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George Moore, Parnell And His Island: A Sketch of Ireland and Irish Conditions (London: Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey & Co. 1887).
SUMMARY (Life languishing in Dalkey and Dublin:) ‘For in Ireland there is nothing but the land; with the exception of a few brewers and distillers in Dublin, who live upon the drunkenness of the people, there is no way, in Ireland of getting money except through the peasant [...] in Ireland the passage, direct and brutal of money from the horny hands of the peasant to the delicate hands of the proprietor is terribly suggestive of serfdom. In England the landlord lays out the farm and builds the farm-buildings. In Ireland he does absolutely nothing. He gives the bare land to the peasant, and sends his agent to collect the half-yearly rent; in a word he allows the peasant to keep him in ease and luxury. [...] In Ireland every chicken eaten, every glass of champagne drunk, every silkdress trailed in the street, every rose worn at a ball, comes straight out of the peasant’s cabin.’ (6-8). Moore finds an absence of character in Dublin - only poverty and a faded society; dreams of Paris in this beautiful setting: ‘Paris would sing in this bay; Paris would dance on these terraces [...] (p.11) ‘Nobody reads, nobody thinks. To be considered a man of the world, it is only necessary to have seen one or two plays in London before they are six months old, and to curse the Land League. In the ‘best society’ I have met with young men who have never read ‘Vanity Fair’ and young women who have never heard of Leonardo da Vinci. Once I was dining with a Mr. Ryan; on the club table there were two photographs, one was of Richard Wagner and the other was of Beethoven. / Mr Ryan: “Who is that?” / I: “That is Wagner”. / Mr Ryan: “Who is Wagner?” / I: “Don’t you know?” / I (recovering myself with an effort) Richard Wagner, the great breeder of shorthorns.” / Mr Ryan: “Begorra ’tis strange I niver came across him in Ballinasloe: and who is the other?” / I: “That is Beethoven.” Mr. Ryan: “Who is Beethoven?” / I: “ Don’t you know? He is the great breeder of cobs.” Mr. Ryan: “And I niver met him at the Dublin Horse Show; does he niver go there? Tell me - are you listening to me? - what sort of stock does he go in for?” [...] ‘Dublin is in a barbarous state, and, what is worse, in a retrograde state [...] ’ (pp.18-19). [MUSLIN MARTYRS]: ‘As soon as a young girl has left school she is taken to Dublin, kissed by the Lord-Lieutenant, and let loose of the ball-rooms of the Castle to flirt as extravagantly or as discreetly as she thinks proper. In Prance the chaperon has a meaning; in England and Ireland she is a nonentity: from the moment a chaperon enters the ball-room till the time she leaves it she sees nothing of her charges. Still, nevertheless the young girl passes four or five hours dancing; or, when an occasion presents itself, searches for a favourite corner hidden at the end of a dark corridor. The young girls without any greet moral conscience make their way at the Castle, and those who are well introduced may amuse themselves, but for the majority it is a place of torture and despair. The girls outnumber the men in the proportion of three to one, the competition is consequently severe; and it is pitiable to see these poor muslin martyrs standing at the door, their eyes liquid with invitation, striving to inveigle, to stay the steps of the men as they pass by. But although these balls are little else for the young girls than a series of heartbreaks, nevertheless the most abject basenesses are committed to secure an invitation.’ (pp.25-26); PEASANT FARMERS: These people are called small farmers ; they possess from three to ten acres of land, for which they pay from twenty to five-and-twenty shillings an acre. In their tiny fields, not divided by luxuriant hedges like the English fields, but by miserable stone walls which give an unspeakable bleakness to the countryside, they cultivate oats and potatoes. With the former crop and the pig they pay the landlord, with the latter they live. As Balzac says. “Les beaux sentiments fleurissent dans l’âme quand la fortune commence de dôrer les meubles’; and never have I observed in these people the slightest aesthetic intention - never was a pot of flowers seen in the cottage window of an Irish Celt. [...] You want to know what Ireland is like? It is like the smell of paraffin oil! The country exhales the damp, flaccid, evil smell of poverty - yes, a poverty that is of the earth earthy [see note infra]. And this smell hangs about every cabin; it rises out of the chimney with the [smell] of the peat, it broods upon the dung-heap and creeps along the deep black bogholes that line the roadway, and the thin meagre aspect of the marshy fields and the hungry hills reminds you of this smell of poverty - the smell of something sick to death of poverty. (pp.48-49). [Moore sees Ireland as] ‘a primitive country and a barbarous people’; [Parnell’s leadership has brought] ‘boycotting and moonlighting’ (p.233); ‘Ireland is a bog, and the aborigines (the Fins) are a degenerate race - short, squat little men - with low foreheads and wide jaws. But the bog, its heather and desolation, and the Fins and their hovels and dirt are as good a subject for brush or pen as an English village clustered round a green [...] Picturesque comfort or picturesque misery l’un vaut l’autre in art [...] (234). ‘The scenes in the pages of this book point to no moral - at least no moral that I am conscious of, they were not selected to plead any cause [...] they were chosen because they seemed to me typical and picturesque aspects of a primitive country and barbarous people. Unconcerned with this or that opinion, my desire was to produce a series of pictures to touch the fancy of the reader as a Japanese ivory or fan, combinations of hue and colour calculated to awake in him fictitious feelings of pity, pitiful curiosity and nostalgia for the unknown [...]. Picturesque comfort or picturesque misery Pun vaut Pautre in art, and I sought the picturesque independent of landlords and Land Leaguers; whether one picture is cognate in political feeling with the one that preceded it I care not a jot; indeed I would wish each to be evocative of dissimilar impressions, and the whole to produce the blurred and uncertain effect of nature herself. Where the facts seemed to contradict, I let them contradict.’ (pp.233-35; quoted in Brendan Fleming, ‘French Spectacles in an Irish Case: From Lettres sur l’Irlande to Parnell and His Island’, in Aaron Kelly & Alan Gillis, eds., Critical Ireland: New Essays in Literature and Culture, Dublin: Four Courts Press 2001, pp.69-75.873-1890’, pp.30-31.)
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