I
I met George Moore, during a feverish winter I spent in Paris in 1890,
at the house of Doctor John Chapman, 46 Avenue Kleber; who at one time,
before he settled there, had been the Proprietor and then Editor of _The
Westminster Review._ In his review appeared in 1886 Pater's wonderful
and fascinating essay on Coleridge; in 1887 his penetrating and
revealing essay on Wincklemann. "He is the last fruit of the
Renaissance, and explains in a striking way its motives and tendencies."
At that time I had heard a good deal of Moore; I had read very few of
his novels; these I had found to be entertaining, realistic, and
decadent; and certainly founded on modern French fiction. He made little
or no impression on me on that occasion; he was Irish and amusing. Our
conversation was probably on Paris and France and French prose. He gave
me his address, King's Bench Walk, Inner Temple, and asked me to call on
him after my return to London.
I was born, "like a fiend hid in a cloud," cruel, nervous, excitable,
passionate, restless, never quite human, never quite normal and, from
the fact that I have never known what it was to have a home, as most
children know it, my life has been in many ways a wonderful, in certain
ways a tragic one: an existence, indeed, so inexplicable even to myself,
that I can not fathom it. If I have been a vagabond, and have never been
able to root myself in any one place in the world, it is because I have
no early memories of any one sky or soil. It has freed me from many
prejudices in giving me its own unresting kind of freedom; but it has
cut me off from whatever is stable, of long growth in the world.
When I came up to London, in 1889, I was fortunate enough to take one
room in a narrow street, named Fountain Court. In 1821 Blake left South
Molton Street for Fountain Court, where he remained for the rest of his
life. The side window looked down through an opening between the houses,
showing the river and the hills beyond; Blake worked at a table facing
the window. At that time I had only seen the Temple; so that when I
entered it for the first time in my life, to call on Moore, I was seized
by a sudden fascination which never left me. I questioned him as to the
chances I might have of finding rooms there; he wisely advised me to
look at the outside of the window of the barber's shop, where notices of
vacant flats were put up. Finally I saw: "Fountain Court: rooms to let."
I immediately made all the necessary inquiries; and found myself in
March, 1871, entire possessor of the top flat, which had a stone balcony
from which I looked down on a wide open court, with a stone fountain in
the middle. I lived there for ten years. My most intimate friends were,
first and foremost, Yeats, then Moore: all three of us being of Celtic
origin.
My intercourse with Moore was mostly at night; that is, when I was not
wandering in foreign countries or absorbed in much more animal and
passionate affairs. I dedicated to him _Studies in Two Literatures_
1897; the dedication was written in Rome, which begins: "My dear Moore,
Do you remember, at the time when we were both living in the Temple, and
our talks used to begin with midnight, and go on until the first
glimmerings of dawn shivered among the trees, yours and mine; do you
remember how often we have discussed, well, I suppose, everything which
I speak of in these studies in the two literatures which we both chiefly
care about." It ends: "I think of our conversations now in Rome, where,
as in those old times in the Temple, I still look out of my window on a
fountain in a square; only, here, I have the Pantheon to look at, on the
other side of my fountain."
George Moore, whose _Pagan Poems_ were a mixture of atrociously rhymed
sensations, abnormal and monstrous, decadent and depraved, not without a
sense of luxury and of color, and yet nothing more than feverish fancies
and delirious dreams, has in some way fashioned a French sonnet which is
an evident imitation of Mallarmé's. Only, between these writers is, as
it were, an abyss. It has been Mallarmé's distinction to have always
aspired after an impossible liberation of the soul of literature from
what is fretting and constraining in "the body of that death" which is
the mere literature of words. Finally come his "last period"--after the
jewels of Hérodiade, which scattered and recaptured sudden fire,--in
which his spirit wandered in an opaque darkness; as for instance, in the
sonnet, made miraculously out of the repetition of two rhymes--"onyx
lampadophore"--or, by preference, one that begins:
_Une dentelle s'abolit._
Here, then, is Moore's sonnet to Edouard Dujardin.
