George Moore has been described, with impressive inaccuracy, as the
English Zola. At what was practically the outset of his career he gained
a certain notoriety; which did him good, by calling public attention to
an unknown name; it did him harm, by attaching to that name a certain
stigma. In a certainly remote year, but a year we all of us remember,
there were strange signs in the literary Zodiac. There had been a
distinctly new growth in the short story, and along with the short story
("poisonous honey stolen from France") came a new license in dealing
imaginatively with life, almost permitting the Englishman to contend
with the writers of other nations on their own ground; permitting him,
that is to say, to represent life as it really is. Foreign influences,
certainly, had begun to have more and more effect upon the making of
such literature as is produced in England nowadays; we had a certain
acceptance of Ibsen, a popular personal welcome of Zola, and literary
homage paid to Verlaine. What do these facts really mean? It is certain
that they mean something.
The visit of Zola, for instance--how impossible that would have been a
little while ago! A little while ago we were opening the prison doors
for the publishers who had ventured to bring out translations of _Nana_
and _La Terre_; now we open the doors of the Guildhall for the author of
_Nana_ and _La Terre_; and the same pens, with the same jubilance,
chronicle both incidents. To the spectator of the comedy of life all
this is merely amusing; but to the actor in the tragic comedy of letters
it means a whole new _repertoire._ Not so very many years ago George
Moore was the only novelist in England who insisted on the novelist's
right to be true to life, even when life is unpleasant and immoral; and
he was attacked on all sides.
The visit of Paul Verlaine, too--unofficial, unadvertised, as it
was--seemed to be significant of much. In the first place, it showed, as
in the case of Zola, a readiness on the part of some not unimportant
section of the public to overlook either personal or literary scandal
connected with a man of letters who has done really remarkable work. But
the interest of Verlaine's visit was much more purely literary than that
of Zola; his reception was in no sense a concession to success, but
entirely a tribute to the genius of a poet.
I find that William Watson published only one tiny volume of verse, the
barren burlesque of _The Eloping Angels_, which should never have been
printed, and a book of prose, _Excursions in Criticism_, the criticism
and the style being alike as immature and unbalanced as his verse is
generally mature and accomplished; while Mr. Le Gallienne has forsaken
the domesticity of the muse, to officiate, in _The Religion of a
Literary Man_, as the Canon Farrar of the younger generation. The most
really poetic of the younger poets, W. B. Yeats, who has yet to be
"discovered" by the average critic and the average reader, has this year
published a new volume of verse, _The Countess Kathleen_, as well as a
book of prose stories, _The Celtic Twilight_, and, in conjunction with
Edwin J. Ellis, a laborious study in the mysticism of William Blake.
Yeats' work, alone among recent work in verse, has the imaginative
quality of vision; it has the true Celtic charm and mystery; and while
such admirable verse as Watson's, such glowing verse as Thompson's, are
both superior, on purely technical grounds, to Yeats', neither has the
spontaneous outflow of the somewhat untrained singing-voice of the
younger poet.
Another writer of verse who has not yet been estimated at his proper
value, John Davidson, has also published a new book of poems, _Fleet
Street Eclogues_, and a book of prose, _A Random Itinerary._ It is
difficult to do justice to Davidson, for he never does justice to
himself. His verse is always vivid and striking; at its best it has a
delightful quality of fantastic humor and quaint extravagance; but it is
singularly uneven, and never, in my opinion, at its best in purely
modern subjects. The _Random Itinerary_ is a whole series of happy
accidents; but there are gaps in the series. Davidson strikes one as a
man who might do almost anything; why, then, does he not do it?
Now, these paradoxical digressions have brought me back to the question
of Zola and Moore, and of the realistic novel. Moore's were based on no
theories; Zola's on certain theories, really a view of humanity which he
adopted as a formula: "Nature seen through a temperament;" a definition
supposed to be his definition of all art; which it most certainly is
not. Yet nothing, certainly, could be more exact and expressive as a
definition of the art of Huysmans.
