I juxtapose “legacy” with “heritage,” though the dictionary says they mean nearly the same thing. From my picky point of view they’re actually quite different. Legacy is forward looking while heritage looks back. Moreover mistaking critical heritage for literary legacy may obscure George Moore’s genius and skew his influence.

Literary legacy is vouchsafed in “primary source material” — Moore’s writing both published and unpublished. Novels, plays, poems, memoirs, essays, letters, manuscripts, ephemera — his tangible creative output made many years ago, that still can be viewed, touched, read, pondered, collected and freshly published today. 

Critical heritage is vouchsafed in “secondary source material” — writing about Moore by friends and family, associates, peers, journalists, scholars, critics, educators. Heritage is promulgated in essays that began as lectures that later surfaced in journals and anthologies; also in longer treatises such as thematic or historical monograph and life-and-works biography.

The genre of bibliography is a special case because it uniquely spans legacy and heritage. It’s legacy when it inventories Moore’s own writing without critical or theoretical intent. It’s heritage when it surveys writing about Moore (other than what Moore wrote about himself). 

Edwin Gilcher’s Bibliography of George Moore was published in 1970; his Supplement in 1988. A pillar of George Moore Interactive is a unified digital edition of these books, augmented with publications of the past 35 years and counting. Like the originals, this edition will be legacy — but also “living”: never to be finished, never to go out of print or date.

Robert Langenfeld’s George Moore: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography of Writings About Him was published in 1987. It is heritage rather than legacy; and for that reason it’s beyond the scope of George Moore Interactive. Spawned by an academic journal named English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, it is now out of print and way out of date. It purports to be a complete survey of 2,355 publications about George Moore — a massive achievement in sleuthing. Will somebody please — members of the George Moore Association? — get around to reviving it? I wish!

I’ve been AWOL from the critical heritage of George Moore for decades. It was all too easy to be like that because I rarely bumped into publications about him in bookstores, in book reviews, in newsfeeds — anywhere other than in secondhand bookshops where I went looking for collectables. Besides that, my academic career was wholly devoted to legacy. That’s what turned me on: the quest for unknown primary source material and discovery of new knowledge made by the master himself.

Am I proud of being AWOL? I am not. But thanks to friendships with Moore family members in the United States and members of the George Moore Society in Ireland, my mind stayed open to heritage and recently became curious. I assigned myself some remedial reading to check out what I’ve missed.

Not having the advantages of a “living” secondary bibliography, I am using interlibrary loans to borrow anthologies that may fairly represent George Moore’s critical heritage to readers today:

George Moore: Spheres of Influence (forthcoming in 2023)

George Moore’s Paris and His Ongoing French Connections (2015)

George Moore: Influence and Collaboration (2014)

George Moore: Across Borders (2013)

George Moore and the Quirks of Human Nature (2013)

George Moore : Dublin, Paris, Hollywood (2012)

George Moore: Artistic Visions and Literary Worlds (2006)

Scholars who are reading this, please let me know how to expand my remediation. These seven anthologies contain 102 critical essays and more than 1,800 pages! I’ve already enjoyed four, I’m queuing the fifth and sixth at Oak Park Public Library, and the seventh will be borrowed when it becomes available.

“Borrow” is anathema to collectors like me. I prefer to buy books and keep them permanently in my handcrafted bookcases, where I can feel them always. However the retail prices of the anthologies are forbidding, even the older ones, and prices in the secondary market are also way up there.

So borrow I must; and I recommend you borrow them too, in any order, to enhance perspective on the legacy that your own mind supplies.

The great strength of the heritage, in my opinion, is its zeal. All of the contributors are well aware that George Moore needs defenders and promoters, and they bravely step up to the challenge. The innumerable hours of research and composition implicit between their lines is staggering, to me; their sensitive theories concerning George Moore’s liminal aesthetics, their marshaling of disparate evidence from far-flung archives, their unconditional belief in the worthiness of their eclipsed subject and revelatory findings. I agreed with most of their opinions.

There is weakness in the heritage as well. I am not one to judge, being an amateur when it comes to literary criticism, but I noticed the influence of central casting among the contributors. The same names again and again, implying that nobody is crashing the party to get into the action. Moreover nearly all these cast members are academic, whose modes are pedagogic and therefore self-limiting.

