Of all that Mr. Moore said on that extraordinary occasion, I remember
most his sudden outburst into what he called practical politics.
He demanded the impeachment of Mr. Asquith, the restoration of the
Coronation Oath and the abolition of all dogs! The comic incongruity of
those three items in a plan to win the war was apparent neither to him
nor his three elderly auditors, or so it seemed, and I deemed it wise
to control my laughter. Mr. Moore declared that Mr. Asquith's inertia,
of which we were hearing so much then, was certain to bring defeat to
the Allies. One of Mr. Asquith's daughters had sat beside Mr. Moore at
dinner one night in London and had informed her neighbour that "Father
is bored with the War!" whereupon Mr. Moore informed her (or so he
said) that her father's boredom might cause the Allies to lose the War.
Mr. Asquith was guilty of more serious crimes than that: he had ruined
the Irish gentleman and delivered the country over to hobbledehoys and
low minded peasants. Not content with ruining Ireland, no longer fit
to be inhabited by gentlemen, fit only to be the country of publicans,
pawnbrokers, priests and politicians, Mr. Asquith had tried to make
equal ruin in England. He has abolished the Coronation Oath which,
until his advent, had always been administered to the kings of England
at their crowning. In this Oath, they declare their belief that the
Mass is an idolatrous ceremony, not to be acknowledged by reasonable
persons and likely to be accepted only by vulgar Papists. Mr. Asquith,
mindful of the fact that many hundreds of thousands of Catholics are
members of the British Commonwealth of Nations, decided that the kings
of England should not be humiliated and embarrassed at their coronation
by the compulsion to insult the faith of many of their subjects; and so
he introduced a Bill into Parliament to abolish the Oath, which was,
in due time, abolished. Mr. Moore seemed to think that all the evils
from which mankind has suffered since 1914 directly sprang from that
political achievement.
As for dogs, these abominable animals, he said, are nuisances at any
time, but during a war and period of food shortage, they are a positive
menace to the country. He begged us to consider (a) the great quantity
of food consumed by dogs, (b) the amount of nervous irritability
brought about by their incessant yapping, and (c) the extent to which
they defile the streets. He threatened us with famine, insanity and,
finally, plague!... There is an English poet who is also a breeder
of bulldogs. Whenever he reads one of Mr. Moore's periodical canine
denunciations, he becomes so enraged that only the strongest efforts of
his friends prevent him from emptying the contents of his kennels on to
Mr. Moore's doorstep that they may there do their worst. The ambition
of his life is to see one of his bulldogs fasten its teeth firmly in
the calf of Mr. Moore's venerable leg....
V
All that has been written here so far will seem to support the
superstition that Mr. Moore is a trifler with life, that he is a man
destitute of serious purposes; but I am anxious to make plain to
my readers that this superstition is a superstition. His lack of
reticence about his own and other people's affairs and his perverse
incursions into what he imagines to be practical politics are obviously
responsible for the belief that he is what is called "a typical
Irishman," that is to say, a man without a sense of responsibility.
My experience is that "typical Irishmen" are generally discovered
to be Englishmen or Welshmen or New York East Side Jews--the late
Padraic Pearse, Mr. Arthur Griffith and Mr. de Valera correspond to
those descriptions--but it is undeniable that Mr. Moore, not without
deliberation, has helped to maintain the legend that Irishmen are
without a sense of responsibility. When, for example, during one of
the many Home Rule crises, he suggested that the trouble between the
two islands of Great Britain and Ireland might easily be settled by
intelligent engineers, many persons were of the opinion that a man
who could talk such twaddle, as they called it, in a time of much
difficulty ought to be imprisoned. The proposal, when the details were
disclosed, confirmed pessimists in their profound belief that the
unsurmountable obstacle to the solution of Irish affairs is the Irish
themselves! What Mr. Moore suggested was this: that a thick wall
should be built across the North Channel between the Giant's Causeway
and the Mull of Kintyre, and that another thick wall should be built
across St. George's Channel between Carnsore Point and St. David's
Head. These operations completed, the engineers should then pump out
all the water in the Irish Sea, fill in the resultant gap with earth,
and make one island out of two! He seemed not to have considered the
case of Liverpool. What, some one jestingly demanded, would become
of that great port when deprived of its "pool"? What also, he might
have added, would become of Belfast and Dublin, deprived, the one of
its Lough, and the other, of its Bay? Mr. Moore might have retorted
that what Ireland lost on Belfast Lough it would more than gain on
Galway Bay, but he preferred to remain silent. One could, of course,
draw a conclusion, packed with thought and judgment, from Mr. Moore's
playful proposal, and I do not doubt that such was his intention; but
the average person is either too busy or disinclined to draw such
conclusions from anything; and so, having glanced casually at the
details of Mr. Moore's plan to settle the Irish Question, he turned
impatiently away, convinced (a) that Mr. Moore was an incorrigible
buffoon, and (b) that the government of Ireland must ever remain an
unsolved problem because of the Irish people's amazing inability to
conduct themselves reasonably!
