"; but these visits were none of them of long duration until his
"return" in 1901.

It is far easier to paint in the background of landscape remembered
from childhood than it is again to get into touch with people parted
from in childhood. The landscape changes little in far-off, lonely
places, but people nowhere are what they were when the past years
sufficient to bring up beside the old folks a new generation with ideals
changed. Ireland, for all the agitation of the Land League, was landlord
Ireland when Mr. Moore got "A Drama in Muslin" from Ireland; Ireland was
passing to the peasant proprietor when Mr. Moore returned to it to write
"The Untilled Field" and "The Lake." Social and economic questions,
however, interest Mr. Moore only as they concern the individual, but the
changing conditions in Ireland cannot be prevented from finding their
way here and there into his writing through the changes they have
brought about in the people of whom he writes, though many of those he
writes of are survivals from an older generation.

There are glimpses in his writing of many phases of Irish life, his
characters varying all the way from such old-timers as his Cousin Dan,
who, as he himself intimates, might have come out of the pages of Lever
or Lover, to the very modern Father Gogarty, whose outlook is on an
Ireland that "perhaps, more than any other country, had understood the
supremacy of spirit over matter, and had striven to escape through
mortifications from the prison of the flesh." One wonders, at times, if
Mr. Moore, who joined the cause of Mr. Martyn and Mr. Yeats,
self-confessedly, to have his finger in a new literary pie, really felt
the landscape as he says he does in his books, or whether he just
momentarily caught the power of seeing it through their eyes. Can one
who was once so resolute a realist really appreciate "faint Celtic haze;
a vision of silver mist and distant mountain and moor"? Perhaps he can,
as a good actor appreciates a part alien to his sympathy, that he is
playing. But whether or not Mr. Moore learned to love the lonely
landscape for a while, he eventually tired of it, as his Father Gogarty
tired of it. Surely Mr. Moore is speaking personally as well as
dramatically when he writes, "This lake was beautiful, but he was tired
of its low gray shores; he was tired of those mountains, melancholy as
Irish melodies, and as beautiful."

Almost any novelist, sooner or later in his career, dabbles in d