George Moore: References & Notes

References
Dictionary of National Biography, lists George Henry Moore, [his father], 1811-1870, ed. Oscott, Birmingham, and Cambridge; MP Co. Mayo, 1847; leader of tenant-right movement; unseated 1857; elected unopposed, 1868. See also contemporary notices in Irish Book Lover 2, 4, 5, 6.

Justin McCarthy, ed., Irish Literature (Washington: Catholic Univ. of America 1904), gives extract from ‘Exile’ in The Untilled Field.

Stephen Brown, Ireland in Fiction [Pt. I] (Dublin: Maunsel 1919), lists A Drama in Muslin; The Untilled Field; the Lake; A Story-Teller’s Tale. Others such as Esther Waters are not treated as Irish by him. Brown remarks: George Moore was born to family of distinguished nationalists; according to Mr William Barry, he is ‘excessively, provokingly un-English’ but has little but scorn for things Irish; abandoned Catholic Church (Confessions of a Young Man); at war with all prevailing types of religion and current codes of morality; books bear abundant evidence of the fact; most unsavoury topics ... with naturalistic freedom and absence of reserve; excluded from Mudie’s and Smith’s; ranked high as psychologist by some; article in him in G Chesteron’s Heretics; not Irish stories include Evelyn Innes, Sister Theresa; Esther Waters; A Mummer’s Wife; Celibates; Vain Fortune; A Mere Accident, &c.; reminiscences [sic],. Ave, Salve, Vale, in which no privacies are respected and which in other respect resemble his novels. IF lists A Drama in Muslin (Vizetelly [1886]); 8th edn. Walter Scott 1918) [girls of convent of St Leonard’s adventures in Irish society looking for husbands, all going bad except two of which one is a mad missionary and a Protestant, who becomes a Catholic nun, and the other a free-thinker and authoress, a combination which the author considers natural; disgust for peasants]; The Untilled Field (Unwin; Philadephia: Lippincott [1903]; Heinemann 1914) [unconnected skethces of Irish country life mostly dealing with relations between priests and people, evil effects of religion banishing joy, producing superstition, killing art; apart from religious bias, true to life; trans. by P. O’Sullivan as An t-Ur Gort]; The Lake (Heinemann 1905), 340pp; NY: Appleton), 340pp. [Brown quotes Baker, shrewdly, ‘a vague and inchoate novel with some passion and delightful description of Nature. The theme very indecisively worked out, is that of a young priest’s rebellion against celibacy stimulated by the attractions of a girl whom he drove from the parish because she had gone wrong’; Connaught and Kilronan Abbey; mean to uphold the purely Hedonistic view of life; described by Boyd, in Literary Renaissance (1916), as the revival’s first and only novel of disctinction; free form sensual suggestiveness]; A Story Teller’s Holiday (London: T. Werner Laurie 1918), issued privately for The Society of Irish folklore, lim. edn. [60 pages of discursive comment on art, love, women, priests and land; introduced at Westport to Alex Trusseby [sic] fern-gather who has taken sunstroke in America and is a note shanachie; facetiae; Moore proceeds to tell stories to Alec only slightly less suggestive than his own; improper and even blasphemous].

D. E. S. Maxwell, A Critical History of Modern Irish Drama 1896-1980 (Cambridge UP 1984; pb. 1985), lists Works [uniform edn.] (London: Heinemann 1924-33); also plays, The Strike at Arlingford (Independent Theatre Co., Lon.; Feb. 1893); Diarmuid and Grania (Chicester Th. 1974); other works, Hail and Farewell ([1911-14] complete, Heinemann 1947, rep. of 1933 edn.); and studies, Joseph Hone, Life of George Moore (NY 1936); A. N. Jeffares, George Moore (London 1965) [pamph.], and Jean C. Noel, George Moore: L’Homme et l’ouevre (Paris Didier 1966).