A pedagogue writes to inform and instruct, rather than excite. If “lay” readers were to arrive at Moore’s heritage without already loving the legacy, I suspect they would not be charmed. The heritage does nothing, that I can sense, to grow George Moore’s fandom. It may have a stifling air of faculty commons.

In Modern Painting (1893), George Moore presciently wrote that “The separation of the method of expression from the idea to be expressed is the sure sign of decadence.” His heritage sometimes demonstrates the maxim. It occasionally purports to make him mean what he didn’t; it sometimes ventriloquizes a wooden George on the lap of an erudite critic. Is that decadent?

No, it is not. In its present state the critical heritage may not make converts to the vibrant legacy, but it does cut many fascinating, intriguing paths for any curious pilgrim making their way to Lough Carra.

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Exciting, by Comparison

The journalist A.O. Scott recently published an article in the New York Times named “Nobody Ever Read American Literature Like This Guy Did.” The title is inaccurate; it should be Nobody Ever Wrote About American Literature Like This Guy Did. I contend that lots of people read the canon just the way this guy (D.H. Lawrence) did; moreover that is precisely why the canon and Lawrence are still read today — and perhaps why Moore is not.

I cite the article here as an example of plein-air critical heritage. Lawrence was fun to read and he made the objects of his literary criticism engaging, exciting, challenging, thought-provoking, full of relevance and utility.

Yes, utility! The general use case for Lawrence’s legacy is that he makes readers feel more vital and empowered, more happy in their own skin or ready to change the world around them.

Something like that is true of George Moore’s legacy, though you might never think so from reading just the heritage. What is its use case?

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Worlds

The seventh pillar of George Moore Interactive got a kick-start this week when I began collecting digitized texts of his first editions. These primary source materials will be converted into Google Docs — like Aesthetics has been already — so they can be encoded for machine learning and analysis of GM’s artistic world-building.

The supplier of these texts (so far) is the Internet Archive, a phenomenal cultural resource that everybody should support like they (hopefully) support the Wikimedia Foundation.

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In a newspaper column (The Speaker, London, 20 January 1894, pages 73-74) George Moore defended his admittedly naive appreciation of art against “the imposture of the expert.” He pushed back against authorities who trade in “preposterous theories.” Nitpicking by geeks in aesthetics did not please him! He rejected it wholesale, going so far as to claim that he — an aesthete grounded in direct sensory perception — is right even if/when he may be technically wrong.

I was reminded of this ‘chagrin of the amateur’ when I reviewed documentation about a portrait sketch of George Moore in the Ashmolean Museum. One distinguished expert — Ronald Pickvance — had publicly attributed the sketch to Edgar Degas; another — Theodore Reff — quietly challenged Pickvance for what seemed (to me) like no good reason (in a word: hubris). 

In my Iconography of George Moore, I side with Pickvance because I believe his attribution is correct; but the Ashmolean sides with Professor Reff because… well I don’t know why. Perhaps because “preposterous theories” can bend a curve when they come from an expert. Moore believed that kind of thing happens all the time.

Now that I’m well along in salvaging all of Moore’s art criticism (under a banner of Aesthetics), it may be a good time to raise the question: Why bother? is Moore’s vintage art criticism worth the effort? will making it useable in the twenty-first century kickstart his literary legacy? Or should his art criticism be left to rot in the analog mausoleum where it’s hard to find, hard to read, and impossible to analyze — or even use efficiently?

I hesitate to broach this question because it sounds scholarly, and mine is not that kind of project. I am wholly committed to making the writer himself — his life and work — more accessible, integrated and dynamic; to bringing him back to life, so to speak, come what may. I am not promoting a thesis about him, nor do I care much about others’ theories — preposterous or otherwise. 

It may be observed that scholarship in the humanities typically shifts attention from authentic engagement with content to intellectual hobbyhorses; and I am very wary of doing that. Moore himself can empower readers to form thoughts about his legacy; he doesn’t want or need exegesis. I certainly don’t wish to come between him and them as an “expert.”

