A passing dog
Denis Donoghue
Hail and Farewell: Ave, Salve, Vale George Moore, edited by Richard Cave (Colin Smythe £20.00) In 1901 George Moore decided to conceive a passion for the redemption of Ireland. To form a liaison with the Gaelic League and the Irish National Theatre he left London and settled in Dublin, choosing to reside in a Georgian house in Upper Ely Place just a few yards from St Stephen's Green and the Shel bourne Hotel. Ten yeamlater he cleared out of Dublin and brought his conversations to Ebury Street, London, where he would be free to write Hail and Farewell. 'A work of liberation I divined it to be,' he claimed, 'liberation from ritual and priests, a book of precept and example, a turningpoint in Ireland's destiny.' Ave was published in 1911, Salve in 1912, and Vale in 1914. Moore revised the work for the second edition (1925). So there are no textual problems, the text is identical in the editions of 1925, 1933 (Uniform), 1937 (Ebury) and the present edition which establishes a claim to exist by virtue of Mr Cave's useful annotations. The book has not changed, but its new readers are deemed to know nothing, apparently, about French Impressionism, Anglo-Irish lore, or a saint named John of the Cross. Mr Cave's edition is handsome, expensive, informative, and inadequately proof-read. The notes are generally excellent, but I don't see why Mr Cave is coy about naming Yeats's 'Diana Vernon' as Olivia Shakespear, since the attribution has already appeared in print several times. Incidentally, Mr Cave thinks that the Rhymers' Club began in 1891. When I edited Yeats's Memoirs I gave the same date, but Karl Beckson has assembled documentary evidence to prove that the right date is 1890.
Moore ascribed to nature the authorship of Hail and Farewell, at least in the sense of providing every episode and every character. His own contribution was limited to 'what my eye has seen, and my heart has felt,' a formula which does not specifically exclude the activity of malice. In the January-February number of the English Review Moore wrote an insolent account of' Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Synge. Yeats immediately wrote two 'poems of hatred,' and included one of them, 'Notoriety,' as the closing rhyme of his Responsibilities: till all my priceless things Are but a post the passing dogs defile.
Yeats's father, John Butler Yeats, told him that Moore 'was not worth powder and shot,' but the poet had powder and shot to spare, and he kept in it good condition for a formal assault on Moore, holding fire till
he was safely dead, in Dramatis Personae (1935). It is clear that Yeats was especially stung by the pages in Salve in which Moore laughed at his pretensions to ancestry, all that Ormonde blood: it is easily the funniest part of Hail and Farewell in its account of the fur-coated Yeats attacking bourgeois Dublin for philistinism. I have always assumed that Yeats's revenge was sweetest in that section of Dramatis Personae in which he told or Moore dining with Edward Martyn in an excellent London restaurant and abusing the waiter for the quality of the soup: by Martyn's standards, not a whit inferior to Moore's, the soup was remarkably fine. In short, Moore was a barbarian, a moral gangster, he had manner but lacked manners. And nature, according to Yeats, 'had denied to him the final touch: he had a coarse palate.' Witness the soup. No wonder Moore wrote a long preface to one of his books to prove that he had a mistress in Mayfair.
Clean, wholesome fun, at this stage. The tedious parts of. Hail and Farewell are the routine attacks on Catholicism, Irish priests, the Mass, and so forth. Surely this stuff did not form the celebrated evenings at Ely Place where Moore scintillated with George Russell, Oliver St John Gogarty, and the other dear shadows: gossip, yes, malice, calumny, detraction, libels, the mocking of absent friends, but I cannot believe that Moore's proffered entertainment consisted in the demonstration that there has not been a good Catholic book since the Reformation. Yeats called Moore more mob than man,' and certainly Moore had the sensibility of a steamroller, especially when he thought it behoved him to exhibit tenderness. His irony is enjoyable only when it is directed against people whose achievement has rendered them immune to it : so we enjoy the mockery of Newman's style in Ave, or of Hardy's in Conversations in Ebury Street, or Moore's teasing account of Yeats seeing or failing to see the wild swans at Coole. With smaller people than these masters, Moore's jibing is wearisome. The anecdotes of Martyn are not very funny-Martyn was too simple to be worth goading so interminably. Douglas Hyde gets a severe press from Moore, partly for daring to speak Irish, a language which Moore did not trouble to learn but which he recognised when he heard the noise of porter issuing from Hyde's moustache. You had only to listen to Hyde's English to understand why he wanted to revive Irish; but it was not Moore's intention to be fair to a decent man. • Ave ends with Moore's dismissal of England, Salve with his announcement of a conversion to Protestantism, Vale with his dismissal of Ireland. The entire book is a gesture of riddance. Moore got his keenest pleasure not, apparently, from his attention to women but from the act of disengaging himself from dead enthusiasms. His feelings were not various or deep, and he most enjoyed the pleasure of disowning them. Yeats seizes upon this quality in the Memoirs, where he says that Moore gave himself up to every new impression and quarrelled with everyone who did not share his exaltation, but he could not bear to retain his old impressions or respect their age. As a woman will speak evil of the lover who has left her,' Yeats wrote, 'Moore would scorn all other impressions, those of his past life as energetically as the rest.' I think he craved the emotion of sublimity and insisted upon finding it wherever he chose to turn: disappointed, he thought to make his rage sublime in the form of irony or malice. The result is that when he writes of these things they issue as fads: masterpieces assume an air of corruption, their majesty compromised, tainted by Moore's experience of them. He preferred the portrait of Rembrandt's wife to the Mona Lisa: if any other critic stated the preference it would be worth pondering, consulting its reasons. Since the taste is Moore's, we set it aside, thinking of a palate incapable of distinguishing between a perfect soup and a bowl of dish-water. And when we read that he intended writing a book about Ireland called Ruin and Weed, 'ruined castles in a weedy country,' we take malicious pleasure in recalling that Moore's estate in Mayo, 12,371 acres, has passed into more deserving hands. Malice is contagious.
In 1914, stung by Moore's insolence, Yeats started to write his own autobiography, beginning with the safe distance of childhood and youth but moving steadily toward the tendentious years of politics, religion, theatre. It is instructive to compare the two autobiographers. Moore remembers especially what he is now impelled to disown: he recalls people (Russell always excepted) so that he can make their dismissal complete. Yeats remembers people so that he may retain them, celebrating them when praise and gratitude are vivid. If an old score must be settled, as in Moore's case, Yeats settles it with the precise qualities which nature denied to his enemy: charm, grandeur, style.
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