XII

It is said that young men of genius come to London with great poems and

dramas in their pockets and find every door closed against them.

Chatterton's death perpetuated this legend. But when I, George Moore,

came to London in search of literary adventure, I found a ready welcome.

Possibly I should not have been accorded any welcome had I been anything

but an ordinary person. Let this be waived. I was as covered with "fads"

as a distinguished foreigner with stars. Naturalism I wore round my

neck, Romanticism was pinned over the heart, Symbolism I carried like a

toy revolver in my waistcoat pocket, to be used on an emergency. I do

not judge whether I was charlatan or genius, I merely state that I found

all--actors, managers, editors, publishers, docile and ready to listen

to me. The world may be wicked, cruel, and stupid, but it is patient; on

this point I will not be gainsaid, it is patient; I know what I am

talking about; I maintain that the world is patient. If it were not,

what would have happened? I should have been murdered by the editors of

(I will suppress names), torn in pieces by the sub-editors, and

devoured by the office boys. There was no wild theory which I did not

assail them with, there was no strange plan for the instant

extermination of the Philistine, which I did not press upon them, and

(here I must whisper), with a fair amount of success, not complete

success I am glad to say--that would have meant for the editors a change

from their arm-chairs to the benches of the Union and the plank beds of

Holloway. The actress, when she returned home from the theatre,

suggested I had an enemy, a vindictive enemy, who dogged my steps; but

her stage experience led her astray. I had no enemy except myself; or to

put it scientifically, no enemy except the logical consequences of my

past life and education, and these caused me a great and real

inconvenience. French wit was in my brain, French sentiment was in my

heart; of the English soul I knew nothing, and I could not remember old

sympathies, it was like seeking forgotten words, and if I were writing a

short story, I had to return in thought to Montmartre or the Champs

Elysées for my characters. That I should have forgotten so much in ten

years seems incredible, and it will be deemed impossible by many, but

that is because few are aware of how little they know of the details of

life, even of their own, and are incapable of appreciating the influence

of their past upon their present. The visible world is visible only to a

few, the moral world is a closed book to nearly all. I was full of

France, and France had to be got rid of, or pushed out of sight before I

could understand England; I was like a snake striving to slough its

skin.

Handicapped as I was with dangerous ideas, and an impossible style,

defeat was inevitable. My English was rotten with French idiom; it was

like an ill-built wall overpowered by huge masses of ivy; the weak

foundations had given way beneath the weight of the parasite; and the

ideas I sought to give expression to were green, sour, and immature as

apples in August.

Therefore before long the leading journal that had printed two poems and

some seven or eight critical articles, ceased to send me books for

review, and I fell back upon obscure society papers. Fortunately it was

not incumbent on me to live by my pen; so I talked, and watched, and

waited till I grew akin to those around me, and my thoughts blended

with, and took root in my environment. I wrote a play or two, I

translated a French opera, which had a run of six nights, I dramatized

a novel, I wrote short stories, and I read a good deal of contemporary

fiction.

The first book that came under my hand was "A Portrait of a Lady," by

Henry James. Each scene is developed with complete foresight and

certainty of touch. What Mr James wants to do he does. I will admit that

an artist may be great and limited; by one word he may light up an abyss

of soul; but there must be this one magical and unique word. Shakespeare

gives us the word, Balzac, sometimes, after pages of vain striving,

gives us the word, Tourgueneff gives it with miraculous certainty; but

Henry James, no; a hundred times he flutters about it; his whole book is

one long flutter near to the one magical and unique word, but the word

is not spoken; and for want of the word his characters are never

resolved out of the haze of nebulae. You are on a bowing acquaintance

with them; they pass you in the street, they stop and speak to you, you

know how they are dressed, you watch the colour of their eyes. When I

think of "A Portrait of a Lady," with its marvellous crowd of

well-dressed people, it comes back to me precisely as an accurate

memory of a fashionable soirée--the staircase with its ascending

figures, the hostess smiling, the host at a little distance with his

back turned; some one calls him. He turns; I can see his white kid

gloves, the air is sugar sweet with the odour of the gardenias, there is

brilliant light here, there is shadow in the further rooms, the women's

feet pass to and fro beneath the stiff skirts, I call for my hat and

coat, I light a cigar, I stroll up Piccadilly...a very pleasant evening,

I have seen a good many people I knew, I have observed an attitude, and

an earnestness of manner that proved that a heart was beating.

