After his wont Mr. Moore puts his intimates into books made out of Irish life. In "Evelyn Innes" Ulick Dean, fashioned in the first version of the novel after Mr. Yeats, is the only wholly Irish character. Evelyn is not Irish at all, and her Scotch father is given the musical interests of Mr. Dolmetsch, a Bohemian, I believe. But Sir Owen Asher has in him much of Mr. Moore himself, though most of Mr. Moore that is there is the English Mr. Moore. There is something of Mr. Martyn in Monsignor Mostyn, though an actual and not a potential ecclesiastic is drawn upon for the basic characteristics of the character In the second version of "Evelyn Innes" there is more of Mr. Russell than of Mr. Yeats in Ulick Dean, at least in his appearance and sayings, though Mr. Moore could not divest his composer of the personality of Mr. Yeats. There is less of Ireland in "Sister Theresa" (1901) than in "Evelyn Innes," but "The Untilled Field," short stories written after the removal of Mr. Moore to Dublin and gathered together in 1903, are wholly concerned with Ireland. As Mr. Moore makes Jasper say to Millicent in "The Bending of the Bough": "It is the land underfoot that makes the Celt. Soon you will feel the fascination of this dim, remote land steal over you." It was when this æsthetic homesickness overtook Mr. Moore that he grew to feel lonely in England, at least momentarily, and to believe that "we are lonely in a foreign land because we are deprived of our past life; but the past is about us here [he is speaking through the mouth of Dean and in Ireland]; we see it at evening glimmering among the hollows of the hills."
In "Memoirs of my Dead Self" (1906) there are chapters which tell of the return of his thought to his boyhood in the west and that record his wish to be buried with his father by Lough Gara; and all three volumes of "Hail and Farewell," the first of which was published in 1911 as "Ave," and the second in 1912 as "Salve," are the fruit of his ten years' partial residence in Ireland, 1901-11.
Our concern with Mr. Moore here, however, is with Mr. Moore the dramatist, so I shall not dwell on the short stories and the novels save to say that they, more than any writing of his, reveal his inherent dramatic power. By dramatic power I mean not his power of situation and evolution of dramatic technique, but his power to change his point of view with the character he is creating A sensual exquisite himself whose predominant thought is of woman, and of woman from a standpoint closely akin to an epicure's toward an ideal meal, Mr. Moore can identify himself with people in whom there is none of himself but the essential humanity common to mankind. Most wonderful of many wonderful realizations of viewpoint so different from what is his personally is his realization of the attitude of Father MacTurnan, an old priest, celibate by nature, who put aside his books, as ministering to the pride of the intellect, and sat, night after night, with them by his side in the study, but always unopened, while he was knitting socks for the poor of his parish. Better known, of course, than this character of Father MacTurnan is that of Father Gogarty in "The Lake," but for all his sympathetic elaboration of this bemused and distraught cleric the character is never wholly opposed to that of Mr. Moore himself as is the character of Father MacTurnan.