1892-06-24 to James Stanley Little

Autograph letter signed, New York Public Library, 438 words

[Edited for paragraph breaks, capitalization, spelling and punctuation.]

8 Kings Bench Walk, Temple

Friday night, 24 June 1892

My dear Sir

On the very day I received your kind letter I happened to have been at Goupil’s and there I saw your brother’s picture.I am glad to say that I admired it. I looked at it a long time and asked Mr. Thomson who painted it. Pray convey to your brother my sincerest congratulations.

I have read with much pleasure the little pamphlet you sent to me. Although I was born in Ireland my most real memories are of Sussex. I have lived there a great part of my life and the long girdling downs are forever present in my mind. I know their heights and hollows better than anything else. So your description of what is so intimate in me was of special interest.

Regarding the article on the Academy which met with your approval, I have only to say that it is only a part of a campaign which I carry on from week to week in The Speaker. I write an article on art every week in that paper and perhaps next autumn I shall rewrite and fit them together. They were written with a view to a volume entitled Modem Art and are not journalistic. I will send you The Speaker that comes out tomorrow. I have no notion if my contribution is above or below my average. I am no judge of my own work.

The Academy is a flagrant dropsee, but we shall do more good by attacking the academicians than by attacking the Academy. If half-a-dozen journalists were to attack popular art in different journals, we should soon affect a substantial change in public taste. But where are they, those half-dozen journalists who can distinguish bad work from good?

I am much obliged to you for the kind things you said in the Library Review about my novel Vain Fortune. Your remarks about other writers interested me, but I confess your taste is much more catholic than mine. What you can see to admire in Rider Haggard I cannot imagine. And surely Hardy's Tess is very poor stuff  — an ill conceived story written by a person of very small mind. Hardy does not seem to me to have the brains of a rabbit. The landscapes are very beautiful but of humanity pas meme un bout, a sort of limping Loti — or shall I say a provincial Loti? Loti amid the turnips?

Most sincerely yours

George Moore