John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (Longmans 1988; rep. 1989), lists Esther Waters (1894), A Mummer’s Wife (1885), and Evelyn Innes (1898) only. Notes that Moore was chronically ill in youth and missed much schooling; steeped in Miss Braddon’s fiction after reading her Lady Audley’s Secret; on returning to London after a tame bohemian period, he was deeply affected by his aged publisher Nenry Vizetelly’s being sent to prison for publishing Zola’s novels; appointed High Sherriff of Mayo in 1905; ‘his later works are excessively stylised’; sexual involvement with John Oliver Hobbes (Mrs. Craigie) reverberates through the fiction of both authors; first met in 1893, while she was embroiled in divorce suit; a version of his troubled affair given in ‘Mildred Lawson’ in Celibates (1895). BL 19. Note remarks under Julia Frankau that Moore allegedly part-wrote Dr. Phillips (1887), an anti-semitic novel. Also, separate entries on A Mummer’s Wife, dealing with the career of marriage, seduction, child-birth, child-death, separation, drunkenness, and final lonely death of Kate Ede, who becomes the actress Kate D’Arcy when she meets Dick Lennox, visiting her North of England town; ‘relentlessly Zolaesque’. Also, Evelyn Innes (1898), in which the title character, a Wagnerian singer and a Catholic, is seduced by Sir Owen Asher and later by the poet Ulick Dean and finally comes under the influence of a priest, Monsignor Mostyn, who persuades her to renounce immoral ways and enter a sisterhood; Sister Teresa (1901), the sequel, is the latter part of the orig. MS of 300,000 words; Dean is modelled on W. B. Yeats, and Evelyn thought to be a malicious portrait of John Oliver Hobbes [Mrs Craigie]; religious tone of the work is ambiguous.

Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2,, 254n; 520; extract from ‘Salve’ [542-49]; from The Untilled Field, ‘The Wedding Gown’ [549-53]; see also 555; 562; 740; 741; 772; 780; 784; 1008; 1010; 1021; 1022-23; extract from The Untilled Field, ‘A Letter to Rome’ [1034-40]; also 1218; BIOG 560-61. See also The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991), Vol. 3 , references and remarks at pp.2 [Moore like O’Casey writes third-person autobiography; Deane, ed.], 244 [re Beckett; FDA ed.], 480 [cited by Seán O’Faolain among those ‘gone into exile’] , 496 [Austin Clarke: ‘George Moore shocked his neighbours ... by having his door painted a patriotic green’]; 523 [his lit. mem. compared to Anthony Cronin, et al.], 665 [W. J. McCormack, from Ascendency and Tradition, 1985); also Terence Brown, ed. essay, with rems. on 937-38, 939, 940 [sought lucidity and ‘the melodic line’; treating epic themes in prose beautiful and dignified yet preserving illusion of a story melodiously spoken; ‘spent the last 22 years in London polishing a style that seemed more and more out of tune with the age.].

Belfast Linenhall Library holds Joseph Hone, The Moores of Moore Hall (1939); also Literature and the Irish Language (1901); also by Susan Mitchell, George Moore (1916); M. G. Moore, An Irish Gentleman, George H. Moore, by [n.d.].

Belfast Public Library holds Humbert Wolfe, George Moore (1931) and twenty Moore titles. CATL, Library of Herbert Bell (Belfast) holds Memories of George Moore (1956) [n.a.].

Hibernia Books (Cat. 19) lists The Lake (NY 1906) [Gilscher A27.2a]; Spring Days (1888) [Gilscher A13]; Héloïse and Abelard (1921) [Gilscher A40.3b]; Celibate Lives (Ist ed. 1927) [Gilscher A52]; Aphroditis in Aulis (1930) [NY 1931, Gilscher A56.b; revised edn.; another copy, London: 1931, Gilscher A56.2b]; A Communication to My Friends (London: Nonesuch 1933) [lim. 1000; Gilscher A60.a]; In Search of Divinity , 2 pts., from English Review [q.d.] Celibates (Scott 1895); Esther Waters (Cumann Sean-eolais n h-Eireann 1920) [ltd. signed edn., 750]; The Apostle (Heinemann 1923) [signed]. [also Hyland, Cat. 214.]

Whelan Catalogue (Cat. 32) lists Hail and Farewell [Ave, Salve, Vale] comp. in 2 vols. (London: Heinemann 1925), printed from handset type on handmade paper; ltd. edn. 780, signed; another, in 3 vols. [uniform ed.] (Heinemann 1947); The Coming of Gabrielle, a Comedy (Cumann Sean-eolais na hEreann 1920) [priv. ltd. edn. 1000 copies]; The Apostle, A Drama in a Prelude and Three Acts (London: Heinemann 1923) [ltd. edn. 1030 copies]; A Story-Tellers Holiday, 2 vols. (Heinemann 1928) [1st gen. UK edn.]; Héloise and Abélard (Heinemann Ebury Edn. 1936); Avowals (Heinemann Ebury Edn. 1936); Celibate Lives (Heinemann Ebury Edn. 1937); Esther Waters Heinemann Ebury Edn. 1937); Letters to Lady Cundard 1895-1933), ed. with intro. Rupert Hart-Davis (Greenwood 1979), ill.

