George Moore: A Reconsideration

REVIEWS 107 George Moore: A Reconsideration A "reconsideration" demands positive statements, and Mr. Malcolm Brown begins bis book strongly (George Moore: A Reconsideration. Seattle: Uni· versity of Washington Press, 1955, pp. xx, 235, $4.50). Wishing to believe in what he calls a "long" hibernation of Moore's reputation since his death in 1933, he writes: "To his contemporaries George Moore was a very great writer. In the 1920's one of the certainties of literary criticism was the view that he was 'the greatest living master of English prose: >I A little later he exclaims: "How many readers owe their discovery of Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Turgenev, Huysmans, Verlaine, Manet, Degas and even Wagner to the infectiousness of Moore's enthusiasms!" The exclamations cannot be answered (although general education cannot be quite so bad, even in the United States), but one would have no difficulty in quoting from critic after critic who did not share the conviction of Moore's absolute mastership. However, perhaps enough time has passed for a more objective approach, and Mr. Brown has honestly attempted it. Acknowledging his indebtedness to Mr. Joseph Hone's admirable biographies of Moore and the Moore family, Mr. Brown gives his book the form of a chronological and biographical study in which the principal subject is Moore himself. We begin with the dilemma of the Irish landlord, and proceed to Paris, to the first assault on London, to Dublin. to Ebury Street; Mr. Brown sketches in the various societies and aesthetic climates from which Moore derived at once an intensely naive enjoyment and also the material for his superbly visualized, fully self-conscious autobiographical writing. Some of the resumes of the social and literary scenes (for instance that of England in the 1880's), are rather thin and external, or extreme, but there is a clear conception of Moore's various roles, and Moore's own preoccupations were often with the same surfaces. In an early chapter Mr. Brown parallels a quotation from Gauthier with Moore's version of it, and comments on the "clownish piquancy" with which the fin de siecle manifesto of Gauthier's hero is extended. The Confessions are not always conscious parody, nor are the Pagan Poems. but it is nevertheless the vitality of parody (with other gifts) which makes Moore's best writing so exhilarating in Avowals. Conversations in Ebury Street, and above all, Hail and Farewell. Different in so many ways, Moore yet possessed the comic detachment and sense of fun, the clarity of observation for his own gestures and those of other people which we find in Shaw and Joyce. Mr. Brown does not forgo the pleasure of using as epigraphs some of the more famous uMoorisms" from Hail and Farewell: Within the oftentimes bombastic and truculent appearance that I present to the world. trembles a heart shy as a, wren in the hedgerow or a mouse along the wains· coting; or To be ridiculous has always been mon petit luxe, but can anyone be said to be ridiculous if he knows that he is ridiculous? Not very wen. It is the pompous that are truly ridiculous. In what way is this book a "reconsideration"? Not in any serious critical sense about Moore's work, certainly. In the first chapter Mr. Brown quotes three pronouncements of which Moore was fond (one by Manet and two by Gauthier): "One should be ashamed of nothing but to be ashamed"; "the correction of form is virtue"; "the visible world is visible"; and says "the transplantation of these three precepts to English ground was Moore's basic life work." He gives some idea of what this meant; there is interesting comment on some of the novels and a good appraisal of Esther Waters in relation to Moore's attitudes and his practical motives in choosing such a subject in an attempt to win popularity. But Mr. Brown's main concern seems to be Moore's personality, and there is little criticism here to put beside the best of John Freeman, Charles Morgan, and others. Nevertheless, as a general introduction, this is a lively and readable book, observant, free of animus, and full of enjoyment. And sometimes Mr. Brown...