MOORE, GEORGE (1852-1933), novelist, eldest son of George Henry Moore, M.P. for Mayo, and his wife Mary Blake, was born at Moore Hall, Co. Mayo, on Feb. 24, 1852. He was at school at Escott, but, like many other great artists, did not take kindly or long to formal education. At the age of 18 he had already decided that art in some form or another was his vocation, and in the year 1870, on the death of his father, he entered the art schools at Paris. Though he was not destined to become a painter, those early years left a permanent mark on his artistic conscious ness. Not only did he acquire that penetrating knowledge of pic tures which has always distinguished him, but he learned both from the study of line, and from the brilliant painters and writers who became his friends, that relentless integrity of style, which gives each of his paragraphs something of the copper certainty of an etching. While in Paris and while still seeking for his medium he attempted poetry in Flowers of Passion (1878), and Pagan Poems (1882). Here again, though verse was not to be his method of expression, he still further prepared himself for his relentless economy of manner, more often found in poetry than prose.
Gradually, however, his true bent began to reveal itself, and he returned to England with the avowed intention of liberating Eng lish fiction from its Victorian shackles. A Mummer's Wife (1885) was in its way as startling a challenge to the contemporary novel as had been the first volume of "Poems and Ballads" to the poetry of its time. Moore took his place immediately as a rebel with a torch, not of an incendiary, but of a new luminary.
In his next considerable work Confessions of a Young Man (1888, latest ed. 1908), he took the first step on the path which was to lead to Avowals (1919 and 1926), Hail and Farewell (3 vols., 1911-14) and Conversations in Ebury Street (1924), no less than the gift of a new form to English prose. He turned from that to the three great novels of his prime: Esther Waters (1894), Evelyn Innes (1898), and Sister Teresa (19oi ). In these with quiet certainty he established the claim he had made in A Mum mer's Wife. He believed that he had transplanted the French "philosophical" novel. What he had in fact done was to restore the Fielding tradition. He had given back honesty and clarity of vision, and an English almost flawless in its severe simplicity.
He had in the meantime also continued to express his artistic gospel in critical articles which were collected and published in 1891 and 1893 respectively. But the next landmark in his life was the return to Ireland in 1901, a return dictated in part by his detestation of the Boer War. He remained in Ireland until 1910,
and though that period was not immediately productive (the only books in that time being The Unfilled Field (1903), The Lake (1905) and Memoirs of my Dead Life (19051 it renewed his ar tistic youth. Imemdiately on his return to London he began the publication of Hail and Farewell—those entrancing dialogues which are regarded (wrongly) in certain quarters as his master piece. They are not that, but they would have been a master piece for anyone but the author of The Brook Kerith (1916, 7th revised ed. 1927) and Heloise and Abelard (1921). What turned Moore's mind to the gospel story as a subject for treatment is not clear, but at any rate in order to prepare himself for no less a task than re-creating the story of Jesus he visited Palestine. A record of that pilgrimage almost in his own words may be found in Dialogues and Monologues (Humbert Wolfe). The result of the journey was The Brook Kerith which, with Heloise and Abelard, touches a point of almost flawless artistry and nobility that has rarely been reached before in the history of English prose. In both these books he has reconstructed a period, and though to say so is almost hyperbole, in neither is his genius unworthy of its subject. Below these peaks, there were lesser though charming eminences in 1918 with A Story-Teller's Holiday, in 1924 with a version of Daphnis and Chloe, and in 1926 with an Irish story of the Middle Ages Ulick and Soracha. All these, like a note-book of Rembrandt, are full of convincing glimpses of the master.
Having tried painting, poetry, dialogue and the novel, he was not content till he had also attempted the drama. The Coming of Gabrielle (1920) was produced, but it was not till 1928, with The Making of an Immortal that he had a success in the theatre.