"Balzac and the Land League": A "New" Article by George Moore

"Balzac and the Land League": A "New" Article by George Moore Brendan Fleming Oxford, England ON 1 MARCH 1886, the Freeman's Journal published an unsigned article, "Balzac and the Land League," which discussed the ways in which Balzac's portrayal of the French peasantry and its struggle for land in Les Paysans prefigured the Irish Land War.1 An unsigned extract from this article was later reprinted in the Pall Mall Gazette on 8 March 1886.2 This essay proposes that the author of the article in the Freeman's Journal was George Moore. Such an article is significant for two reasons: it is one of the first examples within Irish literature of the application of Balzac's model to the representation of Ireland, and it would place Moore's reflections on Balzac and the Irish Land War three years earlier than previously known. According to Malcolm Brown, the use of Balzac within the Irish context can be traced through the work of George Moore, Somerville and Ross, and Patrick Kavanagh.3 For example, in 1914 James Stephens wrote to Alice Stopford Green: "In short I want to write La Comedie Humaine of Ireland [italics added]."4 The earliest example of Moore's writing on Les Paysans in the context of the Irish land agitation occurred in October 1889, in his essay "Some of Balzac's Minor Pieces."5 He later returned to the theme in Conversations in Ebury Street.61 propose that the section of Moore's essay which concerns Les Paysans is based upon the arguments of "Balzac and the Land League." That article opens with a brief introductory discussion of the critical status of Balzac, in which he is compared to Shakespeare. It then summarizes Les Paysans and highlights its préfiguration of the events of the Irish Land War. In Moore's essay, "Some of Balzac's Minor Pieces," the discussion of Les Paysans is restricted to the first two pages. A possible objection to Moore being the author of the unsigned article is that in 356 FLEMING : MOORE "Some of Balzac's Minor Pieces" there is no explicit reference to the title "Les Paysans." However, the seventh paragraph of Moore's essay does summarize the novel and refers to a chapter entitled "En quoi le cabaret est le parlement du peuple" which is the title of Chapter XII of Les Paysans. Thus it is clear that Moore's essay does adddress Balzac's novel. The summary given by Moore in "Some of Balzac's Minor Pieces" of Les Paysans bears a striking similarity to that in "Balzac and the Land League." In the unsigned article the novel is described as follows: In this extraordinary book [Les Paysans] will be found all the harrowing events and anarchic theories that have disturbed Ireland for the last five years strikingly prefigured—boycotting, the assassination of bailiffs, the forcible division of property.7 Moore's description of Les Paysans in "Some of Balzac's Minor Pieces" parallels both the content and rhetorical structure of the quotation from the unsigned article. He writes: In this book [Les Paysans] will be found every incident of the land war in Ireland ; indeed, the murder of the bailiff differs not at all from the many such murders we have read of in Ireland in these last ten years, and the boycotting of the general might be included with very little alteration in Captain Boycott 's memoirs ... and the schemes for land reform ... might pass without exciting suspicion, for extracts from one of Michael Davitt's speeches.8 The unsigned article opens with a comparison between Balzac and Shakespeare. Moore's essay also considers the relative merits of both writers, but in an extended discussion at its conclusion. Such comparisons between Balzac and Shakespeare were not exclusive to Moore; they occur, for example, in W S. Lilly's essay, "The Age of Balzac."9 However, it is suggestive as this was a theme to which Moore returned in Avowals.10 Between January and July 1886 Moore's novel A Drama in Muslin was serialized in the Court and Society Review. Significantly, for my argument , the unsigned article on Balzac and the Land League...