of his love for Shelley, 
 his admiration of Yeats and " ^E." It was 
 John Eglinton's grace in turning a sentence 
 that secured him the friendship of Moore, 
 and even in the shearing of Edward Martyn, 
 conducted with all the ferocity of a near 
 relative, the wind was tempered by Moore's 
 respect for Martyn's very real dramatic 
 talent. Indeed, so great is Mr. Moore's 
 love for art that I believe if when he returned 
 to Ireland he had found good stained glass 
 in the Catholic churches, and altar pieces 
 there by artists he respected, he would have 
 
 26 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 become an ardent champion of the Catholic 
 faith, and Protestantism would never have 
 received an adherent so little to her mind, 
 and whose hunger for art she also was totally 
 unable to satisfy. For I can never believe 
 that it was the parish priest's love of a good 
 dinner that drove Mr. Moore from that 
 fold, such a love is not really alien to Mr. 
 Moore's nature and could be no stumbling- 
 block to his faith. So desirable and human 
 a characteristic might well have won his 
 praise, if to the love of a good dinner the 
 parish priest had united love for a good 
 picture. 
 
 27 
 
Women, I feel, are only intermittently self- 
 conscious and the business of putting to- 
 gether the wisdom obtained in these momen- 
 tary glimpses of themselves is a troublesome 
 one, because they live only occasionally in 
 their minds at all. Therefore no woman 
 has risen up to write a book containing the 
 whole wisdom of woman, and I for one pray 
 that such an one may never arise to profane 
 our mysteries. For the most part we look 
 to men to reveal us to ourselves. Man is 
 our logos, articulate on our behalf. Women 
 are, I think, curious, prying creatures, seeking 
 mind. I can easily explain to myself Mr. 
 Moore's ideas about women and why they are 
 not so offensive to women as to men. There 
 is often a wreckage of women about the 
 lives of prominent writers or thinkers or 
 any men who stand above their fellows. 
 They attract women as the lighthouse at- 
 tracts the birds, and the wheeling creatures 
 die of exhaustion, unable to reach the light 
 and unable to leave it. Mr. Moore, perhaps, 
 makes the common error that it was his 
 person and not the light they fancied on his 
 brow that lured them. Therefore perhaps 
 
 28 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 he and they are quits. The sexes perhaps 
 are always quits, and when Mr. Moore says 
 such and such a one was or was not his 
 lover, we women are unmoved. We think 
 he is rather an idiot to talk so much about 
 it, and we can only comprehend vicariously 
 and through our sympathy with them the 
 tremendous to do men raise over Mr. 
 Moore's breach of their convention. We 
 make him a present most cheerfully of any 
 little pleasure he gets out of fancying we 
 are in love with him while we crane eagerly 
 over his shoulder to read what he writes 
 about us. His main theme in his novels is 
 love. What are " Evelyn Innes " and " Sister 
 Teresa" but the only novels exclusively 
 about love in the language ? Funny person. 
 Women know instinctively all he knows 
 about love and more also. It is intellect 
 we are after. The intellect he brings to 
 bear upon love we wash out of his novels as 
 carefully as the miner washes the gold from 
 the clay. 
 
 In Mr. Moore's continual occupation with 
 love and lovers I find him less unpleasant 
 than many of the English novelists. There 
 is a less adhesive quality in his coarseness, 
 and I think it is because he has never been 
 able even to simulate passion. His nature is 
 strongly biassed in one direction, but his 
 intellect has balanced him : there is a cold 
 quality in it. Passion would, perhaps, have 
 
 29 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 spared us his tiresome preoccupation with 
 what one might call millinery and confec- 
 tionery in the love adventures in his novels. 
 But how absurd I am ! Given passion, the 
 novels would never have been written. In 
 that grotesque character of his where mingles 
 much that is noble with much that is base, 
 I think that beauty has never had her lamp 
 put out. It seems to me that the women in 
 Mr. Moore's novels are such as no woman 
 would ever draw aside her skirts from. He 
 has not created a wholly unpleasant woman, 
 and some of his women are delightful beings, 
 docile to life, mother-hearted, full of wonder 
 and trust, inimitably kind. We can recall 
 Alice in ''Muslin," Esther Waters, Kitty 
 Hare, Agnes Lahens, Evelyn Innes. We 
 are often suspicious that Mr. Moore was by 
 nature an amiable and kindly gentleman, 
 who ought never to have annoyed anybody, 
 but either a false idea of art led him into 
 evil courses or a natural impishness of 
 temper, which no training could subdue. 
 Nature never intended him to write droll 
 tales like Balzac. He is not at home in 
 them, and, when he does violence to our 
 feelings, I suspect he does violence to his 
 own. He brazens it out, of course, like the 
 nasty little boy who puts out his tongue at 
 one, and does it all the more, the more he 
 thinks it annoys. Is there a little devil in 
 Mr. Moore that makes him want to annoy ? 
 
 30 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 Most of us owned one in our early days, 
 but grown-up obligations made us put the 
 chain on him. Mr. Moore has never grown 
 up and his little devil is an active little 
 beast. 
 
 We expect this impishness in Mr. Moore 
 annoys his men more than his women 
 readers. There is hardly a naughty boy's 
 trick which is new to us women ; we have 
 laid the rod in pickle so very often. Mr. 
 Bernard Shaw understands women much 
 better than Mr. Moore, but we do not like 
 our Bernard ; he sees too much with that 
 chill grey eye of his. He would be good to 
 us in actual life, clothe us and feed us 
 and give us good wages, but what woman 
 can forgive " Man and Superman " ? Mr. 
 Moore in actual life would fly from all that 
 was disagreeable in us, unless he could use 
 it for literary purposes. It would not be 
 agreeable to him to work at social problems 
 like Mr. Shaw. But Mr. Moore pleases us 
 more than Mr. Shaw. Mr. Moore often 
 totally misreads us, but we do not want to 
 be read, we want to read ; we do not want 
 to be understood, we want to understand. 
 And when Mr. Moore adopts, as he so often 
 does, the Sultan attitude towards women, 
 with its false air of petting and protection, 
 we are not offended. We like, even those of 
 us who do not wear it, to be told how men 
 are subjugated by powder and paint. The 
 
 31 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 more hardworking we are, the more we love 
 to hear of those women whose only labour 
 is that they may achieve an instant's beauty. 
 Yet women are the sincerest creatures and 
 but seldom taken in even by those false 
 statements of life that they find so extremely 
 comforting. 
 
 Mr. Moore once said that his brother 
 Maurice was the only member of his family 
 who knew how to behave as a gentleman. 
 Well, Mr. Moore is an amazingly truthful 
 person, and this commentary upon himself 
 is illuminating in view of the liberties which 
 in his later books he has taken with his 
 friends. He has never had any private 
 life himself, and he regards as eccentricity 
 the objection his friends have to the private 
 lives invented for them by him. In his 
 essay on Corot, Mr. Moore tells how once 
 he came upon the old man painting in the 
 woods. After admiring his work, Mr. Moore 
 said to him, "Master, what you are doing 
 is very beautiful, but where is it ? " Corot 
 flicked his brush in the direction of a clump 
 of trees a couple of hundred yards away 
 and said " There." Corot was improvising 
 from a dim suggestion. He did not want to 
 be too close, to lose grip of his subject in a 
 mass of details. This story is a parable of 
 Mr. Moore and his friends. He did not 
 want to see them closely, knowledge of 
 detail would have interfered with his pic- 
 
 32 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 ture. How important it was to him not to 
 get too close to his subject, the following 
 story illustrates : Last summer returning 
 from Kilteragh in Sir Horace Plunkett's car, 
 having lunched there and been treated as an 
 honoured guest, he seemed penetrated by 
 the kindness of Sir Horace. He said to me : 
 " Why, Plunkett is a most intelligent man, 
 he has a real intellect. I never spoke to 
 him before. I never understood ' ^E's ' 
 belief in him. ' JE ' was right, he is never 
 wrong. Why does Plunkett treat me like 
 this after the way I wrote about him ? He 
 must be a good man." Then, the first 
 generous impulse past, he recurred to what 
 really mattered — his writing, and with a sly 
 smile said, " How fortunate it was I wrote 
 my book before I knew him." Bouvard 
 and Pecuchet were already fixed in their 
 places, no intimate knowledge had come in 
 time to spoil the literary effect. As I write 
 this little story with a horrible exactness I 
 cannot help feeling what an admirable gem 
 of fiction it mig^i' have become in the 
 capable hands'orMr. Moore. He would have 
 got out of it the whole first volume of a 
 novel. 
 
 Mr. Moore is no Rabelais, his Irish nature 
 forbids him. He is no French novelist at 
 home' in his sins. I once was present at a 
 social gathering in Dublin which tried to 
 imitate what we have grown to believe — 
 
 C 33 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 it is probably fiction — was the life of the 
 Latin quarter in Paris. There was just one 
 person present who was native to that life 
 and at home in it, and he was not Irish. 
 The others ! My goodness, how funny they 
 were ! Dear things, they had never learned 
 how to be anything but good, and they 
 couldn't learn. They were as awkward as 
 dancing bears. Conscience sat on them like 
 Sunday clothes, the atmosphere was as 
 gloomy as a church heavy with mea culpas. 
 They drank pitifully, it was the only road 
 they knew to Verlaine. There may have been 
 a time in Ireland when your young blood 
 could carry his drink "like a gentleman." 
 Alas, I never saw it. When your clever 
 young Irishman rots his brains with drink, 
 they rot, that is all, and the decomposition 
 is a horror to fly from. Perhaps the Latin 
 races can sin gracefully, the Irish cannot. 
 And Mr. Moore's sinning ? He cannot 
 escape from his birthright. Lough Cara set 
 her seal on him, " islands lying in misted 
 water, faint as dreams." As Silenus he is a 
 poor thing. His leer is so much " make-up," 
 and it is the more revolting because he is 
 naturally sincere. He has no genius for the 
 gross. It is a creed with him not to be 
 ashamed, but here I catch him tripping, 
 for he is ashamed of being ashamed. Shame 
 would become him well who has so griev- 
 ously betrayed himself. When he speaks 
 
 84 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 in "Memoirs of My Dead Life" of the 
 shock he experienced in a ghmpse of his 
 " ugly old face," I wish some mirror had 
 showed him his ugly old soul 1 He cannot, 
 however, entirely obscure his natural kind- 
 ness. Many women must have found him a 
 good friend. It is an artifice and a peculiarly 
 irritating one that makes him so continually 
 translate his kindly human feeling into 
 terms consistent with his perverse literary 
 theory. 
 
 35 
 
VI 
 
 Though levity is justifiable and even com- 
 mendable when one deals with Mr. Moore 
 as a poet or a painter, for one does not take 
 him seriously in either of these aspects, it 
 would be entirely out of place when one 
 comes to speak of Mr. Moore as a novelist. 
 Personally — ^and I need not apologise for 
 personality in an intentionally personal book 
 about a very personal writer — all Mr. Moore's 
 novels are very distasteful to one who never 
 feels quite comfortable or happy when 
 obliged to voyage in fiction outside the safe 
 harbourage of " The Wide Wide World," or 
 " Mansfield Park." I have an ingrained 
 propriety of mind that makes me most at 
 home in a novel where the young lady 
 marries the Rector, who should, if possible, 
 be the next heir to a baronetcy ; and where 
 all the characters walk daintily in the guarded 
 paths of life. But I have been warned 
 against the error of confounding my likings 
 with my judgment, and while my personal 
 self is most unhappy with the Balzacs, the 
 Turgenieffs, the Flauberts, the Daudets, the 
 Hardys and the Moores, my intellect is 
 stimulated by such society. Like most 
 
 36 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 women, I do not live in my intellect, but 
 I derive great benefit from my occasional 
 visits there, and when there and in the seat 
 of judgment, I allow no personal predilec- 
 tion to influence an intellectual decision. 
 My intellect, then, having examined all the 
 evidence, assigns Mr. Moore his just place 
 as a novelist. " Esther Waters " and " The 
 Mummer's Wife" are masterpieces of the 
 naturalistic school. With a more varied 
 mind than Hardy, Moore has the same sub- 
 human insight. It is the uncanny and in- 
 stinctive underground knowledge of the 
 domestic servant. It has the same minute- 
 ness, the same unemotional completeness. 
 Had servants an intellectuality commensur- 
 ate with this instinct what terrors we should 
 experience ! But luckily for us they have 
 for the most part a simplicity and warmth 
 of nature which turns this sinister instinct 
 into an engine for our comfort. While Mr. 
 Moore in his ''Ave, Salve and Vale" has 
 turned it into an engine for the discomfort 
 of his friends, in his other novels he has 
 used it with great skill in an examination, 
 pathologically minute, of the emotions. The 
 ordinary novel reader is very like the 
 ordinary theatre goer, both desire a sort of 
 after-dinner lounge for the mind. It is 
 most distressing to such persons to find 
 themselves in a dissecting room where 
 humanity is laid upon the table and that 
 
 37 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 interior life so happily hidden from the 
 un-intellectual man is exposed in ail its 
 complicated workings. He feels it to be an 
 indecency, an outrage, though he may admit 
 its value. Dear ordinary person, I am entirely 
 with you in my prepossessions and tastes ! 
 
 From the year 1888, when he published 
 " A Modern Lover," till to-day when he is 
 publishing his " Brook Kerith," Mr. Moore 
 has been incessantly busy writing. Natur- 
 ally a lazy man, as those who know him 
 best assure us, he has compelled himself 
 to arduous mental labour. He has deserved 
 well of his art, he has propitiated it by the 
 sacrifice of many things dear to the ordinary 
 man, he has not even withheld his friends. 
 He has written unblushingly of many lovers, 
 but his art has been his one love all his 
 life, and he has been to her the most faithful 
 of devotees, and he has had his reward. 
 Three of his novels show us very clearly 
 what this reward has been. In " The Mum- 
 mer's Wife" Mr. Moore obtained power, in 
 " Esther Waters " sureness, and in " Ave " 
 he found a complete expression of a most 
 vivid and original personality. 
 
 Mr. Moore in his " Confessions of a Young 
 Man," published in 1888, tells us the story 
 of his journeying from Mayo to Mont- 
 martre, of his life as an art student in Paris, 
 and of his return to London and his self- 
 imposed servitude there to the art of writing. 
 
 38 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 There is little to distinguish his story from 
 that of other ardent young men of his day 
 or of ours, except the determined publicity 
 he gave it. I remember when I was a little 
 schoolgirl pulling out a shaky tooth with a 
 determination to let no pain deter me, 
 because in five or ten minutes I should be 
 able to show the tooth to my schoolmates 
 and boast of my sufferings. Mr. Moore, 
 with as many teeth as a crocodile, has 
 pulled them all out in his " Confessions of a 
 Young Man," and hasn't spared us a single 
 reminiscent pang. This bad boy of English 
 literature who does his own birching so per- 
 sistently and publicly tells us of his selfish- 
 ness, his folly and perverseness in Paris, 
 and how he found that painting was un- 
 attainable for him, and how he had the 
 sense to drop it and make another bid for 
 fame. I do not regret his Paris, however, 
 when I come to read his novels. How in- 
 tolerable his realism would have been on an 
 English foundation. If an Irish writer 
 must travel, then I think the long way 
 round by Paris is the shortest way home for 
 him. Synge found it so, and James Stephens 
 is travelling that way also. Paris saved 
 Mr. Moore from the English idea that the 
 novel is meant merely to amuse. In the 
 English novels, with a few exceptions, one 
 finds no light, no air, they treat of love as 
 if it were one of the courses at dinner, a 
 
 39 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 heavy dinner. Paris also may have saved 
 Mr. Moore from building on this foundation 
 because it influenced him in his ideas about 
 women. However narrow his realism, how- 
 ever obsessed by sex, your French novelist 
 does not seem to be able to get away from 
 the conviction that woman stands for beauty. 
 His belief is a fugitive gleam, perhaps, from 
 some old pagan memory, flitting here and 
 there across his darkness. 
 
 Moore in his " Mummer's Wife " is affected 
 by the realists, but his Irish temperament 
 saved him from what might easily have de- 
 generated into a catalogue of details and the 
 use of the observer's notebook. He gradu- 
 ally obtained mastery over his materials 
 and his art became less a picture of life and 
 more and more a manifestation of his own 
 temperament. In " The Lake," written in 
 1905, for the first time he began to get a 
 mastery of his style, long practice had 
 brought him to the point where he deserved 
 to be called a writer as distinct from a 
 story-teller. We begin more and more 
 after this book to find happy turns of phrase 
 such as that which delights us in " Ave," 
 when he speaks of Yeats' attempt at a joke 
 being " lost in the folds of his style." " The 
 Lake ' ' was written in Ireland. It seems as if it 
 was a true instinct that drew him to Ireland, 
 his incessant labour for his own making was 
 not in vain, his best work was done here. 
 
 40 
 
VII 
 
 The reviewer, that literary agitator, who 
 could not live at all but for the strife he 
 stirs up about writers, will say that my 
 attempt at a criticism of Mr. Moore's novels 
 is an absurdity, he will show me how it 
 ought to be done. Even so, that is his 
 business. I am attending to mine, which is 
 to provide him with things to say. The 
 writers will be on my side. They would 
 surely rather that their books should be 
 treated as living persons, first of all, than 
 that I should show sentence by sentence 
 how Mr. Moore or another learned to write 
 them. This is the reason I provide for my- 
 self for choosing some of the most living 
 to me of Mr. Moore's novels and showmg 
 the effect of their acquaintance on me, 
 rather than writing in the usual manner of 
 the reviewer of the effect of my acquaint- 
 ance on them. Three of the writers who 
 have preceded me in this series of " Irish- 
 men of To-Day" have approached their 
 task somewhat differently. Yet I cannot 
 help feeling that Mr. Darrell Figgis, who so 
 ostentatiously presents us with a clue to the 
 labyrinth of '' ^," is lost in it himself and 
 
 41 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 can never lead us out. Mr. Hone, one of the 
 very few impartial Irish writers, is listless 
 about Mr. Yeats, his book has no more blood 
 in it than a balance sheet. There is blood in 
 Mr. Ervine's "Carson"; he knows nothing 
 about Sir Edward Carson, of course, but 
 his teeth are firmly fixed in the calf of 
 someone's leg, all the time, and he draws 
 blood without a doubt. 
 