Mr James might say, "If I have done this, I have done a great deal," and

I would answer, "No doubt you are a man of great talent, great

cultivation and not at all of the common herd; I place you in the very

front rank, not only of novelists but of men of letters."

I have read nothing of Henry James's that did suggest the manner of a

scholar; but why should a scholar limit himself to empty and endless

sentimentalities? I will not taunt him with any of the old taunts--why

does he not write complicated stories? Why does he not complete his

stories? Let all this be waived. I will ask him only why he always

avoids decisive action? Why does a woman never say "I will"? Why does a

woman never leave the house with her lover? Why does a man never kill a

man? Why does a man never kill himself? Why is nothing ever

accomplished? In real life murder, adultery, and suicide are of common

occurrence; but Mr James's people live in a calm, sad, and very polite

twilight of volition. Suicide or adultery has happened before the story

begins, suicide or adultery happens some years hence, when the

characters have left the stage, but in front of the reader nothing

happens. The suppression or maintenance of story in a novel is a matter

of personal taste; some prefer character-drawing to adventures, some

adventures to character-drawing; that you cannot have both at once I

take to be a self-evident proposition; so when Mr Lang says, "I like

adventures," I say, "Oh, do you?" as I might to a man who says "I like

sherry," and no doubt when I say I like character-drawing, Mr Lang says,

"Oh, do you?" as he might to a man who says, "I like port." But Mr James

and I are agreed on essentials, we prefer character-drawing to

adventures. One, two, or even three determining actions are not

antagonistic to character-drawing, the practice of Balzac, and

Flaubert, and Thackeray prove that. Is Mr James of the same mind as the

poet Verlaine--

"La nuance, pas la couleur,

Seulement la nuance,

.....

Tout le reste est littérature."

In connection with Henry James I had often heard the name of W.D.

Howells. I bought some three or four of his novels. I found them pretty,

very pretty, but nothing more,--a sort of Ashby Sterry done into very

neat prose. He is vulgar, as Henry James is refined; he is more

domestic; girls with white dresses and virginal looks, languid mammas,

mild witticisms, here, there, and everywhere; a couple of young men, one

a little cynical, the other a little over-shadowed by his love, a

strong, bearded man of fifty in the background; in a word, a Tom

Robertson comedy faintly spiced with American. Henry James went to

France and read Tourgueneff. W.D. Howells stayed at home and read Henry

James. Henry James's mind is of a higher cast and temper; I have no

doubt at one time of his life Henry James said, I will write the moral

history of America, as Tourgueneff wrote the moral history of Russia--he

borrowed at first hand, understanding what he was borrowing. W.D.

Howells borrowed at second hand, and without understanding what he was

borrowing. Altogether Mr James's instincts are more scholarly. Although

his reserve irritates me, and I often regret his concessions to the

prudery of the age,--no, not of the age but of librarians,--I cannot but

feel that his concessions, for I suppose I must call them concessions,

are to a certain extent self-imposed, regretfully, perhaps...somewhat in

this fashion--"True, that I live in an age not very favourable to

artistic production, but the art of an age is the spirit of that age; if

I violate the prejudices of the age I shall miss its spirit, and an art

that is not redolent of the spirit of its age is an artificial flower,

perfumeless, or perfumed with the scent of flowers that bloomed three

hundred years ago." Plausible, ingenious, quite in the spirit of Mr

James's mind; I can almost hear him reason so; nor does the argument

displease me, for it is conceived in a scholarly spirit. Now my

conception of W.D. Howells is quite different--I see him the happy

father of a numerous family; the sun is shining, the girls and boys are

playing on the lawn, they come trooping in to high tea, and there is

dancing in the evening.

