George Moore, ‘Hail and Farewell’, originally in sep. vols. as Ave (Lon: Heinemann; NY: Appleton 1911), Salve (1912), and Vale (1914); later as Hail and Farewell [Ave, Salve, & Vale; comp. in 2 vols.] (Lon: Heinemann 1925; 1933); Do., [1 vol.] (Lon: Heinemann 1947); Do., (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1976);

PAGINATION REFERS TO SEPARATE EDITIONS, VIZ, Ave (1911, rep. 1947); Salve (1912, rep. 1926); Vale (1914, 2nd ed. 1915).

The whole trilogy is governed by a cyclic movement. His friendship with AE is the central relationship. But more important still, and increasingly as the narrative unfolds, is the book itself, an embodiment of his ‘belief’ that he was ‘an instrument’ in ‘the liberation of my country from priestcraft.’ This, of course, might have been a dour and humourless ambition were it not for the urbanity and comical diffidence of the author, exposing his own vanity and folly as well as his appetite for life. Accordingly, he chooses to write the ‘sacred book’ in the form of an ‘autobiography’ [V295]. It includes ‘literary silhouettes’ [Vale, conversation with Eglinton about AE.]

The time frames covered include the Revival proper (ten years, ?1897-1907]; the period when landlord troubles brought him back—aged forty-six (with Stella); his youth in Ballinrobe and Paris; his time at the Temple in London with Martyn; other times in Paris and London.

Moore began Hail and Farewell with a firm plan, from which he never strayed’, for ‘any straying would have been fatal, so intricate are the windings of the story I had been chosen to tell.’ The story is, on the surface, that if his involvement with the Irish revival; but more deeply, his ‘discovery’ in the garden at Ely Place that Catholicism is the enemy of intellectual culture and literature; and, beyond that, an appraisal of modern Irish history in the period of the Land Acts, and, with it, an appraisal of the system of individualism and aestheticism which Moore reveres as the proper form of artistic and social life.

Preface, 1919 revised ed.: a paper entitled ‘Art without the Artist’, deals with the Irish revival as a natural subject for art, complete with its own cast of exceptional characters, chiefly AE, Yeats, Edward Martyn, Lady Gregory, Gill and Plunkett. The authorship, he argues, belongs to Banva. Moore contemplates a novel called Ruin and Weed

ARRAN: The possibility of genius completely equipped, arising in the Arran Islands, seemed a little remote (i.e., before Synge) [A28]; necessary to live in Arran islands for several years to learn Irish [A279]; SEE also comments on Synge.

YEATS: a dialectician ... of the first rank [A36]; Yeats in search of ‘a language’; cf. return to the dialects—Yeats [A251]; Yeats: It is with idiom and not with grammar that the lit. artist should concern himself. [A42]; There is more race in Yeats than anyone I have met [A43]; Yeats likes parlour magic, Edward Cathedral magic. [A52]; Yeats, an umbrella left at a picnic party [Axi and A186]; Yeats: ancient writers wrote about things ... effeminacy of modern literature attributable to ideas [A266]; Countess Cathleen [A96; 69-71]; heresies in Countess [76-77]; Yeats: one cannot but admire him for even early in the morning he was convinced of the importance of literature in our national life. [A207]; a peasant Grania appealed to Yeats [A265]; Yeats ‘put style on it’ [A270, A267]; no two such literary lunatics (as) Yeats and myself [A278]; In a storm, Yeats prays, ‘Of Man’s first disobedience ... ‘ [S36]; Yeats: obsessive reviser [S102]; Yeats: Folk is our refuge from vulgarity [S137]; Yeast’s literary arrogance [A221]

So all the Irish movement rose out of Yeats and returns to Yeats. ... [Yeats] began to feel that his mission was to give a literature to Ireland ... like herself, that should wear her own face and speak with her own voice, and this he could only do in a theatre. ... knew exactly what he wanted; he wanted a folk theatre, for if Ireland were ever to produce any literature he knew that it would have to begin in folk, and he has his reward. Ireland speaks for the first time in literature in the Abbey Theatre. [V210]

Yeats defends Hugh Lane: ‘It is impossible to imagine the hatred which came into his voice when he spoke the words “the middle classes”’ [V164]

... on one side excellent mercantile millers and shipowners and on the other side a portrait painter of rare talent ... Yeats’s belief in his lineal descent from the great Duke of Ormonde was part of his poetic equipment ...spoons in the Yeats family bearing the Butler crest ... certain passages in The Countess Cathleen are clearly derivative from the spoons. [V165]