 Mr. Moore in his preface to " Spring 
 Days," published in 1888, says that some 
 six years before he had noticed that " an 
 artificial and decadent society was repre- 
 sented by a restricted and conventional 
 literature of no relation with the moment 
 of which it chattered." He explains that 
 in spite of the great difficulties in his way 
 he had written '' A Drama in Muslin " and 
 '' A Mere Accident," " scorning all facile 
 success and walking to the best of my 
 strength in the way of Art." Mr. Moore has 
 certainly laboured in his realism in " Spring 
 Days," and alas ! we labour in it too. A 
 human being will die who is obliged to re- 
 breathe the air he exhales and no other, 
 and these exhalations of our own lives, the 
 realistic novels, are heavy with death to 
 the imagination. Yet one cannot but ac- 
 knowledge what a painstaking and faithful 
 picture " Spring Days " is of our middle- 
 class life, where no wild adventure occurs, 
 where crises come towards us insidiously 
 
 42 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 and not in the grand manner with a swoop 
 of wings. The nets of convention are about 
 us, character develops through a series of 
 little pushes this way and that. It is life, 
 but life repeated so faithfully that it asphyxi- 
 ates. I am glad Mr. Moore sloughed his 
 realism as he went on, though it fits in with 
 his nature that he should have revolted 
 against the insincere art of his day. It is 
 not easy for us now to realise what an up- 
 heaval these early realistic novels repre- 
 sented, and we are inclined to do them less 
 than justice. Mr. Moore struggled bravely 
 through the surf in these, they developed 
 his muscle as a writer, and through them 
 he learned to handle his boat " Esther 
 Waters " as a master mariner. 
 
 I read "The Mummer's Wife" when I 
 lived with the Yeats in Bedford Park, and 
 chiefly, with feminine perversity, because 
 W. B. Yeats had forbidden his sisters to 
 read it. I gulped guilty pages of it as I 
 went to bed of nights. Its merciless probing 
 into life intimidated me. I shrank from it 
 as the periwinkle from the pin. At this 
 distance of time I could not perhaps give a 
 very clear account of the story, but I will 
 agree with anybody that it is a powerful 
 novel ; I was impaled on the point of it, and 
 I know. I have not the courage to read it 
 again. The fat actor who lures away the 
 poor little woman who becomes his wife lives 
 
 43 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 in my memory as one of the most real 
 human beings in Enghsh fiction. His rela- 
 tions with the woman he lured, away and 
 the gradual deterioration of her character 
 are depicted with truth so merciless that the 
 most severe moralist could have added 
 nothing to the lesson it teaches. I under- 
 stand that the book is regarded as immoral ; 
 to me it appeared one of the most gloomy 
 moralities in literature. Mr. Moore is a 
 man who by personal preference would like 
 all love tales to end happily, but as an artist 
 and an Irishman he could not be senti- 
 mental, and he degraded the runaway wife 
 as if he had learned his doctrine of retribu- 
 tion in the plain black and white it would 
 have been taught him by any parish priest 
 in Connaught. 
 
 On Mr. Moore's return to his native land, 
 when I met him for the first time of speech, 
 remembering those tortured readings of 
 " The Mummer's Wife," as nobody was 
 within hearing at the moment, I asked 
 him, with the ignorant courage of my Puri- 
 tanism, why he wrote such horrible books. 
 He answered by asking me had I read any 
 of them. I faltered "No" — for I was 
 ashamed to confess to " The Mummer's 
 Wife." He said with that instant surrender 
 to attack so characteristic of him : "I 
 wrote one good book, 'Esther Waters.' I 
 will get you a copy of it." He went out of 
 
 44 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 the Homestead office and returned shortly 
 with a sixpenny copy of "Esther Waters," 
 in which he wrote his name at my request. 
 I read the book, and my respect for him 
 grew great, for I thought I discovered in it 
 not only a brain but a heart, and in spite 
 of an extraordinary amount of evidence 
 since produced to me of Mr. Moore's want 
 of heart, I cannot rid myself of the con- 
 viction I felt when I read that book. To 
 this eager, inquisitive being who busied 
 himself so untiringly about life, and who 
 has lived a vicarious life of so much intensity 
 in the creatures of his imagination, I could 
 almost say when I follow him with heart- 
 ache through the story of Esther's suffer- 
 ings, told with a most moving sympathy : 
 '' For this thy sins be forgiven thee," as 
 the man in the audience at Fishamble Street 
 theatre cried to the sinful woman who sang 
 Handel's angel music at the first perform- 
 ance of the " Messiah." 
 
 " Esther Waters " is the story of a servant 
 girl, and in that lowly story Mr. Moore has 
 expressed the life of the lowly with a most 
 finished art and with real tenderness. In 
 " The Mummer's Wife " he shows us how 
 fiercely life treats the mere wisp of woman- 
 hood, without will, without character, who 
 is flung into its cruel currents —the fragility 
 that is her charm making her ruin the more 
 complete and the more tragic. In Esther 
 
 45 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 Waters we have a woman refined, delicate, 
 but in whom will and affection are so strong 
 that her character begins to grow from the 
 very moment when its destruction seemed 
 inevitable. Mr. Moore has an almost un- 
 canny insight into a woman's being. In 
 " The Mummer's Wife " his analysis of the 
 emotions is so minute that one's sensibilities 
 are excited to a point that is quite painful. 
 In " Esther Waters " it is one's heart that 
 is touched. The following extract from the 
 preface to the cheap edition of the book 
 issued in 1899 shows us a Moore whom 
 perhaps many of his readers will not recog- 
 nise and whose acquaintance, I imagine, Mr. 
 Moore himself made with some surprise. He 
 says : " It was very generally assumed that 
 its (' Esther Waters' ') object was to agitate 
 for a law to prevent betting rather than to 
 exhibit the beauty of the simple heart and 
 to inculcate a love of goodness. The teach- 
 ing of ' Esther Waters ' is as non-combative 
 as the Beatitudes. Betting may be an evil, 
 but what is evil is always uncertain, whereas 
 there can be no question that to refrain from 
 judging others, from despising the poor in 
 spirit and those who do not possess the 
 wealth of the world is certain virtue. That 
 all things that live are to be pitied is the 
 lesson that I learn from reading my book, 
 and that others may learn as much is my 
 hope." It was the first time in literature 
 
 46 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 that the Hfe of a servant girl was treated 
 with the sincerity of an artist. Mr. Moore 
 had none of the desire to exhibit his Esther 
 in the kind of picturesque way Dickens ex- 
 hibits his characters. We can imagine 
 Dickens, in spite of his humanity, reflecting : 
 " How amusing these people are." Mr. 
 Moore seems to say rather : " How alike 
 everywhere is the human heart." He has 
 no bias, he never patronises his servant. He 
 does not look for the picturesque, but only 
 traces the love of a mother for her child 
 with a sincerity which, as I said before, was 
 probably amazing to himself. 
 
 It is a curious matter this of the novelist ; 
 if one examined into it one would wander 
 in dark labyrinths. If the novelist Hves in 
 his characters, who control him for the 
 moment as the medium's body is controlled, 
 and he receives vision through them and 
 realises through them the purposes of life, 
 will this imaginative life count anything to 
 him who outside his writings— for all record 
 we have of him— has just been a digestion 
 and a breathing apparatus, a life so vicarious, 
 that the wittiest woman in Dublin said of 
 him : " Some men kiss and tell, Mr. Moore 
 tells but doesn't kiss." Will there be any- 
 thing chalked up to his credit in the tavern 
 of life when he comes to drink again ? I 
 leave it to you, my readers, I am no meta- 
 physician. Here is a man, Moore, who has 
 
 47 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 to many minds profaned his home, his 
 parents, his most sacred ties, to whom 
 writing is father, mother, home, lover, 
 friend, Hfe itself, who when he ceases to 
 write will cease to live and will crumple up 
 shapeless, nameless, mortal. What is there 
 to him — any way — more than to a miner 
 who sweats chunks out of the earth, who 
 marries and leaves hearty children to per- 
 petuate mining and the Iron Age of Man ? 
 
 In the year following the publication of 
 '' Esther Waters " Mr. Moore published 
 " Celibates." It is written with great con- 
 fidence and ease and shows Mr. Moore 
 getting a grip of himself and his powers and 
 possibilities as a writer. The morbid states 
 it deals with are treated with none of the 
 waywardness we are inclined to associate 
 with Mr. Moore. The adventurer in life 
 comes upon strange discoveries, and the 
 novelist must be in a sense a pathologist of 
 the emotions. It is when he goes beyond 
 this and becomes the pathologist pure and 
 simple that he nauseates us. Mr. Moore is 
 too good an artist to make this mistake. 
 He faces life as squarely as any writer I 
 know, but one is in no danger of mistaking 
 a page in any of his novels for a page in a 
 medical journal ; a confusion of mind that 
 one sometimes experiences in reading a 
 modern novel. Mr. Moore's discoveries in 
 life are not for the medical museum, but for 
 
 48 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 the picture gallery. Mildred Lawson is a 
 very clever study of a feminine George 
 Moore — the same temperament with a 
 woman's instinctive intellectuality, self-con- 
 scious but not profoundly so. John Norton 
 is the voyager who hugs the shores of life ; 
 who has no confidence in his own nature ; 
 who is austere rather from timidity of 
 temperament than from any moral self- 
 consciousness. Mr. Moore has analysed him 
 very ably. Agnes Lahens and Kitty Hare 
 are snowflakes — exquisite, unsubstantial, 
 reaching earth only to die. 
 
 " Celibates " is serious work, yet I find 
 in it something that alienates. It opens up 
 fields of speculation, and I delight in specula- 
 tion where the mind takes wing, but such 
 speculations as are here do not liberate the 
 mind, they rather lead it into a blind alley. 
 I am always inclined to take a book as a 
 living creature, make friends with it or 
 leave it alone as it attracts or repels. " Celi- 
 bates " is one of Mr. Moore's books that I 
 should leave alone. 
 
 " Memoirs of My Dead Life " is a book 
 that attracts, and though there is much of 
 the dead life resurrected in it that Mr. 
 Moore would have done well to leave in 
 its grave, for it has seen corruption and is 
 unfit to be above ground — and much of it 
 that should never have been born — ^there 
 are some beautiful things in the book. 
 D 49 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 " Spring in London," " Marie Pellegrin," 
 "A Remembrance," "A Waitress," '' Re- 
 surgam," should not die. This is the Mr. 
 Moore whom we know in '' Esther Waters," 
 who reveals himself partially in " The Lake," 
 who is continually with us in " The Untilled 
 Field," and of whom we have fitful glimpses 
 in the waywardness of ''Ave, Salve and 
 Vale." The Moore who is neither a mock 
 satyr, nor a nasty little schoolboy, but a 
 thinker and a warm-hearted human being. 
 This book is Mr. Moore's second essay in 
 confessions, and while it is an advance on 
 " The Confessions of a Young Man," showing 
 greater power of selection and expression 
 and less perversity and vanity — for life had 
 no doubt been sitting heavily on Mr. Moore's 
 head since those early days — it has not the 
 fine originality, the wit and skill and malice 
 and the entire indiscretion of the great 
 Trilogy. Mr. Moore, who desires to pose 
 before the world as the passionate lover, is 
 quite unconvincing in this part. He is really 
 interested in affection, and I think there are 
 few writers who approach this subject with 
 greater delicacy or fuller comprehension. 
 The element of fantasy with which nature 
 has endowed Mr. Moore began to appear for 
 the first time in " Memoirs of My Dead 
 Life," breaking out there as the heather 
 does in a reclaimed field. How easy it 
 would have been for this versatile artist 
 
 50 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 to have been a writer of fantasies rather 
 than a reahst will appear from the following 
 passage in "Resurgam." Perhaps he would 
 have been a much greater writer if he could 
 have mingled both moods together. We 
 sigh for a little fantasy when we read the 
 realistic novels, and Mr. Moore himself must 
 have sighed for it also, for he finally broke 
 away from naturalism and achieved a style 
 in which his whole being could be reflected. 
 He says in " Resurgam " : " Twenty priests 
 had been engaged to sing a Mass, and whilst 
 they chanted, my mind continued to roam, 
 seeking the unattainable, seeking that which 
 Raminese had been unable to find. Unex- 
 pectedly, at the very moment when the 
 priest began to intone the Pater Noster, I 
 thought of the deep sea as the only clean 
 and holy receptacle for the vase containing 
 my ashes. If it were dropped where the 
 sea is deepest, it would not reach the bottom, 
 but would hang suspended in dark moveless 
 depths where only a few fishes range, in a 
 cool, deep grave ' made without hands, in 
 a world without stain,' surrounded by a 
 lovely revel of Bacchanals, youths and 
 maidens, and wild creatures from the woods, 
 man in his primitive animality. But nothing 
 lasts for ever. In some millions of years 
 the sea will begin to wither, and the vase 
 containing me will sink. My hope is that it 
 will sink down to some secure foundation 
 
 51 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 of rocks, to stand in the airless and waterless 
 desert that the earth will then be. Raminese 
 failed, but I shall succeed. Surrounded by 
 dancing youths and maidens, my tomb shall 
 stand on a high rock in the solitude of the 
 extinct sea of an extinct planet. Millions of 
 years will pass away, and the earth, after 
 having lain dead for a long winter, as it 
 does now for a few weeks under frost and 
 snow, will, with all other revolving planets, 
 become absorbed in the sun, and the sun 
 itself will become absorbed in greater suns, 
 Sirius and his like. In matters of grave 
 moment, millions of years are but seconds ; 
 billions convey very little to our minds. 
 At the end of, let us say, some billion years 
 the ultimate moment towards which every- 
 thing from the beginning has been moving 
 will be reached ; and from that moment 
 the tide will begin to flow out again, and the 
 eternal dispersal of things will begin again ; 
 suns will be scattered abroad, and in tre- 
 mendous sunquakes planets will be thrown 
 off ; in loud earthquakes these planets will 
 throw off moons. Millions of years will pass 
 away, the earth will become cool, and out 
 of the primal mud life wdll begin again in 
 the shape of plants, then of fish, and then 
 of animals. It is like madness, but is it 
 madder than Christian doctrine ? And I 
 believe that, billions of years hence, I shall 
 be sitting in the same room as I sit now, 
 
 52 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 writing the same lines as I am now writing : 
 I believe that again, a few years later, my 
 ashes will swing in the moveless and silent 
 depths of the Pacific ocean, and that the 
 same figures, the same nymphs and the same 
 fauns will dance around me again." 
 
 I cannot help feeling that in " Evelyn 
 Innes," published in 1898, Mr. Moore was 
 at a stagnant period in his development as 
 a writer. Perhaps he was ready for that 
 troubling of the waters that came to him 
 in the call to Ireland a little later. There is 
 everything in " Evelyn Innes " to make it 
 a fine novel; an eternal idea— the struggle 
 of the spirit and the flesh— but the success 
 does not come off. This is, I think, because 
 Mr. Moore, while very fully assured about 
 the flesh, is diffident about the spirit, and 
 leaves us in the end undecided as to what in 
 Evelyn is fighting the affection of Sir Owen 
 Asher, an affection which seems to us a 
 more spiritual thing than the supposed 
 spiritual influence into which she is drawn. 
 Mr. Moore is not convincing in his Cardinal, 
 his Eminence does not satisfy us any more 
 than he does Mr. Moore, and above all he 
 does not satisfy Evelyn. His failure is Mr. 
 Moore's own failure, lack of spirituality. 
 Nevertheless " Evelyn Innes " will be for 
 many readers Mr. Moore's most popular 
 piece of work, and I hardly like to suggest 
 that this may be because it has some 
 
 53 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 touches which show Mr. Moore to have a 
 sneaking regard for Ouida. I am not above 
 this feeling myself. Is it not a little reminis- 
 cent of Ouida when Sir Owen Asher leads 
 Evelyn through his hall on the evening of 
 their flight to Paris? "Crossing the tessel- 
 lated pavement through all the footmen, 
 the majestic butler there solemn as an idol," 
 " Owen bends over a marble table to scribble 
 a note." Yes, and in Ouida's hands the pen 
 would have been of gold with a handle of 
 porphyry. I believe Owen Asher is the arche- 
 type on which Mr. Moore had fain fashioned 
 himself. For his secondary hero Ulick 
 Deane, he chose Mr. Yeats first, then tried 
 to fit "^" into the part; afterwards re- 
 jecting both of these, he fixed on a hero who 
 to our great sorrow was unknown to us in 
 Dublin. The resemblance of Sir Owen Asher 
 to Mr. Moore is very strong when in the 
 scene where Owen learns that Evelyn has 
 finally forsaken him for the Church, he roars 
 and yells in agony in the presence of Ulick 
 Deane and Merat the maid. I think, accord- 
 ing to a Dublin legend, Mr. Moore behaved 
 in much the same way when his cook spoiled 
 an omelette ! 
 
 All the same, I am touched by "Evelyn 
 Innes," and I think all that is obscure in 
 Mr. Moore's design in writing it explains 
 itself in the last few pages of its companion 
 book " Sister Teresa." Mr. Moore writes a 
 
 54 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 moving preface to the second edition of 
 '' Sister Teresa," and in the story of the 
 unveihng of Frenhofer's picture, " confused 
 colour and incoherent form, and in one 
 corner a delicious foot, a living foot escaped 
 by a miracle from a slow progressive de- 
 struction," does Mr. Moore refer to those 
 last few pages ? I find it so, and the two 
 books gather a meaning for me in that scene 
 when Evelyn and Sir Owen meet in the 
 garden where the nightingales answer one 
 another. " Mute in the midst of that im- 
 mortal symphony about them" — a scene 
 that holds the nearest approach to spiritu- 
 ality in any of Mr. Moore's novels. What 
 woman will not be touched by a novel 
 where, as Mr. Moore says, " love is the 
 only motive " ? "A love story, the first 
 written in English for three hundred years." 
 There is a great deal of what I have called 
 the millinery and confectionery of love, no 
 doubt, but while this is a necessity to Mr. 
 Moore to supply his lack of passion, out of it 
 emerges affection, that quality in which, as 
 I noticed before, Mr. Moore is really inter- 
 ested, and which reaches us in these two 
 books through all their wearisome detail. 
 
 Mr. Moore republished last year his 
 " Drama in Muslin " under the name of 
 " Muslin " and fitted it with a preface — a 
 Georgian preface to an early Victorian novel. 
 It is a most unsuitable preface, but it is in 
 
 55 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 his later and better manner, the manner of 
 " Ave." He threatens to become an eminent 
 prefacer, an alarming threat. He has to 
 some extent rewritten the book, and this 
 makes it interesting to the student of his 
 style. He can note pretty closely the com- 
 mentary of the elderly George the stylist 
 on the youthful George the story-teller. 
 
