"I knew a man," he said, "who claimed to read Morley's Life of Gladstone every Christmas. And I think he did. He was my father." Likewise he read not once or twice, but many times George Moore's trilogy AVE, SALVE, VALE, chuckling aloud, particularly at the visit to Newgrange by Moore and AE. And then he relished Susan Mitchell's book on Moore, published by Maunsel in 1916. Early on, Miss Mitchell gives us this departing point that while Rousseau, eminent among confessors, made confessions about himself, Mr Moore's are largely about his friends. Moore's tendency to devastating criticism she illustrates with an anecdote, which tells us more than something about Mr Moore. Anyway, he visited a friend who had a vast picture by Sargent, of three ladies seated amid high-class furniture. It was hung in the dining room but throughout dinner Moore never lifted his eyes to look at it. When the hostess said "You have not looked at my Sargent, Mr Moore," he answered that he was afraid she would notice. "I don't like it. But I have just been talking to someone who saw it there and who admires it tremendously." The hostess asked if he would like to come and see it again. Moore answered that he didn't think she would like him to come; "You see, he is my greengrocer. He likes pictures and he talks about them when I go to pay my bills." "Oh, Mr Moore," he said, "wasn't it a beautiful picture? Here were the young ladies on the sofa and you knew the footmen were on the stairs handing up the young gentlemen, and they were drinking champagne all day long. It was real high life." And Moore concluded: "That is exactly what I think of it, just the greengrocer's idea of high life."
As to Moore's worth as a painter, Miss Mitchell has one chapter of just five lines. Chapter three reads in its entirety: "Nobody in Ireland has ever seen any of Mr Moore's paintings except AE, to whom he once shyly showed a head, remarking that it had some "quality". AE remained silent."
Of those few lines a Dublin newspaper reviewer of the book wrote: "That is worthy of `dear George's' own pen. His weapon and his method have been turned against himself." Y