AE says Yeats has discovered a style which, like a suit of livery, remains empty; Gogarty adds, ‘becoming gradually moth-eaten.’ [V170] Moore wonders if it is a case of ungratified desire, comparing his love for Maud Gonne with Wagner’s consummated passion for Madame Wesendonck. Yeats’s own deposition—in a train conversation—was, ‘I was very young and was satisfied with ...’, and Moore supplies the words, ‘the spirit of sense’ [V171-2]; In Wind Among the Reeds Yeats has written poems so difficult that even the adepts could not disentangle them; compares with Mallarmé [V174]; Yeats has only half an ear; an exquisite ear for the beauty of folk imagination, and a very little for folk idiom ... Yeats’ s enthusiasm for Michael Moran in The Last Gleeman [V174] peasant speech is only adapted to dialogue ... [V175]

MOORE’s analysis of his own childhood and character [A63, also A199]; he would marry an old beggar woman [A61]; love English temperament (and women) [A261]; Everybody knows I’m not a Catholic ... I’ve written it in half a dozen books [A196]; Moore sees himself as Protestant; also views on Luther [A141]; When Moore finds himself to be pro-Boer, he wonders when the Englishman in him was overtaken by the Irishman. [A224]; Boer war, greatest event since Thermopylae [S160]; sufferings of self-consciousness [A255]; Catholic great-grandfather, 18thc. [S301]; Only one generation of pure Catholicism—you don’t know how happy you’ve made me [S302]; disinherit my nephews if they did not learn Irish [A251]; ‘I would throw the shutters open’ (Moore/Ibsen/JJ) [206}; kinship to Sir Thomas More [V6]; first Catholic Moore [V7]; he felt no repugnance in being bedded with a papist ... strange. [V8]; it was kelp that had turned my great-grandfather into a Papist. [V9]

CREDO: Moore’s mission: ‘Nature ... intended to redeem Ireland from Catholicism and has chosen me as her instrument, and has cast chastity upon me so that I may be able to do her work,’ I said. As son as my change of life becomes known the women of Ireland will come to me crying ... and I will answer them, ... ‘I have come into the most impersonal country in the world to preach personality—personal love and personal religion, personal art, personality for all except God [V294]. Moore sees Parnell as drawing the sword of Wotan, but being struck by the spear of Hunding, an allegory of sexual weakness [V295].

The impulse to redeem Ireland from obscurity was not strong enough to propel me from London to Holyhead [A29]

6If there were no one to shock, our trade would come to an end, and for this reason I am secretly in favour of the cardinal virtues. [A39].

WORKS: Strike at Arlingford [A36]; Drama in Muslin and the church at Ardrahan [A197]; Dermod and Grania [A107]; Diarmuid and Grania [A262ff]; writing Diarmuid and Grania in Irish ... if I succeeded in acquiring Irish (which was impossible) it would be no nearer to the language spoken by Diarmuid and Grania than modern English is to Beowulf [A279]; The Lake: Father Gogarty is to come out of the Hellespont like Leander, with no Hero to meet him [S307]; Inception of Untilled Field, contra sacerdos [S147] also 162-69; Rolleston’s retranslation of UF, ‘full of exquisite little turns of phrase’ [ 162]; Esther Waters [A65-68].

MISSION: Ever since the day [when] it had been revealed to me that Catholics had not written a book worth reading since the Reformation, my belief had never faltered that I was an instrument in the hands of the Gods, and that their mighty purpose was the liberation of my country from priestcraft. [V295]

Ruin and Weed, the unwritten novel about Dan Moore and Carmody the Poacher, in which Dan takes on a peasant mistress; talk of ‘emigrating his mistress’, Mary Ellen.

CHARLES LEVER: a sort of restaurant gravy that makes everything taste the same.

IRELAND spoken of as a human entity [A113; cf. S341] ]; never does good to return to Ireland [A32]; ‘working for Ireland’ [A221]; not sure I loved Ireland [A254]; the dust higher up the road no better than ... lower down the road [A117]; ... Ireland being a fatal disease [A221]; Irish nationalism, a kind of spiritual consumption [A225]; It never does an Irishman any good to return to Ireland. [A32]; modern Ireland ... awakening at last out of the great sleep of Catholicism ... In Ireland, men and women die without realising any of the qualities they bring into the world [A5]; the folly of bringing a literature to Ireland [A55]; Ireland has shown no interest in religious questions, merely a wrangle between Protestant and Catholic [A260]; Ireland has lain too long under the spell of the magicians [V294]; Those who had remained in Ireland had never written nothing of any worth—miserable stuff, no narrative of any seriousness, only broad farce ... strange Ireland should have produced so little literature, for there is a pathos in Ireland, in its landscapes, and in its ruins. [A4-5]

HISTORY: Boyne: the beastly English won that battle [S42]; Newgrange [S48] Tara [S55]; Marban [S57]

PEASANTS: Irish peasants [202]; Mass at Gort with Edward Martyn [A205]; Moore visits Moore Hall: The gentry are gone and the big houses in ruins, or empty or sold to nuns and monks [V297] ... all I shall see is a peasant in a frock and sandalled shoon instead of a peasant in frieze and clouted shoon [V297]; Moore’s uncle Dan lives with peasant girl Bridget; ‘The cross is the worst stock of all, the pure decadent.’