 Years ago in the west of Ireland, I was 
 present at a prize-giving in a convent that I 
 believe has some credit there as a place of 
 education for girls. The Catholic Bishop 
 of the diocese presided, and it was to me as 
 if the solid ground had fissured beneath my 
 feet revealing an underworld entirely un- 
 suspected. In the narrow pride of my 
 Ascendancy I had never dreamed of a 
 Catholic Ireland that had its own presiding 
 lawn sleeves, its own yards of white muslin 
 billowing in restless rows, representing money 
 that could be paid and was paid for teaching 
 in French and the piano and the violin, all 
 the very same trappings of education that I 
 believed only to exist among the Ascendancy 
 under whose shadow I was nurtured. And 
 that these white forms represented young 
 ladies who, when they dispersed from the 
 convent, would each adorn a real home and 
 a society that really existed behind the 
 barriers of the R.M., the D.I., the Rector, 
 the bankers and the county gentry ; a 
 society with its grades and its codes of 
 
 56 
 
GEORGE MOOUE 
 
 manners as strict as any I had known, 
 this was surely an amazing thing. The 
 whole solid ground of my experience trem- 
 bled. How^ was it I had never glimpsed 
 these muslin forms behind my Ascendancy 
 barriers, never realised this excellent imita- 
 tion of Society as I knew it ? Almost the 
 same it seemed to be, a redder hand here and 
 there perhaps, a heavier foot, but social and 
 in the full swing of life ? The walled garden 
 of the Ascendancy was no more to me a 
 world, but a walled garden, and I another 
 Eve, curious as the first. My inquisition 
 was rewarded when I read " The Drama in 
 Muslin." I had found my convent. It was 
 on English soil no doubt, but its dispersed 
 pupils went home to Ireland, and save that 
 one takes for granted that they were not 
 behind any social barriers there, as the 
 muslin-frocked maidens of my earlier know- 
 ledge, how little different are they ! Always 
 apart, preserving their hereditary charac- 
 teristics as surely as the Jews. Mr. Moore's 
 muslin girls play their parts in a drama 
 of the Zenana, so thick is the purdah separ- 
 ating them from the strong boot and short 
 skirt life in the south-western counties as 
 my youth knew it in a decade or so after 
 Mr. Moore. 
 
 Some decades have passed since then, with 
 a breaking down of many barriers. I wonder 
 if this generation of Protestants in the Irish 
 
 57 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 provinces realises at all the social aloofness 
 of the two religions in the days I write of, 
 when in the west of Ireland a Catholic 
 nurse might indeed hold a Protestant infant 
 in her arms at the Protestant baptismal 
 font, and hear our heresies unhindered, but 
 a Protestant vestry could prevent the burial 
 of a Catholic wife in the same grave as her 
 Protestant husband, lest it might mar the 
 perfection of a Protestant resurrection. The 
 tables have turned on us now and we cannot 
 complain, but are the barriers breaking 
 down, is the fissure narrowing ? 
 
 I have lingered willingly over " Muslin," 
 though to the critic my choice of this novel 
 may seem an unintelligible fancy. I know 
 my literary armour is not proof against 
 attack, any bow drawn at a venture might 
 hit me, so I fight my corner in my own way, 
 following no rules but planting a blow 
 wherever I can. "Muslin" is an Irish story, 
 and I am writing of a man who is more 
 characteristic of his nation than a Carson 
 or a Redmond. In my writing I am like 
 the child who suffers the meat course, but 
 saves his appetite for the pudding. Moore 
 the Irishman, Moore as we knew him in 
 Dublin, is my pudding. 
 
 58 
 
VIII 
 
 Mr. Moore is an Irishman. He was born 
 in Mayo, where his family had been settled 
 for several generations. He himself claims 
 an English origin, but like Peter the Galilean, 
 who, in spite of his accent, would have 
 denied his province, the accent of Mr. 
 Moore's mind bewrayeth him. And if one 
 had no other evidence of his Irish origin, 
 " Parnell and his Island," written with all 
 the malignity of kinship, would have re- 
 vealed it. 
 
 Everyone who writes about Ireland takes 
 it for granted that it is a sick country, and 
 each writer has his nostrum. I wonder are 
 we really as sick as the doctors say, and 
 shall I also in a page or so be advertising 
 my potion ? Opinions are divided also as 
 to the identity of the patient, and the ques- 
 tion " What is an Irishman ? " causes almost 
 as much concern as a lately debated problem 
 " What is whiskey ? " Ireland is full of 
 people all so busied in being Catholics and 
 Protestants and Unionists and Nationalists 
 that they have no time to betray any Irish 
 character. Mr. Moore resisted the tempta- 
 tion common to every Irishman to obliterate 
 
 59 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 himself in a movement, consequently his 
 Irish character had a chance to emerge. 
 But on those who have effaced their identity 
 in religious or party nomenclature the ques- 
 tion as to who is the real Irishman must 
 continually obtrude itself. Can it be decided 
 by religion, politics, lineage or name ? The 
 little weeklies are often very fierce; mostly 
 Catholic and Nationalist, it seems to me 
 they would have these terms interchange- 
 able ; to be Irish, they suggest one must be 
 both. Hence the Nationalist and Catholic 
 descendants of Cromwell's troopers with 
 names unmistakably Saxon are accounted 
 Irish, while such as I, a Protestant, having 
 names stiff with Gaeldom in every genera- 
 tion of my family, have our claim to Ireland 
 disallowed. Yet it is an old truism that for 
 leaders Irish Nationality had Emmet, Tone, 
 Fitzgerald, Mitchell, Davis, Parnell, all Pro- 
 testants. 
 
 In Ireland a man's religion is not a per- 
 sonal and private matter, as in other coun- 
 tries it may be ; it is a public business, and 
 the getting or not getting a job is involved 
 in it. This being so, perhaps one should not 
 drop one's eyes timidly when the subject 
 of religion appears, but confront it boldly 
 and examine into it. Boldly then I speak 
 as a Protestant, and my Catholic friends 
 shall hear a stiff -kneed Protestant confess. 
 Irish Protestants have two inheritances : one 
 
 60 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 is Foxe's " Book of Martyrs," the other is 
 the history of their country. One tells of 
 martyrdoms to Rome, the other of martyr- 
 doms to England : the result being, in 
 minds inclined to justice, a very cordial bias 
 against both powers. The hounds of time 
 had left us very little of Foxe but his brush ; 
 but England is ever with us, and those 
 Protestants in Ireland who did not hate 
 her for her treatment of their Gaelic ances- 
 tors were beginning to cultivate a very 
 pretty exasperation with her treatment of 
 themselves. One is often inclined to credit 
 England with more brains than she possesses, 
 and we may be wrong who imagine her 
 policy is always to divide us in Ireland. She 
 has sold this country so very often that we 
 are either obliged to consider her diabolically 
 clever or ourselves idiotically stupid, and 
 of course the latter idea is a distasteful one. 
 It was an old but always pleasant discovery 
 to England that bishops are as a body 
 pretty sure to be on the side of stability 
 and safety and against violence, and in ruling 
 Ireland through the Catholic bishops she 
 secured safety from agrarian crime ; but the 
 fostering of a New Ascendancy brought 
 about Hibernianism as the fostering of the 
 Old brought Orangeism, and then came the 
 Insurance Act, giving such a fillip to the 
 Catholic Orangeman that the Protestant 
 Orangeman who had become sleepy and 
 
 61 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 indifferent began to feel stirrings of life 
 again. The revival of his old sectarian 
 doctrines in a Catholic translation brought 
 the Orangeman to his feet. The sons of 
 William rose, and while Joe Devlin, the 
 Captain of the Hibernian team, kicked Ire- 
 land back one hundred years, Edward Carson, 
 the Protestant Devlin, not to be outdone, 
 with his Orangeman kicked her back a little 
 further. And so it came to pass that the 
 outbreak of a European war found one por- 
 tion of Ireland organised, armed and drilled, 
 and the other portion beginning to do like- 
 wise, and I for one can never make out 
 whether this state of things was due to the 
 Act of God or the King's enemies or to his 
 friends the English Junkers who wanted 
 recruits out of Ireland. 
 
 Is it any wonder that the inhabitant of a 
 country such as ours, where so many creeds 
 and parties clamour for a man's soul, cannot 
 resist the temptation offered him of a com- 
 fortable pigeonhole retreat for it where it 
 need never agitate him again? A country 
 where it is more convenient to be anything 
 rather than an Irishman. There are just 
 two or three persons in Ireland who walk 
 about freely unclaimed by any Shibboleth, 
 and the tenants of the pigeonholes peer at 
 them, some in admiration, some in fear, 
 some in dislike. 
 
 When Mr. Moore came over to Ireland at 
 62 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 the time of the Boer War he was perhaps 
 obeying his natural instinct as an Irishman : 
 he was seeking his pigeonhole, and it is a 
 proof of his strong individualism that in 
 spite of the agonising desire to retreat there 
 that he describes so graphically in " Ave," 
 he resisted the temptation. Ten years of 
 Ireland couldn't fetter him. Neither the 
 Gaelic League, the Nationalists, the Catholics 
 or the Protestants could detain this slippery 
 customer, and he left Ireland with a gibe 
 for them all, sparing only those amongst his 
 friends whose independence of mind and 
 indifference to his opinion perhaps pro- 
 tected them — ".E," John Eglinton, and 
 Oliver Gogarty. 
 
 It is very entertaining to read in "Ave" 
 Mr. Moore's elaborate staging of his Irish 
 career. It is not unusual for a man to see 
 himself dramatically, but it is not given to 
 every man to plan out a moving scenario 
 for his life and then to make his actions 
 fit it. I cannot help suspecting that Mr. 
 Moore may have sketched out his " Ave, 
 Salve and Vale " before ever he set foot in 
 Dublin, and when he leaped upon the stage 
 here all was prepared to his own order. 
 But Mr. Moore, though a clever Irishman, 
 was not, like so many others of his clever 
 countrymen, clever enough to keep out of 
 Ireland. 
 
 We in Ireland are gifted beyond most 
 63 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 peoples with a talent for acting, and in 
 Dublin especially, while scorning culture, 
 which indeed we have not got, we are pos- 
 sessed of a most futile and diverting clever- 
 ness. Mr. Moore's entrance on the stage in 
 Dublin was marred by an audience having 
 as much dramatic talent as he himself, and 
 each so full of admiration for his own 
 exercise of it that he had only a fierce 
 criticism and no appreciation to give a 
 rival player. We Irish are very much 
 aware of our art as actors, we seldom lose 
 ourselves in it, but Mr. Moore's dramatic 
 concern with himself is so much inwoven in 
 his nature that he can only be really himself 
 in the various poses he assumes. He is 
 absolutely sincere in each, and his Gaelic 
 pose had for him a momentous importance 
 that provoked the merriment of Dublin, 
 where no one really believes in anything 
 and where nothing matters at all save as 
 providing a subject for conversation, and 
 where if by chance a noble aspiration arises 
 in some heart, the effect of its utterance is 
 exploded in the percussion of a drawing- 
 room jest. 
 
 For the cause of his failure in Ireland 
 Mr. Moore, I think, sought everywhere but 
 in the right quarter, the quarter I have in- 
 dicated above. His discovery that Catholi- 
 cism was to blame for all the futility of 
 Ireland was a very diverting one to many 
 
 64 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 people who never knew of Mr. Moore's 
 Catholicism till he announced his Protestant- 
 ism, and who thought his conception of the 
 one religion as funny as his conception of 
 the other. In pursuance of my resolution 
 to wear no blinkers in this book, I am not 
 afraid to state that I think the silence as 
 regards discussion of their religious ideals 
 between Catholics and Protestants is the 
 most powerful cause of the cleavage between 
 the creeds in this country. It leads to the 
 most absurd misconceptions of each other's 
 beliefs. I do not complain of any silence 
 in the Press representing either side — good- 
 ness knows these have yelled loudly enough, 
 and I think the Protestant has out -yelled 
 the Catholic — I mean the silence of social 
 intercourse, the absence of discussion. I 
 speak as a fool perhaps, and my plea for 
 discussion may be due to my own " absurd 
 misconception " of the Catholic belief. The 
 discussion of Catholicism with Irish Catholics 
 — except in the ardent and early days of the 
 Irish Church Missions — is considered among 
 decent Protestants nowadays as a hitting 
 below the belt. I can never be quite sure if 
 this is because Catholicism in Ireland is 
 reckoned among Protestants as largely the 
 religion of the poor and as so ennobled by 
 their sufferings for it that it is sacred from 
 our criticism, or if deep down in the incur- 
 able Protestant mind there is not a per- 
 E 65 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 suasion that to Catholics must be extended 
 the forbearance one gives to lunatics or 
 children, poor things with whom no rational 
 subject should be discussed and whose 
 wildest statements should be allowed to 
 pass unchallenged ; and that the shyness of 
 Catholics in speaking to us of their religion 
 proceeds from the fear of our laughter and 
 of being led away by our superior wisdom. 
 Where the first reason moves Protestants 
 silence is right and just; Protestantism in 
 Ireland has a bitter record and it does well 
 to hold its tongue ; but to those who are 
 neither poor nor unlearned, why offer the 
 insult of our silence ? My panacea, as you 
 may perceive, has at last been offered ; I 
 cannot escape the common fate of a writer 
 about Ireland. Free discussion is my potion. 
 For God's sake let us discuss everything. 
 So only shall we approach each other and 
 learn respect for each other's point of view. 
 Everyone knows the value of discussion in 
 elucidating one's own cleverness and fixing 
 one more firmly than ever in one's own 
 opinion, and I have no doubt that free dis- 
 cussions between the religions in Ireland 
 would be of more value to Catholicism here 
 than much motu proprio and many ne temere 
 decrees, for these it seems to me in another 
 nation have paved the way to statutes like 
 to Prcemunire, 
 
 It may be that my little ripple of wisdom 
 66 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 will babble in vain against the Rock of 
 Peter, but it is in my nature to ripple on. 
 And as to Protestants, it was said once of a 
 noble family in the west of Ireland, " You 
 will never get anything out of a Browne 
 unless you kick him first," and perhaps my 
 Protestants will respond to much kicking 
 and admit that their empty places of worship 
 bear witness to the fatal influence of pros- 
 perity upon a Christian Church, and will go 
 down on their knees and ask for the hasten- 
 ing of those Protestant Penal Laws that 
 some of us may feel are already overdue. 
 
 While I am not at all sure that the frank- 
 ness of Mr. Moore the Catholic was not 
 without benefit to that religion in Ireland, 
 I am perfectly sure that a Protestant Mr. 
 Moore is badly needed to turn the hose- 
 pipe of his criticism on Protestant Ireland, 
 and if Mr. Moore feels sufficiently confirmed 
 in the faith to attempt it I invite him to the 
 task. 
 
 67 
 
IX 
 
 In " Parnell and His Island " I find proof 
 of Mr. Moore's nationality as an Irishman, 
 because the contempt and scorn in it are 
 too bitter to be the work of an alien. The 
 gibe that we fling at an alien glances off 
 because our knowledge of him is seldom 
 intimate enough to point it, but when we 
 desire to wound our own people, knowing 
 the vulnerable spots, our shafts get home. 
 There is to me more indecency in " Parnell 
 and His Island " than in those of Mr. 
 Moore's books where this characteristic is 
 said to predominate. It is indecent in the 
 revolting display he makes of his country's 
 hurt. Aristophanes in Athens dared the 
 wrath of the Athenians when he satirised 
 their popular hero Cleon and himself took 
 the part of the character he satirised. That 
 is courage; if he had produced his play in 
 Sparta it would have been cowardice and a 
 treachery to his own city. What shall we 
 say of Mr. Moore who exhibits his country's 
 sores for the coppers of the Paris press, for 
 he wrote the book first for a French news- 
 paper. In all he has written about his 
 friends, all his indefensible association of 
 
 68 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 their names with events wholly fictitious, I 
 have never felt him so shameful as he is in 
 this book. Of course he never libelled me 
 in any of his work— and perhaps his fiction 
 had a certain art about it that blinded me 
 to its baseness and it was fiction. There is 
 no art in " Parnell and His Island," and 
 there is sufficient truth in it to make it a 
 horrible exhibition of Mr. Moore's own soul. 
 The writing is bad and immature, and Mr. 
 Moore's almost ludicrous haste to dissociate 
 himself from his country only implicates 
 him in it more hopelessly, because a mere 
 English settler, as he strives to represent 
 himself, would have felt none of the pain 
 that shrieks from every page of the book. 
 He would have had the contempt no doubt, 
 if he was made like Mr. Moore, but the pain 
 he would not have felt, nor if he had felt it 
 would it have reached us as through Mr. 
 Moore it reaches us. As an artist Mr. 
 Moore must thoroughly regret " Parnell and 
 His Island," and it is one of the books he 
 has never ventured to rewrite, though I 
 surmise black streams from it trickling 
 through others of his books. I do not dis- 
 like " Parnell and His Island " because in 
 it Mr. Moore traduces his country. Irish- 
 men continually traduce their country and 
 sometimes as much by their praise as by 
 their blame, but because in this book he 
 identifies himself with her, though such 
 
 69 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 was not his intention, and the sharp edge 
 of truth bites in this identity and it wounds, 
 because there does exist such an Irishman 
 as Mr. Moore proves himself to be here. I 
 wish there was no such Irishman and that 
 Mr. Moore had not had to pass this way on 
 his journey to " The Untilled Field." Mr. 
 Moore's mind has a continual tendency to 
 nausea which spoils him as an artist. He 
 writes contemptuously in " Ave " of the 
 Irish that Douglas Hyde spoke, pouring as 
 inky stuff out of his mouth, but Mr. Moore's 
 pages are perpetually stained with the inky 
 vomit of a mind incontinent. This may be 
 salutary for Mr. Moore, but it is very un- 
 pleasant for his readers. 
 
 It seems a curious thing that a man like 
 Mr. Moore, who in his early work disowned 
 Ireland, should have been drawn to her 
 later in life. We are not now even sure — 
 eminent farewellist as he is — that he has 
 really left her. It seems curious, but I find 
 it quite natural. Hate is the other magnetic 
 pole of love and draws its object towards it 
 just as surely. Mr. Moore's hatred of Ire- 
 land polarised his thoughts towards Ireland 
 and in the end he came here. Sometimes 
 I fear that the hatred to England evinced 
 by some of our journalists has so preoccupied 
 minds that might have been of service to 
 Ireland that it has caused them to educate 
 their readers far more in England's concerns 
 
 70 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 than in those of their own nation. There 
 is no safety for a man in the practice of the 
 black magic of hatred. It binds him hand 
 and foot and leads him whither he would 
 not. 
 
 Mr. Moore's hatred of his native land is 
 responsible no doubt for that overturning of 
 his life that drew him thither. There is 
 much that is absurd in his own account of 
 his gradual divorce from a Mafficking London, 
 but there is also much that is pathetic. I 
 was living in London at that time myself, 
 and I remember the tin-pot heroics that 
 clanked side by side with real heroism. I 
 remember tawdry and tipsy processions, 
 headed by a whiskey bottle in Hammer- 
 smith Broadway, and the trays and baths 
 and tin trumpets wherewith respectable 
 suburban London signalised a British vic- 
 tory. I remember the raw boys, under- 
 sized, underfed, filling the departing trains, 
 the anguish, the fear, the shameful joys of 
 victory. England becoming self-conscious, 
 the tipsy bully lashing himself into what he 
 believed was a similitude of Elizabethan 
 greatness. It was very pitiful and very 
 human, and South Africa was very far away. 
 The London that I see to-day in the trough 
 of heavy seas is a very different place. It 
 has grown up suddenly and in company 
 with a grown-up England. The tipsy bully 
 was sobered in South Africa by the cold 
 
 71 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 water of many defeats. The final victory 
 indeed was England's, but not until she had 
 been taught a lesson by a handful of obscur- 
 antist farmers. To-day she is fighting a 
 bully of her own size, it is a graver and a 
 deadlier struggle, and it is at her own doors. 
 England is anguished indeed, and the tea- 
 tray and the bath heroics have passed away. 
 A real heroism, I think, has taken their 
 place, and some of the fineness of Elizabethan 
 England has returned. 
 
