Moore's Hail and Yeats's Farewell

Abstract

George Moore lived from 1852 to 1933, and in those 81 years he wrote over sixty books—poems, plays, criticism, novels, and autobiographies—many of them in revised editions, and still further revised editions of those revisions (as Yeats put it, "he pumice-stoned every surface"). 1 In the last decade of his life, after the deaths of Henry James, then Thomas Hardy, and finally Joseph Conrad, Moore was spoken of in the press as "the greatest living English novelist," no doubt on the polite understanding that only those writers well advanced in years were under consideration for this honorific, for by the 1920s Joyce and Lawrence were recognized to be the dynamic presences. Still, Moore's reputation was great at that time, and perhaps had never been greater, not even in 1894 when his Esther Waters was judged to be the best novel of its year, and better than Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles of 1893. Since his death, of course, Moore's standing—for most, he requires a general introduction—has gone in one direction . . . down. That this should be so is significantly the work of one man, W. B. Yeats.