DECEMBER 9TH, 1904: Given his acerbic commentaries on many of his famous contemporaries and events generally, one would have thought it would have been easy to listen to George Moore. That it was not so is suggested by this leader inThe Irish Times about a speech Moore delivered, mainly about art, at the Royal Irish Academy. It was a subject on which he was knowledgeable but his delivery appears to have defeated the reporters present.
MR. GEORGE Moore’s lecture at the Royal Hibernian Academy last night would have been more entertaining if it had been delivered by somebody else. The lecturer has a very monotonous style of delivery, which prevented many of his best points from reaching those of his audience who were at the end of the room; and even the reporters could not catch much that he said. This was a pity, for Mr. Moore had evidently taken great pains with his address, which should be well worth reading when printed in full. There were many parts of it with which we do not agree.
Mr. Moore is the prophet of unconventionality, and is such a thorough believer in his creed that he becomes almost conventional in his support of it. The doctrine upon which he insisted with almost painful reiteration last night was, “Do not be ashamed of anything but being ashamed,” and the quality in Manet’s art which he praised most highly was that it was “unashamed.” Now we are ready to admit that it is the mark of the true artist that he expresses to the full his own individuality – “bad art is bad because it is anonymous” was another of the lecturer’s phrases – but when Mr. Moore asserts ex cathedra that “well-mannered people cannot think sincerely” we take leave to differ with him. The rude have no monopoly of sincerity; but well-mannered people do not blurt out all that they think.
Mr. Moore declares that in Dublin “everyone is afraid to confess himself,” and there is, perhaps, a certain amount of justice in the charge; but the reason may be in many cases not so much a craven fear of making one’s own views known as a laudable desire to avoid offending the susceptibilities of other people. Mr. Moore himself might perhaps have done better to consider this aspect of the question before making his ill-advised attack upon the management of the National Gallery of Ireland. The desire of those who advocate the purchase of a selection of the pictures now on view at the Royal Hibernian Academy is not to belittle the collection at Leinster Lawn which owes so much to the taste and devotion of Sir Walter Armstrong, but to supplement it by the acquisition of a number of modern works which will give art students and the public generally an idea of what contemporary painters in other countries have achieved. Mr. Moore, in his search for the unconventional, committed himself to some judgements – as, for example, that the children of Sir Joshua Reynolds are “stunted, leering little monkeys,” that “there is no art but French art,” and that “the British Academy has fallen to the level of Madame Tussaud’s – that we do not think many competent critics would endorse, or that he himself would seriously defend; but he was right enough in saying that “we must speak in the idiom of our time,” or in other words, that slavish imitation of the old masters will never produce great art.
... we strongly endorse Mr. Moore’s appeal, which was supported in an earnest little speech by Mr. W. B. Yeats, for the retention in Dublin, as the nucleus of a Gallery of Modern Art, of the collection got together with such zeal by Mr. Hugh Lane.
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