Moorishness
George Moore: Letters 1895-1933 to Lady Cunard. (Hart-Davis, 27s. 6d.) '.Sohn men kiss and tell,' said Sarah Purser in a well-known gibe, 'but Mr. Moore doesn't kiss and does tell.' Poor Moore, he was always laying him- self open to the malice of others—not that he could not manage plenty himself when the need arose. But he successfully aroused the collective spitefulness that is Ireland's main defence mech- anism, and it has left him caricatured for ever. `A man carved out of a turnip,' said Yeats. 'Mr. Moore conducts his education in public,' sneered Wilde. The ridiculous squireen from the County Mayo who became an art-fancier in Paris, a pre- posterous patriot in Dublin, and a pallid esthete in Ebury Street—that was his public and not engaging figure.
Yet here we have him, kissing or telling or not, the devoted and accepted admirer of, and the writer of impassioned and fulsome letters to, the greatest society hostess of her day, the American millionairess Maud Alice Burke, Lady Cunard. The affair lasted nearly forty years, and must have involved the exchange of several thousand letters. But Lady Cunard, who died in 1948, fifteen years after Moore, held grimly on to the correspon- dence and only 276 of the letters, all from Moore, have survived, in the possession of Mr. Sacheverell Sitwell. These, with the exception of some of no consequence, have been devotedly edited by Mr. Rupert Hart-Davis.
In a way they cast no particularly new light on Moore. He still shows his wonderful capacity for the absurd and pretentious. The sheer gro- tesquerie, the veritable Moorishness of Moore, is always just round the corner. He writes of Lord Howard de Walden: 'He is a great dear . . . like Jesus Christ—I mean very much in the same way—an affectionate nature like myself.' No wonder they gathered round and jeered at him. This self-educated, self-styled gentleman from the wilds of the West of Ireland was an easy target. There is a reproduction in Mr. Hart-Davis's book of a painting by Orpen in which Lady Cunard masterfully dominates Moore. He huddles in. the corner of a sofa, his moustaches almost visibly waving with distress, and a look on his face that clearly shows that he is afraid she is going to bite. This is the Moore of tradition, the helpless ass who fell with a dull thud between two literary, periods.
That he was a failure there can be hardly any doubt. He was always there ready for a fight when the fashionable quarrel was taking place some- where else. He came back to Ireland to help to save the soul of the people by reviving the Irish language, only to find that if the Irish wanted their language revived at all—which was doubtful —they certainly did not want it revived by Mr. Moore. The attempt to purvey French culture from Ebury Street met with equally dismal failure. And when Moore Hall was burned down in 1923, it was not because the younger generation hat any strong views about the writings of Gee Moore, but simply because his brother, Colonq Maurice Moore, was a Senator on the Free Stat` side.
f f4 But he had a quality; he did not escape -1,°,,,,, Mayo to Paris just for escape. He had a feel": for. Art--something that is liable to lead a Pers°4 into just those absurdities that Moore not nru toppled into but wallowed in. The feeling, 11 ever, was still genuine. He was, after all, one 1 the first non-Frenchmen to appreciate the P°5: Impressionists. He knew about, and was laudin' poets like Laforgue before they were ever Pie/4 up by Mr. Pound and Mr. Eliot. In these lette we see him at his best, because for all the inciden tal niaiseries, in them he is writing about the thin he cared most for—art and music—and a, people are at their best when they arc bet genuinely enthusiastic. There may never he Moore revival—people may never again be °b to be quite so hieratic about the Beautiful. ‘y are not necessarily any the better off for that THOMAS lit°Ti
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