 Mr. Moore's departure from England at 
 the time of the Boer War was forced on 
 him by a real loathing of London's attitude 
 at that time and by as sincere a desire to 
 stand by his country as was possible to his 
 wayward heart. I have said many harsh 
 things of Mr. Moore, though never anything 
 so bad as he has said of himself, but the 
 interior sincerity that prompted his return 
 to Ireland I have never doubted, however 
 I may have chuckled at his staging of the 
 part he played here. 
 
 72 
 
X 
 
 Perhaps one might say that " The Untilled 
 Field " was Mr. Moore's indemnity to Ire- 
 land for " Parnell and His Island." I often 
 wonder if it was his own nature that took 
 him by the hand and showed him the Ire- 
 land that we find in this book, or did a 
 friendly finger, " ^'s " or Turgenieff' s, un- 
 seal his darkened eyes. I can realise per- 
 fectly what Mr. Moore felt when he came to 
 Dublin and found himself in a town that, 
 even when it had heard of them, cared 
 nothing for Manet, for Balzac, for Turgenieff, 
 for French poets however exquisite; that 
 recked naught of the differences between 
 turbot and halibut and hake, or the sauces 
 which should or should not accompany 
 these ; a people to whom all Moores were 
 equal, him of the Melodies and him of the 
 Almanac, and to whom Frankfort was as 
 great as George. Yet a puzzling people, 
 because though they cared nothing for cul- 
 ture, and ate but never dined, were yet so 
 nimble of wit, so polished of tongue, that 
 they could not be passed over as of no 
 account. A people from whom he felt 
 absolutely divergent in all matters of taste 
 
 73 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 and yet with whom he had ties of tempera- 
 ment stronger than in either of the countries 
 where he had sojourned. The Ireland Mr. 
 Moore knew in his early days was all a 
 confusion to him, and detestable because 
 his crude and immature art could not cope 
 with it. We always detest what we desire 
 to mould and yet cannot bend to our pur- 
 pose. Out of that detestation he wrote 
 ''Parnell and His Island." But the Mr. 
 Moore who found himself in Ireland at the 
 time of the Boer War, had matured and was 
 achieving his literary style. He heard all 
 round him, amongst people whose lack of 
 culture he despised, brilliant and witty 
 conversation. He heard Yeats and " iE " 
 and Hughes and John Eglinton and Gill all 
 talking the most excellent copy, and in high 
 good humour at the discovery of so rich a 
 soil he sat down and wrote the best-natured 
 book he ever wrote about Ireland, " The 
 Untilled Field." He felt no doubt that 
 Ireland could be made productive of much 
 good literature for him if he only tilled it. 
 Alas, he did not realise that mental tillage 
 had gone out of fashion here and that our 
 intellect is all laid down in grass. 
 
 Mr. Moore's passion for re-writing led him 
 somewhat astray in " The Untilled Field." 
 The first edition had a spontaneity and 
 simplicity that are sometimes lost in the 
 latest one. The reader is vexed by the drag- 
 
 74 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 ging into the text of a number of Mr. Moore's 
 favourite perversities. One recognises them 
 so well now, and they serve no earthly pur- 
 pose but to irritate the reader and break 
 up the form of an earlier and clearer narra- 
 tive. The charm of the "Wild Goose" 
 was a delicate thing which the last edition 
 of " The Untilled Field " has shattered. I 
 am all against this continual re- writing of 
 books. Re- write by all means again and 
 again while the book is in the process of 
 making, but do not return to a book after 
 years and think to recapture the mood in 
 which it was written. When we pull the 
 structure to pieces something essential 
 escapes, something that was enclosed within 
 the walls in the first building. I think Mr. 
 Moore became infected by Mr. W. B. Yeats' 
 passion for altering his work. In Mr. Moore's 
 earlier work he was more occupied with 
 the substance than the form, but in his 
 later the form tends to master him. The 
 effect on the reader of all this re -writing is 
 that he begins to doubt the author's in- 
 spiration and to believe that he did not 
 really know what he wanted to say. That 
 definite imagination which is the most 
 precious thing in any writer's work and which 
 alone gives it authenticity, becomes blurred 
 and one begins to suspect the fumbler. 
 
 The preface to the last edition of " The 
 Untilled Field " is an entertaining fantasy. 
 
 75 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 Mr. Moore claims that Synge got from 
 reading " The Untilled Field " the inspira- 
 tion which drew him out of what Mr. Moore 
 calls the " board-school English " of his 
 earlier work into the living speech of the 
 plays. I am afraid there are few critics of 
 Synge who will take this view. It is well 
 known to every student of Irish literature 
 that Douglas Hyde was the true begetter 
 of the rich dialect based upon a foundation 
 of Gaelic idiom, and anybody can prove 
 this who will turn to Douglas Hyde's render- 
 ing in English of the " Love Songs of Con- 
 nacht " and the " Commentary." These 
 appeared long before either Lady Gregory 
 or Synge had loomed upon the literary 
 horizon. Hyde was the first who, knowing 
 Gaelic thoroughly, was able to discern the 
 bony Gaelic structure underlying the Anglo- 
 Irish speech, and Synge and Lady Gregory, 
 who both had some knowledge of Gaelic, 
 were able to follow where Hyde pointed out 
 the way. 
 
 The Mr. Moore in " The Untilled Field " 
 begins to be a more likeable person than the 
 novelist and critic we knew heretofore. He 
 devotes as much of his intelligence as he can 
 spare from the development of his art to a 
 sympathetic study of Ireland and her prob- 
 lems. Father McTurnan, Father Maguire, 
 Peter O'Shane, Biddy McHale are not cos- 
 mopolitan but Irish characters. " The Win- 
 
 76 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 dow " IS, I think, one of the most poignant 
 things Mr. Moore has written. The tales in 
 " The Untilled Field " seem to me to be 
 less art for art's sake, or even art for Moore's 
 sake, than art for life's sake, yet they failed 
 to impress Dublin. Many of them were 
 translated into Irish, but the Gaehc League 
 never seemed to cotton to Mr. Moore, and 
 we doubt if " The Untilled Field " as a text- 
 book ever enjoyed the popularity accorded 
 to the manual that instructed our young 
 Gaehc enthusiasm to "Put the butter on 
 the^ floor " or recorded the unnatural thirst 
 of " Art " who went so often to the well. 
 Among Mr. Moore's circle in Dublin it 
 awakened a certain nervousness, for Mr. 
 Moore was quite manifestly using up his 
 friends for copy, and one looked askance at 
 another and wondered how much was au- 
 thentic in the personal adventures attributed 
 to the characters in the book. Mr. Moore's 
 friends were to become better instructed as 
 to^their function in his literature later on. 
 
 " The Lake," pubHshed in 1905, is memor- 
 able because it marks, I think, a change in 
 Mr. Moore as a writer. He had found his 
 style and from "The Lake" onwards he 
 handles it with great ease. There is some 
 beautiful writing in " The Lake," and the 
 book is a feat of construction because Mr. 
 Moore has contrived to make a novel of 
 some hundreds of pages out of the medita- 
 
 77 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 tions of one man walking up and down 
 beside his lake and with but one idea in his 
 mind. Mr. Moore is independent in " The 
 Lake " of any of that paraphernalia of varied 
 character on which the novelist usually 
 depends. But the book is, after all, a tour 
 de force. The meditation of the priest is a 
 personal struggle and has little spiritual 
 depth or intensity. There is in the book 
 more technical merit of writing and con- 
 struction than there is profound observa- 
 tion of life. The name of the priest, " Oliver 
 Gogarty," is taken wholesale from a well- 
 known Dublin doctor, and when the bearer 
 of the name remonstrated with Mr. Moore, 
 Mr. Moore replied : " Where can I get a 
 name so good ? " In one sense the book is 
 symbolical if not prophetic, for was it not 
 about the time of its publication that Mr. 
 Moore was preparing to shed the last rags 
 of his Catholicism and appear as a naked 
 Protestant before an entirely unmoved 
 Dublin ? 
 
 78 
 
XI 
 
 Mr. Moore has summed up in " Ave, Salve 
 and Vale " his Irish experiences, and I pro- 
 pose in these chapters to sum up our ex- 
 periences in Ireland of Mr. Moore. In this now 
 famous Trilogy Mr. Moore invented and per- 
 fected a strikingly original form of the novel. 
 It was nothing new for a novelist to use his 
 friends as models, and the circumstances of 
 his own life and of theirs as a framework for 
 his story. But he was often shy about it, 
 and disguised and varied circumstance and 
 actor to hide identities. It remained for 
 Mr. Moore, who has never put on his clothes 
 since the day when as a little boy in Stephen's 
 Green he took them all off and ran naked 
 to the scandal of his nurse, to do away 
 once for all with subterfuge in fiction. 
 "The Untilled Field" made his friends 
 somewhat nervous, but no names were 
 named. In " The Lake " Oliver Gogarty's 
 name lent piquancy to Mr. Moore's hero. 
 It was a sort of trial trip in nomenclature, 
 and its success encouraged Mr. Moore to 
 come boldly into the open in " Ave " and 
 attach names to their rightful owners, and 
 use both names and owners for the purposes 
 
 79 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 of fiction with a complete disregard for the 
 feehngs of the proprietors, marvelling only 
 that his friends should prefer immortality 
 in any other form than that he had chosen 
 for them. And no doubt success justified 
 him, for though some of his friends who up 
 to this had given him a fool's pardon for his 
 many breaches of faith and manners, were 
 deeply wounded by the Trilogy, the rest of 
 the world were amused and interested by 
 this new and daring form of the novel. It 
 opens up a horrible vista, if this method of 
 writing novels with real characters all under 
 their own names should become fashionable, 
 and people should even grow so depraved that 
 they would actually desire to be in such 
 novels, and it may come at last to this, that 
 we shall find the fashionable portrait painter 
 in literature as well as in art. Sir Edwin 
 and Lady Angelina will go to the fashion- 
 able portrait-painter in literature and say : 
 " We understand your terms for making a por- 
 trait novel of the happiest period of our lives, 
 for an edition we can distribute to our friends, 
 are £500. We have kept our love-letters, and," 
 says Sir Edwin, " I have made notes on my 
 disappointed rivals, their lives and habits," 
 while Lady Angelina slyly slips into the 
 painter's hand her notes on the girl who 
 wanted to marry Sir Edwin, and all her little 
 cackling ways. The Yellow Journalism of 
 America, with its shameless inquisition into 
 
 80 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 private life, has paved the way for a novel 
 such as is foreshadowed in " Ave." We are 
 a shy people in Ireland now, and Mr. 
 Moore's revelations affeeted us to hissing as 
 the red-hot iron affects the drop of water. 
 It was not always so with us ; when we 
 were an independent people our social frank- 
 ness was a terror, and our invective hot as 
 the hob of hell. 
 
 This personality of ours that we have 
 tailored so carefully in tradition and pre- 
 judice in order that it may appear with 
 fashion and credit amongst the figures of 
 our world — is all in ovitcry against the rude 
 unrobing of writers such as Mr. Moore. But 
 let us be honest. Does not this outcry per- 
 haps mean that we fear a deeper inquisi- 
 tion and the dragging into publicity of things 
 in our nature that might not posture so 
 well in the limelight as tliat carefully garbed 
 and tutored figure by whom we desire to be 
 represented, an inquisition that foreshadows 
 that Dread Day when the secrets of all 
 hearts shall be made manifest ? I think 
 when we go profoundly into ourselves, 
 behind this masking personality, we are 
 confronted with a franker being who desires 
 that all barriers shall be broken down ; who 
 realises the oneness of human life, and that 
 our lives are continued in the lives of others ; 
 one who is weary to death of the elaboration 
 of our concealments from one another and 
 F 81 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 who would have all things known, even the 
 worst. What is there to be afraid of after 
 all in the common humanity we share ? 
 Mr. Moore has perhaps encountered this 
 being in himself, and has some inkling of this 
 truth, but with a perversity usual to him 
 he seems to seek truth not for purposes of 
 soul but for purposes of art. I sometimes 
 think Mr. Moore knows very well what he is 
 about, and how wrong is the motive of his 
 inquisition into other lives, and that a con- 
 sciousness of wrong doing makes him un- 
 scrupulous in the uses to which he puts his 
 knowledge. 
 
 Mr. Moore should have called his Trilogy 
 " George Moore — A Novel of Contemporary 
 Life," for it is a work of fiction improvised 
 upon his friends and himself. That it is 
 exceedingly well done will not console those 
 who have gained through it an immortality 
 they never coveted. Perhaps there is but 
 one portrait in the books that most people 
 in Dublin will acknowledge to be a genuine 
 one, and that is the portrait of John Eglin- 
 ton. Mr. Moore has painted him with great 
 skill, real comprehension and kindliness. 
 To " ^ " he has been more than kind, 
 furnishing one who makes no claim to saint- 
 ship with a halo he has no use for. " ^ " 
 is reported to have said to him : " Moore, 
 you have a passionate literary affection for 
 me, but it is the affection of a porcupine, 
 
 82 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 unconscious of its quills, rubbing itself 
 against the bare legs of a child." 
 f Mr. Moore has been most flagrantly un- 
 just in his portrait of Douglas Hyde, paint- 
 ing the outer man indeed with a merciless 
 fidelity but totally uncomprehending of the 
 real Hyde. It is a portrait that cries aloud 
 y for vengeance on the painter. When " ^ " 
 jj'told Mr. Moore that his portrait of Hyde 
 ^ was glaringly unfair, he replied that it was 
 a case of Jekyll and Hyde, he had painted 
 Hyde and Jekyll was coming on. But 
 ^ Jekyll never came on. I am inclined to 
 j think that an incompatibility of tempera- 
 ""ment between the two types of Connaught 
 men accounts for Mr. Moore's malevolence 
 about Douglas Hyde, all the nausea of 
 ! " Parnell and His Island " surges up again 
 in his onslaught on him. How indignant one 
 , feels at the base caricature of one whose 
 ^ name in Ireland is beloved beyond most 
 ►^ames ; the man who drew out of the gutter 
 j^ where we ourselves had flung her, the 
 language of our country, and set a crown 
 upon her ; who by sheer force of personality 
 \ created the movement in Ireland for the re- 
 ^vival of Gaelic, blowing with a hot enthu- 
 llbiasm on that dying spark of nationhood and 
 Ij recalling it to life. Those who know " The 
 Love Songs of Connacht " will not need to 
 be told that here was the soul of a poet. 
 The movement he blasted out of the rock of 
 
 1 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 Anglo-Irish prejudice in his epic. I wonder 
 how many people realise to-day in Ireland 
 what it meant to give back to the Gael his 
 language ; how the honour Hyde put upon 
 the language and the literature straightened 
 the back of young Ireland and interpene- 
 trated all its thoughts. I am prepared to 
 be told, with that curious desire to depreciate 
 that is common to my countrymen, that the 
 Gaelic revival in Ireland was really the work 
 of some bookworm or obscure grammarian. 
 There are always little persons to be found 
 in Dublin grubbing in darkness that they 
 may undermine some reputation, but Doug- 
 las Hyde is safe in Ireland. We who remem- 
 ber those days know what Ireland owes to 
 Hyde's fiery spirit, his immense courage, 
 his scholarship, his genius for organisation, 
 his sincerity, his eloquence, and the kind- 
 ness of his heart. 
 
 As to Mr. Moore's little parable of Bouvard 
 and Pecuchet. How ungrateful he is to 
 Pecuchet, for he must often have watched 
 Mr. Gill with half-closed eyes as a cat 
 watches a saucer of cream, dreaming of the 
 copy he should lap up by and by. Mr. Gill 
 was a ready-made Pecuchet, and how well 
 Mr. Moore knew him. He had to find his 
 Bouvard, and he selected Sir Horace Plun- 
 kett, whom he did not know at all, for the 
 part. Mr. Moore's comic repentance of this 
 caricature I have already described. Few 
 
 84 
 
 } * 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 people know Sir Horace Plunkett ; though 
 he is the most approachable of men, he is 
 
 ^ reserved as only your frank Irishman can 
 be. His portrait presents many difficulties, 
 for I might say with perfect truth that he is 
 a statesman, a large-minded, clear-thinking, 
 most witty and most courteous gentleman, 
 and I should not have conveyed any worthy 
 
 [' picture of him or one at all equal to that 
 which springs up in the minds of his friends 
 at the mention of his name. He stands, I 
 think, this unassuming figure, for something 
 that shall be more intimately of the future 
 spirit of our country than any shouting 
 
 ^ shibboleth of to-day. That one who is so 
 typically an Irishman in the individualism 
 of his thinking should be little understood 
 in his own country is not perhaps very 
 wonderful. In Ireland we are accustomed 
 to see a man's mind obliterated in the 
 movement with which it is identified, and 
 that Sir Horace has not so obliterated his 
 
 f mind somewhat disconcerts us. Much has 
 been written of him in praise and blame, 
 and I see no reason why I should not sum 
 up the view he presents to my mind. I see 
 
 ( him as a man who does his own thinking, 
 
 i excluding no one's opinions, however ex- 
 
 ftreme, but considering all ideas that are 
 presented to him with a mind dispassionate, 
 but never cold. His judgment is never 
 clouded by temper, and one can always 
 
 f 85 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 trust him absolutely in every circumstance 
 to take the noble point of view. He is gifted 
 also in a way that is not perhaps generally 
 realised with a wit that bites like mustard, 
 and gets home to its mark as unerringly as 
 the arrow of William Tell. 
 
 ■: 
 
 86 
 
XII 
 
 I HAVE some right, I think, to speak of 
 Dublin at the time of Mr. Moore's advent, 
 for I was living here myself, and I was ac- 
 quainted with many of the dramatis personse 
 amongst whom Mr. Moore was shortly to 
 distribute their parts. I can thoroughly 
 realise the feeling of Mr. Moore, who, living 
 in London, had smelt out the pie that was 
 being made in Dublin and felt that he 
 himself was one of the ingredients that must 
 not be missing. I, too, had my feelings in 
 the matter of pies. When I was a young 
 girl in Dublin I lived next door to the family 
 of Purser, and Miss Sarah Purser, then as 
 now the wittiest woman in Dublin, was the 
 heroine of my girlish imagination. I felt 
 I had no talents to equal me to such people, 
 but I had a singing voice and through it I 
 would claim my right to be among them. 
 Many a time have I sat on the stairs at the 
 top of the house singing away my whole 
 soul that it might reach them through the 
 wall and prove that title to be their equal 
 that the music in me claimed. Many a 
 year it took me before I got any real share 
 of their pie, and therefore I cannot help 
 
 87 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 admiring the daring with which Mr. Moore 
 at once dashed for Ireland and secured his 
 portion. 
 