But Mr. Moore has a serious purpose in life, and he pursues that
serious purpose with indefatigable industry. The immediate and
unmistakable fact about him is that he is an artist. There are few
writers in English, not even excepting Mr. Conrad, who have so much
power over words as is possessed by George Moore, and this power has
been achieved, as all power is achieved, by incessant labour and the
most pure devotion. He is, in the real sense, a self-made man. The
artistry that is undeniably his has been wrought not only in the sweat
of his brain, but in face of powerful obstacles. His position as the
heir of a fairly well-to-do landowner in Ireland might have resulted
in him becoming a minor poet, publishing tiny verses in tiny volumes,
or a small author of fragile essays about butterflies and pierrots.
He did, in fact, begin his writing career, as most reputable writers
do, by composing poems, but he speedily turned to prose. He actually
published verses in books entitled "Flowers of Passion"--a name which
incongruously suggests Baudelaire and Ella Wheeler Wilcox--and "Pagan
Poems," but, so far as I have been able to discover, no one has ever
seen these books or read the poems contained in them. The first was
published in 1877 and the second in 1881 and we may conclude that they
have been dissolved by the chemicals of time. Miss Mitchell, in the
book to which reference has already been made, states that "nobody in
Ireland has ever seen any of Mr. Moore's paintings except 'A. E.' to
whom he once shyly showed a head, remarking that it had some 'quality.'
'A. E.' remained silent." The poems remain under the same kindly
condemnation. The favourable fortune which might have made a minor
poet, and nothing but a minor poet, out of Mr. Moore was one of the
powerful obstacles to his becoming a master of prose.
The other was the attempt made by his father to influence his mind.
In the preface from which I have already made a brief quotation, he
gives an account of his education at the Roman Catholic school of
Oscott. George, it seemed, had a reticence in his childhood which he
remarkably lost in maturity: he refused to confess his sins on the
singular ground that he had not got any sins to confess. He had not
then learned, seemingly, that he who has not got any sins to confess,
can easily invent a few. The story of this episode is fully narrated
in "Hail and Farewell," but in the new preface Mr. Moore summarizes it
and tells how his father was summoned to Oscott by the president of
the school "to inquire into his son's lack of belief in priests and
their sacraments." The upshot of the business was that the boy, "not
only the last boy in the class, but in the last class in the school--in
a word, the dunce of the school" was removed from Oscott for private
instruction at home in Mayo. "George's case is really very alarming,"
the president wrote to his father, and the letter contained the
admission that he did not know whether George would not or could not
learn.
It is exceedingly illuminating to observe how his prose style has grown
through a series of very diverse books into its present condition. One
of his most remarkable novels, as it is also one of his earliest, "A
Mummers Wife," was clearly written under the influence of Zola, but
with such individual quality that Zola might profitably have taken
lessons from his pupil. The difference between Emile Zola and George
Moore is that while Zola never forgot to be a doctrinaire, Moore never
forgot to be an artist. "A Mummer's Wife" was unaccountably banned by
the circulating libraries in England, and, such is the conservatism
of these remarkable institutions, that I believe the ban is still
maintained, although a generation has arisen which regards it as very
restrained indeed. The style in which it is written is somewhat arid,
and the reader is not carried forward by the flow of the story itself,
but is forced along by its weight. A comparison between "A Mummer's
Wife," or "Esther Waters," and such later books as "The Lake" or "The
Brook Kerith" reveals such a difference in manner that the critic has
some difficulty in believing that all four novels came from the mind
of the same author. Mr. Wells is a writer with many manners, but the
reader can discover a unifying characteristic, unmistakably Wellsian,
in all of them. Mr. Shaw, a more consistent author than most men of his
quality, has kept so closely to one level that the difference between
his earliest, his best and his latest work is merely the difference
of degree between growing powers, highest powers and declining powers.
The style in the novels, "Love Among the Artists," "The Unsocial
Socialist," "The Irrational Knot" and "Cashel Byron's Profession"
is the same style, under less control, as the style of "Man and
Superman," "John Bull's Other Island," "Heartbreak House" and "Back To
Methuselah." But in Mr. Moore's case the style of "A Mummer's Wife" has
no obvious relationship to that of "The Lake" or "The Brook Kerith."
The difference between the earlier books and the later ones is the
difference between the flow of a river through a canal and the flow of
a river through its natural bed.