Variations (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE RECANTATIONS OF GEORGE MOORE I Had intended writing of the tragic Chopin to-day, but George Moore supervened; he and Atlantic City ? an odd combination. Man cannot live in music alone, and when Maurice Speiser met me on the boardwalk and lent me his copy of Avowals (numbered eighty and privately printed for subscribers), I shooed Chopin to the backyard of my consciousness and proceeded to reread Mr. Moore. I say reread because much of the subject-matter in this new, bulky volume saw the light of publication years ago in various English and at least one American periodical: Lippincotts', the Fortnightly, et al. Still, it is, all of it, worthwhile, notwithstanding the fact the old nurse of the County Mayo author wouldn't have blushed at a line therein. Why the book was published as "wicked" by implication is difficult to discover. It should be given to the world at large, after several minor excisions. The one gay anecdote is related in France, and it is so mildly diverting that it will bear repeating here. An eccentric nobleman adorns himself with peacock's feathers for the edification of his peahens ! Yet people subscribe for the pleasure of such innocent foolery. By all means, let us have Avowals naked and unashamed. Only good Moorovians will endure its leagues of technical literary criticism. The Story Teller's Holiday of last year was another kind of a book. Rather blistering than elevating. But amusing always. There was a time when Mr. Moore was content to be called the Irish Flaubert; nowadays he is evidently after the title of the Celtic Casanova, though hardly in these new avowals. They will never rank in interest with Memoirs of My Dead Life; or, indeed, with his Hail and Farewell Trilogy. For one thing, printed dialogue makes slow reading, even when the prose is...