 There was something pathetic in Mr. 
 Moore's return to his native land. Her son 
 who had made himself famous in France 
 and England returning to build up her 
 fortune with his fame and to swagger a 
 little becomingly in his benevolence. And 
 Dublin — Dublin who cares for none of Ire- 
 land's sons famous or infamous, except 
 those who stand her drinks — killed no fatted 
 calf for her prodigal, never even knew of 
 his return ; worse still, never even knew he 
 had been away. But Mr. Moore, who had 
 mined for himself out of his own reluctant 
 bowels a career and a fame, was not to be 
 daunted by any neglect or contempt in 
 Dublin from shouldering his way in and 
 arranging his pieces on a stage of his own 
 making. 
 
 In those first years of the century it seemed 
 to us in Ireland as if not only were our own 
 geese, beloved and wild, returning to us, 
 but tame geese, not our own, were flocking 
 hither also. A queen of England who had 
 not set foot in our island for a generation, 
 led the fashion. One who when she was 
 young and girded herself, walking whither 
 she would, walked not hither ; but who, 
 when she was old, and another girded her, 
 bringing her whither she would not, was 
 
 88 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 borne amongst us. And many English people 
 at that time were displaying on their family 
 trees before admiring circles, Irish grand- 
 mothers who had hitherto shared the cup- 
 board with other family skeletons. The 
 English are a simple folk and one cannot be 
 hard upon them. On such simple lines the 
 gods build up great nations. 
 
 Dublin at the time Mr. Moore came here 
 was a very pleasant place to live in. It 
 had all the ingredients of an agreeable 
 literary society and a number of persons 
 interested in art or literature or humanity 
 either lived here or made the city frequent 
 visits. George Moore said of Dublin that its 
 " acoustic properties were perfect," so that 
 no jest, be it whispered ever so softly in 
 the closet, fails to be heard on the remotest 
 house-top. It is an ideal home for clever 
 talkers. John Butler Yeats uprooted his 
 family from London where they had been 
 settled for some years and returned here to 
 live. In his studio in Stephen's Green he 
 painted and talked all day long. Mr. Yeats 
 brought his two daughters, distinguished in 
 mind as are all the Yeats family, sharing 
 with their father the gift — made memorable 
 by him in his portraits of women — of dis- 
 covering beautiful and lovable character- 
 istics in their friends. John Butler Yeats 
 had the rare quality that he not only made 
 his women pretty, any artist can do that, 
 
 89 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 but he made them lovable, manifesting 
 some interior beauty in their souls. Incom- 
 parable executants like Sargent and, William 
 Orpen have not this faculty ; they exhibit 
 all a woman's character, but no spiritual 
 life looks out of the faces that are so superbly 
 drawn. Nathaniel Hone lived here, the last 
 survivor of the Barbizon School, an old 
 associate of Corot and Millet, full of reminis- 
 cences of famous men who seem to us to 
 belong to the classical history of art and 
 himself the most distinguished landscape 
 painter Ireland ever produced, with a massive 
 power of building up the architecture of a 
 landscape, which is rare even amongst the 
 greatest painters. Another attractive per- 
 sonality in Dublin at that time was Walter 
 Osborne, the artist, a most competent crafts- 
 man, a charming companion and lovable 
 man whose early death was a great loss to 
 Ireland. John Hughes lived in Dublin 
 then, a sculptor of real talent and still more 
 attractive by his personality, capable of 
 pungent remarks, absolutely free in his 
 mind. Unfortunately for himself he drew 
 upon him Mr. Moore's voracious literary 
 eye, and he made him the Rodney of " The 
 Untilled Field." I do not know whether it 
 is due to this exploitation of his personality 
 that Mr. Hughes decided to live in Paris 
 evermore. William Orpen was also a fre- 
 quent visitor to Dublin, as free as John 
 
 90 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 Hughes in his mind and the most devoted 
 slave of the brush that ever came out of 
 Ireland. While here he painted one of the 
 innumerable portraits of the subject of this 
 monogram. His slavery to his tools no 
 doubt made him the master of his art that 
 he is at present. Sometimes Jack Yeats 
 came here, whimsical and kindly, most 
 winning of all the Yeats ; turning by his 
 genius peasants, farmers, tinkers, and the 
 monstrosities of the shows into symbolic 
 images. That nothing might be lacking in 
 the attractiveness of the city of Dublin 
 to a man of Moore's temperament, there 
 flashed across it the most brilliant con- 
 noisseur of modern times, the generous, pub- 
 lic-spirited, ever-to-be-lamented Sir Hugh 
 Lane. 
 
 Mr. Moore's younger brother. Colonel 
 Maurice Moore, often visited Dubhn in those 
 days. He has a great deal of the family 
 literary talent and a power of pungent 
 speech which shows that if he had not been 
 a soldier he might have attained a consider- 
 able reputation as a writer. Mr. Moore has 
 painted his brother skilfully and merci- 
 lessly in the Trilogy, it might not be seemly 
 for one brother to retort on the other by a 
 counter portrait, but as far as insight into 
 character is concerned, Maurice Moore rather 
 than myself should have been chosen to 
 write this epilogue on George Moore's literary 
 
 91 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 career. For those who know Colonel Moore 
 only through the pages of the Trilogy it 
 may be well to state, on George Moore's 
 private admission, to which we have already 
 referred, that Maurice has always behaved 
 like a gentleman. But Maurice Moore is 
 more than that. He is a distinguished soldier 
 who was the chief military organiser of the 
 National Volunteers, a force which Sir 
 Matthew Nathan states attained a member- 
 ship of 160,000. He is a good Irishman, 
 with the fixed principles which are more 
 readily appreciated by the public than the 
 fluent ones possessed by his brother George. 
 An artist who takes or drops his principles 
 on their literary value is very disconcerting 
 to the ordinary citizen. It is certainly dis- 
 composing to find a man who a year ago 
 was enthusiastic about some idea turning a 
 cold shoulder upon it because it has served 
 his purpose as an artist and there is no more 
 copy in it. Maurice Moore's principles were 
 not those of an artist but those of a patriot. 
 From the very fine book he wrote about his 
 father we gather that Colonel Maurice Moore 
 inherits from him that public honesty which 
 was, I think, George Henry Moore's greatest 
 gift to the politics of his generation. George 
 Henry Moore possessed a fine honesty and 
 frankness which he bequeathed to his sons 
 — the honesty to Maurice, the frankness to 
 George. 
 
 92 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 Douglas Hyde, whose eloquent tongue 
 could coax the Gaelic off the bushes, was 
 continually here, the brain and will of the 
 Gaelic League. There were Lady Gregory 
 and William Butler Yeats, an Orpheus who 
 drew that Eurydice out of the Llades of 
 Irish landlordism — strange that his music 
 should also have attracted so unlikely a 
 ghost as Mr. Moore. 
 
 Professor Mahaffy lived here. When Mr. 
 Moore came first to Dublin he was in- 
 veigled by a fierce environment of Gaels into 
 an attack on Professor Mahaffy, which he 
 bitterly regretted a short time after it was 
 made on hearing that Professor Mahaffy 
 had once said that " Catholicism was essen- 
 tially the religion of the lower classes." 
 " What a friend he would have been," said 
 Mr. Moore. Professor Tyrrell, with a wit 
 polished in the classic manner, lived here; 
 and there was also Professor Edward Dow- 
 den, an excellent critic of literature which 
 had become a classic, but, like most critics 
 a rather more dubious commentator on 
 his contemporaries ; a really distinguished 
 mind but without much sympathy for 
 intellectual revivals in his own country. 
 They seemed to him revolutionary, and he 
 compared his attitude to them to Burke's 
 attitude to the French Revolution, and 
 seemed rather to take a pride in acknow- 
 ledging that he was the solitary Irish 
 
 93 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 intellectual on the side of the stupid 
 people. 
 
 Edward Martyn was frequently in Dublin 
 then, interested in all that made for beauty 
 in his country. His cousin George Moore, 
 in the Trilogy has fashioned him into a sort 
 of scapegoat for his own personal antipa- 
 thies, castigating him for sins he never 
 sinned. The real Martyn, who hates a 
 draught as he hates the devil, held his 
 ground bluffly against all the ill-winds that 
 cousinly venom could direct against him, 
 using the consolations of a religion he had 
 fashioned for himself out of music and the 
 drama. He comes out of the adversity of 
 the Trilogy triumphantly ; a figure whom 
 one regards with auction. " Dear Edward " 
 was clever enough to deprive George Moore 
 of the triumph of knowing what his victim 
 thought of his own portrait, for he steadily 
 refused to read the Trilogy, saying : " George 
 is a pleasant fellow to meet, and if I read the 
 book I might not be able to meet him again." 
 " Dear Edward " is dear to his friends, not 
 as he is dear to the malicious literary affec- 
 tion of Mr. Moore, but for his straightfor- 
 ward and honest humanity, and in spite of 
 Mr. Moore's malicious portrait, I am certain 
 there is no one living for whom he has so 
 sincere an affection as for Edward Martjm. 
 Mr. Moore has always bestowed his respect 
 on those who have the courage to disagree 
 
 94 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 with him, and anybody who has seen Mr. 
 Moore on the war trail for a scalp knows it 
 requires uncommon courage to do so. Sir 
 Horace Plunkett was in Dublin at that 
 time, the puzzle of the politicians, none of 
 whom have any politics at all but supply 
 this deficiency on the one side by prejudices, 
 on the other by public-houses. There was 
 also Mr. Rolleston, who should have been a 
 scholar but for his entanglement in an 
 economic movement ; with an elasticity of 
 temperament which caused him at his first 
 contact with Irish Nationality to bound into 
 Fenianism and from thence to rebound into 
 an Imperialism that carried him across the 
 sea to become permanently an Englishman. 
 Yet I feel that the man who gave us the 
 beautiful words of a poem like " The Dead 
 at Clonmacnoise," pervading it with the 
 honey breath of midland Ireland, deserved 
 more than the punctured Messiahship ac- 
 corded him by Mr. Moore. " M " was here 
 —whom reviewers in continually increasing 
 numbers charge with being a poet, a painter, 
 and an economist, tracing his career from 
 the Esplanade at Bray, where he preached 
 the Ancient Gods of Ireland, through the 
 counting-house to the bicycle whereon he 
 roamed Ireland organising co-operative 
 societies, and into the editorial chair of the 
 Irish Homestead ; but who, in spite of this 
 weight of evidence against him, remains a 
 
 95 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 friendly human being who loves a laugh 
 even at his own expense, and who would be 
 surprised and probably annoyed if he knew 
 that there are some who believe that in 
 Ireland all roads lead to "^"! William 
 Butler Yeats came here, a poet with a more 
 exquisite craft in the use of words than any 
 living poet, and — the noblest figure of them 
 all — a solitary, unconcerned with any move- 
 ment, but himself an incarnation of the soul 
 of Ireland — Standish O'Grady. A name 
 almost unknown across the Channel, and 
 often confused with his cousin Standish 
 Hayes O'Grady, the Gaelic scholar. In the 
 " Bardic History of Ireland," he opened 
 with a heroic gesture the doors which re- 
 vealed to us in Ireland the giant brood of 
 the Red Branch Knights and the Fianna. 
 Though a prose writer, he may be called 
 the last of the bards, a true comrade of 
 Homer. 
 
 Every now and then Synge would loom 
 up here, saying little and obviously not at 
 home in cities and much more a companion 
 of the Arran peasant than of the Dublin 
 literary folk. 
 
 Among other literary persons there were 
 John Eglinton, so affectionately referred to 
 in the Trilogy ; Richard Irvine Best, who 
 turned from an original love of Pater and 
 Wilde and other decadent exquisites to 
 become a genuine scholar and editor of 
 
 96 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 ancient Irish texts ; Oliver Gogarty, who 
 had but just nipped the wires of the cham- 
 pagne of his wit and sprayed a pungent 
 froth around him. 
 
 The infinite variety of Dubhn Hfe brought 
 also a dramatic interest which must be dear 
 to an actor such as Mr. Moore. This interest 
 in the theatre brought him into contact 
 with Frank Fay, who had invented a method 
 of teaching actors to speak beautifully, an 
 art which the Abbey Theatre has not yet 
 lost, and his brother Willie Fay, an actor 
 comparable in his own range to a James 
 Weleh, who made a most perfect study of 
 '' The Playboy of the Western World " and 
 who could — ^such was his strangely com- 
 pounded character — have explained to you 
 the ethics of Epictetus or the esoteric signifi- 
 cance of the memoirs of the Comte de 
 Gabalis. 
 
 At a further period of Mr. Moore's stay 
 in Dublin Seumas O'Sullivan, Padraic Colum, 
 and later on James Stephens, began to be 
 prominent, and one cannot pass from this 
 company without mentioning Mr. Commis- 
 sioner Bailey, clever, discriminating, at 
 whose hospitable house anything that 
 painted, sang, composed, or acted was sure 
 of a welcome. 
 
 With all these colours on his palette, Mr. 
 Moore in the end selected for his picture 
 the most permanent tints, dipping his 
 
 G 97 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 brush often in the luscious human com- 
 pound of T. P. Gill ; W. B. Yeats, and " ^," 
 attracted by their brilliant colouring, while 
 his brother Maurice supplied the sombre 
 tones. 
 
 98 
 
XIII 
 
 All these diverse persons were to be found 
 in Dublin, for the most part hating each 
 other like poison, but shortly " cross as an 
 armful of cats," and with or without their 
 consent to be drawn together in Mr. Moore's 
 all-embracing literary affection. To a 
 novelist a society such as this Irish one was 
 infinitely attractive. In Ireland humanity 
 develops in its natural forms, it is like 
 virgin forest, untamed, untrained, uncivilised, 
 there has been no settled social order to 
 constrain its growth. The difference be- 
 tween society in England and Ireland seems 
 to me to be as the difference between wild 
 forest and forest scientifically planted by a 
 state forester. The English novelists since 
 Dickens days have to grub very far below 
 surfaces to find any difierentiation in their 
 characters. The tall, clean, well-set-up 
 " God's Englishman " has become a national 
 ideal. Irish Society has no such minted 
 ideal and it is unlucky in its false coinage, 
 aping with equal unhappiness what is un- 
 real in English as well as in Irish character. 
 The natural Irishman is then an orgy of 
 temperament, very often a delightful being, 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 because — Mr. Bernard Shaw must pardon 
 me — I think a choicer portion of wits fell 
 to this small island than to its more roomy 
 companion, though the culture that has 
 been a good friend to our companion, we 
 to our great hurt have scorned. It is not 
 unlikely that it is the consciousness of un- 
 trammelled temperament that makes an 
 Irishman so desirous of that pigeonhole 
 retreat for his soul to which I have referred 
 in another chapter, so unhappy when he has 
 found it, and so confident that it is good for 
 all other Irishmen and so determined to 
 place them there. 
 
 At the time of Mr. Moore's return to 
 Dublin some of the group of intellectuals 
 whom I have described were gravitating 
 towards the drama. The story of the in- 
 tellectual revival in drama in Ireland has 
 been told so often and with such canonical 
 authority that to begin to disentangle truth 
 from falsehood now would be a thankless 
 task and one outside the scope of this book. 
 It is sufficient for my purpose here that I 
 give the honour of the inception of the idea 
 of a school of Irish actors where the honour 
 is due, to the brothers Frank and William 
 Fay. While Mr. Yeats, not himself naturally 
 a dramatist, turned the thoughts of most of 
 his literary contemporaries in Ireland into 
 the writing of plays, the Fay brothers were 
 the avatars of a new creed in Irish acting. 
 
 100 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 They laboured at their uncommon task 
 each evening when the common labour of 
 the day was done, Frank with his passion 
 for beauty in speech instructing his dis- 
 ciples, young men and women workers such 
 as he himself, and Willie, holding the little 
 company together by his genius as an actor. 
 Not yet, however, had the temple been 
 built that, like so many other fanes, should 
 smother the religion it sought to shelter, 
 and Yeats' " Countess Cathleen " had to 
 content itself with English actors, and when 
 the dual play, Yeats' and Moore's " Dermiud 
 and Grania " was evolved, the Benson com- 
 pany presented it on the boards in Dublin. 
 
 The writing of this play was in itself a 
 play. The conjunction of such planetary 
 bodies as Yeats and Moore, who should have 
 been by nature always in opposition, was a 
 portent in the literary heaven. Our Yeats, 
 curved and spiral, a Celtic wonder in mind, 
 at home in the magical regions of Tirnanoge 
 — where are land and water, sowing and 
 reaping but as the heart desires them— and 
 Moore, the bantling of Mayo and Mont- 
 martre, concerning himself too often with 
 what Saintsbury calls the " fie-fie " side of 
 the naturalism whose by-product he was. 
 What an alliance ! Literary Dublin sought 
 in the play with intense interest for the 
 footmarks of the writers and when it 
 found God Angus described as " A ragged 
 
 101 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 old man wandering along the mountains 
 prodding a boar," it cried " Lo Yeats " 
 and behold it was Moore, and coming on 
 the description of Conan scratching his head 
 and complaining of lice it said " Lo 
 Moore " and behold it was Yeats. Yeats 
 had come to the collaboration determined 
 to be substantial and material like Moore. 
 Moore had resolved to rise to the heaven 
 of the picturesque and beautiful to meet 
 Yeats. They had passed each other on the 
 journey. The lice came out of Mr. Yeats' 
 fancy and the Sidhe out of Mr. Moore's. 
 
