ABSTRACT
In February 1901, the Irish writer George Moore paid a visit to some old friends who lived below the Sussex Downs. Moore, the second son of a family of large landowners, had left his birthplace by Lough Carra, near Ballinrobe in Mayo, as a young man. His early career, as an unsuccessful artist and later a successful writer, had passed in Paris and London. In 1893, at work on Esther Waters, he had felt he was writing a peculiarly English novel: 'I hate Ireland', he wrote to his brother Maurice, 'and I have no wish to hear anything about Ireland' (Hone, 1936, 185). Yet Moore was to return to Ireland immediately after the episode we are about to consider, to play there a leading part (with Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn) in the founding of the Abbey Theatre. This identification with cultural nationalism in Ireland was temporary, however. As with his vacillations between Catholic and Protestant Christianity and agnosticism, or his short-lived enthusiasm for the use of the Irish language, the full record of Moore's involvement in the Abbey project - and indeed his own record, in Ave-seem in the end to give evidence less of a capacity for commitment than of a conscious, almost willed, ambivalence about where he might belong. At all events, Moore went back to London again in 1911, and was to die there. His birthplace, Moore Hall, was burned out by republican troops during the Civil War, Maurice Moore being a senator of the Free State (Moore, 1919:1947; Hone, 1936; Hone, 1939).