That said, I’m using this post to address the question: is Moore’s art criticism now worth the effort? Spoiler alert: It is. His essays are delightful and meaningful on several levels, from style to ideation. That being my personal opinion, the project is making it easier for others to form their own.

Others in this case cannot include the late Douglas Cooper, an art historian and critic, collector and curator, who vouchsafed his view of Moore’s art criticism in an article named George Moore and Modern Art (Horizon, A Review of Literature and Art, ed. Cyril Connelly, London: Vol X1, No 62, February 1945, pages 113-130). 

The tiny community of interest centered on George Moore always laments the passive neglect he suffers. Douglas Cooper was not a member of that community and not one to neglect; he vigorously assaulted Moore’s legacy.

To take Cooper the expert at his word, Moore’s art criticism and, moreover, his eyes and brain and ethics, were irredeemably defective. Cooper’s tone is supercilious and condescending when he explains this, as though he nursed a personal grievance of some sort. However he seems to have trained that attitude on many others during his combative lifetime, so it’s best not to take it as a unique response to Moore.

According to Cooper, George Moore was a twerp: uneducated, uncultivated, inexperienced, insincere and chronically devious; a liar and a plagiarist; a fop and a poseur. Cooper asserted that Moore’s art criticism doesn’t rise to the level of aestheticism, so my calling a pillar of this project Aesthetics makes me as dumb as Moore. I am in effect promoting a fraud.

To Cooper, Moore’s essays betray a “lack of any positive or connecting theme, of any standards or principles consistently applied. They merely skim the surface of art without ever being penetrating or profound, without ever expressing a conception. Indeed it is impossible to extract from them Moore’s artistic philosophy (if he had one!) as their spirit is largely negative, a denying rather than an appraising of art.” 

Gosh! If Cooper was right about that, Moore was his kindred spirit! But he was not right; and the explicit claim of Moore’s art criticism — really his only justification for writing it — was to set forth his aesthetics as a consistent, coherent system which he unfolded in public over a period of several years.

A clue to Cooper’s animosity towards Moore is in the title of his article, George Moore and Modern Art. “Modern” here is more or less equivalent to Cooper’s “great artistic renaissance” of French impressionism. He claimed that Moore’s view of impressionist art was shallow and dead wrong; that Moore merely parroted what he heard “experts” say about it, often not understanding what he wrote and haphazardly screwing it up.

Cooper claimed that Salon painters such as “Cabanel, Lefebvre and Bouguereau had all his admiration”; that “Moore proudly allied himself with the philistines”; and that he visited the studios of French impressionists merely to stalk women rather than consort with artists he admired.

It is true that Moore wrote hundreds of articles of art criticism, most of them reviews of exhibitions in London and Paris. As a columnist he wrote to deadline, not only about the great unwashed of impressionism, but also about far more numerous and influential artists of the day who controlled and skewered the art market.

Much of Moore’s criticism of them is “negative” and “denying” because he loathed their pictures and what they stood for. When he wrote about impressionists, on the other hand, he did so thoughtfully, critically, candidly — not as a fanboy or propagandist. His appreciations of them and other modernist artists are very positive and constructive, but never fawning.

Cooper on a rhetorical roll claimed that “despite the reality of [Moore’s] contacts with the Impressionists, his natural cheap taste remained unaffected and his understanding limited.… If Moore ever had enjoyed any pictorial receptivity, it had already withered by the age of 34” — that is, by 1886, a peak year of the purported “renaissance,” before Moore started a position as one of London’s leading art critics.  

OMG, “the imposture of the expert”; it’s so obnoxious! Reminds me of peer reviews (just kidding).

I often find Moore’s writing on art witty and amusing. Cooper’s is neither; nor it is truthful. But one quizzical detail in Cooper has stayed with me after flushing all the rest.

It’s that Cooper discussed the fictional artists named Marshall (Confessions of a Young Man) and Lewis (A Modern Lover; later titled Lewis Seymour and Some Women). But he never mentioned the name of the real symbolist painter this character was based on, Moore’s friend Lewis Welden Hawkins. I suppose the reality of Hawkins didn’t sync with the polemic of Cooper.

