But then the facts it sets down in cruel type! When the years have removed the actors therein from the earthly scene, our grandchildren will chuckle over Moore's unconscious humour and Pepys-like chronicling of small-beer. For the social historian this trilogy will prove a mine of gossip, rich veracious gossip. It throws a calcium glare on the soul of the author, who, self-confessed, is now old, and no longer a dangerous Don Juan. In real life he was, as far as I can make out, not particularly a monster of iniquity; but, oh! in his Confessions and Memoirs what a rake was he. How the "lascivious lute" did sound. Some of the pages of the new volume (see pp. 274-278, English edition), in which he describes his tactics to avoid a kiss (kissing gives him a headache in these lonesome latter years, though he was only born in 1857), is to set you wondering over the frankness of the man. Walter Pater once called him "audacious George Moore," and audacious he is with pen and ink. Otherwise, like Bernard Shaw, he is not looking for physical quarrels.
He once spoke of Shaw as "the funny man in a boarding-house," though he never mentions his name in his memoirs. He doesn't like Yeats; what's more, he prints the news as often and as elaborately as possible. In the present book he doesn't exactly compare Yeats to a crane or a pelican, but he calls attention to the fact that the poet belonged to the "lower middle-class." It seems that Yeats had been thundering away at the artistic indifference of the Dublin bourgeoisie. Now, looking at Yeats the night when John Quinn gave him a dinner at Delmonico's, you could not note any resemblance to exotic birds, though he might recall a penguin. He was very solemn, very bored, very fatigued, his eyes deep sunken from fatigue. Posing as a tame parlour poet for six weeks had tired the man to his very bones. But catch him in private with his waistcoat unbuttoned--I speak figuratively--and you will enjoy a born raconteur, one who slowly distils witty poison at the tip of every anecdote, till, bursting with glee, you cry: "How these literary men do love each other! How one Irishman dotes on another!" Yeats may be an exception to the rule that a poet is as vain and as irritable as a tenor. I didn't notice the irritability, finding him taking himself seriously, as should all apostles of culture and Celtic twilight.