FEUDAL IRELAND: Until the seventies, Ireland was feudal, and we looked upon our tenants as animals that lived in hovels round their bogs, whence they came twice a year with their rents ... jabbering to each other in Irish [V41]; there was no pity for a man who failed to pay us ... and if we thought that bullocks would pay better we ridded our lands of they; ‘cleaned our lands of tenants,’ is an expression I once heard ... they used to go away by train ... bawling like animals ... seigniorial rights [V42]; In those days everything came off the land ... housemaids too, for feudalism had lasted in Ireland down to 1870; but all that is changed now [V307]; up to the seventies ... we were feudal landlords [V341]; we were kings in those days; little kings, but kings for all that, with power of life and death ... for we often sundered wife and husband ... and drove away a whole village to America if it pleased us to grow beef and mutton for the English market [V345]; the landlords have had their day, and their day is over. We are a disappearing class, our lands are being confiscated, and our houses are decaying ... dialect, idiom, local customs, and character are disappearing, and in a great hurry [V346]; in thirty years time we shall be ... as extinct as the dodo ... [V349]

WOMEN are colours [A145] women understand only lovers, children, and flowers [A145, A262]; Nature has bestowed on women the power of enjoying things as they go by ... it may be that that is why women have not written a great book or painted a great picture. [A166]; If the boy is a natural healthy boy with healthy love of his body, the wife or mistress will redeem him from his mother but if there is no such love in him he stands in great danger; from a woman’s influence the son of man may not escape; and it would seem that whoever avoids the wife falls into the arms of the mistress; and he who avoids the wife and the mistress becomes his mother’s bond-slave. [A185]; women in Gaelic league [S118f]

STELLA [OSBORNE] [V271ff] story about her parents’ love-making [V271]; afraid that a lover would interrupt her devotion to art [V271]; I remember her saying that things interest us only because we know that they are always slipping from us. A strange thing for a woman to say to her lover. [V276] There relative ages, 26 and 46. One begins to feel that one’s time for love is over; one is consultant rather than practitioner [V278]; she accuses him of not making love to her enough [V278]; perhaps no man’s health can withstand the strain that an amorous woman can put upon it ... the problem ... set for the married ... more marriages shipwrecked ... on this very question ... it was my own weakness which created our embarrassment; her [Stella’s] death overshadows my life, and for no reason [V284]

Elizabeth: at length I discovered the divine reciprocation of all my instincts and aspirations, the prophetic echo of my eternity, one summer’s day among a luncheon party at Auteuil [V285]; I knew very well that in ten years I should be too old even to desire her love ... so obsessed was I by her soul and body [V287] ... at fifty we should have learned that life is a lonely thing and cannot be shared ...

Doris ... there had been fears of failure [V289] ... women are idealists and it is their natural idealism which enables them to ignore our ugliness [V290] ... a disgraceful exhibition of Beauty and the Beast ... begin to avoid unplatonic encounters [V291] ... one does not grieve for a lost appetite, a lost power, a lost force [V292]

SEXUALITY: My impotency is certainly a [silver] spoon, for while my manhood lasted there was no part of me in Irish history. Celibacy is above all the other virtues in Ireland, and the Irish people will listen to my exhortations now that I have become the equal of the priest, the nun, and the ox. ... it was the story of my ‘unbridled passions’ which caused the Irish people to turn a deaf ear ... [V293]

IRISH NATIONAL THEATRE & ABBEY: Premier Cathleen Ni Houlihan and AE’s Deirdre, April 15 1901, at St. Teresa’s Hall, Clarendon St. Maud Gonne performing [S130]; Irish National Theatre, Pres. Yeats [S131]

JESUS, (‘called Christ in Dublin’): Christ was only a bachelor [A147]; Jesus Christ: if Christ had not chosen to remain a bachelor it is open to us to believe that he would have chosen a Violet Russell rather than a Jane Carlyle.’ [V246]

Dermot O’BRIEN, portrait painter [A170]; Miss PURSER and Irish glass [A171]

REVIVAL: It seemed to me that the analogy between the Italian renaissance and the Irish was a false one. The Irish had imported nothing, but had recreated all the arts simultaneously.’ [A171]; A literary movement consists of five or six people who live in the same town and hate each other cordially. [V169]; writing Diarmuid and Grania in Irish

JOYCE INFLUENCE? priest ... calling attention to the famous line that echoes the crash of the wave onto the beach [A198; cf. JJ, in Proteus, hrrsssh ...]

