George Moore

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George Augustus Moore (1852--31), an Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist, and dramatist.

Moore came from a Roman Catholic landed family who lived at Moore Hall in Carra, County Mayo.

He aspired to be a painter and studied art in Paris in the 1870s.

There, he befriended many of the leading French artists and writers of the day. He was one of the first English-language writers to absorb the French realist's lessons, and was particularly inspired by Émile Zola's writings.

According to literary scholar and biographer Richard Ellmann, his writings inspired James Joyce, and though Moore's work is often seen as outside the mainstream of both Irish and British literature, he is often described as the first great modern Irish novelist.

Life

George Moore's family had lived in Moore Hall, near Lough Carra, County Mayo, for nearly a century. The house was built by his paternal great-grandfather, George Moore, who had made his fortune as a wine merchant in Alicante, and he also called him George Moore. The novelist's grandfather, another George, was a friend of Maria Edgeworth and author of An Historical Memoir of the French Revolution. John Moore, his great-uncle, was president of Connacht during the 1798 Irish Rebellion.

During the Great Irish Famine, George Henry Moore's father, George Henry Moore, sold his horses and hunting interests, and Mayo served as an Independent Member of Parliament (MP) for Mayo in the British House of Commons from 1847 to 1857. George Henry, a celebrated landlord who struggled to protect the rights of tenants and was a founder of the Catholic Defence Association, was known as a good landlord who was fought to uphold tenants' rights. In Mayo, his estate was worth 5000 ha (50 km2), with a further 40 ha in County Roscommon.

Moore was born in Moore Hall in 1852. He loved Walter Scott's books as a child, which his father read to him. He spent a lot of time outside with his brother, Maurice George Moore, and also became familiar with the teenage Willie and Oscar Wilde, who spent their summer holidays in Moytura. Moore's "He practices his education in public" was to be a remark made by him later in the story.

His father had devoted his time to horse raising in 1861, when he and his wife and nine-year-old son moved to England for a fruitful racing season. George was at Cliff's stables for a time until his father decided to bring him to his alma mater, which could be aided by his winnings. Moore's formal education began at St. Mary's College, Oscott, a Catholic boarding school near Birmingham, where he was the youngest of 150 boys. He spent all of 1864 at home, having contracted a lung disease caused by a health scarcity. Although he was hungry and hungry, his academic results were weak. He and his brother Maurice both returned to St. Mary's College in January 1865, where he refused to study as instructed and spent time reading novels and poems. Spencer Northcote, the principal of Delaware, wrote a story in which he "had no idea what to say about George" in December. He was banned from (1867) 'idleness and general worthlessness' by the summer, and he had returned to Mayo. George and his brother Maurice once remarked, "I fear those two redheaded boys are stupid," an observation that was untrue for all four sons.

Moore's father was again elected MP for Mayo in 1868, and the family returned to London the next year. Here, Moore senior tried unsuccessfully to convince his son to work in military service but, before that, he attended the School of Art in the South Kensington Museum, where his results were no better. When his father died in 1870, he was relieved of any burden of education. Moore, although a juvenile, inherited the family's house that earned a yearly income of £3,596. He handed the estate over to his brother Maurice to handle, and in 1873, when he gained his majority, he went to Paris to study art. It took him several attempts to find an artist who would accept him as a pupil. Monsieur Jullian, who had previously worked as a shepherd and circus masked man, was arrested and jailed for 40 francs a month. Lewis Weldon Hawkins, Moore's flatmate and whose reputation as a failed artist, appears in Moore's own words at Académie Jullian. He met many of the best writers and writers of the time, including Pissarro, Degas, Renoir, Monet, Daudet, Mallarmé, Turgenev, and, perhaps, Zola, who was to be a central figure in Moore's subsequent success as a writer.

