George Moore

BY "WAYFARER"

It is rather a pity that, while several newspaper and magazine articles have been published on the work of John Galsworthy who died in England recently, hardly any notice was taken, at this end, of the death of George Moore who undoubtedly occupies a very much greater position in literature and whose personality ought to be found more interesting than that of any of his contemporaries.

This is, perhaps, not very surprising when we remember that a writer of Moore's class, whatever greatness, beauty and excellent qualities may have been blended in his work, generally, keeps a certain distance between himself and the so-called modern, general public; makes himself inaccessible to that public in consequence of certain idiosyncrasies in the character of his work; and it would be interesting to inquire whether this kind of obstacle placed between a writer and the world remaining outside the sphere of his influence is not a requisite of a certain greatness, a source of a certain charm in that writer.

That is, however, not to say that Moore's greatness as a writer of a high order has not been acknowledged, not only by his peers but by a larger and important public. The obituary notices in the English newspaper and literary Press that have appeared after his death would easily dispel such an inference. Nor is it necessary that a great writer's genius should meet the exact measure of praise from the average public: on the other hand, such praise, which is as lavishly showered as it is withheld, carries with it its dangers and there is always the certainty of turning of the tide.

Moore, one ventures to think, is happily placed beyond such a possibility not because he is dead but because he has always adopted a particular attitude towards such things as popularity, success, fame, which most men pursue–an attitude that is so noble, so characteristic of what may be described as artistic idealism. He retained, indeed, that Irish pugnacity and courage till the end which add a fresh and charming quality to his work and which bring out his gifts of wit and humour. One of his earliest books, Parnell’s Island, is a typical instance of this courage which is also the supreme human courage–the courage of truth. A representative of Irish landlordism and a ‘reactionary,’ antagonistic to the agrarian movement of the day, the artistic instinct and culture triumph over his class-identity and his book contains the most moving picture of the misery of the victims of his own class. This humanism of his pen developed in his later Esther Waters which is rightly considered to be the first novel in the Zolaesque naturalism. Yet, like everything else in all his work, it is pronouncedly individual, bursting forth with a powerful spontaneity although he cannot be said to have resisted the influences of these nineties in which liberalism swept over the inspiration of principal writers both in England and France–a liberalism of which Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga is a fine example.

Moore began with painting with, of course, the prelude of poetry, following the law laid down for wild-oat-sowing youth. Very few amongst us have seen his youthful verses: Poems of Passion, I think, was its significant title, reminding as they do both of Baudelaire and Swinburne who must have influenced him a great deal. He went to Paris to learn painting and ended finally by discovering his real vocation. Yet he owes not a little to painting which enabled him to find himself and which influenced and shaped his critical faculties. His art-criticism in Modern Painting will live as a record of these influences, and, in spite of his enthusiasm for certain impressionists like Monet, Manet, Degas and Corot, he formed a taste, an eye for beauty, a sureness and penetration of judgment not unworthy of an artistic-literary connoisseur.

The next important phase in his career was his association with the Irish Renaissance movement to which, in a moment of temptation, he succumbed and his visit to, and residence in, the country of his birth contributed a great deal to his experience. His three volume Hail and Farewell, a book in personal biography merged with phantasy, in which his peculiar genius finds the happiest medium of expression, preserves an essential record of this period in his life. This work will certainly survive as most characteristic of those qualities in this writer which the Landorian Conversations in Ebury Street bring out. More than this, it acts as a corrective in presenting the Irish literary movement and the interesting and brilliant personages viewed from a strongly individual and highly interesting point of vantage. It has certainly as much historical value as artistic and one may set it beside W. B, Yeats's Autobiographies–the work of a poet and more or less serious writer–to judge of the difference between the two temperaments and the methods employed by each of the two writers.

His sojourn in Dublin in the midst of the group Moore has immortalised in his three volumes of Hail and Farewell was also marked, not only by the spiritual experiences of which he speaks in these books, but by the production of his Untilled Field (a symbolic title) and the Lake. The former was translated in Gaelic and used as a text-book and the latter will always occupy an important place amongst his other books like Abelard and Heloise, Esther Waters, Celibate Lives (a collection of stories), not to mention the series of those he wrote earlier. And his Bending of the Bough, a play with a characteristic Irish ground, certainly deserves to be better known not only because of its beauty but also because it deals largely with an event in his career that is not without a certain significance affecting his personality. It is a remarkable fact that Ireland had remained (and continues remaining, in a measure) a land of the emigres, a country of exiles, and the history of Anglo-Irish literature furnishes one of the strongest paradoxes in irony and a most striking phenomenon, namely, of Irish writers winning fame and eminence amongst (nationalistically speaking) foreign audiences. Curiously enough, the Renaissance movement fostered by persons like Lady Gregory and Yeats, while its basis was national idealism, played a passive part in the political events that profoundly changed Ireland's destiny and one even receives a suggestion of that apathy and lack of enthusiasm towards the nationalist politics which is difficult to reconcile with the aims of the movement in the attitude of some at least of its leaders. One has, of course, to make allowance for several factors that entered into this question: and does not Yeats define the pure intellectualist's attitude regarding this in his famous lines? It must however be admitted that the part the leaders of the Irish literary movement played in politics, compares quite unfavourably with that played by the Spanish writers during the recent years that saw the collapse of monarchy and establishment of the Republic in that country.

 Moore's contribution, then, to the Irish literary movement must be considered as both valuable and generous if we take his brilliant cosmopolitanism and his strongly individualistic and restless temperament into consideration; and that contribution adds to the movement's work an element that one misses in purely Irish writers. The Irish themselves instinctively recognise this and are not slow in the expression of gratitude for whatever Moore had been able to do for his country. It is, of course, impossible to drag in considerations of racial or geographical nationalism in literature and one explanation of the phenomenon we remarked above is the fact that great writers who rise above the level of provincialism and servile flattery and are solely guided by the needs of their art would find it impossible to practise their trade in a country which lacks in a certain literary culture, liberalism and that atmosphere of freedom which Irish writers of the position of Liam O'Flaherty miss in the country of their birth. The post revolution history of literary censorship and the dominance of clericalism in Ireland makes this quite clear.

And now Moore's figure can be recalled as that of a man who stood so long as a representative, so like and unlike his younger contemporary, Galsworthy, of past generations, of a literary old-world the excellence and savour of which was wafted by his charming personality. He may even be considered to be the last of the legendary poets of the ivory towers, artists of distinction who, whatever work they produced, produced it on their own terms mainly for the delight of producing it, out of the necessity even, imposed upon themselves who can tell out of what mysterious subtle laws of artistic being? Yet Moore was not a literary solitary but was steeped in a humanism the flavour of which floats out of every page he wrote. The old controversy of L'art pour L'art may not be raised in his case; nor was he in any sense one of the decadents and other literary species of the nineties and did not join in the tragic wreckage of that sad age. If he was exposed to several influences, as he certainly was, he may be said to have assimilated their excellence and the qualities he imbibed from each could flow in his pen which was always wielded by energetic and firm fingers. In him artistic sensibilities and sympathies were cultivated to the highest degree and his genius could touch any thing and turn it into gold. He was a connoisseur of life; his sympathy, thanks to his artistic culture, never turned into insipid sentimentality; he had depths of humanity in him and countered the calamities of life with his polished irony, his profound sense of humour, his wisdom and his naivete. And so he will live while the love of literature endures, and men turn to his page to have a glimpse of beauty and enjoy its myriad pleasures.