Moore’s wading girl: ‘Sitting on the bank, they drew off their shoes and stockings and advanced into the water, kilting their petticoats above their knees as it deepened. On seeing me they laughed invitingly; as if desiring my appreciation once girl walked across the pool, lifting her red petticoat to her waist, and forgetting to drop it when the water shallowed, she showed me thighs whiter and rounder than any I have ever seen, their country coarseness heightening the temptation. And she continued to come towards me. ... they might have bathed naked before me, and it would have been the boldest I should have chosen, if fortune had favoured me. But Yeats and Edward began calling, and, dropping her petticoats, she waded away from me. S143] [Cf. JJ, Bull Island, also Bloom, on Dollymount Strand.] [

COOLE: Coole Park [A184]; life at Coole was arranged primarily to give Yeats an opportunity of writing poems [A209]; wild swans at Coole [A209]; Yeats in the care of Lady Gregory [A207; A211] Coole will become a legend, a sort of Minstrelbery [A264]; A visitor had come back from Coole telling how he had discovered the poet lying on a sofa in a shady corner, a plate of strawberries on his knee, and three or four adoring ladies serving him with cream and sugar ... and how the poet ... consented to recite some verses ...: ... A line will take us hours maybe ... [V167]

MESSIAH: No messiah had been found by me at the Shelbourne because the Messiah Ireland was waiting for was in me not in another [A282]. ‘The Messiah will not wear the appearance that you expect him to wear. Salvation always comes from an unexpected quarter. It may come from AE, it may come from me, it may come from you.’ [S341]

Bedell’s bible [S63, S116]; O’Growney’s grammar [S63];

Feis melomaniac’s face ... creatures of the marsh ... sad as the primitive nature in which they lived [S136]

no living writer has made use of patois ... we are only beginning to become alive to the beauty of living speech when living speech is fast being driven out by journalists, living speech [S132]

on translating Diarmuid into Irish and leaving the brogue for Yeats to add [S133]

New Ireland Review, Jesuit paper [S149] Father Tom Finlay [S154]

The Irish people experience little passion in their courtships or their marriages [S152]

Moore’s pantheism v. Jesuit morality: ‘Parcel of divinity’ [S153]

Intelligence and moral courage are eccentricities in the Irish character [S154]

Moore is Voltaire versus Logue, according to AE [S158]

Every race gets the religion it deserves ... Nature did not intend them to advance beyond the stage of herdsmen ... divining the steak in the bullock ... as the Greeks divined the statue in the block of marble [S169]

Bergin: we did nothing with it when we had it [S171];

Gogarty, the arch-mocker, author of all the jokes that enable us to live in Dublin, author of the Limericks of the Golden Age, my youngest friend, full in his face, with a smile in his eyes and always a witticism on his lips, overflowing with quotation ... a survival of the Bardic age ... [S178]

Chap. XI, a specimen of Moore’s discursive unity, goes from 1901 to 1914, that is, from the early Revival to Gogarty’s Ely Place era.

CATHOLICISM: Remembers Oscott, the injustice and beastliness of that place ... is it possible to forget it? [S282f]; men enjoy cruelty ... especially priests [S286]; a reek of priests [S294]; Moore’s tempted to identify with the Roman Church although Romanism is incompatible with civilisation [S349]; Moore’s Bible-criticism class [S350f]; The filthiest god that ever came out of Asia [S356]; Moore discovers the New Testament {S361]; ‘the literary art of Christs’ [S361]; apostolic succession, a blatant ecclesiastical fake [S363]; His brother can accept all Catholic doctrines except immortality: ‘We are all Agnostics at heart.’ [V5]

Father James Browne preaching in Irish: us ‘wondering at the terrible things he was saying’ [A203]

The Catholic method, which is to encourage the acquisition of knowledge while enjoining that the students must refrain from drawing conclusions, seems to me especially well adapted to the destruction of the intellect. [S258]; ... give me the little boy till he is 14 and I don’t care who gets him after [S264]; Irish Catholics take their morality from English puritans [S118]; 3 priests [S1219]; Catholics have written so little in Ireland ... Maynooth has produced no book in 100 years, not even in theology [S176] ... (Moore’s ambition to) deal Catholicism such a blow [S177]

Literature and Dogma [S180, 195, 206, 207, &c.] Catholicism an intellectual desert [S193] Moore’s ‘Great Discovery’. NOTE: the Literature and Dogma argument is condensed in Salve Chps. Xi-XIII in a serious of meditations and dramatic conversations, full of personal and satiric descriptions and coloured by comic diffidence, together with a real enthusiasm for his ‘discovery’. He begins by thinking that his messianic role in Ireland is the promotion of the Irish language and agrees to back-seat the fight against the parish priest, but comes to realise that he sword he has found in his garden—intellectual apostasy from Catholicism—is his real weapon. Moore, an Irish sophisticate, is coming to fight for an agnostic renaissance. Cf. ‘Oh! An agnostic!’ [circa S265]

filioque [S184] ... at Trent the Church drew a circle about faith and morals forbidding speculation on the meaning of life and the conduct of morals, and arranging the Catholic journey from the cradle to the grave as carefully as any tour planned by that excellent firm, Messrs. Cook and Sons, ... how strange that no one should have seen before that Catholicism is an intellectual desert! [S193]; intellectual inferiority of Catholics [S204]; cf. Ireland to be governed by the parish priests ... Italian renaissance [S117]; All conversion can be traced to sex, or money, or hysteria [S199]

