"Though I may have lost the habit of reading," says Mr. Moore, "I have acquired, perhaps more than any other human being, another habit, the habit of thinking. I love my own thoughts." It must be a great pleasure to be Mr. George Moore, to have confidence in one's intellectual habits, to enjoy the memories and opinions that the mind excogitates, and to be able to phrase them with beautiful precision. The mind that honestly likes itself is sure to attract other minds and to interest even those that are antipathetic. If Mr. Moore does not persuade you that all his judgments are to be accepted, he provokes you to examine your own. He is stimulant, irritant, but there is no depressant reaction from him. One can stand a large dose of him, both of his exquisite fiction and of his repetitive reminiscences, which may or may not be fiction.
There is a remark ascribed to Lady Gregory: "Some men kiss and do not tell; George Moore does not kiss, but he tells." It is the business of the writer of fiction to "tell," and it makes little difference to the reader who reads for fun whether the gallant adventures are biographical or not. Early in his literary career Mr. Moore tried the confessional form of narrative and succeeded masterfully. The young man who "confessed" twenty-five years ago grew older, and in "Memoirs of My Dead Life" looked back upon his youth from the quiescence of middle age. Mr. Moore says that "if the reader of 'Vale' be wishful to know what happened at Orelay he can do so in a volume entitled 'Memoirs of My Dead Life,' but he need not read this novel to follow adequately the story of 'Vale.'" So the "Memoirs" is fiction. What, then, is "Hail and Farewell"? Simply an extension of the autobiographic novel, it includes real persons living and dead and calls them by their names, but it is as obviously a "made-up" book as anything in literature. It is the work of an artist and critic, the artist who gave us two masterpieces, "Esther Waters" and "Evelyn Innes," and the critic, who, apropos books and pictures, writes, if not with infallible judgment, ever with an unfailing sense of beauty.
Mr. Moore's lady-loves have not, according to his own testimony, direct and unconscious, been the most interesting affairs of his life. He writes better about Manet than about an amatory encounter of yesteryear. The women of his "regular" novels are more vivid than the women who perturb his mature reminiscences. He says that the critics complain that "instead of creating types of character like Esther Waters," he is wasting his time describing his friends, "mere portrait painting," and he asks an argumentative question: "In writing 'Esther Waters' did I not think of one heroic woman?"