 Mr. Moore was ever a hero-worshipper, and 
 when Yeats, during the writing of the play, 
 made such strange suggestions as that the 
 first act should be horizontal, the second 
 perpendicular, and the third circular, Mr. 
 Moore was puzzled, but reverent. Walking 
 under his apple trees in Ely Place he cogi- 
 tated. " The first act — Grania, the nurse, 
 etc. Is that horizontal ? Yes, surely that 
 must be horizontal." Going on to the second 
 act, the question, " What is perpendicular in 
 drama ? " struck a dumb note in his mind, 
 and that mind failed altogether when he 
 came to consider the circular in relation to 
 the third act. This story and the fact that 
 he accepted from Mr. Yeats a list of words 
 that must not be used because they had 
 been used in literature too much already, 
 and that he even contemplated writing his 
 
 102 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 part of the play in French, Lady Gregory 
 to translate it into English for Yeats to 
 work on, show in a man so full of vanity 
 and egoism as Mr. Moore an extraordinary 
 power of abasing himself before one whom 
 he regarded as a master in the guild of litera- 
 ture. We can never be quite certain that 
 this worship was altogether genuine. We 
 continually find in Mr. Moore a desire to 
 lose himself in some worship. In Mr. 
 Yeats, in Gaelic, in Protestantism, but we 
 always suspect that at the back of his 
 mind he was well aware that he could never 
 unfasten himself from his own moorings 
 and that he had always this feeling, " If I 
 cannot lose myself I shall at least not lose 
 art, and in the end it all produces copy." 
 The story of the spoliation of Edward 
 Martyn in " The Bending of the Bough " 
 has been told with absolute frankness by 
 Mr. Moore in the Trilogy. I should have 
 more confidence in the shame for the theft 
 that he expresses there if he had not used 
 the shame as he uses every asset of emotion 
 he possesses for literary purposes. Edward 
 Martyn's genuine dramatic talent proved in 
 " The Heather Field " was a temptation to 
 a born literary bandit like Mr. Moore, who 
 prides himself on yielding to temptation, 
 and in alliance with Mr. Yeats, always an 
 unfortunate conjunction, Edward Martyn's 
 play was tortured from its original inten- 
 
 103 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 tion and became no play at all, but a 
 dramatic experiment doomed to failure. 
 Mr. Moore would fain have captured also 
 Miss Alice Milligan's " Last Feast of the 
 Fianna," but she defended it " like a little 
 white Persian cat spitting at him from the 
 corner," as he himself described her ; very 
 wisely trusting to her own talents, her con- 
 fidence being justified in the result. 
 
 After "The Bending of the Bough," Mr. 
 Moore broke up his association with Irish 
 drama and with Mr. Yeats, and looked round 
 for other partners. He came to Ireland 
 with, I think, a sincere belief in the literary 
 potencies implicit in the Gaelic League. He 
 may have cherished a faint ambition to 
 learn the language, but as all his friends 
 tell us it took him many years to acquire 
 any facility even in English, he was no 
 doubt deterred from the more complex 
 tongue of the Gael. But he was willing to 
 learn Gaelic vicariously, through his nephews, 
 and he was very firm in his determination 
 that they should miss none of the accents 
 and elisions of the wiliest speech in Europe. 
 But though he did not learn Irish he felt 
 that Irish had much to learn from him, and 
 he placed at the disposal of the Gaelic 
 League the name and fame and talents of a 
 great English novelist and the best-paid 
 writer upon art of his generation. He wrote 
 '' The Untilled Field " that Gaelic Ireland 
 
 104 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 might feel its way into modern literature, 
 and no doubt if he had been more careful 
 of Irish susceptibilities some small seed of 
 naturalism might have fructified in Irish 
 soil, which was not unkindly just then to 
 the reception of new influences. He had 
 lived too long out of Ireland to realise that 
 a Gaelic public has the tenderest toes. It 
 has in fact cultivated its susceptibilities into 
 a fine art, believing that its salvation lay 
 in them ; Moore's lightest footstep pro- 
 duced anguish. Causes in Ireland are strange 
 creatures, tender and fierce ; many of them 
 die in childhood or perhaps the world might 
 harden them. The Gaelic League, an ador- 
 able cause for an Irishman, has not escaped 
 this touchiness. Had it not possessed a 
 leader who like Douglas Hyde knew no 
 fear, it too had died in infancy. But his 
 splendid courage swung it through the perils 
 of infancy and adolescence ; the pity is that 
 in its most freakish age it developed an ill- 
 timed and ill-directed boldness and dis- 
 pensed with the leadership of a man of 
 genius in whom lay its only hope of cap- 
 turing all Ireland. I sometimes wonder if 
 anything now remains for what was, without 
 question, at one time one of the biggest 
 possibilities in Irish life, but a gradual 
 sinking back into that academic stage which 
 in a language precedes decay and death. 
 In Ireland more perhaps than in other 
 
 105 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 places, a movement needs a man. " The 
 Untilled Field " even in a Gaelic translation 
 did not capture Gaelic Ireland. Though 
 there was something in its mood that might 
 have tempted Gaels, I am not surprised at 
 its failure. Mr. Moore's meat for babes con- 
 tained some elements that might have taxed 
 stomachs inured to stronger diet than any 
 Gaelic Leaguer ever encountered. So like 
 another of his name, " There was trouble 
 on George, Ireland would not do his business 
 for him," and the Gaelic League, like others 
 of his Irish aspirations, went into the melt- 
 ing pot of the Trilogy. 
 
 106 
 
XIV 
 
 Mr. Moore after this, I think, rested from 
 movements and became in more than one 
 sense in Dublin a society entertainer. There 
 has always been in him a trace of the Donny- 
 brook Fair Irishman and in his relations 
 with society in Dublin these characteristics 
 frequently appear. The following episode 
 of the green hall door illustrates this : 
 There are certain people in Dublin the desire 
 to shock whom must have been irresistible 
 to one of Mr. Moore's temperament, for 
 Dublin has other and more inexcusable 
 susceptibilities than those of Gaelic Leaguers. 
 There are respectable Irish people who have 
 a morbid horror of anything they consider 
 " unsound " either in religion or politics. 
 These persons are often, though by no 
 means always, our Protestants and Tories, 
 who could better pardon open immoralities 
 than the " unsoundness " I speak of. I 
 feel quite sure that these persons thought 
 Mr. Moore a very bad man, but they might 
 have winked at his badness alone— robust 
 virtue is ever tender to robust vice— but 
 there was an element in Mr. Moore's badness 
 which made it unpardonable in the eyes of 
 true blue Protestant Tories— he truckled 
 
 107 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 with Fenianism. The more a movement in 
 Ireland proclaims itself non-political and 
 non-sectarian, the more your true blue of 
 every section suspects it. To be a Gaelic 
 Leaguer was to be a Fenian, and when such 
 a one painted his hall door in the Fenian 
 colour green, what was this but an open 
 flaunting of his abominable sympathies in a 
 respectable neighbourhood. All Ely Place 
 rebelled, letters were written by neighbours 
 to his landlord. The occasion was one after 
 his own heart and Mr. Moore rushed into 
 the fray with a letter to his landlord, which, 
 I am told, ran somewhat as follows : Mr. 
 Moore said he was glad his neighbours had 
 complained first about him because he had 
 grave complaints to make of their conduct, 
 only being a peaceable man he did not wish 
 to say anything; but now that they had 
 begun the attack, he would say that his 
 neighbours did not clean their chimneys 
 and that large smuts the size of sixpenny 
 pieces floated through his windows and on 
 to his clean doorstep. His neighbours also 
 kept dogs which they beat with sticks, and 
 these dogs howled, which was distressing to 
 a man of humane feelings. The young 
 ladies, his neighbours, were noisy persons 
 who rode their bicycles round and round 
 before his door, ringing their bells and look- 
 ing at his hall door, which they objected 
 to, and into his windows, which he objected 
 
 108 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 to. But he would let that pass and come to 
 the matter of the hall door. He would like 
 to remind his landlord that he was George 
 Moore, whose opinion on matters of taste 
 was more highly paid than that of any other 
 person in these islands, and he was not 
 accustomed to find his opinion on such 
 matters disputed. But he would let that 
 pass also ; he was a peaceable person and 
 was willing to agree on a new colour for the 
 hall door after mutual consultation. But 
 he would like to remind them that the green 
 hall door was the key-note of the melody 
 of colour in the whole house, and the colour 
 prepared one for the harmonies which un- 
 folded room by room. As his landlord was 
 a practical business man he would know that 
 such harmonies were expensive things, but 
 still for the sake of peace he was prepared 
 to evolve a fresh harmony on a new key- 
 note, the landlord of course bearing the 
 expense. He did not know which of his 
 neighbours had made the complaint, so he 
 was sending copies of the letter to all, and 
 if they were not satisfied he would write to 
 the Press and ask the public to judge between 
 his green hall door and the dirty white of the 
 hall doors of his neighbours. Mr. Moore's in- 
 vitation was not, as we may imagine, accepted 
 — and his hall door remained an oasis of ten- 
 der green in the desert of Ely Place. 
 
 On another occasion, to which I have 
 109 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 referred in an earlier chapter, Mr. Moore's 
 cook served him with an unsuccessful ome- 
 lette. Mr. Moore had often explained to his 
 friends that his tastes in food were very 
 simple, that just as Whistler had narrowed 
 down his colours to a couple of tones, so he 
 had narrowed down his carnal appetites to 
 a couple of dishes — an omelette — but it 
 must be properly made, a chop — but it 
 must be properly cooked. Six cooks within 
 a fortnight failed to minister to this modest 
 appetite, and Mr. Moore's indignation in all 
 probability rose higher and higher at suc- 
 cessive failures, till it came to pass that the 
 last of the six went out to get a policeman to 
 protect her from a flood of artistic expos- 
 tulation with her cooking wherewith Mr. 
 Moore threatened to engulf her. Mr. Moore 
 met the policeman on the doorstep, took 
 him by the arm and dragged him into the 
 dining-room, pointed to the omelette and 
 asked in a tragic voice, " Am I to be com- 
 pelled by law to eat this ? " That his tastes 
 were really modest is shown by the fact 
 that the seventh cook proved capable of 
 evoking from her materials the exact tones 
 required by Mr. Moore, and she remained 
 with him ten or twelve years. There is a 
 distinction between flavours, and as Walter 
 Pater, Mr. Moore's ancient master in the 
 art of writing, says, " To miss the sense of 
 distinction is to miss success in life." 
 
 110 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 The conversion of George Moore to religion 
 was an event which interested the Dubhn 
 that goes to the Abbey Theatre and enjoys 
 good acting and literary art, for the con- 
 version was conceived in the mood of light 
 comedy. It was reported that the ecclesi- 
 astical authorities at Maynooth, on the 
 occasion of the late King's visit there, 
 decorated that seat of divinity with the 
 King's racing colours. This may or may not 
 have been so, but at the moment the account 
 appeared, religion came to George Moore. 
 His conversion was as instantaneous as 
 St. Paul's, and no doubt his experiences en- 
 abled him later on to understand the Apostle 
 who is the hero of "The Brook Kerith." 
 It is possible that the light which fell from 
 Heaven on Moore was in the nature of a 
 literary inspiration, and he saw as in a 
 vision the book which he, a Messiah, should 
 write about an Apostle. " Ave, Salve and 
 Vale " occupied him at the moment and it 
 was needful that ''The Brook Kerith" 
 should be postponed for a few years. But 
 the wise litterateur while working at one 
 book will prepare his life for the next and 
 will be collecting experiences. So George 
 Moore as a prologue to the comedy of his 
 religion, at once wrote to the papers and 
 announced his intended reception into the 
 Protestant communion as a protest against 
 the decoration of Maynooth with King 
 
 111 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 Edward's racing colours. The chorus in 
 Dublin, in a mood rightly related to the 
 mind of the protagonist, commented gaily 
 upon the spiritual state of one whose pro- 
 test against a King took the surprising form 
 of adopting the religion of that King against 
 whom he protested. Mr. Moore desired 
 complete initiation into the mysteries of his 
 new faith. He had his revelation, but 
 revelation has to be reconciled to human 
 reason, and so he went to the Archbishop of 
 Dublin demanding as candidate the rites of 
 initiation. The Archbishop was wiser than 
 he looked, and referred Mr. Moore to the 
 rector of his parish, and so probably escaped 
 an immortality, which I am certain he 
 would not have desired, in the pages of the 
 Trilogy. The Archbishop made the escape 
 of his life, for it was suggested by the 
 chorus that Mr. Moore was trying to kill 
 two birds with the one stone. He hoped to 
 destroy one religion by explaining his reasons 
 for leaving it and another by explaining his 
 reasons for joining it. 
 
 His preference for Protestantism was based 
 on the belief that Protestant clergymen were 
 men of the world. This view he explained 
 to " ^," who expostulated with him for 
 carrying his joke too far, and who said 
 Moore would hurt the feelings of men who 
 were really sincere and pious. " Oh no, 
 ' M,' you don't understand ; these men are 
 
 112 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 men of the world." '' But I tell you, Moore, 
 that I know many of these men and they are 
 truly sincere and believe what they preach, 
 and they will ask you to pray, Moore, to go 
 down on your knees, Moore, things you 
 have never done in your life, and you will 
 feel very much out of place." " Oh no, 
 ' JE,^ you don't understand ; these are men 
 of the world, they understand perfectly." 
 "Well, I warn you," said " ^," and departed. 
 After a week had elapsed " ^ " met Mr. 
 Moore and asked him about the initiation. 
 " Well," said Moore, " what you said nearly 
 burst up the whole thing. When the clergy- 
 man came I did not wish to appear to be 
 taken in too easily and I worked up a few 
 remaining scruples, fenced for a while and 
 finally announced my scruples as conquered, 
 and myself ready to be received into the 
 fold. Then the clergyman said, ' Let us have 
 a prayer,' and I remembered your words 
 and saw your face looking at me and I 
 burst out laughing. When I saw the horri- 
 fied look in the clergyman's face I realised 
 it was all up unless I could convince him 
 that it was hysteria, and I clasped my 
 hands together and said, ' Oh, you don't 
 realise how strange all this appears to 
 me to be. I feel like a little child that 
 has lost its way on a long road and at last 
 sees its father,' and I, folding my hands 
 anew, began ' Our Father.' I took the wind 
 
 H 113 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 out of his sails that way, for he had to join 
 in, but he got in two Httle prayers on his 
 own account afterwards, and very nice little 
 prayers they were too." 
 
 This little child in religion had the en- 
 thusiasm of the newly converted. He has 
 told us how he began to read the Bible for 
 the first time, and he went so far as to read 
 the Lessons in a country church in England 
 where he was on a visit. " I believe in 
 Protestantism," he said to " ^," "1 don't 
 mind what anybody thinks . ' ' Then he added, 
 looking slyly at "" ^," as an afterthought : 
 " I don't think I could go on reading the 
 Lessons if Mallock came into the church." 
 
 When Ireland was rent in two over the 
 prospect of Home Rule, Mr. Moore trailed 
 not a red herring, but a rarer fish across its 
 path when he informed his country, through 
 the contentious columns of the Irish Times, 
 that in the restaurant of one Henri in Paris 
 he had eaten a grey mullet. The bones of 
 that mullet, to be sure, stuck in Ireland's 
 throat, but it was still articulate enough to 
 talk, and for days every shade of religion and 
 politics in the country told the Irish Times 
 what it thought of mullet and how often it 
 had eaten it in every colour from grey to 
 scarlet. Besides the mullet matter, Mr. 
 Moore trailed his coat in letters to the 
 papers on every variety of subject, irrelevant 
 if possible to any event or emotion of the 
 
 114 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 day, and but seldom trailed it in vain. 
 Someone was always found to respond to 
 the invitation, and Dublin waxed merry 
 over the encounters, and learned to like 
 Mr. Moore more in his character of jester 
 than of patriot ; so pleasantly did he, like 
 Bottom, put an ass's head upon him and 
 gambol in our walks. 
 
 115 
 
XV 
 
 Mr. Moore having written a book in 
 which he said his farewells to Dublin with 
 all the literary skill at his command, could 
 hardly remain here when the book was 
 published. So he, to whom sacrifice had 
 become the chief ceremonial of his religion 
 as an artist, tore himself away from a charm- 
 ing house and a lively company of agreeable 
 friends, exchanging the soft clean airs of 
 Dublin for stuffy Pimlico where is distilled 
 in its crudest form that mixture of hot 
 rubber and petrol fumes that makes all the 
 Londoners know of atmosphere. Mr. 
 Moore's contributions to literature since 
 his return to London have been lamentable. 
 Casual articles in newspapers on such sub- 
 jects as whistling for taxicabs, politics and 
 barking dogs. I do not, I confess, think 
 much of Mr. Moore's pronouncements on 
 the last subject, and but that I am committed 
 to a statement of Mr. Moore as an Irishman, 
 his preoccupation with this matter would 
 make me suspect him of an English ancestry. 
 I have often been struck by the sensitive- 
 ness of elderly military and naval English- 
 men in the matter of the dogs' protesting 
 
 116 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 voice. Any barking that is to be done in 
 England they want to do themselves. 
 
 In politics Mr. Moore ranges himself 
 naturally with God and the Daily Mail on 
 the side of the big battalions, or, as they 
 view it through the larger other end of their 
 mental opera glasses, the side of the small 
 nationalities. Mr. Moore's make-up, how- 
 ever, is not that of the politician, and one 
 is not surprised to find him an echo. The 
 labour of his mind is all on the side of per- 
 sonal expression, and he has none of the 
 intellectual adroitness that enables the poli- 
 tician to identify his own cause with the 
 cause of humanity. Mr. Moore is very 
 clear about his own cause and never hesi- 
 tates to hustle other causes off the course. 
 He is primitive, indeed, infantile man, as 
 sure of himself as the baby is. He has 
 escaped all that sophistication of altruism 
 wherewith the guardians of our youth so 
 early confound our confidence in ourselves. 
 Masculine character, as it appears to the 
 feminine mind weary with wisdom from its 
 age-long researches, seldom gets beyond 
 the boyhood stage, and our Peter Pans are 
 dear to us, but Mr. Moore has never got 
 beyond babyhood in his character, and few 
 women can have known him long without that 
 desire to slap him that is the normal woman's 
 attitude towards an aggravating baby, let 
 the sentimentalists say what they will. 
 
 117 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 I do not find Mr. Moore's essays in the 
 Press in England as amusing as his essays 
 here. Your EngHshman being a born senti- 
 mentahst, hke his German forefathers, will 
 accept no statement of life that is not 
 practical. To get a footing in an English 
 paper Mr. Moore was constrained to link 
 himself on to such obvious nuisances as 
 taxi whistling fiends, and barking dogs. 
 Such flinty matters can kindle a spark of 
 rage, but out of them no pleasant glow of 
 humour comes. Ireland, sure of its prac- 
 ticality, and unutterably weary of it, de- 
 mands continual imaginative statements of 
 life. The colour of a hall door, the juxta- 
 position of a policeman and an omelette, 
 the mythical flavour of a mythical mullet, 
 mythically eaten in a French restaurant, 
 such things delight us, as a way of escape 
 from the harsh constraint of our practical 
 temperament. Dr. Mahaffy, the Provost of 
 Dublin University, is more concerned that 
 his girl students should not wear pink blouses 
 than that the course of study provided by 
 his college should be of the slightest in- 
 tellectual advantage to them, and all Dublin 
 is with him in a hearty appreciation of his 
 attitude and does not care a hang for college 
 courses. The merchants of Belfast, owners 
 of as fine businesses as any in the world, 
 were happier running guns illicitly than they 
 ever were in reading bulky balance sheets. 
 