Salve, Chp. XIV is an anti-Catholic analysis of literary history: Saint Simone, La Bruyere, La Fontyaine, Fenelon, Chateaubriand, Montalembert [S216]; Newman [S217]; ‘English literature is, of course, Protestant [S217]. Studies Alice Meynall’s fatuous introduction to Chesterton [S218]; Chesterton’s style rollick down Fleet Street. Moore sees his Catholic brother Maurice as Spanish inquisition type, with El Greco head, more yesterday than today’ [S251]; quite prepare to expose his brother’s infantile hypocrisy [261]; ‘The fact that you are their father doesn’t give you the right to ... mutilate their minds [S270]; grief to the Colonel if George becomes Protestant [S308]

the Christian idea of horns and hooves has been rammed into us so thoroughly that we seldom cease to be Christians ... it does not occur to us that our abnormal self may be conducing us to good [S260]

Catholicism makes for illiteracy ... has hardly produced a book worth reading since the Reformation ... degrades, corrodes, paralyzes, and stupifies the intelligence, its day is over. [V333]; I am prejudiced in favour of Protestantism for intellectual reasons, and because my life is moulded on facts rather than upon sentimentalities [V335]; my inexhaustible loathing of priest [V337]; as long as priests can persuade people that Masses for the dead will get their souls out of purgatory they will continue to dispoil their relations [V359].

CLERICS: Fr. Sheehan’s last masterpiece advocates all Ireland becoming one great monastery [S121]. Somewhere Moore says that insurrection against the priests is to be the work of his generation in Ireland.

JOHN EGLINTON: Eglinton on Calderon/Shelley [S210]; Eglinton: ‘dear little man ... beautiful English’ [S210]; Eglinton: ‘If at Home Rome we are set to persecute the Protestant ... the terrible fate of exile may be mine [S342]; Eglinton: ‘there is something in human nature which escapes even your analysis’ [V114]; Eglinton on the success of AE Russell’s theosophical anthology; ‘The English have so completely lost all standard of poetic excellence that anyone can impose upon them.’ [V239]. Moore calls him Contrairy John, passim V242]. John Eglinton disputes with Yeats about the literary value of national legends in modern literature [circa A95]; Eglinton: dear little man ... dry, determined, and all of a piece, valient in his ideas and in his life, come straight down from the hard North into the soft Catholic Dublin atmosphere ... [which] has intensified John Eglinton—boiled him down, as it were ... the little round head and the square shoulders, and teh hesitiating puzzled look that comes into his face ... his contempt for our literary activities strengthens [V250]

LANGUAGE REVIVAL: A new language for new thoughts! [A2]; what a wonderful thing it would be to write a book in a new language or in an old language revived and sharpened to literary usage for the first time [A3]; the Irish language cannot be revived and nothing would be gained unless Ireland dropped Catholicism [S259]; Language wears out like an old coat [S62]; A Gaelic leaguer’s eyes are not clear ... his mind is not a comfortable mind [S222]; On Languages, [S10f.]: ... may we acquit the race of lack of imagination, and lay the blame upon the Irish language, which is, perhaps, too harsh and bitter for such a buttery word as Bearnaise? [S1170] ... it may be that the Irish language was merely inteneded for the sale of bullocks—a language which has never been to school, as John Eglinton once said. [S170] ... never been spoken in a drawing-room, only in rude towers . the French language is implicit in the balconies, lanterns, perrons, that we see as the train nears Paris ... [S171]; English ... a language of commerce [A253]; My life has been sacrificed for a bubble! [S214]; What is the use of changing the language of Ireland since Catholics cannot write? [S213]; the Irish language cannot be revived and nothing would be gained unless Ireland dropped Catholicism [S259].

NEWMAN: On Newman’s prose: ‘I believe the Duke of Norfolk to be the author of the Apologia [S250]

MEYER: Kuno Meyer [S221]

ENGLAND: English and their bible [S288]; passionate revolt against England’s empty materialism [A233]; a great European conflagration ... (will) give birth to a hero to conquer England [S92]; Tom Jones ... an empty work written in a breezy manner [V4].

