An event in Dublin later this month will commemorate a highlight of Ireland’s Gaelic Revival, which occurred (the highlight, that is, not the revival as a whole) in the garden of writer George Moore one day in May 1902.
It was a staging of Douglas Hyde’s play, An Tincéir agus an tSídheog (The Tinker and the Fairy), in which Hyde himself performed the part of the tinker and “Janie O’Flanagan”, soon to be better known as Sinéad de Valera, played the fairy.
Three hundred invited guests attended a party that seemed to capture the zeitgeist of a new Ireland. So at least thought Mary EL Butler, who rhapsodised about it in an article for The Gael, a monthly journal dedicated to Irish language and culture.
“A short time ago Dublin was one of the dullest of provincial towns,” she wrote in her introduction to the piece. “Now it is on the high road to becoming one of the most interesting capitals in Europe.”
Moore the Merrier - Frank McNally on the commemoration of a famous Irish garden party from 1902
Ché sara, Sara – Frank McNally on a mysterious Irish beauty who turned Casanova’s head
What’s with the name? – Frank McNally on O’Doul, O’Day, and other nominal oddities of Irish America
Far away, so close – Fionnuala Ward on measuring distance
Her high road ran through Ely Place, clearly, where Moore lived at Number 4. But the excellence of entertainment aside, Butler thought the event had also been notable for its extraordinary display of Irish unity.
It would, she said, have been “almost bewildering to those who have thought of Ireland… as a place divided into warring camps, in which different creeds and classes glare at each other across barriers of hereditary prejudice…”
As she portrayed it, Moore’s garden that day was a melting pot of Irish life:
“Here, for instance, might be seen Dr Kuno Meyer, the world-famed German classicist, chatting to Michael Davitt, while the editor of the United Irishman, the organ of the extreme national party in Ireland, stood close to the editor of the Daily Express, the organ of the extreme Orange party.
“Again one might see a fashionable society woman, side-by-side with a frieze-coated country delegate to the Gaelic League Congress which was held in Dublin during the week, or note a Catholic priest in animated conversation with Mr George Russell, the mystic poet…”
In making Hyde’s play “the raison d’être for a garden party”, Butler thought, Moore had given unstoppable impetus to the cause. “The Irish language movement is going ahead day-by-day and week-by-week, surely and swiftly,” she declared. “The dawn of a thoroughly Irish Ireland is now within measurable distance.”
That was a lot of responsibility to place on a mere party, however exciting. It may also have asked a bit much of Moore, who was hardly a model for unifying communities.
Renowned for his feuds, he was even then engaged in one with two neighbouring sisters, the “Miss Beams”, after he painted his front door green in defiance of the area’s Georgian uniformity, which had white doors as standard.
The Beams expressed their opinion of Moore by buying a copy of his novel Esther Waters, shredding it, and posting the remains in his letterbox, with a note saying it was “too filthy to keep in the house”.
He then retaliated using the sisters’ dog (which had exacerbated matters by fouling the pavement outside his house) as collateral.
When his guest WB Yeats accidentally locked him out one night, Moore had to explain his nocturnal routine: “Oh, I forgot. Every night I go out at 11, at 12, at 1, and rattle my stick on the railing to make the Miss Beams’ dog bark.”
The Beams in turn escalated the row by hiring organ grinders to play outside his window while he tried to write.
And then there was their cat, which threatened a blackbird whose singing – in a garden opposite – Moore loved. Whenever he saw the cat cross the street, he threw stones at it. When he was going away, he set a deadly trap.
This resulted in a three-way correspondence between the sisters, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and Moore. But before the dispute could be peacefully resolved, there was a tragic plot twist.
On a later visit, Yeats found his host depressed and wondered why. Moore asked if he remembered the cat and the trap and, when Yeats said yes, confessed: “I have caught the bird.”
After that and many other rows, often with fellow writers, an increasingly friendless Moore left Dublin for London in 1911 and spent most of the rest of his life there or in France.
As for his former garden, where the great party had happened, that became a victim of a later and larger conflict. In October 1940, The Irish Times lamented that the garden was being built over for an “air-raid shelter”.
This helps explain why, when the George Moore Association hosts a first-ever commemoration of the 1902 party on March 21st, it will not be at the original venue.
The day-long event, including talks, music, and a rehearsed reading of Hyde’s play, will instead take place at the Technological University of Dublin, Aungier St. Admission is free, but those planning to attend are asked to notify the georgemooreassociation@gmail.com.