_La chair est bonne de l'alose
Plus fine que celle du bar,
Mais la Loire est loin et je n'ose
Abandonner Pierre Abélard._
_Je suis un esclave de l'art;
La sage Héloise se pose
Sans robe, sans coiffe et sans fard,
Et j'oublie aisément l'alose._
_Mais je vois la claire maison--
Arbres, pelouses et statue.
Du jardin, j'entend ta leçon:_
_Raison qui sauve, foi qui tue,
Autels éclabousses du son
Que verse une idole abattue._
I find in Moore's _Confessions_ these sentences: "A year passed; a year
of art and dissipation--one part art, two parts dissipation. And we
thought there was something very thrilling in leaving the Rue de la
Gaieté, returning to my home to dress, and presenting our spotless
selves to the élite. And we succeeded very well, as indeed all young
men do who waltz perfectly and avoid making love to the wrong woman." I
should have preferred to read those sentences in French rather than in
English; they are essentially Parisian and of the _grands Boulevards_;
only, the end of the last sentence must have been suggested from some
cynical phrase written by Balzac. Add to this the egoism of the
Irishman: after that, what more do we need in the way of comparisons?
That Balzac is the greatest, the most profound, thinker in French
literature after Blaise Pascal, is certain. Only, he had a more creative
genius than any novelist, a genius unsurpassable and unsurpassed; in
proof of which--if such a proof were actually required--I give these
sentences of Baudelaire translated by Swinburne. "To me it had always
seemed that it was his chief merit to be a visionary, and a passionate
visionary; all his characters are gifted with the ardours of life which
animated himself. In a word, every one in Balzac, down to the very
scullions, has genius. Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with
will. It is actually Balzac himself." Somewhere, he compares Shakespeare
with Balzac; and adds: "Balzac asserts, and Balzac cannot blunder or
lie. He has that wonderful wisdom, never at fault on its own ground,
which made him not simply the chief of dramatic story, but also the
great master of morals."
No critic could for one instant apply to any of George Moore's novels
the phrase of "grand spiritual realism." A realist he always has been; a
realist, who, having founded himself on French novelists, has really, in
certain senses, brought something utterly new into English fiction.
Luckily, he is Irish; luckily, he lived the best years of his youth in
Paris. His prose shows the intense labor with which he produced every
chapter of every novel; in fact, there is too much of the laborious mind
in all his books. He was right in saying in _Avowals_: "Real literature
is concerned with description of life and thoughts of life rather than
with acts. He must write about the whole of life and not about parts of
life, and he must write truth and not lies." The first sentence
expresses the writer's sense of his own prose in his novels: and yet
there is always a lot of vivid action in them. Only the greatest
novelists have written about the whole of life: Balzac, Tolstoi,
Cervantes, for instance; but the fact is that Balzac is always good to
reread, but not Tolstoi: I couple two giants. Goriot, Valérie Marneffe,
Pons, Landsch are called up before us after the same manner as Othello
or Don Quixote; Balzac stakes all on one creation, exactly as
Shakespeare stakes all in one creation.
Writing on Joseph Conrad, I referred to one of his tricks--which seem
inextricable tricks of art--which he learned from Balzac: the method,
which he uses in _Youth_, of doubling or trebling the interest by
setting action within action, as certain pictures are set within certain
frames. It is astonishing to find the influence Balzac had on Conrad,
partly when suspense is scarcely concerned with action, partly in his
involved manner of relating events. In Balzac I often find that some of
his tales, like Conrad's, grow downwards out of an episode at the end;
in some the end is told first, the beginning next--which was a method
Poe often used--and last of all in the middle; for instance, in
_Honorine._
Writing of Zola I said:
Zola has defined art, very aptly, as nature seen through a temperament.