Zola has made up his mind that he will say everything without omitting a
single item; so that his vision is the vision of the mediocre man; and
his way of finding out in a slang dictionary that a filthy idea can be
expressed by an ingeniously filthy phrase in _Argot_, is by no means
desirable. Every one knows two sentences in that supreme masterpiece,
_Madame Bovary_, how that detail, brought in without the slightest
emphasis of the husband turning his back at the very instant when his
wife dies, is a detail of immense psychological value; it indicates to
us, at the very beginning of the book, just the character of the man
about whom we are to read so much. Zola would have taken at least two
pages to say that, and, after all, he would not have said it.
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. _A Mummers Wife_ is
admirably put together, admirably planned and shaped; the whole
composition of the book is masterly. The style may drag, but not the
action; the construction of a sentence may be uncertain, but not the
construction of a character. The actor and his wife are really living
people; we see them in their surroundings, and we see every detail of
those surroundings. Here, of course, he would never have made Zola's
stupid mistake; but can one imagine for a moment--I certainly can
not--the writer of this novel writing, creating, (if I may dare use the
word) two such sentences of Flaubert, which I quote in their original?
"_Huit jours après, comme elle étendait du linge dans sa cour, elle
fut prise d'un crachement de sang, et le lendemain, tandis que Charles
avait le dos tourné pour fermer le rideau de la fenêtre, elle dit:
'Ah! Mon Dieu!' poussa un soupir et s'évanouit. Ella était morte._"
George Moore's _Modern Painting_ is full of injustices, brutality and
ignorances; but it is full also of the most generous justice, the most
discriminating sympathy, and the genuine knowledge of the painter. It is
hastily thought out, hastily written; but here, in these vivid, direct,
unscrupulously logical pages, you will find some of the secrets of the
art of painting, let out, so to speak, by an intelligence all sensation,
which has soaked them up without knowing it. Yet, having begun by trying
to paint, and having failed in painting, and so set himself to the
arduous task of being a prose-writer, he is often, in spite of his
painter's accuracy as to "values" and "technique" and so on, unreliable.
For, being neither creative as a novelist nor as a critic, he has
nothing, as a matter of course, of two among many essential qualities:
vision and divination. Take, for instance, a few pages anywhere in
_L'Art Romanesque_ of Baudelaire, or from his prose on Delacroix, on
Constantine Guys, on Wagner, on Daumier, on Whistler, on Flaubert, and
on Balzac--where he is always supreme and consummate, "fiery and
final"--and place these beside any chosen pages of Moore's prose on
either Balzac or on Whistler, and you will see all the difference in the
world: as I have said above, between the creative and the uncreative
criticism.
Had Walter Pater devoted himself exclusively to art criticism, there is
no doubt that, in a sense, he would have been a great art critic. There
are essays scattered throughout his work, as in the Botticelli where he
first introduces Botticelli to the modern world, as in the Leonardo da
Vinci--in which the simplest words take color from each other by the
cunning accident of their placing in the sentences, the subtle spiritual
fire kindling from word to word creates a masterpiece, a miracle in
which all is inspiration, all is certainty, all is evocation, and which,
in the famous page on _La Gioconda_, rises to the height of actually
lyrical prose--in which the essential principles of the art of painting
are divined and interpreted with extraordinary subtlety. In the same
sense all that Whistler has written about painting deserves to be taken
seriously, and read with understanding. Written in French, and signed by
Baudelaire, his truths, and paradoxes reflecting truths, would have been
realized for what they are. He fought for himself, and spared no form of
stupidity: for, in Whistler, apart from his malice, his poisonous
angers, taste was carried to the point of genius, and became creative.
George Moore's literary career has been singularly interesting; his
character as a writer is very curious. A man who respects his art, who
is devoted to literature, who has a French eye for form, he seems
condemned to produce work which is always spotted with imperfection. All
his life he has been seeking a style, and he has not yet found one. At
times he drops into style as if by accident, and then he drops style as
if by design. He has a passionate delight in the beauty of good prose;
he has an ear for the magic of phrases; his words catch at times a
troubled expressive charm; yet he has never attained ease in writing,
and he is capable of astounding incorrectness--the incorrectness of a
man who knows better, who is not careless and yet who can not help
himself. Yet the author of _A Mummer's Wife_, of _The Confessions of a
Young Man_, of _Impressions and Opinions_, has more narrowly escaped
being a great writer than even he himself, perhaps, is aware.