It is good, after all, to come across a novel written by a man who can
write a novel. We have been much in the company of the Amateur of
late, and I for one am very weary of him--weary of his preposterous
goings-out and comings-in, of his smart ineptitudes, of his solemn
zeal in reforming the decayed art of fiction, of his repeated failures
to discover beneficence in all those institutions, from the Common Law
of England to the Scheme of the Universe, which have managed to leave
him and his aspirations out of count. I am weary of him and of his
deceased wife's sister, and of their fell determination to discover
each other's soul in a bottle of hay. Above all, I am weary of his
writings, because he cannot write, neither has he the humility to sit
down and learn.
Mr. George Moore, on the other hand, has steadily labored to make
himself a fine artist, and his training has led him through many
strange places. I should guess that among living novelists few have
started with so scant an equipment. As far as one can tell he had, to
begin with, neither a fertile invention nor a subtle dramatic
instinct, nor an accurate ear for language. A week ago I should have
said this very confidently: after reading _Esther Waters_ I say it
less confidently, but believe it to be true, nevertheless. Mr. Moore
has written novels that are full of faults. These faults have been
exposed mercilessly, for Mr. Moore has made many enemies. But he has
always possessed an artistic conscience and an immense courage. He
answered his critics briskly enough at the time, but an onlooker of
common sagacity could perceive that the really convincing answer was
held in reserve--that, as they say in America, Mr. Moore "allowed" he
was going to write a big novel one of these days, and meanwhile we had
better hold our judgment upon Mr. Moore's capacity open to revision.
What, then, is to be said of _Esther Waters_, this volume of a modest
377 pages, upon which Mr. Moore has been at work for at least two
years?
"Esther" and Mr. Hardy's "Tess."
Well, in the first place, I say, without hesitation, that _Esther
Waters_ is the most important novel published in England during these
two years. We have been suffering from the Amateur during that period,
and no doubt (though it seems hard) every nation has the Amateur it
deserves. To find a book to compare with _Esther Waters_ we must go
back to December, 1891, and to Mr. Hardy's _Tess of the
D'Urbervilles_. It happens that a certain similarity in the motives of
these two stories makes comparison easy. Each starts with the
seduction of a young girl; and each is mainly concerned with her
subsequent adventures. From the beginning the advantage of probability
is with the younger novelist. Mr. Moore's "William Latch" is a
thoroughly natural figure, and remains a natural figure to the end of
the book: an uneducated man and full of failings, but a man always,
and therefore to be forgiven by the reader only a little less readily
than Esther herself forgives him. Mr. Hardy's "Alec D'Urberville" is a
grotesque and violent lay figure, a wholly incredible cad. Mr. Hardy,
by killing Tess's child, takes away the one means by which his heroine
could have been led to return to D'Urberville without any loss of the
reader's sympathy. Mr. Moore allows Esther's child to live, and thus
has at hand the material for one of the most beautiful stories of
maternal love ever imagined by a writer. I dislike extravagance of
speech, and would run my pen through these words could I remember, in
any novel I have read, a more heroic story than this of Esther Waters,
a poor maid-of-all-work, without money, friends, or character,
fighting for her child against the world, and in the end dragging
victory out of the struggle. In spite of the Æschylean gloom in which
Mr. Hardy wraps the story of Tess, I contend that Esther's fight is,
from end to end, the more heroic.
Also Esther's story seems to me informed with a saner philosophy of
life. There is gloom in her story; and many of the circumstances are
sordid enough; but throughout I see the recognition that man and woman
can at least improve and dignify their lot in this world. Many people
believe _Tess_ to be the finest of its author's achievements. A
devoted admirer of Mr. Hardy's genius, I decline altogether to
consent. To my mind, among recent developments of the English novel
nothing is more lamentable than the manner in which this
distinguished writer has allowed himself of late to fancy that the
riddles of life are solved by pulling mouths at Providence (or
whatever men choose to call the Supreme Power) and depicting it as a
savage and omnipotent bully, directing human affairs after the fashion
of a practical joker fresh from a village ale-house. For to this
teaching his more recent writings plainly tend; and alike in _Tess_
and _Life's Little Ironies_ the part played by the "President of the
Immortals" is no sublimer--save in the amount of force exerted--than
that of a lout who pulls a chair suddenly from under an old woman.
Now, by wedding Necessity with uncouth Jocularity, Mr. Hardy may have
found an hypothesis that solves for him all the difficulties of life.
I am not concerned in this place to deny that it may be the true
explanation. I have merely to point out that art and criticism must
take some time in getting accustomed to it, and that meanwhile the
traditions of both are so far agreed in allowing a certain amount of
free will to direct the actions of men and women that a tale which
should be all necessity and no free will would, in effect, be
necessity's own contrary--a merely wanton freak.
For, in effect, it comes to this:--The story of Tess, in which
attention is so urgently directed to the hand of Destiny, is not felt
to be inevitable, but freakish. The story of Esther Waters, in which a
poor servant-girl is allowed to grapple with her destiny and, after a
fashion, to defeat it, is felt (or has been felt by one reader, at any
rate) to be absolutely inevitable. To reconcile us to the black flag
above Wintoncester prison as to the appointed end of Tess's career, a
curse at least as deep as that of Pelops should have been laid on the
D'Urberville family. Tess's curse does not lie by nature on all women;
nor on all Dorset women; nor on all Dorset women who have illegitimate
children; for a very few even of these are hanged. We feel that we are
not concerned with a type, but with an individual case deliberately
chosen by the author; and no amount of talk about the "President of
the Immortals" and his "Sport" can persuade us to the contrary. With
Esther Waters, on the other hand, we feel we are assisting in the
combat of a human life against its natural destiny; we perceive that
the woman has a chance of winning; we are happy when she wins; and we
are the better for helping her with our sympathy in the struggle.
That is why, using the word in the Aristotelian sense, I maintain that
_Esther Waters_ is a more "philosophical" work than _Tess_.
The atmosphere of the low-class gambling in which Mr. Moore's
characters breathe and live is no doubt a result of his careful study
of Zola. It is, as everyone knows, M. Zola's habit to take one of the
many pursuits of men--from War and Religion down to Haberdashery and
Veterinary Surgery--and expand it into an atmosphere for a novel. But
in Mr. Moore's case it may safely be urged that gambling on racehorses
actually is the atmosphere in which a million or two of Londoners pass
their lives. Their hopes, their very chances of a satisfying meal,
hang from day to day on the performances of horses they have never
seen. I cannot profess to judge with what accuracy Mr. Moore has
reproduced the niceties of handicapping, bookmaking, place-betting,
and the rest, the fluctuations of the gambling market, and their
causes. I gather that extraordinary care has been bestowed upon these
details; but criticism here must be left to experts, I only know that,
not once or twice only in the course of his narrative, Mr. Moore
makes us study the odds against a horse almost as eagerly as if it
carried our own money: because it does indeed carry for a while the
destiny of Esther Waters--and yet for a while only. We feel that,
whichever horse wins the ultimate issues are inevitable.
It will be gathered from what I have said that Mr. Moore has vastly
outstripped his own public form, even as shown in _A Mummer's Wife_.
But it may be as well to set down, beyond possibility of
misapprehension, my belief that in _Esther Waters_ we have the most
artistic, the most complete, and the most inevitable work of fiction
that has been written in England for at least two years. Its plainness
of speech may offend many. It may not be a favorite in the circulating
libraries or on the bookstalls. But I shall be surprised if it fails
of the place I predict for it in the esteem of those who know the true
aims of fiction and respect the conscientious practice of that great
art.