The art of Zola is nature seen through a formula. He observes, indeed,
with astonishing closeness, but he observes in support of preconceived
ideas. And so powerful is his imagination that he has created a whole
world which has no existence anywhere but in his own brain, and he has
placed there imaginary beings, so much more logical than life, in the
midst of surroundings which are themselves so real as to lend almost a
semblance of reality to the embodied formulas who inhabit them.
As I have said that George Moore might be supposed to be a lineal
descendant of Zola, it seems to me that in many ways his method is
almost the same as Zola's; only, they have different theories; both
observe with immense persistence; but their manner of observation, after
all, is only that of the man in the street; while, on the contrary, the
Goncourts create with their nerves, with their sensations, with their
noting of the sensations, with the complex curiosities of a delicately
depraved instinct. The strange woman in _La Faustin_ is one of
Goncourt's most fascinating creations: Germinie Lacerteux, his most
sordidly depraved animal; and in the Preface to that novel, in 1864,
they were right in saying: "_Aujourd'hui que le Roman s'élargit et
grandit, qu'il commence à être la grande forme sérieuse, passionnée,
vivante, de l'Étude littéraire et de enquête sociale, qu'il devient,
par l'analyse et par la recherche psychologique, l'Histoire morale
contemporaine._" They were the first, I believe, to invent an entirely
new form, a breaking-up of the plain, straightforward narrative into
chapters, which are generally disconnected, and sometimes no more than
six sentences: as, for instance, in that perverse, decadent, delicately
depraved study of the stages in the education of the young Parisian
girl, _Chérie_ (for all its "immodesty") was an admirable thing, and a
model for all such studies. Only, when I have to choose, after Balzac,
the most wonderfully created woman in any novel, the vision of Emma
Bovary starts before me--a woman, as I have said somewhere (with none of
the passionate certainty of Charles Baudelaire) who is half vulgar and
half hysterical, incapable of a fine passion; her trivial desires, her
futile aspirations after second-hand pleasures and second-hand ideals,
give to Flaubert all that he wants: the opportunity to create beauty out
of reality.
I have always had a great admiration of Camille Lemonnier, who brought
something rare, exotic and furiously animal into Flemish prose; as in
his masterpiece, _Un Mâle_, where he reveals in an astonishing fashion
those peasants who are so brutal, yet so subtly and rudely apprehended,
in their instincts: these peasants who are the most elemental of human
beings. He has none of Hardy's sinister and dejected vision of life; who
often seems closer to the earth than to men and women, and who sees
women and men out of the eyes of wild creatures; whose peasants have
been compared with Shakespeare's. Lemonnier's women and men have in them
something mysterious, dramatic, tragic: in their loves and hatreds, in
their crimes and joys, they have something of the mysterious force which
germinates in the furrows which they turn.
Pater, who hated every form of noise and of extravagance, who disliked
whatever seemed to him either sordid or morbid, guarded himself from all
these and from many other things by the wary humor that protects the
sensitive. So, in his reviews of Wilde and of Moore, he is always very
much on his guard as to the manner of expounding his individual
opinions; saying of Wilde that his _Dorian Gray_ "may fairly claim to go
with that of Edgar Poe, and with some good French work of the same kind,
done--probably--in more or less conscious imitation of it." So in
praising Moore's clever book, he refers to his "French intuitiveness and
gaillardise;" saying that he is "a very animating guide to the things he
loves, and in particular to the modern painting of France," that (here
he uses his wary humor) "these chapters have, by their very conviction,
their perverse conviction, a way of arousing the general reader, lost
perhaps in the sleep of conventional ideas," that, to and with "the
reader may now judge fairly of Moore's manner of writing; may think
perhaps there is something in it of the manner of the artists he writes
of."