My fat landlady lent me a novel by George Meredith,--"Tragic

Comedians"; I was glad to receive it, for my admiration of his poetry,

with which I was slightly acquainted, was very genuine indeed. "Love in

a Valley" is a beautiful poem, and the "Nuptials of Attila," I read it

in the _New Quarterly Review_ years ago, is very present in my mind, and

it is a pleasure to recall its chanting rhythm, and lordly and sombre

refrain--"Make the bed for Attila." I expected, therefore, one of my old

passionate delights from his novels. I was disappointed, painfully

disappointed. But before I say more concerning Mr Meredith, I will admit

at once frankly and fearlessly, that I am not a competent critic,

because emotionally I do not understand him, and all except an emotional

understanding is worthless in art. I do not make this admission because

I am intimidated by the weight and height of the critical authority with

which I am overshadowed, but from a certain sense, of which I am as

distinctly conscious, viz., that the author is, how shall I put it? the

French would say "quelqu'un," that expresses what I would say in

English. I remember, too, that although a man may be able to understand

anything, there must be some modes of thoughts and attitudes of mind

which we are so naturally antagonistic to, so entirely out of sympathy

with, that we are in no true sense critics of them. Such are the

thoughts that come to me when I read Mr George Meredith. I try to

console myself with such reflections, and then I break out and cry

passionately:--jerks, wire splintered wood. In Balzac, which I know by

heart, in Shakespeare, which I have just begun to love, I find words

deeply impregnated with the savour of life; but in George Meredith there

is nothing but crackjaw sentences, empty and unpleasant in the mouth as

sterile nuts. I could select hundreds of phrases which Mr Meredith would

probably call epigrams, and I would defy anyone to say they were wise,

graceful or witty. I do not know any book more tedious than "Tragic

Comedians," more pretentious, more blatant; it struts and screams,

stupid in all its gaud and absurdity as a cockatoo. More than fifty

pages I could not read. How, I asked myself, could the man who wrote the

"Nuptials of Attila" write this? but my soul returned no answer, and I

listened as one in a hollow mountain side. My opinion of George Meredith

never ceases to puzzle me. He is of the north, I am of the south.

Carlyle, Mr Robert Browning, and George Meredith are the three

essentially northern writers; in them there is nothing of Latin

sensuality and subtlety.

I took up "Rhoda Fleming." I found some exquisite bits of description in

it, but I heartily wished them in verse, they were motives for poems;

and there was some wit. I remember a passage very racy indeed, of

middle-class England. Antony, I think, is the man's name, describes how

he is interrupted at his tea; a paragraph of seven or ten lines with "I

am having my tea, I am at my tea," running through it for refrain. Then

a description of a lodging-house dinner: "a block of bread on a lonely

place, and potatoes that looked as if they had committed suicide in

their own steam." A little ponderous and stilted, but undoubtedly witty.

I read on until I came to a young man who fell from his horse, or had

been thrown from his horse, I never knew which, nor did I feel enough

interest in the matter to make research; the young man was put to bed by

his mother, and once in bed he began to talk!...four, five, six, ten

pages of talk, and such talk! I can offer no opinion why Mr George

Meredith committed them to paper; it is not narrative, it is not witty,

nor is it sentimental, nor is it profound. I read it once; my mind,

astonished at receiving no sensation, cried out like a child at a

milkless breast. I read the pages again...did I understand? Yes, I

understood every sentence, but they conveyed no idea, they awoke no

emotion in me; it was like sand, arid and uncomfortable. The story is

surprisingly commonplace--the people in it are as lacking in subtlety as

those of a Drury Lane melodrama.

"Diana of the Crossways" I liked better, and had I had absolutely

nothing to do I might have read it to the end. I remember a scene with a

rustic--a rustic who could eat hog a solid hour--that amused me. I

remember the sloppy road in the Weald, and the vague outlines of the

South Downs seen in starlight and mist. But to come to the great

question, the test by which Time will judge us all--the creation of a

human being, of a live thing that we have met with in life before, and

meet for the first time in print, and who abides with us ever after.

