Aet. 41, to a man of letters. Gosse edited and introduced William Hazlitt’s Conversations of James Northcote, B.A. (London: Bentley, 1894). Comparing the positions in art criticism of William Hazlitt to George Moore, he wrote: “Each has tried to paint professionally and has resigned the effort; each has been disturbed or disquieted by foreign study; each is, by nature, a man of letters, the slave of intellectual rather than plastic ideas; each is perfectly honest, fearless, and unsympathetic. A parallel of this kind has its obvious dangers, and must not be pushed too far, but an allusion to it may serve to define the position of Hazlitt to the modern reader. He had, of course, a much wider sense of beauty, a much better balanced mind, than some of these merry swashbucklers of our own day. It is not to be conceived that in his most frenzied moments he would have talked about ‘the shoddy commercialism of the Sistine Madonna’” (page xxi).
The quote concerning the Sistine Madonna was of Joseph Pennell, the art critic and biographer of Whistler. He was later pressed to defend it, during his libel action against Walter Sickert and Frank Harris in April 1897 (George Moore testified for the defense).
George’s prospective outline was of his next two novels, the duology Evelyn Innes and Sister Teresa.
Leave a comment