1900-05-19 to Maurice Moore

Autograph letter signed, National Library of Ireland, 521 words

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

92 VICTORIA STREET. S.W.

Saturday [19 May 1900]

My dear Maurice

That the war will soon be over is the best news I have heard for a long time. Nothing will give me greater pleasure than to see you again. When you leave the army we will live together in Dublin or in Moore Hall. I am tired of London and I don’t think you want to live there.

I am sending you a number of the North American for the sake of an article, an ill written article, by me. You will find two articles on the war from different points of view and a very bad article by Zola which must have cost a great deal.

The Irish language interests me more than anything else and if you will let your children be taught Irish I will pay. I call the tune so it is only fair that I should pay. I do not know if I should write to Evelyn about it. I am afraid she would not sympathise for she would not understand. Nor should I have understood three years ago. Opinions change, we know not how, the new opinions spring like grass in the soil.

Everything in the speech which you liked was yours. It was you who gave me the ideas twenty years ago, some of them twenty five years ago. I published the speech in the New Ireland Review. But it did not read well. I rewrote it on the proofs just as the Review was going to press but the rewriting was not sufficent. A speech is not an article and an excellent speech makes a poor article. Yeats told me I must repeat myself in a speech and I failed to rid the speech of the repetitions when I rewrote it.

The comedy was a great success. I invited Evelyn to come to stay with me at the Shelbourne but she could not come. It would take too long to explain how I came to rewrite and become the author of The Bending of the Bough. I am afraid Edward suffered a good deal. He says I spoiled his play but that is an illusion. I recast his play compl but not enough.

I should have written a new play on the subject. But you see Edward had not discovered the subject. I did not discover the subject till too late. I patched and patched until it was all mine, then Edward said he could not sign it and he refused to let it be played anonymously, so I had to sign it.

If I write another word I shall miss the post. So goodbye my dear brother

Always affectionately yours

George Moore

There are fifty things I should like to say but can’t. Anything you send me needless to say will receive my best attention. Learning the Irish language with shells bursting about you is — well I don’t know what it is, lurid is I suppose the right word.