Into what shadow has not Diana floated? Where are the magical glimpses

of the soul? Do you remember in "Pères et Enfants," when Tourgueneff is

unveiling the woman's, shall I say, affection, for Bazaroff, or the

interest she feels in him? and exposing at the same time the reasons why

she will never marry him...I wish I had the book by me, I have not seen

it for ten years.

After striving through many pages to put Lucien, whom you would have

loved, whom I would have loved, that divine representation of all that

is young and desirable in man, before the reader, Balzac puts these

words in his mouth in reply to an impatient question by Vautrin, who

asks him what he wants, what he is sighing for, "_D'être célèbre et

d'être aimè_,"--these are soul-waking words, these are Shakespearean

words.

Where in "Diana of the Crossways" do we find soul-evoking words like

these? With tiresome repetition we are told that she is beautiful,

divine; but I see her not at all, I don't know if she is dark, tall, or

fair; with tiresome reiteration we are told that she is brilliant, that

her conversation is like a display of fireworks, that the company is

dazzled and overcome; but when she speaks the utterances are grotesque,

and I say that if anyone spoke to me in real life as she does in the

novel, I should not doubt for an instant that I was in the company of a

lunatic. The epigrams are never good, they never come within measurable

distance of La Rochefoucauld, Balzac, or even Gohcourt. The admirers of

Mr Meredith constantly deplore their existence, admitting that they

destroy all illusion of life. "When we have translated half of Mr

Meredith's utterances into possible human speech, then we can enjoy

him," says the _Pall Mall Gazette_. We take our pleasures differently;

mine are spontaneous, and I know nothing about translating the rank

smell of a nettle into the fragrance of a rose, and then enjoying it.

Mr Meredith's conception of life is crooked, ill-balanced, and out of

tune. What remains?--a certain lustiness. You have seen a big man with

square shoulders and a small head, pushing about in a crowd, he shouts

and works his arms, he seems to be doing a great deal, in reality he is

doing nothing; so Mr Meredith appears to me, and yet I can only think of

him as an artist; his habit is not slatternly, like those of such

literary hodmen as Mr David Christie Murray, Mr Besant, Mr Buchanan.

There is no trace of the crowd about him. I do not question his right of

place, I am out of sympathy with him, that is all; and I regret that it

should be so, for he is one whose love of art is pure and untainted

with commercialism, and if I may praise it for nought else, I can praise

it for this.

I have noticed that if I buy a book because I am advised, or because I

think I ought, my reading is sure to prove sterile. _Il faut que cela

vienne de moi_, as a woman once said to me, speaking of her caprices; a

quotation, a chance word heard in an unexpected quarter. Mr Hardy and Mr

Blackmore I read because I had heard that they were distinguished

novelists; neither touched me, I might just as well have bought a daily

paper; neither like nor dislike, a shrug of the shoulders--that is all.

Hardy seems to me to bear about the same relation to George Eliot as

Jules Breton does to Millet--a vulgarisation never offensive, and

executed with ability. The story of an art is always the same,...a

succession of abortive but ever strengthening efforts, a moment of

supreme concentration, a succession of efforts weakening the final

extinction. George Eliot gathered up all previous attempts, and created

the English peasant; and following her peasants there came an endless

crowd from Devon, Yorkshire, and the Midland Counties, and, as they

came, they faded into the palest shadows until at last they appeared in

red stockings, high heels and were lost in the chorus of opera. Mr Hardy

was the first step down. His work is what dramatic critics would call

good, honest, straightforward work. It is unillumined by a ray of

genius, it is slow and somewhat sodden. It reminds me of an excellent

family coach--one of the old sort hung on C springs--a fat coachman on

the box and a footman whose livery was made for his predecessor. In

criticising Mr Meredith I was out of sympathy with my author, ill at

ease, angry, puzzled; but with Mr Hardy I am on quite different terms, I

am as familiar with him as with the old pair of trousers I put on when I

sit down to write; I know all about his aims, his methods; I know what

has been done in that line, and what can be done.