When he was still in Paris, his first book, a series of lyric poems titled The Flowers of Passion, was self-published in 1877. The poems were derivative, and were scathingly analyzed by the writers who were offended by some of the depravities in store for moralistic readers. Moore took the book from its display. Because of his tenants' refusal to pay their rent and the decrease in agricultural prices, he was forced to return to Ireland in 1880 to collect £3,000 in loans incurred on his family's home. During his time in Mayo, he earned a reputation as a compassionate landlord, continuing the family's tradition of not evicting tenants and refusing to carry firearms when traveling around the estate. He left art and moved to London to become a professional writer while living in Ireland. Pagan Poems, his second poetry collection, was published in 1881. These early poems represent his obsession with French symbolism and are now almost entirely ignored. Moore's Confessions of a Young Man, a colorful memoir about his time in Paris and London among bohemian artists, appeared in 1886. It contains a substantial amount of literary criticism for which it has been lauded, for example, the Modern Library chose it in 1917 to be included in the collection as "one of the most important documents of the fierce anti-Victorian literature movement against the Victorian period."

Moore began working on a line of books in a realist style in the 1880s. A Modern Lover (1883), his first book, was a three-volume work, and it concerns the art scene of the 1870s and 1880s, in which several characters are identifiably true. The book was banned from circulation libraries in England because of its explicit representation of the hero's amorous pursuits. At this time, the British circulatory libraries, such as Mudie's Select Library, ruled the fiction and the public market, who paid to borrow their books, and they wanted to ensure the morality of the books available. His new book, A Mummers Wife (1885), was also considered unsuitable by Mudie's, and W H Smith refused to sell it on their newsstands. Despite this, the book was in its fourteenth edition during its first year of publication, largely because of the media stirred up by its opponents. In July–October 1886, Le Voltaire, the French newspaper, issued it in serial form as La Femme du cabotin. Mudie's and Smith's books haven't banned Drama in Muslin again. Moore declared war on the circulating libraries by releasing two provocative pamphlets; Literature at Nurse and Circulating Morals. In these, he argued that the libraries profit from salacious popular fiction while refusing to stock serious literary fiction.

About this time, Moore's publisher Henry Vizetely began to publish unabridged mass-market translations of French realist books that threatened the circulating libraries' moral and commercial presence. The circulating libraries retaliated in 1888 by urging the House of Commons to bring legislation to prevent "the rapid dissemination of demoralizing literature in this region." However, the National Vigilance Association (NVA) had Vicentetely taken to court for "obscene libel." The accusation stemmed from the publication of Zola's La Terre's English translation. The following year, a second lawsuit was brought to force the original to be enforced and to delete all of Zola's work. This led to the involvement of the 70-year-old publisher in the literary movement. Moore remained faithful to Zola's publisher throughout the trial, and a letter from Patrick James Gazette appeared on September 22nd, a month before the trial was held. Moore suggested that it was wrong for Vizetelly's destiny to be determined by a jury of twelve tradesmen, and that it would be preferable to be judged by three novelists rather than by a jury. Moore noted that the NVA could make the same arguments against such books as Madame Bovary and Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin, as their morals are equivalent to Zola's, although literary merits may differ.

Moore's books were initially met with disapproving, extramarital sex, and lesbianism. However, this subsided as the public's interest in realist fiction soared. Moore began to flourish as an art critic with the publication of Impressions and Opinions (1891) and Modern Painting (1893), the first significant attempt to introduce the Impressionists to an English audience. Moore was first able to live off the proceeds of his literary work by this time.

A Drama in Muslin (1886), a satiric story of an unmarried housemaid who is abandoned by her footman lover, and A Drama in Muslin (1886), a satiric tale of the bribe between the gentry's young daughters, hints at same-sex relations among the octagons. Since their first appearance, both of these books have been in print almost continuously. A Mere Accident, an 1887 book by Amir Khan, is an attempt to blend his symbolist and realist influences. Celibates (1895) is also a collection of short stories by the author.

Moore returned to Dublin in 1901 at the behest of his cousin and acquaintance, Edward Martyn. Martyn had been active in Ireland's cultural and dramatic movements for many years, and he was collaborating with Lady Gregory and William Butler Yeats to create the Irish Literary Theatre. Moore became heavily involved in this project and in the wider Irish Literary Revival. The Strike at Arlingford (1893), which was produced by the Independent Theatre, he had already written a play. In Impressions and Opinions, Moore and George Robert Sims met over Moore's critique of all modern playwrights. Moore dominated a stall to see a "unconventional" play by Moore, but Moore maintained that the word "unconventional" be banned.