Captain George Moore, historian of the French Revolution: ‘an Agnostic like his master Gibbon’ [V13; and cf. ‘Moore’s own ‘style ... so unlike Gibbon’ V317]; his history prefaced: ‘... impregnated with all the feelings and sentiments of an Englishman, and written in a style, I hope, purely and thoroughly English, I am ambitious it should be read after me. [V16]

The gentlemen of 1830 all had Byronic adventures [V21]

I should certainly have had some sch memory to play with if my father could have restrained himself from asking the electors of Mayo to send him to Parliament to ride for the Repeal of the Union. [V25].

Father’s death [V37]; frightened ... at my own selfish wickedness ... I tried to grieve like my mother. But I could not. [V38]; the thin girl sitting up my knee revealed my own taste to me, and my regret that my best efforts had been wasted on fat women. [V60]; Menage a trois with Lewis and Alice, [c.76]; la belle Hollandaise [V89]

Mallarme, Manet, Mendes, Degas ... [V106]

HUGH LANE: going to revive Irish painting ... ‘I am Lady Gregory’s nephew, and must be doing something for Ireland.’ ‘Striking a blow,’ I said. ... he did not understand the remark. Moore shows Lane as a young man dressing in Lady Gregory’s clothes with a seriousness about their tailoring [V129]; It is to Mr. Hugh Lane’s extraordinary enthusiasm, energy,and love of Art that we owe the pleasure of this beautiful collection ... [V134]

I am the only one in Dublin who knew Manet, Monet, Sisley, Renoir, Pissaro ... at the Nouvell Athenes [V133] ... my good fortune to know these men when their talent was beginning [V135]

A young man who sets out on artistic adventure must try to separate himself from all conventions, whether of politics, society, or creed [V135]

Chp. VI: reminiscences of Manet, Monet, Pissaro, Renoir etc. [V134-164]

... the crisis are longing for—that spiritual crisis when men shall begin once more to think out life for themselves, when men shall return to Nature naked and unashamed. [V144]

we may meet men who admit they are incapable of education, but we never meet anybody who will admit that he cannot educate somebody else. Hence the great vogue for museums. [V144]

great egotist always take it for granted that everybody is thinking of what they are doing [V153]

Renoir: finding himself in easier circumstances, he thought he would take what the newspapers call a well-deserved—or its it well-earned?—holiday. for some time he was not sure whether he should lay in a stock of wine or cigars and give dinner-parties, or should furnish a flat and fall in love. These are the outlets that life offers to the successful painter, and it would have been well for Renoir if he had not been son virtuous: for he went instead to Venice to study Tintoretto, and whe he returned to Paris he entered a studio with a view to perfecting his drawing, and in two years he had destroyed for ever the beautiful art which had taken twenty years to elaborate. ... Renoir had sad what he had to say, and when a man has done that, he had better be silent. [V159-60]

Millet: ... given over to tendious sentimentalities [V161]

... (Impressionists) painters whose desire was to dispense altogether with shadow. Whether, by doing so, they failed sometimes to differentiate between a picture and a strip of wallpaper is a question that does not come within the scope of the present enquiry. [V162]

CREDO: Art is but praise of life, and it is only through the arts that we can praise life. Life is a rose that withers in the iron fist of dogma ... the deadly fingers of the Ecclesiastic ... [renaissance in Italy, torch passes to France] The light will rise higher and higher, Northern Europe will bask in sunlight, the beams will reach this lonely Western valley—not in our time; a hundred years hnce the sun will be again overhead, and life shall be praised again, praise of the incomparable gift shall be sung in joyous procession about the temples of the young compassionate gods. [V164]

VII: Chiefly on Synge. Moore discusses folk imagination and folk idiom [V172-75]

LADY GREGORY: ‘it was a great day for Ireland the day that she came over to Tillyra [when Lady G. met Yeats] [V175]; her family and her indifference to the prosletyzing ways of her sisters [V176] ‘she has shaken no faith except perhaps the faith in certain ideals known as Boucicault and the English drama. But even admitting this much it may be that I am exposing her to fresh persecutions. Ireland clings to old ideals and the faith-shaker is as unpopular in politics and literature as he is anathema in Western Tibet. [V177]; her conception of life still somewhat formal [V179]

Mayomen and Galwaymen (Sir William and Capt. George) [V179]; Moore snubbed when she entertains Sir Edwin Arnold of Light of Asia fame.

[Yeats would] help her out of conventions and prejudices and give her wings to soar in the free air of ideas and instincts [V180] her method of writing the Cuchulain cycle by collating the best bits of various translations. [V181] This method ‘a strange theory’ uncritically endorsed by Yeats. Moore criticises her cavalier method of editorship: ‘I left our a good deal ... I thought you would not care about.’