I have heard that Mr Hardy is country bred, but I should not have

discovered this from his writings. They read to me more like a report,

yes, a report--a conscientious, well-done report, executed by a

thoroughly efficient writer sent down by one of the daily papers.

Nowhere do I find selection, everything is reported, dialogues and

descriptions. Take for instance the long evening talk between the farm

people when Oak is seeking employment. It is not the absolute and

literal transcript from nature after the manner of Henri Monier; for

that it is a little too diluted with Mr Hardy's brains, the edges are a

little sharpened and pointed, I can see where the author has been at

work filing; on the other hand, it is not synthesized--the magical word

which reveals the past, and through which we divine the future--is not

seized and set triumphantly as it is in "Silas Marner." The descriptions

do not flow out of and form part of the narrative, but are wedged in,

and often awkwardly. We are invited to assist at a sheep-shearing scene,

or at a harvest supper, because these scenes are not to be found in the

works of George Eliot, because the reader is supposed to be interested

in such things, because Mr Hardy is anxious to show how jolly country he

is.

Collegians, when they attempt character-drawing, create monstrosities,

but a practised writer should be able to create men and women capable of

moving through a certain series of situations without shocking in any

violent way the most generally applicable principles of common sense. I

say that a practised writer should be able to do this; that they

sometimes do not is a matter which I will not now go into, suffice it

for my purpose if I admit that Mr Hardy can do this. In Farmer Oak there

is nothing to object to; the conception is logical, the execution is

trustworthy; he has legs, arms, and a heart; but the vital spark that

should make him of our flesh and of our soul is wanting, it is dead

water that the sunlight never touches. The heroine is still more dim,

she is stuffy, she is like tow; the rich farmer is a figure out of any

melodrama, Sergeant Troy nearly quickens to life; now and then the

clouds are liquescent, but a real ray of light never falls.

The story-tellers are no doubt right when they insist on the difficulty

of telling a story. A sequence of events--it does not matter how simple

or how complicated--working up to a logical close, or, shall I say, a

close in which there is a sense of rhythm and inevitableness is always

indicative of genius. Shakespeare affords some magnificent examples,

likewise Balzac, likewise George Eliot, likewise Tourgueneff; the

"Œdipus" is, of course, the crowning and final achievement in the music

of sequence and the massy harmonies of fate. But in contemporary

English fiction I marvel, and I am repeatedly struck by the inability of

writers, even of the first-class, to make an organic whole of their

stories. Here, I say, the course is clear, the way is obvious, but no

sooner do we enter on the last chapters than the story begins to show

incipient shiftiness, and soon it doubles back and turns, growing with

every turn weaker like a hare before the hounds. From a certain

directness of construction, from the simple means by which Oak's ruin is

accomplished in the opening chapters, I did not expect that the story

would run hare-hearted in its close, but the moment Troy told his wife

that he never cared for her, I suspected something was wrong; when he

went down to bathe and was carried out by the current I knew the game

was up, and was prepared for anything, even for the final shooting by

the rich farmer, and the marriage with Oak, a conclusion which of course

does not come within the range of literary criticism.

"Lorna Doone" struck me as childishly garrulous, stupidly prolix,

swollen with comments not interesting in themselves and leading to

nothing. Mr Hardy possesses the power of being able to shape events; he

can mould them to a certain form; that he cannot breathe into them the

spirit of life I have already said, but "Lorna Doone" reminds me of a

third-rate Italian opera, _La Fille du Régiment_ or _Ernani_; it is

corrupt with all the vices of the school, and it does not contain a

single passage of real fervour or force to make us forget the inherent

defects of the art of which it is a poor specimen. Wagner made the

discovery, not a very wonderful one after all when we think, that an

opera had much better be melody from end to end. The realistic school

following on Wagner's footsteps discovered that a novel had much better

be all narrative--an uninterrupted flow of narrative. Description is

narrative, analysis of character is narrative, dialogue is narrative;

the form is ceaselessly changing, but the melody of narration is never

interrupted.