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Notes

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Parnell and His Island [1887; Ebury Edn. 1937], intro. Carla King (Dublin UCD Press 2004), begins by denigrating Killiney, and then Dublin city; ports. of landlords, MPs, Priests, poets.

The Lake (1905); Father Oliver Gogarty denounces Rose Leicester [rev. to Nora Glynn in 1921 Edn.], music teacher in the Parish School, when she becomes pregnant; In the correspondence that builds up between them after he receives news of her wherabouts from an London priest, he expresses his remorse and she her indifference to convention; He is converted to her wider view of life; She works as the literary secretary of Mr. Ellis, a writer on the ancient origins of Christian philosophy [The Source of the Christian River ]; Gogarty plans to disappear and go to America where he will work as a journalist; to avoid scandal, he pretends to have drowned in the lake, which has been the focus of his lonely sensitivity to nature and humanity from the beginning of the novel; Other than Gogarty and Rose Leicester, there are no fully drawn characters, though a variety of Roman Catholic clerical types are convassed in Father O’Grady, Father Moran, and Gogarty’s sister Eliza, the Reverend Mother; other minor characers include nationalists and gaelgoirís; in plan, the novel is a criticism of Irish Catholicism and more especially the native-life, anti-women philosophy of the Irish clergy; it is fairly contrived, considered as an argument; but the depiction of Gogarty and the discussion of the opposition of flesh and intellect is effectively done; Gogarty is flogged by Tom Bryan to whom he gives a flagellant’s cane, not realising what real cruelty is; he expunges his humiliation in hard work; one of the thrusts of the novel is the imporance of flowers - the colour of, the liking for - in the rejuvenation of Irish sensibility after the massacre of Jansenist Catholicism. Oliver St. John Gogarty’s remark in It Isn’t This Time of Year At All [1954, 1983]: ‘I have not forgiven Moore for his attempt at wit when my mother called on him to object to the use of my name in his novel, The Lake ’ [to which:] “Madame, if you can find me a name which is composed of two dactyls, like the name of your son Oliver, I will substitute it for Oliver Gogarty”.

Hail and Farewell, 3 vols. (1947 edn., with sep. pagination per vol., viz., Ave (1911, rep. 1947); Salve (1912, rep. 1926); Vale (1914, 2nd ed. 1915)]: The whole trilogy is governed by a cyclic movement. His friendship with AE is the central relationship. But more important still, and increasingly as the narrative unfolds, is the book itself, an embodiment of his ‘belief’ that he was ‘an instrument’ in ‘the liberation of my country from priestcraft.’ This, of course, might have been a dour and humourless ambition were it not for the urbanity and comical diffidence of the author, exposing his own vanity and folly as well as his appetite for life. Accordingly, he choses to write the ‘sacred book’ in the form of an ‘autobiography’ [V295]. It includes ‘literary silhouettes’ [Vale, conversation with Eglinton about AE.] The time frames covered include the Revival proper (ten years, ?1897-1907]; the period when landlord troubles brought him back - aged forty-six (with Stella); his youth in Ballinrobe and Paris; his time at the Temple in London with Martyn; other times in Paris and London. Moore began Hail and Farewell with a firm plan, ‘from which [he] never strayed’, for ‘any straying would have been fatal, so intricate are the windings of the story I had been chosen to tell.’ The story is, on the surface, that if his involvement with the Irish revival; but more deeply, his ‘discovery’ in the garden at Ely Place that Catholicism is the enemy of intellectual culture and literature; and, beyond that, an appraisal of modern Irish history in the period of the Land Acts, and, with it, an appraisal of the system of individualism and aestheticism which Moore reveres as the proper form of artistic and social life. Chap. XI, a specimen of Moore’s discursive unity, goes from 1901 to 1914, that is, from the early Revival to Gogarty’s Ely Place era. Moore later professed, ‘for years I believed myself to be the author of Hail and Frewell, wheras I was nothing more than the secretary.’ [See further under Quotations, supra.]

Hail and Farewell , 3 vols. (1947 Edn.), errata; ‘in those days when women desert their lovers as frequently as men desert their mistresses’ [V284]; typographical errors incl. <Sinn Fien> two times out of three at V240-41.

The title of Moore’s memoir of the Irish Literary Revival - Hail and Farewell: Ave, Salve, Vale - echoes a line in Catullus which reads, ‘Atque in Perpetuum, Mater, Ave Atque Vale’ which Moore he quotes at the conclusion of Vale where he styles himself ‘a very humble fellow, forgetful of Ireland, forgetful of Catholicism, forgetful of literature [who] went below [deck on the Kingstown mail-boat - to think of the friends he had left behind him - Æ and the rest.’ (Vale, pp.367; end).