 118 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 Your Englishman, conscious of his danger 
 on the sentimental side of his nature, is, in 
 common with his Teuton relative, armouring 
 himself on that side more heavily day by 
 day. I need not talk to Irishmen of their 
 danger in following their practical bent, we 
 —and England also— know it very well. 
 Whether we are right in regarding life as a 
 schoolmaster with a rod in pickle for tempera- 
 ment or whether we are wrong, it is perhaps 
 fortunate for literature, and it is certainly 
 luck for the student of Mr. Moore's wayward 
 character, that he never went to school. 
 
 Mr. Moore is safely installed in London 
 now, he has his house and furniture, mahog- 
 any doors and pictures and all the burdens 
 that man sets himself to accumulate in his 
 passage through time. He has the occasional 
 society of Mr. Tonks and Mr. Steer to whet 
 his appetite for discussion on art. His ex- 
 cursions into print have not, I fancy, 
 afforded him much amusement, for irrelevant 
 as such trifling was in the midst of an agon- 
 ising war, they were too much in the key of 
 English life to relieve the boredom of a 
 nature such as Mr. Moore's, which loves to 
 strike a discord. I do not feel that Mr. 
 Moore is as at home in the picture in his 
 London life as he was in Dublin. His opera 
 hat fits in there, no doubt, and his bull-in- 
 the-china-shop truthfulness, which he was 
 diplomatic enough to replace in Dublin by 
 
 119 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 a more subtle and edged sincerity, probably 
 serves him well in a country where a Bull is 
 the popular hero. He has also in cold storage 
 in his nature, like most Anglo-Irish people, 
 an appreciation of the well-oiled English 
 mechanism of life. Yet for all this I hardly 
 think that one who has never written Finis 
 after any chapter in his life has put the last 
 seal on his Irish Chapter. I am the more 
 inclined to think this because there were 
 wafted to us here in Dublin from time to 
 time scraps of his latest book " The Brook 
 Kerith," and although he has made a 
 pilgrimage to the Holy Land since he left 
 us the tales borne to me bring airs from Ely 
 Place. Mr. Moore came to Ireland in search 
 of a Messiah, and though having tried to fit 
 the part to each of his friends here and 
 finding they failed him in some essential 
 characteristic, he cast himself for it, he can- 
 not have been satisfied with his own pre- 
 sentation of the part, for in " The Brook 
 Kerith," he starts the quest anew. The 
 story of the successor to the Messiahship 
 has not yet leaked out, but Mr. Moore 
 presents us with an apostle who believes 
 that the new religion will not succeed unless 
 it is associated with a language revival ; 
 and another apostle who talks about style, 
 pondering over his Epistles to his followers 
 with a literary anxiety as keen as Mr. 
 Yeats' ! I believe it was once said of Mr. 
 
 120 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 Moore by a member of his family that he 
 would end his days as a monk, and it is 
 certainly true that his later writings show 
 the attraction of religion drawing him closer 
 and closer. It seems, however, to be an 
 attraction of repulsion and to consist rather 
 in renunciations than confessions of faith. 
 In Dublin he renounced St. Peter. In 
 "The Brook Kerith " he confesses St. Paul; 
 but doubtless we shall have a renunciation 
 there also. I think Mr. Moore's conten- 
 tion that his family is of Protestant origin 
 must have some truth in it, for he has a 
 good deal of the Protestant protest against 
 faith in any shape or form. So strong is 
 Mr. Moore's protest against all that relates 
 to the See of Peter, that I believe amongst 
 the many endings he proposed for his book 
 he had almost chosen the following : " You 
 know," he is reported to have said to a 
 friend, " the ordinary legend of the martyr- 
 dom of St. Paul I discard as invented by a 
 Church who wanted a long background of 
 martyrs to justify any martyrdoms she 
 herself should inflict. I intend to bring St. 
 Paul in his old age to Spain, where he gradu- 
 ally fades away surrounded by his disciples. 
 At the very last he hears once more the 
 Voice he heard on the way to Damascus, 
 and a light penetrates him with a vision of 
 futurity and he sees with horror all that his 
 religion is bringing on the world. He sees 
 
 121 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 the Inquisition in Spain and Maynooth in 
 Ireland, and he dies crying with all the 
 ferocity peculiar to the Pauline nature, " To 
 hell with the Pope ! " 
 
 Mr. Moore is too good an artist to disfigure 
 his book with this freakish story, and too 
 much of an imp not to whisper it in some 
 friend's ear with a confidence which has 
 certainly not been misplaced in the perfect 
 acoustic properties of Dublin. 
 
 122 
 
XVI 
 
 A MAN who suffered so much for religion as 
 actually to submit to pray and be prayed 
 over would not shrink from further sacrifices, 
 and after " Ave, Salve and Vale " was com- 
 pleted the idea of writing a story about 
 St. Paul, in which Moore's own experience 
 as a propagandist of religion would be in- 
 valuable, laid hold of him and, as an artist 
 conscientious about details, he felt he must 
 go to Palestine as he went to Ireland for 
 local colour. No doubt not a scrap of 
 adventure there will be wasted and we will 
 get it all in some future tale. But he has 
 told the story of his wanderings to his 
 friends so fully, that they have got all 
 the publicity of rumour and we can set 
 some of them down. At Marseilles Mr. 
 Moore embarked on the bluest of blue seas. 
 " With Marseilles," he says, " my quest 
 really began. When I looked on those 
 white shores rising behind me out of the 
 blue water into the twilight, the precipitous 
 chalk worn and corroded by the wind into 
 battlements and parapets and towers, re- 
 minding the beholder of Valhallas builded 
 by gods that have been— a beautiful phrase 
 
 123 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 of William Morris. Those phantasmal 
 ghostly shores rising steeply out of the wave 
 with not a blade of grass enchanted me all 
 through the lingering twilight until they 
 faded as the vessel passed out of the bay, 
 and suddenly I realised where I was and 
 whither we were hastening, and I thought, 
 * I'm afloat for the first time on the Mediter- 
 ranean, that sea, around whose shores all 
 the old stories sprang up like flowers.' " 
 
 Mr. Moore was so enchanted by antique 
 names and classical memories that he raved 
 around the ship to callous fellow passengers. 
 Here was Sicily, where the naughtiest idylls 
 of Theocritus evoked memories he would 
 willingly have discussed with his shrinking 
 companions. In the lands about this inland 
 sea were born the old gods and especially 
 the goddesses, Venus foam bright rising from 
 the waves and floating shorewards in her 
 shell, Europa and the Bull, Proserpine 
 gathering daffodils on the plains of Enna — 
 on all these legends he dilated. But, alas, 
 his intoxication with classical myth fell flat 
 on companions who desired intoxication 
 with whiskey and soda, and were more 
 interested in a volcano in eruption than in 
 George Moore in eruption. Only one fellow 
 passenger, a silent, pleasant, middle-aged 
 man, seemed to listen to Mr. Moore with 
 interest. He did not talk much but kept 
 the conversation going. Who he was, Mr. 
 
 124 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 Moore did not know or care. He was a 
 listener, and the art of picturesque conversa- 
 tion did not rust for want of practice. At 
 Port Said Mr. Moore had to ship for Joppa, 
 and here he became aware of a sudden in- 
 crease in respect for himself. He desired 
 a cabin to himself, for the thought of being 
 polite to a fellow passenger horrified him, 
 but a cabin was a difficult thing to get ; yet 
 when he appeared with his silent companion, 
 he was treated as if he were an Emperor. 
 All difficulties were smoothed away. Haroun 
 Alraschid could hardly have passed amid 
 more obsequious subjects than did George 
 Moore, wondering at the way people ran 
 to do him service. The East welcomed a 
 Messiah from Ireland, what did it all mean ? 
 He was enchanted if puzzled. He tells us 
 that on the Joppa steamer suddenly looking 
 into the hold he saw the East in all its sub- 
 lime rags : turbans and burnouses, long 
 skirts half silk, half cotton, in divers 
 colours, sometimes yellow stripes sometimes 
 blue, and always turbans, with veils floating 
 down the back, and fastened with coils of black 
 camel's hair rope round the head. The Syrian 
 women are unveiled, the Mohammedans all in 
 black. There were Jews and a rabbi, a 
 great paunchy, bearded fellow with a nose 
 like a flag, all thrown together like so many 
 cattle and sheep, to sleep as best they could 
 on their own rags, and there were plenty of 
 
 125 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 these. Every moment a family would pull 
 out a sack and drag out its hoard of rags, 
 and then put them back for no reason a 
 European could understand. The Bedouins 
 seemed to him to bear the sadness of sun- 
 light, for nothing, Mr. Moore thinks, is so 
 sad as the sun, and the sun-sodden Bedouins 
 seemed to him sadder than any Irish tinker 
 he had ever seen. 
 
 He was rowed ashore at Joppa in a great 
 galley like a Roman barge, twelve-oared, 
 two men to an oar, the rowers chanting 
 their boat songs. He saw Joppa rising steep 
 from the sea, house after house, stretching 
 away east and west, beautiful in outline, 
 like a strung bow, one minaret above all — 
 an arrow pointing heavenwards. He stepped 
 from the vessel into the straggling street, for 
 there is no shore, and lo, a strange cry ! the 
 symbol of the East appears, a camel, swinging 
 great boxes of oranges tiered on either side, 
 walking with a melancholy resignation sur- 
 passing that of any saint's, long puritanical 
 lips, callous tufted hide, the anchorite of 
 the desert, the nonconformist of the four- 
 footed world ! The donkeys were beautiful, 
 well fed and would gallop ringing their 
 bells — all unlike the Irish donkeys, sombre 
 and obstinate, and only to be moved by a 
 union of sticks and profanity. Here again 
 the hotel melted in obsequiousness to George 
 and his mysterious companion, and so it 
 
 126 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 was all the way to Jerusalem. Moore was 
 in search of a monastery where his Essene 
 monks in " The Brook Kerith " could be 
 housed and he wanted to ride on an Arab 
 horse. He refused to ride on English ponies. 
 Go to the East to ride on English ponies ! 
 He must have an Arab horse. There were 
 none, only the Arab draught horses, but 
 still the magical influence prevailed. They 
 would send to Damascus for an Arab steed 
 for George ! Never before attended with 
 such ready service, Moore commented on it 
 to his companion, the middle-aged mystery 
 who went with him to Jerusalem. " I do 
 not know who you are," he said, " but they 
 treat me as if I were a king." " My name 
 is Frank Cook," said the mystery, mani- 
 festing itself. Alas, it was not the splendour 
 of George Moore's genius which made the 
 East to bow itself before him, but the fact 
 that his companion was the great Cook, 
 the Adept who conjures tours out of the 
 strange places of the earth, whose presence 
 had caused all obstacles to melt. 
 
 When Mr. Moore found that Damascus 
 was a long way from Jerusalem and that 
 he would have to wait a week for his Arab 
 horse, he determined to ride anything he 
 could get, and left the choice of horses to 
 the dragoman. And here Nature who, in 
 the words of Whistler, " is creeping up " 
 to art, brought together for this new Don 
 
 127 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 Quixote all the materials that had been used 
 so successfully for the old. For the drago- 
 man, a gaunt hungry-looking Arab, ap- 
 peared next day mounted on a lean roan 
 that would not, Mr. Moore says, have 
 reminded him of Rosinante but that it was 
 accompanied by a small bay pony ! Nature 
 had brought all the players together, but 
 she had juggled the parts, giving the drago- 
 man Rosinante and casting George for the 
 part of Sancho Panza. One sighs for the 
 grotesque pencil of Gustave Dore to make a 
 picture of such a party, to show the plump 
 silhouette of Sancho on the little bay 
 ambling along the peaks of Moab. Prob- 
 ably Mr. Moore said to himself, " A Messiah 
 dare not give any opportunities to the carica- 
 turist ; public men, yes, emperors, yes, but 
 Messiahs, never ! " So as he had cast him- 
 self for the part of hero, he could not allow 
 nature to divert him from his purpose and 
 start him on the great errand of his life in 
 such ignoble shape. He insisted on return- 
 ing to the stables and exchanging the little 
 bay pony for the gaunt Arab draught 
 horse, that was to goose-step him relentlessly 
 with military precision to the top of every 
 mountain and the depth of every ravine 
 between Jerusalem and Jericho, till each 
 several bone in George's body shrieked for 
 mercy. He got riding-breeches made of 
 some terrible material such as people might 
 
 128 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 make sails out of. Those terrible breeches, 
 those wooden horses, the heat, the insects, 
 the precipices he had to climb, fainting, 
 searching along the Jordan and through 
 Moab and by the Dead Sea for a monastery. 
 His horse would not trot ; if it was beaten 
 it kicked ; it would attempt the exploit of 
 buck-jumping on the edge of precipices. It 
 conquered its rider. At last after many 
 monasteries, too unromantic for the pur- 
 poses of the tale, were visited, on turning 
 the shoulder of a mountain one was dis- 
 covered perched half-way up a precipice over 
 a valley and below was the Brook Kerith ! 
 Moore is not an adept at climbing and he 
 had been days in the saddle and was sore 
 in every atom, but religion is a great power, 
 and at last he climbed to his rock monastery. 
 He subsided at last crying, " My God, my 
 bones, my bones!" So tired was he that 
 when he saw a woman there among the 
 monks he did not even enquire what she 
 was doing there. " You need say no more," 
 said a witty woman who listened to George's 
 account of his fatigues. "If you saw a 
 woman in a monastery and did not enquire 
 as to the cause of her presence there, you 
 were indeed tired." There in some antique 
 valley in the neighbourhood of Jericho is the 
 monastery of the Essenes of the Brook 
 Kerith. To placate the Abbot, George 
 prayed for the second time in his life, or 
 I 129 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 pretended to pray, in the rock cell where 
 Elijah was fed by the ravens. We hear 
 rumours of mountain climbing to which, I 
 believe, " ^E," who has had experience of 
 Mr. Moore's capacity as a mountaineer, 
 listens with a sceptical ear, remembering 
 that George Moore could not get a quarter 
 of the way up Slieve Gullion, and he doubts 
 in a hotter climate these ascents of precipices 
 wild and gigantic as those in a Dore land- 
 scape. " ^," I am told, suggests that Mr. 
 Moore's dragoman or his draught horse 
 carried him or pushed him through these 
 wild adventures. As for the rest of the acts 
 and adventures of this apostle, are they not 
 written in "The Brook Kerith" ? 
 
 130 
 
XVII 
 
 '' The Brook Kerith " is the story of Jesus 
 of Nazareth, whom Mr. Moore represents as 
 a shepherd belonging to a brotherhood of 
 Essenes living in a great settlement on the 
 eastern bank of Jordan. Led by his medita- 
 tions among the mountains where he fed 
 his flock to believe that nothing should 
 come between the soul and God, Jesus went 
 to be baptised of John the Baptist and his 
 baptism developed in him a fury of desire to 
 save his people from the tyranny of the 
 priests. This led him to Jerusalem. On the 
 charge of threatening to destroy the Temple 
 there, which was sustained by his actual 
 eviction of the money-changers by physical 
 force, and also of attempted blasphemy in 
 equalling himself to God, he was, by priestly 
 instigation, crucified by the Romans. Ap- 
 parently dead, he was removed from the 
 cross by his devoted friend Joseph of Arima- 
 thsea, who placed him in his own new tomb. 
 Jesus was not dead, and was restored to 
 health by Esora, Joseph's ancient nurse. 
 He is taken back by Joseph to the Brook 
 Kerith, the monastery where his former 
 brethren the Essenes had settled, and there 
 
 131 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 he is restored to his task as shepherd of 
 their flocks. Wandering again among the 
 hills, he came to healing of his mind, shat- 
 tered as it has been by his terrible experi- 
 ences. After many years when Jesus was 
 coming to himself, Paul the Apostle being 
 persecuted by the Jews takes refuge at 
 the Brook Kerith and is there confronted 
 by Jesus, on the story of whose death and 
 resurrection he had staked all his hopes and 
 founded many Christian churches. Paul 
 refuses to admit to his mind the truth of 
 Jesus' story and leaves the monastery with 
 Jesus as his guide to Caesarea. Paul wraps 
 firmly round him his belief in his own 
 Apostleship which had been conferred on 
 him in vision from a Christ in heaven, and 
 puts away from him as delusion the real 
 Jesus and the teaching he would have given 
 him. Jesus leaves Paul in safety near 
 Caesarea, and we have a momentary passage 
 across the stage of some Buddhist monks, 
 when Jesus disappears from our view, while 
 Paul pursues his journey to Csesarea and 
 finally to Rome. 
 
 The rumours that had reached us in 
 Dublin of " The Brook Kerith," were many of 
 them dispersed for me when I read the book 
 itself. I was reminded for an instant — so 
 do trivial matters arise uninvited in the 
 mind during its most serious occupations — 
 of those suggestions, to which I have referred 
 
 132 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 before, made by Mr. Yeats to Mr. Moore 
 when together they fashioned the play of 
 " Dermiud and Grania." The first act, 
 Mr. Yeats said, should be " horizontal." 
 Mr. Moore was puzzled at that time by Mr. 
 Yeats' geometrical language, but I think he 
 must have since gone profoundly into this 
 matter, for in " The Brook Kerith " we have 
 a book that might be described as horizontal 
 for the first 442 pages, rising suddenly then 
 into one vertical peak and subsiding at 
 page 466 to the horizontal again and con- 
 tinuing at this level up to its close on page 
 471. 
 
 It is perhaps a tribute to Mr. Moore's 
 power of transporting us to the East where 
 he has laid the scenes of his story, that when 
 one attempts to criticise " The Brook 
 Kerith," one is led into a labyrinth of 
 tropes and images that are more in the nature 
 of eastern than of western literature. I 
 might call " The Brook Kerith " a recital 
 in a musical undertone such as those that 
 beguiled " The Arabian Nights " ; the voice 
 is never raised, the key never altered save 
 in that moment when Paul talks noisily to 
 Jesus on the road to Csesarea, and then the 
 tones fall again into a murmur. I might 
 say that the book represents a space of 
 time filled with momentous happenings that 
 yet fall silently as the sand in the hour-glass, 
 and for all their meaning, there remains for 
 
 133 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 us in the end but a little mound of sand. 
 Mr. Moore has been at extraordinary pains 
 to hush all sound in the book. " Down, 
 down," he says to every fawning fancy that 
 leaps up to his hand. " To heel, to heel," 
 he says to any passionate emotion that 
 threatens to overleap the bounds he set it. 
 And perhaps he has done wisely. In at- 
 tempting to retell the story of the Gospels 
 he subjected himself to a tremendous ordeal, 
 and that he has emerged from it with any 
 credit at all, is a high tribute to his art as a 
 writer. 
 