If this were a conference paper, I would be making a point-by-point refutation of practically everything that Douglas Cooper wrote in George Moore and Modern Art. And what would that have accomplished? One so-called expert fencing with another for the entertainment of other experts with their own bones to pick. Not fun.

Thank goodness this is not a conference paper; it’s merely a too-lengthy blog post, offering my unequivocal answer to the question: is Moore’s art criticism worth the effort? You have my answer; it’s not Cooper’s and not yours.

You’ll have the opportunity to judge for yourself with a complete interactive archive of Moore’s Aesthetics. Wait a little longer and you’ll also be able to ask a generative George Moore about the art he loved and the art he didn’t like, and about the always vital voice of the amateur in criticism.

“There are too few amateurs among us,” lamented George Moore (Saturday Review, 22 December 1894, page 679). When James McNeil Whistler famously ribbed him about posing as an art expert, both knew that was silly. Douglas Cooper did something similar, only he wasn’t kidding. The damage Cooper did to Moore’s reputation was thankfully limited to fellow “experts.” It won’t last much longer.

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Hi Reader! In the past few months I laid digital foundations for two pillars of George Moore Interactive: Iconography and Bibliography. That means I have optimized imagery and text for eventual integration with a relational database. Scrubbing the data will continue indefinitely of course, but that work is developmental rather than foundational.

As Joan Webster would say on the Isle of Mull, now I really know where I’m going!

It’s time to move the foundational focus to Aesthetics. That’s a pillar of George Moore’s candid, deeply felt, much discussed, sometimes ridiculed, often misunderstood and overlooked philosophy of art.

For now, this pillar concerns just the visual arts, not the other arts in which he was also heavily invested: namely the dramatic, musical, and literary. They will come to the fore a bit later in this project. 

Aesthetics consists of 224 articles Moore wrote for many periodical publications in England, Ireland, France and the United States, including a handful that he afterwards collected in books.

I have already obtained “rough” digital scans of the articles. These are photo images of pages, processed with optical character recognition, saved in PDF format. They are somewhat readable by humans, not so much by machines because of peculiar typography and page layout, and dirty physical source media. “Dirty” means showing the wear and tear of age.

Still, I’m happy to have the rough scans (and actually amazed that they even exist thanks to Google Books and similar enterprises).

I have just benchmarked one of Moore’s articles in order to estimate my scope of work in building a complete foundation for the pillar. The article is named Art for the Villa; it’s in the Magazine of Art (London) for July 1889 on pages 296-300. Moore later chose it as a chapter in his book Impressions and Opinions in March 1891. 

There are 4,066 words in the first publication of Art for the Villa. This is a relatively long article by George Moore; his typical weekly columns were around 1,700 words.

I spent 3.6 hours transforming the rough scan of Art for the Villa into a Google Doc, a format that nicely supports textual analysis and development. (I converted the bibliography of George Moore into Google Docs for the same reason, though in that case the scan was “clean” because I commissioned it.) 

Thanks to aforementioned peculiarities and dirt in Art for the Villa and other articles, I had to invent a process for crossing the chasm from lousy analog to pristine digital text, one that doesn’t necessitate outrageous amounts of manual labor.

In my first draft of this post, I outlined a process. It worked and then it didn’t. Turned out that my initial benchmarking was flawed; it assumed that all rough scans are similar and comparable. In fact, each of the scans is so different from the others that it has to be handled as a unique challenge.

Using Art for the Villa and several other scans as a measuring stick, I estimated it will take less than 600 hours to convert all of Moore’s articles on Aesthetics into pristine Google Docs; that’s about 150 work days at my leisurely pace.

(Actually the pace isn’t leisurely, but it takes a while to build a foundation of this kind because I can spend only part of a day doing it. This is a marathon rather than sprint! Much better for maintaining a sharp focus.)

The yield of these 600 hours will be a Google Doc that faithfully represents the text of a rough scan of each Aesthetics article minus its problems and dirt. Each Google Doc will be formatted for pleasant human viewing on screen, for textual analysis, for machine learning, and for integration with a database.