The Wooing of Emer (Meyer), and The Courting Of Emer: ‘the word lawn in the sentence, ‘sitting ... on the lawn when they heard coming towards them a clattering of hooves, the creaking of a chariot, the grating of wheels’, belongs to Lady Gregory [V183] Her mistakes show how very little thought she gave to the question of idiomatic speech. [V184] ... just content to pepper her pages with a few idiomatic turns of speech which she very often does not use correctly ... to my ear—and I come from the same country as Lady Gregory—this is not a living speech [V186]

Synge ... man of rough, uncultivated aspect [V187]... his mother had a house in Kingstown which he avoided as much as possible [V188]... articles so trite they were seldom accepted ... [V189]. Synge among the tinkers, ‘a wonderful life’ [V192-93]; discovered that it was possible to write beautifully in peasant idiom. Everybody could write it, Lady Gregory as well as another, but no one but Synge could write beautifully in it. [V194] It was not until Synge wrote The Well of the Saints that I began to feel that a man of genius had been born unto Ireland [V195]. Playboy: the first line convinced me tht Ireland had at last begotten a masterpiece. [V197]; Moore’s ‘superficial’ letter to Synge, and Synge’s strong answer [V199]

Irishmen has written well before Synge, but they had written well by casting off Ireland; but here was a man inspired by Ireland, a country that had not inspired any art since the tenth or twelfth century, a country to which it was fatal to return. Was Synge the exception, and was he goinf to find his fortune in Ireland? [V195].

Gogarty and Synge in the same hospital, the former with appendicitis and the latter with terminal TB. ‘One man’s scale drops while another goes up’ [V201]

Synge and Jack Yeats are like each other in this, neither take the slightest interest in anything except life, and in their own deductions from life; educated men, both of them, but without aesthetics, and Yeats’s stories that Syng read the classics and was a close student of Racine is a piece of Yeats’s own academic mind. Synge did not read Racine oftener than Jack Yeats looks at Titian ... [V202]

Best meets Synge on the way to hospital for the last time. [V203] Synge dies, asking for a view of the Wicklow Mtns. [V204].

From the publishing point of view Synge’s death seems to have done him a great deal of good. [V204]

Chap. VIII. Synge’s Playboy, and Yeats’s central role in the literature revival. Lady Gregory’s plays.

Critique of Fay in the title role of Playboy. ‘The writing of Deirdre in peasant speech was Yeats’s idea; and the text bears witness that when Synge had written an act he began to feel that peasant speech is unsuited to tragedy. [V207]

Lady Gregory came to the rescue of the Abbey theatre and saved it after the secession of the Fays. She could write easily and well, and showed an aptitude for rural anecdotes in dialogue. [V208] ... a Galway woman telling rural anecdotes that amuse her woman’s mind, and telling them gracefully, never trying to philosophize ... Spreading the News [is] just the gossip of a village thrown into dramatic form ... her humour and her strength rarely carry her beyond a one-act. [V209]

Chp. IX: Plunkett and Gill as Bouvard et Pecuchet. Moore gives a full paraphrase of Flaubert’s novel and proceeds to tell the story of the Department of Agriculture and Arts under the allegorical form of their names. Misadventures include the oysters, the calf, and the asses from Egypt. comments on appropriateness of Flaubert’s characters’ names in following chp. (X).

The commission was accompanied by a priest, and he returned much shocked, as well he might be, for he had found no organized religion whatever in Denmark. [V227]

DIALECT: the brogue, the ugliest dialect in the world [A41]; learning a shocking accent [S265].

Gill’s lingo: Nationalism, Co-operation, Delegation, Compromise ... an occasional aphorism, a dead branch [V234-35]; T. P. Gill of Daily Express; a protestant can never know Ireland intimately [A107]; Gill’s yawn [S190]; his meagre mind [S200].

It would have suited Flaubert’s ironical style to say that the destruction of Merrion Street was Bouvard’s real claim to immortality. [V231]

Yeats: ‘Munster was Ireland’s literary portion’—pouring cold water on Lord Dunsany’s review, and Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Fein writers. [V240]

Moore: [to the effect that Griffith holds that ‘believing England doesn’t exist and it won’t). Yts: Yes, there is an element of Christian Science in our friend Griffith’ [V240].

James Stephens, AE protege: ‘we were impressed by his wit and whimsicality of mind but we thought AE had exaggerated the talents of the young man ... I was conscious of little more than harsh versification, and a crude courage in the choice of subjects. [V242]

AE RUSSELL: Moore to AE: ‘You shall be saint Paul ... I’ll be St. Luke taking down your words [S38]; AE on the druids refraining from committing their mysteries to writing since writing is the source of heresies and confusions [S44]; AE: the great truths are returning [S68]; AE lifts us beyond ourselves [S76] NOTE: in this narrative, AE is established as the saintly soul, an enemy of Irish nationalism and language revivalism, and therefore an ally of Moore—as he was of Eglinton and Monk Gibbon; AE is the only man who can distribute courage [V200]; AE: teaching that there is an essential oneness in all the different revelations that Eternity has vouchsafed to mankind. [V236]; Iacchus-Iesus (Eluesis) [V237]; AE: ‘James Stephens has enough poetry in him ... to be a great prose writer’; AE criticises Moore for finding no fault with him. ‘he complains that I have represented him in Ave and Salve as the blameless hrto of a young girl’s novel.’ AE: ‘If you wish to create human beings you must discover their faults.’ [V244]. AE’s life and wife, the family life of the man of genius. [V243]