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‘Marban’, an episode in The Story-Teller’s Holiday (1918), relates to the Abbot his sin in making love to Luachet, a beautiful young woman who brings him ‘the white scriptures’ in her hand. Marban has confessed how love for her overcame him as previously in life the love of Jesus, and argues, ‘I cannot believe it true that my love of her will rob me of my love of Jesus, nor that her love of me will rob him of her love, for in our hearts it is all one and the same thing, and aren’t we more sure that God make our hearts than of anything else?’ The Abbot demurs, then submits: ‘As good a doctrine as I’ve heard this many a day, said the Abbot, and what’s true in it has been for a long time past in the mind of God, and will be for evermore.’

Oscott College is described, with Ware and Ushaw, in Sencourt, Life of Newman : ‘in all of these the classes were mixed, the polish lacking, and over all there hung the professional piety of the seminary, with a rather constricted view of human life. The converts from Oxford noticed the differences at once [and] published comments ...’ (p.171).

Corunna, Moore’s most successful horse, won the Chester Cup, 7th May, 1846, with a return of £17,000 on his personal stake (equiv. of £999,763 in modern money), writing to his mother: ‘It will give me the means of being very useful to the poor the season ... no tenant of mine shall want’; the George Moore Society presented documents relating to his triumph to the Chester Race Course in 1995; the stake was partly put up with borrowings from Lord Waterford, the other keen horse-trainer of the period. Note: Corunna was the battlefield on which Sir John Moore (though no relation), died [see Charles Wolfe, infra].

Epitaph on Moore’s his grave on Castle Island: ‘He forsook his family and his friends / for his art / But because he was faithful to his art / His family and friends / Recovered his ashes for Ireland / Vale.’ Moore indicated that he wished his ashes to be strewn on Hampstead Heath. (Cited in P. J. Kavanagh, Voices in Ireland, 1994, p.243.)

Seán O’Faoláin (The Irish: A Character Study, Penguin 1947): ‘[George Moore’s] special circumstances, his wealth mainly, made it possible for him to transer himself bodily, and to a great extent mentally, out of Ireland as a very young man. What he learned in France went into his naturalistic novels. The nationalist excitement drew him back to Ireland, out of which he got two excellent books, Hail and Farewell and The Lake .’ (p.136).

Elizabeth Bowen gives an account of the matter of A Drama in Muslin, in The Shelbourne (1951, 1955), pp.109-13: ‘[It] follows the fortunes of a group of debutantes, brought up from the West of Ireland by husband-hunting mammas. Mrs. Barton, mother of our heroine, Alice, and of her prettier sister Olive, has made the hotel the headquarters of her winter campaigns.’ (p.109). Further, ‘quietness on all fronts precedes the opening of the offensive - which, in A Drama in Muslin, reaches its height on the night of the Castle Drawingroom - February 20th.... All is breathless flutter, and swirls of finery ...’ (p.110). Further, ‘Husbands and fathers, also bound for the Castle, are less happy - black velvet garbs them, with glittering cut-steel bottons; their calves are silk-clad. George Moore, with his candid novelist’s camera, snaps these gentlemen unaarares, tripping over their swords.’ [p.113].

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James Joyce (1): Moore’s influence on Joyce incls. Moore’s priest in Ave, calling attention to the famous line that echoes the crash of the wave onto the beach [A198; cf. ‘Proteus’]. See also Moore’s wading girl: ‘‘Sitting on the bank, they drew off their shoes and stockings and advanced into the water, kilting their pettitcoats above their knees as it deepened. On seeing me they laughed invitingly; as if desirig my appreciation once girl walked across the pool, lifting her red petticoat to her waist, and forgetting to drop it when the water shallowed, she showed me thighs whiter and rounder than any I have ever seen, their country courseness heighening the temptation. And she continued to come towards me.... they might have bathed naked before me, and it would have been the boldest I should have chosen, if fortune had favoured me. But Yeats and Edward began calling, and, dropping her petticoats, she waded away from me.’ [S143; cf. A Portrait, Chap. V; also Ulysses, ‘Nausicaa’.] Further, ‘Too much rectory lawn in Tennyson [A46; cf. Joyce]; intellect exhausted ... like one who has won a fellowship at Trinity [A140]; Casual visiting is one of the pleasures of Dublin life. [V2]; The acoustics of Dublin are perfect [S129].