 I remember that John Eglinton says in 
 one of his essays that " no one could im- 
 prove upon the story of David, unless, by 
 a miracle, he could introduce some new and 
 transforming element into his conception 
 of it." He says that " when a great legend 
 or narrative comes down to us from anti- 
 quity — as, for instance, the Biblical story of 
 David — it does so in a certain form in which 
 it has spontaneously clothed itself and which 
 fits it as the body fits the soul." The story 
 of the Son of David had behind it more than 
 a thousand years of marvelling worship be- 
 fore our English translators wove it into the 
 amazing literature we know to-day. He 
 who would part such a garment undertakes 
 a terrific task. His tale must inevitably 
 seem to compete with the scripture story — 
 that unequalled epic that begins with the 
 
 134 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 Birth that is coincident with the birth of a 
 new star in space, and that goes on, every 
 line a phrase of music, to tell of Him who 
 shall lead humanity, sickened with the bitter 
 fruit of Eden, to the healing tree that springs 
 up in the street of that Holy City that is 
 built about the throne of God. Who shall 
 worthily re-sing that song that note by 
 note has sung itself into every event of life 
 and death of centuries of English-speaking 
 Christians, so that many of us hardly know 
 now if it is the story, or the manner of its 
 telling, that enchants us ? 
 
 Mr. Moore brings upon his head also the 
 reproach Plato put upon the poets who 
 brought the gods into disrepute, making the 
 heavenly story common, bringing the eso- 
 teric teaching of the mysteries down to such 
 materialistic tales as confront us to-day in 
 the pages of the classical dictionary. 
 
 One opens such a book as " The Brook 
 Kerith " fearing that the morbus pediculosis 
 that so often afflicts the realistic writer may 
 leave its unclean trace on the spotless tale 
 our Bible gave us. But Mr. Moore has been 
 saved from this horrible ending to his literary 
 career. It seems to me in reading the book, 
 that instead of taking the story in his own 
 hands and carrying it his own way, the story 
 took him and carried him whither it would. 
 
 Joseph of Arimathsea, whose life the 
 Bible dismisses almost in a phrase, is the 
 
 135 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 man whose spiritual struggle occupies the 
 greater portion of " The Brook Kerith." 
 If a book so still could be said to have any 
 motion one might divide the tale into three 
 movements. The Joseph movement, slow 
 and languid, which merges into the more 
 solemn movement of the Messiah's story, 
 and the Pauline discord which twangs out 
 noisily before the murmuring close. Joseph 
 of Arimathsea's quest is Mr. Moore's own 
 quest, and one must regret that one who 
 has shown in this book, with an art few 
 writers possess, the passionate desire for 
 worship that starts the human heart on so 
 many restless pilgrimages, should himself 
 seem to be so satisfied that all his own 
 quests shall end in the discovery of a happy 
 phrase. This may be an unjust estimate of 
 Mr. Moore, and it may seem absurd to bring 
 a moral issue into a literary criticism, but 
 I, in common with most women, can only 
 separate the intellectual question from the 
 moral one with extreme difficulty, nor can 
 I follow Mr. Moore in his extraordinary 
 preoccupation with what seems to me the 
 mere scaffolding of life. I may be captured 
 by the happy phrase, but I cannot rest in 
 it with any lasting satisfaction. 
 
 I cannot help being consumed with curi- 
 osity to know if Mr. Moore altered the pur- 
 pose of his book as he went on. I had 
 divined a book almost entirely about St. 
 
 136 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 Paul, and looked forward to a Mr. Moore 
 who, having failed in works, should justify 
 himself as St. Paul justified himself, by 
 faith. But instead of this rugged, hearty 
 optimist as principal hero I find the lov- 
 able, delicate, sceptically-minded Joseph of 
 Arimathsea who drew his Messiah rather out 
 of his own warm heart than out of any 
 profound intellectual adventure. The story 
 leads one with wonderful skill through 
 Joseph's many searchings after a prophet 
 to his meeting with the Galilean Essene. 
 After the crucifixion and disillusionment of 
 Jesus, the prop that Joseph gave the story 
 is cunningly withdrawn, and the way is 
 prepared by the account of Jesus' absorption 
 in the daily common task of shepherd on 
 the hills for the complete self-realisation 
 that came to him with the dramatic entrance 
 of Paul. Paul's occupation of the stage is 
 somewhat violent, but his time there is 
 brief if noisy, and the book dies away in 
 silence with his arrival at Rome. I had 
 imagined a development of the character of 
 Paul. But Paul's character has no develop- 
 ment. It springs on the page fully armed, 
 and remains there mail-clad and unchanging. 
 The curtain goes down on Paul's iron-bound 
 mind. 
 
 Mr. Moore has chosen an extraordinary 
 theme, and that he has been able to raise the 
 disillusioned, broken prophet into a being 
 
 137 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 more nearly divine than he who was crucified 
 because he claimed divinity, we must admit 
 to be a great achievement, if we are content 
 to waive the question — a literary as well as 
 a moral question — whether any writer is 
 justified in breaking up the mould of such 
 a story as the Gospel story. 
 
 He has given us more than the ravelled 
 thread such an attempt might produce. 
 He has given us an absorbing study in a 
 rare psychology, as well as a complete 
 realisation of a land of milk and honey, of 
 deserts and ravines and lakes, fierce and 
 tender, forbidding, stern and bountiful, a 
 land that could produce a truculent anthro- 
 pomorphic deity made in the image of its 
 own inhabitants, and yet gave humanity 
 the Divine Shepherd of the Psalms and the 
 compassionate and gracious figure that has 
 allured Christendom for 2000 years. 
 
 Mr. Moore has put some of his best writing 
 into " The Brook Kerith." There are beauti- 
 ful passages that describe Joseph and Azariah 
 roaming in the woods about Arimathaea. 
 The silence of the forest, "if silence it could 
 be called, for when they listened the silence 
 was full of sound, innumerable little sounds, 
 some of which they recognised ; but it was 
 not the hum of insects, or the chirp of a 
 bird, or the snapping of a rotten twig that 
 filled Joseph with awe, but something that 
 he could neither see nor hear nor smell nor 
 
 138 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 touch. The Hfe of trees — is that it ? he 
 asked himself. A remote and mysterious 
 hfe was certainly breathing about him and he 
 regretted he was without a sense to appre- 
 hend this life." 
 
 The meeting between Jesus and Joseph 
 by the Lake of Galilee is related as follows : — 
 
 " Joseph could re-see the plain covered 
 with beautiful grasses and flowers, with low 
 flowering bushes waving over dusky head- 
 lands, for it was dark when they crossed the 
 plain ; and they had heard rather than seen 
 the rushing stream, bubbling out of the 
 earth making music in the still night. He 
 knew the stream from early childhood, but 
 he had never really known it until he stood 
 with Jesus under the stars by the narrow 
 pathway cut in the shoulder of the hill, 
 whither the way leads to Capernaum, for 
 it was there that Jesus took his hands and 
 said the words ' Our Father which is in 
 Heaven.' At these words their eyes were 
 raised to the skies, and Jesus said : Whoever 
 admires the stars and the flowers finds God 
 in his heart and sees him in his neighbours' 
 face. And ... he recalled the moment that 
 Jesus turned from him abruptly and passed 
 into the shadow of the hillside that fell 
 across the flowering mead. He heard his 
 footsteps and had listened, repressing the 
 passionate desire to follow him and to say : 
 Having found thee, I can leave thee never 
 
 139 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 again . . . through the myrtle bushes he 
 could hear the streams singing their way 
 down to the lake, and when he came to the 
 lake's edge he heard the warble that came 
 into his ear when he was a little child, which 
 it retained always. He heard it in Egypt 
 under the pyramids, and the cataracts of 
 the Nile were not able to silence it in his 
 ears." ..." One of those moments when 
 the soul of man seems to break, to yearn 
 for that original unity out of which some sad 
 fate has cast it — a moment when the world 
 seems to be one thing, not several things ; 
 the stars and the stream, the colours afloat 
 on the stream, the birds' song and the words 
 of Jesus." 
 
 I have made these quotations, though I 
 do not care to make quotations, because 
 they seem to me to convey some idea of the 
 musical undertone in which the book is 
 written. A great deal of it is in prose like 
 the warbling water that Joseph heard. Yet 
 beautiful as much of the book is, is not Mr. 
 Moore in writing it like unto those rational- 
 ising writers who broke up the mould of the 
 old pagan beliefs of Greece and Rome, 
 making indeed a literature but defrauding 
 the world of deity ? He puts upon the God- 
 head feet of clay, successor to those who in 
 turn have resolved into a philosophic ration- 
 alism every divine tale that blessed hu- 
 manity. 
 
 140 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 " The Brook Kerith " is an epilogue to a 
 beautiful story written by a man tired of 
 the theme, yet who cannot invent anything 
 more beautiful than the story he wrecks. 
 He has no faith in any new vision, nothing 
 wherewith to build up a new spiritual 
 romance to make the world breathless with 
 fresh beauty. 
 
 141 
 
XVIII 
 
 I HAVE written in this book at some length 
 of Mr. Moore as an Irishman because 
 although he has lived the greater part of his 
 life in England and France, during the years 
 that he lived here his house in Ely Place 
 was a centre in its way for the literary folk 
 in Dublin and his influence is of some account. 
 There has always been a certain sterility in 
 Irish ideals ; we reach for a star or we 
 scramble lower down for a terrestrial bauble. 
 In all their aims high and low Irishmen 
 have a tragical alienation from life. They 
 became peasant proprietors more because 
 their fields were symbolic of the four fields 
 of Kathleen ni Houlihan than because they 
 might be sown and harvested and produce 
 the food of man. They value their municipal 
 privileges more for the sense of power these 
 confer than from any serious intention of 
 using these powers for simple human needs 
 and comforts. Their political power has 
 been treated as a game as diverting as 
 musical chairs at a children's party, sitting, 
 acting and voting to meaningless party tunes 
 played at hazard and stopped at hazard. 
 If this were not so, would we have our land 
 
 142 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 in grass, our towns and cities in slums, 
 and our country without a human hope to 
 break down the barriers that our several 
 quests have imposed upon us ? 
 
 Mr. Moore as a man of feeling was no 
 doubt moved by this sterility in Irish ideals, 
 and he attempted almost brutally to intro- 
 duce a personal and human ideal in Irish 
 literature. His literary theories might in 
 time have justified themselves here, had he 
 not been deflected by his own excessive 
 egoism from any serious attempt on the 
 heart of Ireland. Where he proved himself 
 stupid was in assuming, in his attempt to 
 carry his literary theories into practice, 
 that the life to be expressed here in literature 
 was of the same quality as the life to be 
 expressed in other countries. Humanity in 
 Ireland has never become self-conscious. We 
 are intensely conscious of our nationalism, 
 of our imperialism, our religion. Catholic 
 and Protestant, but beyond these we are 
 the least introspective race in Europe. Mr. 
 Moore's art is self-conscious and introspec- 
 tive, a very complete expression of the 
 humanity to which he was most accustomed. 
 His art went all astray in Ireland. He sup- 
 posed in us a feverish interest in sex. Ire- 
 land regards sex, when she regards it at all, 
 with an entirely primitive and practical eye. 
 Love in Mr. Moore's use of the word she 
 would consider balderdash. She is approach- 
 
 143 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 able to the literary explorer on the side of 
 the affections. Friendship and affection 
 are extremely strong here, but they are not 
 self-conscious. Mr. Moore, whose nature, as 
 I have said elsewhere, fits him much more 
 to write of affection than of passion, might, 
 had he been patient, truly have served 
 Irish literature and affected Irish life. His 
 impatience and perverseness hindered him. 
 This aspect of Irish life has never had an 
 interpreter worthy of it, and Mr. Moore 
 might have been that interpreter. I think 
 we want an interpreter, and that perhaps 
 the time has come for one, though it is 
 difficult for one to realise this who has seen 
 an Ireland grow more and more obsessed 
 by the cinema and the penny novelette. The 
 impossible cracksman of the one and the 
 impossible duke of the other are both as 
 far away from life as any legend of Saint 
 or Sidhe. We are in a sorry plight, whom a 
 foolish system of education has robbed of 
 those bardic heroes who should have been 
 the natural exemplars of our youth. What 
 room was there in our school primers for the 
 extravagant Gaelic heart ? Our intellects 
 were not bred true to type and we have a 
 mongrel taste. He was a wise man, that 
 Danish bishop Grundtvig, who reared his 
 High School pupils on their native hero tales. 
 The ordered social life of rural Denmark is 
 the result of that inspiration. Still I cannot 
 
 144 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 imagine Mr. Moore as the novelist of the 
 Red Branch or the Fianna. 
 
 I write this last chapter of my book in a 
 city that has been shattered by the big guns 
 of modern warfare. It is a heavy ending 
 for a book begun with a light heart. With 
 every twenty-five years of Irish life we 
 expect a tragedy, with every fifty years it 
 inevitably comes. Can any ruling country 
 afford to neglect such portents ? Can it be 
 stupid enough to imagine that a nation 
 whose belief in its own high destiny is so 
 profound that seven hundred years of Eng- 
 lish domination have failed to obliterate it, 
 will ever lose that hope ? One hundred and 
 eighteen years have passed since the last 
 passionate outburst of that hope, and the 
 revolution of 1916 is but begun. The spirit 
 that inspired it is no less fervent than it was 
 then, and is as widely spread in Ireland, 
 for all the protests of our members at West- 
 minster. It may be a town movement now 
 and in alliance with a hungry labour, as it 
 was a country movement then and in 
 alliance with a hungry tenantry. It is the 
 same movement, it possesses hearts as brave 
 and martyrs as willing. One portion of 
 Ireland expresses its desire for freedom of 
 government by constitutional methods and 
 by taking arms to serve England, one by 
 taking arms against England. This desire 
 K 145 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 should appeal to a people like the English 
 who were wont to love freedom themselves 
 and who fought for it so bravely against 
 their kings and nobles ; who wrung from 
 them by insurrection and by civil wars the 
 charters of their constitution. What English- 
 man but thinks with pride of how the town 
 of York held all England at bay and let its 
 king batter vainly at its gates, till he had 
 yielded it the charter of its civic rights ? 
 Are we to have no charters in Ireland but 
 dishonoured charters, no treaties but broken 
 treaties ? Yet I would be just to England. 
 She is surely in a desperate strait, when 
 within her own borders she is compelled to 
 treat as a " scrap of paper " the most cher- 
 ished charter of her people's liberties, the 
 Habeas Corpus Act. That she should sus- 
 pend it here is natural enough, angered as 
 she was at our disaffection and at the timing 
 of our revolution. That she suspended it 
 at home is a bad omen in a country which 
 has grown great through its passion for in- 
 dividual liberty. 
 
 It may seem to my readers as if I had 
 shoved Mr. Moore aside in the preceding 
 paragraphs. Surely, they may say, I did 
 not dream that there was any part in our 
 recent tragedy that Mr. Moore might have 
 been cast for. I have not done with Mr. 
 Moore at all, though it was no part of my 
 plan in this book to arraign him or any 
 
 146 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 absenting Irishman at the bar of his country 
 and ask him to show cause why he has not 
 devoted such gifts as were his to her service. 
 That would be an absurd position for me to 
 assume ; Mr. Moore at the helm in Dublin 
 during such a storm as has broken here 
 would be an absurd spectacle. Yet it 
 should not be unnatural for an Irishman to 
 be seen in the service of his country. Mr. 
 Edward Martyn, who has never been a 
 sentimentalist about Ireland, and who has 
 indeed given her many shrewd knocks, has 
 believed himself to have a duty towards 
 the country whence he draws his income 
 and has fulfilled that duty. Sir Horace 
 Plunkett has acknowledged the same obli- 
 gation; so too has " iE." 
 
 Had Mr. Moore any gifts that he might 
 have given to Ireland ? I believe his frank- 
 ness might have been of great benefit to 
 our public life, and his intense concern with 
 human life and emotion might have im- 
 parted a warmth to our literature that is 
 missing from it now. The spirit and the 
 flesh are very far apart in Ireland. So un- 
 natural a distance is between them that the 
 conquest of the material by the spiritual, 
 which is, I suppose, the end of all religion, 
 promises to be a long and tedious process 
 here. I remember the sufferings inflicted 
 on Mr. Edward Martyn by the earthliness 
 of the feminine soprano in Church music 
 
 147 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 and how he fought for the aloofness of the 
 boyish treble. He won too, but I think he 
 had done better had he waited for the aloof- 
 ness of Palestrina to capture the feminine 
 soprano. The separation of the spirit and 
 the flesh, the churches tell us of, will surely 
 be done much more efficiently hereafter 
 than we can do it now. The purpose of our 
 existence here is more properly to bring 
 heaven to earth. Yet Mr. Moore would surely 
 be a most inappropriate prophet of such a 
 creed. Heaven may have cast him for this 
 end, but the rival establishment intervened. 
 I often wonder what effect upon our 
 normal constitution here in Ireland had all 
 the movement of that febrile time that we 
 call the Irish literary revival. Has any 
 intellectuality at all emerged out of it, any 
 public opinion, any essentially national flavour 
 in our life ? True, some of our educational 
 establishments are aware now of what was 
 then unknown to them, that in Mr. Yeats 
 and " iE " we have poets of whom any 
 nation should be proud. It can hardly 
 happen now as in those days when one 
 Alexandra College student whispered to 
 another that she had heard by way of a 
 French review that there was a literary 
 movement in Ireland. Yet our public life 
 in Ireland is as barren of thinking as it ever 
 was and there is no true cohesion amongst 
 us, though there are many enforced unities. 
 
 148 
 
GEORGE MOORE 
 
 There has been no lack of courage in Ire- 
 land ; there never is, but even our courage 
 has a fatal quality. Mr. Moore has a moral 
 courage that he has developed to the point 
 where it becomes immorality, as most of 
 his friends realised when they read his " Ave, 
 Salve and Vale." He was content to rear 
 his monument in the Trilogy, and though 
 one may regret that he has not a nobler 
 ambition, it is in a sense an achievement. 
 A century hence people will search in it as 
 eagerly as they search in Hogg and Trelawney 
 for memories of Shelley and Byron. Mr. 
 Yeats and his literary contemporaries in 
 Ireland may have a more kindly, but they 
 never will have a more brilliant, chronicler. 
 Literary history must accord Mr. Moore a 
 place amongst the most brilliant and varied 
 writers of our time. Still, he will be remem- 
 bered less by the creations of his imagina- 
 tion than for his malicious and witty account 
 of his contemporaries. 
 
 In the " Memoirs of My Dead Life," he 
 wished that his body after death might be 
 cremated and the ashes enclosed in a Greek 
 vase, with dancing fauns and nymphs 
 modelled around its curves, but it would be 
 far more appropriate to place round the vase 
 which holds his ashes the figures of the Irish 
 literary revival, with George Moore as Pan 
 playing on his pipes the movement of their 
 dance. 
 
 149 
 
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