One of the most original pictures of Degas is _L'Absinthe_, which
represents Desboutins in the _café_ of the _Nouvelle Athènes_ seated
beside a woman. Moore says "Desboutins always came to the _café_ alone,
as did Manet, Degas, Darentz. Desboutins is thinking of his dry points;
the woman is incapable of thought. If questioned about her life she
would probably answer, _Je suis à la coule._" To my mind Degas gives in
this picture, in a more modern way than Manet, an equal vision of
reality. Desboutins, the Bohemian painter, sits there in a mood of grim
dissatisfaction; he is just as living as the depraved woman who sits
beside him--before the glass of absinthe that shines like an enormous
and sea-green jewel--with eyes in which much of her shameful earthiness
is betrayed, without malice, without pity.
I open at random, the pages of _Confessions of a Young Man_ where there
is a reference to the _café_ of the _Nouvelle Athènes_, Place Pigalle;
where the writer confesses more of himself than on any other page of his
book.
I am a student of ball rooms, bar rooms, streets and alcoves. I have
read very little; but all I read I can turn to account, and all I read I
remember. To read freely, extensively, has always been my ambition, and
my utter inability to study has always been to me a subject of grave
inquietude,--study, as contrasted with a general and haphazard gathering
of ideas taken in flight. But in me, the impulse is so original to
frequent the haunts of men that it is irresistible, conversation is the
breath of my nostrils, I watch the movement of life, and my ideas spring
from it uncalled for, as buds from branches. Contact with the world is
in me the generating force; without it what invention I have is thin and
sterile, and it grows thinner rapidly, until it dies away utterly, as it
did in the composition of my unfortunate _Roses of Midnight._
I turn from those sentences to Casanova, whose _Memoirs_ are one of the
most wonderful autobiographies in the world; who, always passionate
after sensations, confesses, in his confessions, the most shameless
things that have ever been written: one to whom woman was, indeed, the
most important thing in the world, but to whom nothing in the world was
indifferent. He was, as he professes, always in love--at least, with
something. Being of origin Venetian and Spanish, he had none of the cold
blooded libertinism of Valmont in _Les Liaisons Dangereuses_ of Laclos.
Baudelaire, in two of his sweeping Paradoxes, said of this book: "_Ce
livre, s'il brûle, ne peut brûler qu'à la manière de la glace. Tous
les livres sont immoraux._" Casanova, himself, is the primitive type of
the Immoralist, in certain senses of the abnormal Immoralist. His latest
reincarnation is an André Gide's _L'Immoraliste_; a book perverse and
unpassionate.
Now, let us return to the modern writer's Confessions. Whether Moore has
read the whole of Casanova or not, there are curiously similar touches
in both these writers; as, for instance, in the word "alcoves, streets,
ballrooms." Instead of the modern "barrooms" use the word _cafés._ One
essential difference is that Casanova had a passion for books: the more
essential one is, that Casanova was born to be a vagabond and a Wanderer
over almost the whole of Europe, that he had tasted all the forbidden
fruits of the earth, and that he had sinned with all his body--leaving,
naturally, the soul out of the question.
Every great artist has tasted the sweet poison of the Forbidden Fruit.
The Serpent, the most "subtile" of all the Beasts, gave an apple he had
gathered from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to Eve; she
having eaten it and having given one to Adam, both saw they were naked,
and, with nakedness, Sin entered into the World. Now, what was stolen
from the Garden of God has, ever since, been the one temptation which it
is almost impossible to resist. For instance Shakespeare stole from
Marlowe, Milton stole from Shakespeare, Keats stole from Virgil,
Swinburne stole from Baudelaire and Crashaw, Browning stole from Donne;
as for Wagner, having stolen a motet from Vittorio which he used, almost
note for note in _Parsifal_, also from Palestrina and his school, and
from Berlioz and from Liszt, it is impossible to say what he did not
steal. Oscar Wilde stripped, as far as he could, all the fruit he could
gather from the orchards of half a dozen French novelists; besides those
of Poe and of Pater. Gabrielle d'Annunzio has stolen as thoroughly as
Wilde; in fact, the whole contents of certain short stories. As for
George Moore, he has been guilty of as many thefts as these; only he has
concealed his thefts with more stealth. Henry James said to some one of
my acquaintance: "Moore has an absolute genius for picking other men's
brains." That saying is as final as it is fundamental.
