Aet. 48, to an Irish poet and playwright concerning their three-act play Diarmuid and Grania. In 1898 George Moore dedicated his novel Evelyn Innes to Yeats and Arthur Symons: “two contemporary writers with whom I am in sympathy.”
Shortly after writing this letter, George vented his frustration with Yeats as a collaborator in “A Plea for the Soul of the Irish People.” He argued that style, in the hyperconscious manner of the fin de siècle, was a symptom of decadence — an artistic response to the intrinsic poverty of the modern English language.
A few months later in Sister Teresa, he made his surrogate John Harding reiterate:
Harding had said he did not believe in the possibility of writing ineptitudes in good style. Harding had said that he had known Hugo, Banville and Tourgueneff and that they had never spoken of style. He had said that the gods do not talk theology: ‘they leave theology to the inferior saints and the clergy’.
Several more years later, evidently still agitated, George recalled his trying experience of collaboration with Yeats in Chapters 14-15 of Hail and Farewell! Ave (1911).
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