As I cross the chasm for Aesthetics in the coming months, I will retain the original British spelling and formatting of words, retain the punctuation of the original publication; replace paragraph indents with skipped lines; and eliminate line breaks that were forced by printed page layout. All of this for readability and usability. Moreover I will introduce a consistent style sheet that I inaugurated in Art for the Villa.

This foundational work on Aesthetics doesn’t include developmental tasks such as illustrating the articles with pictures Moore critiqued, inserting internal and external links, and appending explanatory notes. Those will be performed later, when the foundation is hard and strong, and it will continue indefinitely because the canon of George Moore will never again be constrained by the paper it is printed on or an app it is conjured with. The canon will continue to absorb developer and user enhancements in the cloud, more or less forever.

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Hi Reader! When I started George Moore Interactive, Iconography was the only pillar. First and foremost, I wanted to explore the symbiosis between words and pictures in Moore’s world. I intended to show how verbal and visual arts enhance and advance one another, as Moore himself often did.

Years ago with an incipient version of this idea in mind, I gave a public lecture about George Moore and art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Likewise I published two articles in the glossy Irish Arts Review. I admit, these were hurried, half-baked efforts, and they remained that way for a very long time, because afterwards I emigrated from academia and found other fish to fry.

Even so, I never lost my desire to do more with words and pictures. And now because technology is so much better, faster and cheaper, I actually can!

My lecture and articles explored two poles of George Moore and art: one being pictures of the author, the other being the author writing about pictures. I slated both under the title “iconography,” but that was a force fit. Strictly speaking, iconography is just a cluster of pictures; the only words that belong there are ones that document the pictures.

That’s what you’ll find in the updated Iconography of George Moore Interactive: currently more than 150 pictures of him; plus dozens more of people, places and things that George Moore experienced and appreciated; plus documentation of all the pictures and where to view them in collections. I’ll talk more about the new Iconography in a future post.

The other pole of my original iconography — the force fitted stuff — is now housed in a second pillar named Aesthetics. This pillar is for George Moore’s writing about art and artists; his visual acuity trained on ancient, neoclassical, impressionist and post impressionist pictures (illustrated by William Orpen in Homage to Manet).

There’s a trove of Moore’s writing in Aesthetics, most of it uncollected and unedited for contemporary readers like you and me (until now). The pillar currently has about 220 essays of art criticism that Moore contributed to magazines and newspapers, from the mid 1880s until the early 1930s. This is Moore the aesthete, the philosopher, the polemicist, the tastemaker, the advocate and iconoclast. 

Also in Aesthetics are about 40 quotidian articles that Moore revised for publication in books, as a more permanent and collectable testament of his beliefs. Because George Moore Interactive is unconstrained by the economics of print publication, all of these revised texts are served up with their predecessors, so that the curious among us can see for themselves how the author’s “impressions and opinons” evolved. Why take Douglas Cooper’s word for it?

Though Aesthetics is mainly textual, it is illustrated. Not with pictures of George Moore (those are in Iconography), but with pictures that Moore gazed at, thought and wrote about (e.g. Manet’s portrait of Eva Gonzalès). As an art critic, he frequently attended exhibitions in academies and galleries and evaluated what was for sale (including lots of pictures that he didn’t like and the few that he loved). When empty column inches and press deadlines demanded Moore’s immediate attention, and there was nothing new in Bond Street worth talking about, he would visit museums and review what he found there; occasionally he advised curators about what to acquire, what to shun and what to deaccession; he once even interviewed for a job as director of a museum of art (but wasn’t hired).

Aesthetics retrieves, edits, annotates and programs hundreds of essays that George Moore wrote about art and artists, and also shows the pictures he wrote about. Each of us gets to ponder and decide what to make of it.

This is a dynamic, self-directed approach to art history and it’s how many of us like to approach words and pictures when we’re allowed to roam the stalls and galleries without a tour guide or lecturer telling us what to think.

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You Are Invited

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The Oak Park (Illinois) Public Library will host a virtual + in-person discussion of George Moore Interactive on Saturday, February 25, 2023 at 12:30 PM US Central Time (6:30 PM GMT). Click here to open the Library’s free online registration page. I’d love to see you there.