Rossetti said: "There ought to be always, double of oneself, the
self-critic, who should be one always with the poet." The legend of the
Doppelgänger haunted him; the result of which is _How They Met
Themselves_, where two lovers wandering in a wood come on their doubles,
apparitions who, casting their perilous eyes on them sidewise, vanish.
It is mysterious and menacing. Pater uses the same symbol: three knights
as they hear the night-hawk, are confronted by their own images, but
with blood, all three of them, fresh upon the brow, or in the mouth. "It
were well to draw the sword, be one's enemy carnal or spiritual; even
devils, as all men know, taking flight at its white glitter through the
air. Out flashed the brave youths' swords, still with mimic
counter-motion, upon nothing--upon the empty darkness before them."
These revenants are ghost-like and flame-like: they are the symbols of
good and evil; the symbols of the haunting of one uneasy conscience.
Balzac, Blake, Hawthorne, saw them in visions; the moderns, such as
Maupassant and Moore, must always ignore them.
The novel and the prose play are the two great imaginative forms which
prose has invented for itself. Prose is the language of what we call
real life, and it is only in prose that an illusion of external reality
can be given. And, in any case, the prose play, the novel, come into
being as exceptions and are invented by men who can not write plays in
verse. Only in the novel and the prose play does prose become free to
create, free to develop to the utmost limits of its vitality. Perhaps
the highest merit of prose consists in this, that it allows us to think
in words. But art, in verse, being strictly and supremely on art, begins
by transforming. Indeed, there is no form of art which is not an attempt
to capture life, to create life over again.
The rhythm of poetry is musical; the rhythm of prose is physiological.
For this reason Ibsen's prose is like that of a diagram in Euclid; it is
the rhythm of logic, and it produces in us the purely mental exaltation
of a problem solved. Swinburne, writing on Wilkie Collins's _Armadale_,
declares that the heroine who dies of her own will by her own crime, had
an American or a Frenchman introduced her, no acclamation would have
been too vehement to express their gratitude! "But neither Feuillet nor
Hawthorne could have composed and constructed such a story; the
ingenuity spent on it may possibly be perverse, but is certainly
superb." As I have never read one line of Feuillet I am no judge of his
merit as a novelist. Hawthorne had a magical imagination, a passion for
"handling sin" purely; he was haunted by what is obscure and abnormal in
that illusive region which exists on the confines of evil and good; his
opinion of woman was that she "was plucked out of a mystery, and had its
roots still clinging to her." Sin and the Soul, those are the problems
he has always before him; Sin, as our punishment; the Soul, in its
essence, mist-like and intangible. He uses his belief in witchcraft with
admirable effect, the dim mystery which clings about haunted houses, the
fantastic gambols of the soul itself, under what seems like the devil's
own promptings.
In the whole of Moore's prose there is no such magic, no such mystery,
no such diabolism; he is not so lacking in imagination as in style. He
has always been, with impressive inaccuracy, described as the English
Zola; at the outset of his career he gained a certain notoriety not
unlike Zola's; his novels are not based on theories, as some of Zola's
are. Moore always knew how to make a cunning plot, to make some of his
compositions masterly, and how to construct his characters--which, to a
certain extent, are living people, really existent, as their
surroundings. As I say further on: "Compare with any of Zola's novels
the amazingly clever novel of Moore, _A Mummer's Wife_, which goes with
several other novels which are--well--_manqués_, in spite of their
ability, their independence, their unquestionable merits of various
kinds." The style always drags more than the action. Vivid, sensual, not
sensuous, often perverse, never passionate; written with a curious sense
of wickedness, of immorality, of vice; extraordinary at times in some of
the scenes he evokes in one or several chapters; always with the French
element; his prose exotic, morbid, cruel, as cruel as this catsuit of
the passions, has in it a certain scorn and contempt of mediocrities,
which can be delivered with the force of a sledge-hammer that strikes an
anvil and shoots forth sparks.