Yeats’s great height and hierarchic appearance authorize the literary dogmas that he pronounces every season. He is the type of the literary fop, and the most complete that has ever appeared in literature. [V248]

Douglas HYDE: Hyde [A255]; Gaelic League ... Hyde [S15]

The softest of all our natural prdoucts, a Protestant that Protestantism has not been able to harden! ... would like nothing better that to visit Clare Island with a batch of priests, not one of them weighing less than 15 stone [V251] ... It is to Hyde that we owe the jargon since become so famous , for that discovery was his that to write beautiful English one has only to translate literally from the Irish; his prose translations of the Love Songs of Connnaught are as beautiful as Synge, and it is a pity he was stopped by Father Tom Finlay, who said ... his election to the Presidency of the Gaelic League made an end of Hyde as a man of letters ... he has mouthed the vilest English ever moulded by the lips of man all over Ireland. [V252] ... arch-type of the Catholic Protestant, cunning, subtle, cajoling, superficial, and affable ... qualities [which] have enabled him to paddle the old dug-out up from the marshes ... right up to the steps of the National University. [V253]

EOIN MAC NEILL: MacNeill [A256]; MacNeill [S17]

EDWARD MARTYN: obsessed with a certain part of his anatomy which he speaks of as his soul [A47] his mother put it into his head that he had a soul [A102]; Martyn’s priests [S120]; Moore is Martyn’s private life [145]; Martyn: a great bulk of peasantry with a delicious strain of Palestrina running through it [S126]; cf. ‘Edward feeling things ... a little deeper than I had ever donw [S211]; myself charging windmills and Edward holding up his hands in astonishment [S211]; a great conscientious crisis [V255]; an unexpected connnection between conscience and appetite [V256]; a conscience like Edward’s might lead him back one hundred years, to his grandfather [V256]; the professional Catholics of Merrion Square dirven out of Westland Row by the search smells of dirty clothes [V260]; the essential escapes him always [V262]. On Martyn’s comparing Ibsen and Racine ‘because nobody is killed on the stage in Racine or in Ibsen’: He does not see that the intention of Racine is to represent men and women out of time and out of space, unconditioned by environment, and that the very first principle of Ibsen’s art is the relation of his characters to their environment. ‘[V263] ... he sees things separately rather than relatively [V264; V269]. martyn’s crisis of conscience over the performance of The Heather Field with Yeats’s Countess [V264-68]. Moore quotes St. Paul: ‘I could wish myself were accursed from Christ for my brethern’ [V268]. There is no doubt that I owe a great deal of my happiness to Edward; all my life long he has been exquisite entertainment. [V269] ... to understand a man better than he understands himself, and to be powerless to help him ... [V269]

I foresaw how exile would give the book a definite distinction. [V296]

Moore’s early farmyard experiences [V321]. Many of the reminiscences at this point are concerned with fleshing out the old Ireland in the process of being destroyed by Land Acts and Land Commission.

Moore takes up the quarrel with his brother over the education of one of his sons as a Protestant [V332] and is striken by the revelation that he has been subventing a Jesuit education during the years when Ave and Salve were being written. [V336]

except Cardinal Newman ... all changes of religion are brought about by pecuniary or sexual reasons. [V334]

On the effects of Land Commission acquisitions: Moore Hall will be no more than a villa in the midst of a wild country ... the present cottagers would probably prevent the pigs from rooting in the graveyard, but the cottagers fifty years hence will have no scruples. [V344]

God seems to have intended to do something from Ireland, and in the tenth or the eleventh century he changed his mind ... In another 50 years Ireland will have lost all the civilistion of the 18th c.; a swamp of peasants with a priest here and there, the exaltation of the rosary and whisky her lot. A hundred legislators interesting only in protecting nunneries from secular inquisition. [V349]

The folk tales of Connaught have ever lain nearer the hearts of the people than those of Galilee [S77] denied that the genius of the Gael owed its inspiration to priestly teaching [S76]

BON MOT: intellect exhausted ... like one who has won a fellowship at Trinity [A140]; Casual visiting is one of the pleasures of Dublin life. [V2]; The acoustics of Dublin are perfect [S129]; Too much rectory lawn in Tennyson [A46; cf. Joyce]

ERRATA: in those days when women desert their lovers as frequently as men desert their mistresses [V284]; typoes Sinn Fien two times out of three at V240-41.