The Whole of Moore

THE WHOLE OF MOORE REVIEWS 161 Jean C. Noel, George Moore: Paris: Didier, 1966. l'homme e_t l'oeuvre (1852-1933), George Moore belongs to the history of three literatures—Irish, English, and French. The last can claim him because his early adulthood was spent in Paris, because he helped to Introduce French naturalism Into the English novel and French impressionism into English art, and because his loyalties, his friendships, even the style of his^gallantries remained French to the end of his long life. The légèreté of his temperament and the lucidity of his style, his volatility, his devotion to art, and his essential qualities as homme de lettres are easy to see as French. His life-style was French: and one wonders If one cannot ssy that though Ireland made him, France gave him the means to be himself. French critical Interest In Moore has never slackened; In the past ten years there have been published two doctoral dissertations concerning him: G.-P. Collet's George Moore et la France (1957) and the big volume here under review. M. Jean C. NOeTTj Professor at the University of Rennes, obviously gave many years of patient energy to his Sorbonne, his dissertation, which in size and scope makes many American Ph.D. dissertations seem even more flimsy and hasty than they are. In America, the dissertation is the beginning of the academic career, while in France it is often the crown of It. Professor Noel's book on Moore is an impressive example of the French academic tradition and an important addition to Moore studies. The book is subtitled "l'homme et 1'oeuvre." and in his approach to the man that Moore was Professor NoMl presents the outlines of a convincing psychological portrait, though he lacks the lively intimacy of such biographers as Edward Wagenknecht in his "psychographs" or the intellectual sophistication of Richard Ellmann or the wit and the flair for anecdote of Joseph Hone in his lives of Moore or Yeats. M. Noël is not a biographer, and depends very largely on Hone for what biographical data he Includes, but he uncovers and analyzes those aspects of Moore's heredity and early environment which determined the nature of his career as a writer--the feeling of inferiority Implanted in him as a child by his brilliant father and never outgrown, the accompanying or resultant reliance on daydream and fantasy, and the compensatory determination to establish his uniqueness, to assert and even proclaim his own ego. Fidelity to self is the center of Noel's interpretation of Moore. Thus, he makes clear that Moore was not so much influenced by Baudelaire, Gautier, etc., as finding 162 in them tendencies of his own made explicit. Noel depicts Moore as one who, struggling for his own liberty of expression, believed in liberty of expression for all artists independent of the morality of Mudie's and the masses; as an agnostic rather than a Protestant; as a rebel against family and religion and "the routine of daily thought"; as one who in each book sought to reveal the developing essence of himself. He quotes Valéry: "Un livre n'est après tout qu'un extrait du monologue de.son auteur." Moore's charm and grace and wit, and his malice and spite and wrongheadedness, —in fact all the surface of the man are missing from Noel's picture, but I do not think anyone would quarrel with his interpretation of the mainsprings of Moore's temperament. He is properly skeptical of Moore's factual reliability in his various memoirs, though alert to the ways in which Moore shaped his memories in his writings. I think that he overestimates the intimacy of Moore's relationship with Lady Cunard and underestimates—in fact neglects--the role of Yeats in Moore's return to Ireland and Irish concerns; but in a work so detailed there are always details to disagree with. The thoroughness of Noel's scholarship is more apparent in his account of Moore's work than of Moore himself. Each of Moore's writings is treated with elaborate commentary--there is nowhere else so full an analysis of...