James Joyce (2): Joyce’s Library in Trieste holds copies of Celibates: Three Short Stories (London 1895); Evelyn Innes (London: T. Fisher Unwin 1898), and Do . (Tauchnitz 1901); Hail and Farewell: Ave, Salve, Vale (Leipzig: Tauchnitz 1912, 1912, 1912), each stamped “J.J.”; The Lake (London: Heinemann 1905); Lewis and Some Women (Paris: Louis Conard 1917); Memoirs of My Dead Life (Leipzig: Tauchnitz 1906); Muslin (London: Heinemann 1915), stamped “J.J.”; Sister Teressa (London: T. Fisher Unwin [n.d.]); Spring Days (Leipzig: Tauchnitz 1912); The Untilled Field (Leipzig: Tauchnitz 1903), stamped “J.J.”, and Vain Fortune (London; Walter Scott 1895), signed ‘James A. Joyce March, 1901’. (See Richard Ellmann, The Consciousness of James Joyce, Faber, p.120 [Appendix].)

James Joyce (3): James Joyce send a 2-guinea wreathe to George Moore’s funeral, instructing Miss Weaver to purchase it against his forthcoming cheque while ‘excluding ivy absolutely’. (See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1959 & Edns.) See also Moore’s determination to play his part in the ‘liberation of my country from priestcraft’ [supra].

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Portrait (1): There is a portrait of Moore in oil by John Butler Yeats (1905) commissioned by John Quinn, NGI (de Breffny, p.157). Yeats spent a year on it, leaving it finally unfinished when Moore left Ireland; Lily Yeats writing to Quinn described it as a very good portrait which did not make people laugh as other portraits of Moore did.

Portrait (1): There is a portrait of George Moore by Edouard Manet (“George Moore au Café”), pastel on fine canvas - set in the Café Nouvelle Athènes, with Manet and Degas for company - now held in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art [Havermeyer Collection] (NY), is printed in Shirley Neuman, Some One Myth, Yeats’s Autobiographical Prose [New Yeats Papers XIX] (Dolmen Press 1982), p.93; also features on the cover of Fintan Cullen, ed., Sources in Irish Art: A Reader (Cork UP 2000), 325pp.

Portrait (2): There is also a port. in ink on brown paper by Manet, rep. in Juliet Wilson-Bareau, Manet By Himself (?1965). Moore is included in “Homage to Manet” by Sir William Orpen (1909), along with P W. Steer, Henry Tonks, Hugh Lane, W. R. Sickert, et al. There is a Death mask of Moore in bronze cast from a wax original by John Behan. Also an coloured chalk portrait by William Rothenstein.

Estate-holder?: Acknowledement for permission to reprint “Home Sickness” is made to Mr. C. M. Medley in Frank O’Connor’s anthology [ed. & intro.], Modern Irish Short Story (OUP 1957; rep. as Classic Irish Short Stories, 1985).

Irish Trans.: Moore’s short-story collection of 1902, An t-Úr-Ghorta, was translated by Tadgh Ó Donnchadha, later professor of Irish at University College Cork, and Pádraig Ó Súilleabháin [...] a Trinity student who formed a club called “Na Draoithe” (the Druids), that welcomed a royal visit to Dublin in 1903 with blaring music and a green flag; ord. in the Church of Ireland, 1904 unsuccessful with his Belfast parishioners; the translation probably influenced Pádraic Ó Conaire’s only novel, Deoraíocht . (See Nicholas Allen, review of Mary Pierse, ed., George Moore: Artistic Visions and Literary Worlds, Cambridge Scholars Press 2007.)

Kith & Kin: John Moore, the son of George Moore of Ashbrook, building of Moore Hall, was ed. in Douai and later at Paris University under the assumed name of Bellew. He studied law in Ireland but did not practice. When General Humbert landed at Killala in 1798 he joined the rebellion with many of his tenants and was proclaimed President of the Republic of Connaught in the sequel to the Races of Castlebar - a rebel victory against the local militia. After the rebels’ defeat at Ballinamuck, Moore was taken prisoner and and subsequently died in Waterford Gaol. His grave in Ballygunner Cemetery, Waterford, was discovered by accident in 1960 and his remains carried back to Castlebar under Irish Army guard on 12 August 1961. A brother George who wrote a history of the British Revolution of 1688 (1817) married Louise Browne, a niece of Lord Altamont [of Westport] and was buried at Kiltoom, nr. Moore Hall.

Kith & Kin?: Crown forces under George Moore were heavily defeated at the Battle of Glenmalure, Co. Wicklow, 25 Aug., 1580 (History Ireland, July/Aug. 2008, p.9.)

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