The Bending of the Bough (1900), a satirical comedy based on Martyn's The Tale of a Town, was originally rejected by the theatre but generously offered to Moore for revision and Martyn's Maeve, was performed by the Irish Literary Theatre. The Bending of the Bough, which would later become the Abbey Theatre, was a historically important performance that brought realism to Irish literature. "Its objectively all round" hits Lady Gregory. The play was a satire on Irish politics, and as it was unexpectedly nationalist, it was the first to address a critical issue that had arisen in Irish life. The Diarmuid and Grania, a poetic play in prose co-written with Yeats in 1901, was also staged by the theatre, with incidental music by Elgar. Moore halted operations following the spectacular event and resumed pamphleteering on behalf of the Abbey.

Around this time, Moore published two books of prose fiction set in Ireland; The Untilled Field (1903), as a second book of short stories; and The Lake (1905). The Untilled Field explores topics such as clerical interference in the daily lives of the Irish peasantry as well as the question of emigration. The stories were originally intended to be translated into Irish in order to serve as examples for other writers working in the language. Three of the translations were originally published in the New Ireland Review, but the publication was then suspended due to a perceived anti-clerical sentiment. The entire collection was translated by Tadhg Donnchadha and Pádraig Silleabháin in 1902 and published in a parallel-text edition of the Gaelic League as An-tr-Ghort. Moore revised the texts for the English version later. These stories were inspired by Turgenev's Sketches, a book that was recommended to Moore by W. K. Magee, a National Library of Ireland sub-librarian, who had earlier stated that Moore "was most suitable to be Ireland's Turgenev." Some believe that the tales represent the onset of the Irish short story as a literary genre.

Moore declared himself Protestant in 1903, following a dispute with his brother Maurice over his nephews' religious upbringing. In a letter to the Irish Times newspaper, his conversion was revealed. Moore lived in Dublin until 1911. He published a gossipy, three-volume memoir of his time there under the collective name Hail and Farewell, which delighted its followers but angered former colleagues. "Dublin has been divided into two sets," Moore said of his memoirs, "one half is afraid it will be in the book, and the other is afraid that it won't."

Oliver St. John Gogarty said: "It's impossible to be a friend of his brother," he said in his later years, as he was unable to give thanks."

Moore returned to London in 1911, where, with the exception of frequent trips to France, he was to spend the remainder of his life. He travelled to Jerusalem in 1913 to look at his upcoming book, The Brook Kerith (1916). Moore was once more embroiled in scandal, because it was based on the belief that a non-divine Christ died on the cross but instead was nursed back to health and reminded of his pride in identifying himself Son of God. A Storyteller's Holiday (1918), a series of essays titled Conversations in Ebury Street (1924), and a play called The Making of an Immortal (1927). Moore spent considerable time refining and preparing his older works for new editions.

Moore Hall was set ablaze by anti-treaty forces in 1923, during the remaining months of the Irish Civil War, owing to Maurice's pro-treaty activities. Moore was eventually awarded £7,000 by the Irish Free State's government. By this time, George and Maurice had become estranged, mainly because of an unflattering portrait of the latter which appeared in Hail and Farewell. Tensions also arised as a result of religious differences: Maurice often made contributions to the Roman Catholic Church from estate funds, which was also due to religious rifts. Moore later sold a substantial portion of the estate to the Irish Land Commission for £25,000.

Moore was friendly with many members of London and Paris' expatriate cultural groups, and she had a long-term friendship with Lady Cunard, Maud. Moore devoted a special interest in the education of Maud's daughter, Nancy Cunard, a well-known publisher and art patron. Moore, rather than Maud's husband, Sir Bache Cunard, was Nancy's father, but historians aren't sure that Moore's relationship with Nancy's mother was ever more than platonic. Aphrodite in Aulis, Moore's last book, was published in 1930.

In early 1933, he died at his address in 121 Ebury Street in Belgravia, London's northern district, earning a fortune of £70,000. He was cremated in London at a service attended by Ramsay MacDonald and others. On Castle Island, Lough Carra, an urn containing his ashes was interred, in view of Moore Hall's ruins. A blue plaque in London honors his stay at his London home.

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