Who was George Moore?
Life of George Moore
George Moore (1852-1933) was born in Ireland of a family of country gentry. He was educated at Oscott and, after a brief experience of the Army, went to Paris at the age of eighteen to study painting. There, he came under those artistic influences which were to have such a lasting effect upon his literary work—the painters Degas, Renoir, Gaugin, Cezanne, and Van Gogh, the contemporary novelists Zola, Flaubert, and Goncourt, and the recently dead Balzac. After some years as an artistic dilettante in Paris he was forced by financial difficulties to return to England, where for some years he earned a precarious living as an art critic. In 1901, his reputation as a novelist now established, he returned to Ireland, where, with his friends Yeats and A.E. (George Russell), he assisted in the renaissance of Irish literature, and especially in the birth of the Irish National Theatre. Ten years later he finally returned to England.
Moore began his career as a detached, impartial realist on the French model, seeking his subjects in the lower and more sordid sides of life, which he studied with remarkable photographic detail. A Modern Lover (1883), A Mummer’s Wife (1885), A Drama in Muslin (1886), and Spring Days (1888) were followed by the greater and deeply moving study of the misfortunes of a poor servant girl, Esther Waters (1894), a realistic yet sympathetic picture of life among the lowest classes. His next two novels, Evelyn Innes (1898) and its sequel Sister Teresa (1901), are really two parts of one work, a long and elaborate character-study on a religious theme, which, though it has the same detailed background as his earlier novels, marks the beginning of the movement away from naturalism towards a more mystical type of writing. Under the stimulus of the Irish literary revival this departure was carried still further, and The Untilled Field (1903), a collection of thirteen short stories of Irish life, and The Lake (1905), a novel also set in Ireland, both show Moore making considerable use of Irish folk-lore rather in the manner advocated by Yeats. After his return to England, he produced two of his most finished novels in The Brook Kerith, A Syrian Story (1916), a boldly conceived and exquisitely told story of the origins of the Christian faith, and Heloise and Abelard (1921), his own version of the famous medieval story. Of his other novels only Aphrodite in Aulis (1930) merits mention here.
Moore was first and foremost an artist. From the French masters, he adopted the conception of the novel as an accurate, impartial, and detached study of life as it really is, a study to be judged only by the artistic skill of its presentation, while from Pater he first gained insight into the artistic potentialities of English prose. An acute and critical mind, a keen observation of life, an urbane detachment, with its attendant incapacity to experience the deeper levels of emotion, a sharp and often malicious wit, and a delicate ear for the rhythms of language equipped him admirably for the exploitation of his chosen form. As a realist he excels Gissing by virtue of his complete detachment, his total lack of sentimentality, and his respect for formal qualities. Throughout his career, his style develops steadily, until in The Brook Kerith and Heloise and Abelard, it achieves a formal perfection, an exquisite simplicity and lucidity which are the supreme achievement of the conscious artist.
His interest in human nature and his psychological insight into the inner processes of the mind (not least into his own) leads him to devote much space in his novels to the analysis of mental states, and his studies of women are particularly good. It is this combination of insight with an easy natural style, often almost colloquial, which gives enduring appeal to those autobiographical works on which many critics feel that his fame will ultimately rest. These are: Confessions of a Young Man (1888), dealing with his early life; Memories of My Dead Life (1906); his picture of the Irish literary world in Hail and Farewell! –Ave (1911), Salve (1912), Vale (1914); and the later Avowals (1919), and Conversations in Ebury Street (1924).
