It is several years now since that day when I heard Mr. Moore
haranguing Mr. Russell and Mr. Magee and Mr. Bailey on the Battle of
Jutland, but my recollection of the occasion is very vivid, partly
because I have a good memory for things which interest me (and none
at all for things in which I am not interested) but chiefly because
it seemed to me that on that day Mr. Moore definitely became an old
man. His age is not stated in the books of reference, for Mr. Moore
is as reticent as an actress on this point, but he is older than
Mr. Shaw, who is much older than Mr. Yeats or "A. E." It may seem
singular that he, so destitute of reserve in other and more intimate
matters, should be secretive on this, but I fancy that his failure
to publish the number of his years is due less to vanity than to
inability to believe that he is as old as they denote. Judged by the
rules of arithmetic his age is--so much; but judged by his feelings,
it is--much less. Facts are stubborn things, so we are told, demanding
acceptance and unquestioned admission, but Mr. Moore declines to accept
the fact of time: he ignores it. But on the day on which the news of
the Battle of Jutland was made public, the fact of time ceased to be
ignorable, and Mr. Moore, for the first moment in his life, yielded to
his years. He looked old and he talked as old men talk. There was a
note of panic in his voice, of frightened urgency, and he complained
bitterly of those who saw importance in a mean brawl in Dublin, but
remained indifferent to an event which might result in the destruction
of a desirable civilization. I doubt whether anything in the world
had ever until that day been serious to Mr. Moore in the sense that
loss and suffering and great grief are serious. I am certain that he
never understood why people were angry with him because of "Hail and
Farewell." The resentment manifested against him by Lady Gregory and
Mr. Yeats was to him incomprehensibly petty: the deeper resentment of
other people, more grievously wounded by his revelations which they
declared to be untrue, filled him with astonishment. The spectacle of
life was so much of a spectacle to him that he could not conceive of
it as anything else to others. He had made himself so completely, not
a participant in affairs, but an observer of them, that he had lost
the faculty of personal feeling. His interest in acts and motives
was so intense that he could not understand any one objecting to his
prying into the more entertaining of their private relationships.
Equally difficult was it for him to understand that they should deeply
disrelish the idea of having their affairs, intimate and even secret,
used as material for a book by Mr. Moore. Any human experience, he
seems to argue, particularly when narrated in his exquisite style, is
of value to mankind, and it must have seemed to him that there was
something, not only absurd, but also disgraceful in the objection many
people had to the publication of their private concerns. Had he not
paid tribute to privacy by omitting names or inventing others than the
proper ones? True, everyone knew who were the persons portrayed, but
was that his fault? And since every one knew already of the affairs,
what possible harm could there be in his putting them into perfect
and publishable prose? The objection raised by some persons that the
incidents narrated by him as facts were pure inventions was frivolous!
What was truth? Mr. Moore, like jesting Pilate, asked the question,
but did not wait for a reply: he published as quickly as he could. The
three volumes which make up "Hail and Farewell" are remarkable and have
much value, but it is necessary to remember that Mr. Moore has not
always been careful in them to distinguish between the historian and
the novelist, between the recorder and the inventor. There are many
dull passages in the trilogy, especially those in which he relates
his experiences with his kinsman, Mr. Edward Martyn, a charge which
Mr. Moore would not deny, but, on the contrary, proudly admit, for he
insists that dullness is a prominent feature of all great books. It
is only the newspapers and ephemeral books which are interesting from
beginning to end, he asserts--a statement which implies that Mr. Moore
has been happier in his newspapers than most people have. In this
matter of privacies, Mr. Moore was, and still is, the most complete and
consistent of communists. He believes in private property, but not in
private feelings. One imagines him, in the days before the Battle of
Jutland, asking in puzzled fashion, "What do you mean when you say you
_feel_ things? What _is_ feeling? Why should it ever be _private_?"
"This lady is in love with that gentleman who is not her husband! How
interesting! I shall write a book about their love for each other.
They may object! But why? Her husband's feelings!... Now, isn't that
absurd!" And so on. Miss Susan Mitchell, in a very entertaining, but
not entirely sympathetic book, entitled "George Moore," declares
that he seceded from the Roman Catholic Church because be objected
to the secrecy of the confessional. His sins, he considered, were so
absorbingly interesting that they ought to be publicly confessed rather
than confided to an undivulging priest. The flaw in Miss Mitchell's
argument is her assumption that Mr. Moore had any sins to confess!...