5 OCTOBER 1956, Page 24

The Last of the /Esthetes

ALL the memoirs of George Moore have been malicious, including his own: here we have,.one that is a record of unbroken affection lasting for over thirty years. Nancy Cunard first met G. M. when she was four years old; their friendship continued till his death at the age of eighty-one. Of course he was always nicer to women than to men,, especially to brilliant and beautiful ones : the other reminiscences were written by men. They have mostly found him an ass, a bounder and a poseur; and since he is also a writer of immense distinction, undeservedly neglected today, 'it is as well to hear something on the other side.

I cannot believe that any very important part of the man who wrote Esther Waters, The Lake and The Brook Kerith was an ass, a bounder or a poseur; but the relation between the works and the surviving records of his life is hard to make out. There is

such a strong element of the ridiculous in Moore's life—and I don't only mean to point to the oft-recorded instances, that he never knew how to keep his pants up, that he didn't kiss very Much but insisted on telling a great deal; there is a sort of fussy capriciousness, an absence of any settled scale of values, tastes that don't make sense, knowledge that seems incompatible with his ignorance. What are we to make of the man who simultane- mislY admired Tristram Shandy, Landor and Turgenev, but had nothing but contempt for Hardy, Conrad and Henry James; Who adored Manet but never got as far as Cezanne; loathed Ireland and Catholicism but wrote The Lake and Sister Theresa? It cannot be said that Nancy Cunard explains the mystery. She talks above all of Moore's charm; but we have to take it largely on trust; it survives faintly in the slight affectionate letters, and a sort of pursy amiability in some of the photographs.

The fact is, Moore was an artist, and that is almost the only important thing about him. There are various other classes into Which he could be put—the Irish eccentric, the Casanova manqué, even what we see in this book, the tender appreciative friend of a girl forty years his junior. But they all become insignificant beside the absolute absorption in his craft—an absorption so great that there were little more than a few irrelevant fragments of personality left for other things. He is the kind of artist whose separable opinions can mostly be idiotic, whose social relations can be trivial, whose friendships can be broken by every kind of indiscretion, whose loves are largely imaginary—yet as soon as he sits down to write, discovers all the gravity, beauty and Purity of line that seems to have been left out of his daily existence. Nancy Cunard does not say very much about his writing, but beneath this rather fragjnentary patchwork of Memories—of Neville Holt in the early years of the century, of Paris, of Ebury Street—the sense of Moore's authentic distinc- tion is always present; and it is this which has escaped many of those who have written about him. Most of them find it impossible to discern the artist beneath the social pantaloon. N, alley Cunard is not only lovingly tolerant of the absurdities, but sees them as accidental trimmings on something else. She records that she and a friend found Moore's style contagious (which one?) and used to spend hours together 'Mooring,' or talking in his manner. Most of this book consists of rather shapeless jottings, with no particular distinction of form; but in the beautiful little essay appended as epilogue Moore's influence really comes to fruition and Miss Cunard writes ten pages of which the master would have been proud.

As is fitting for a memoir of the last of the aesthetes, this volume is very charmingly produced; a pleasure to hold and to look at.

GRAHAM HOUGH