Aet. 46, to an artist and writer (1850-1929), the wife of Edmund Gosse. A few weeks after the date of this letter, Maartens (while reading Evelyn Innes) wrote to Ellen Gosse: “Moore has curiously combined, without blending them, the two extremes of imaginative work: he has not quite digested either realism or idealism. And he is lamentably wanting in humour. But he has intensity….” Letters of Maarten Maartens (1930, page 164).
In his glowing review of Evelyn Innes in the Speaker (18 June and 2 July 1898), Arthur Quiller-Couch wrote:
Mr. Moore has built his story, as an artist should, upon an idea; and I take the idea to be this — What differentiates man from the beasts that perish is his possession of a moral sense, or conscience, and his obedience to it. This sense is independent of the reasoning powers, and must often stand in direct conflict with them. We may convince our reason by arguments that such and such conduct is permissible — then we shall find no happiness in that conduct: we shall weary of it, shall loathe it, shall discover in time that we simply cannot persist in it. ‘After all, what we feel to be true is for us the greatest truth, if not the only real truth.’ Right conduct and wrong do not depend upon understanding. There is a deal of morality which we cannot bring into the focus of our understanding. But it exists nevertheless….
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