But the reading of "Lorna Doone" calls to my mind, and very vividly, an

original artistic principle of which English romance writers are either

strangely ignorant or neglectful, viz., that the sublimation of the

_dramatis personæ_ and the deeds in which they are involved must

correspond, and their relationship should remain unimpaired. Turner's

"Carthage" is Nature transposed and wonderfully modified. Some of the

passages of light and shade--those of the balustrade--are fugues, and

there his art is allied to Bach in sonority and beautiful combination.

Turner knew that a branch hung across the sun looked at separately was

black, but he painted it light to maintain the equipoise of atmosphere.

In the novel the characters are the voice, the deeds are the orchestra.

But the English novelist takes 'Any and 'Arriet, and without question

allows them to achieve deeds; nor does he hesitate to pass them into the

realms of the supernatural. Such violation of the first principles of

narration is never to be met with in the elder writers. Achilles stands

as tall as Troy, Merlin is as old and as wise as the world. Rhythm and

poetical expression are essential attributes of dramatic genius, but the

original sign of race and mission is an instinctive modulation of man

with the deeds he attempts or achieves. The man and the deed must be

cognate and equal, and the melodic balance and blending are what first

separate Homer and Hugo from the fabricators of singular adventures. In

Scott leather jerkins, swords, horses, mountains, and castles harmonise

completely and fully with food, fighting, words, and vision of life; the

chords are simple as Handel's but they are as perfect. Lytton's work,

although as vulgar as Verdi's is, in much the same fashion, sustained by

a natural sense of formal harmony; but all that follows is decadent,--an

admixture of romance and realism, the exaggerations of Hugo and the

homeliness of Trollope; a litter of ancient elements in a state of

decomposition.

The spiritual analysis of Balzac equals the triumphant imagination of

Shakespeare; and by different roads they reach the same height of tragic

awe, but when improbability, which in these days does duty for

imagination, is mixed with the familiar aspects of life, the result is

inchoate and rhythmless folly, I mean the regular and inevitable

alternation and combination of pa and ma, and dear Annie who lives at

Clapham, with the Mountains of the Moon, and the secret of eternal life;

this violation of the first principles of art--that is to say, of the

rhythm of feeling and proportion, is not possible in France. I ask the

reader to recall what was said on the subject of the Club, Tavern, and

Villa. We have a surplus population of more than two million women, the

tradition that chastity is woman's only virtue still survives, the

Tavern and its adjunct Bohemianism have been suppressed, and the Villa

is omnipotent and omnipresent; tennis-playing, church on Sundays, and

suburban hops engender a craving for excitement for the far away, for

the unknown: but the Villa with its tennis-playing, church on Sundays,

and suburban hops will not surrender its own existence, it must take a

part in the heroic deeds that happen in the Mountains of the Moon; it

will have heroism in its own pint pot. Achilles and Merlin must be

replaced by Uncle Jim and an undergraduate: and so the Villa is the only

begotten of Rider Haggard, Hugh Conway, Robert Buchanan, and the author

of "The House on the Marsh."

I read two books by Mr Christie Murray, "Joseph's Coat" and "Rainbow

Gold," and one by Messrs Besant and Rice,--"The Seamy Side." It is

difficult to criticise such work. It is as suited to the needs of the

Villa as the baker's loaves and the butcher's rounds of beef. I do not

think that any such miserable literature is found in any other country.

In France some three or four men produce works of art, the rest of the

fiction of the country is unknown to men of letters. But "Rainbow

Gold"--to take the best of the three--is not bad as a second-rate French

novel is bad; it is excellent as all that is straightforward is

excellent; and it is surprising to find that work can be so good, and at

the same time so devoid of artistic charm. That such a thing should be

is one of the miracles of the Villa.

I have heard that Mr Besant is an artist in the "Chaplain of the Fleet"

and other novels, but this is not possible. The artist shows what he is

going to do the moment he puts pen to paper, or brush to canvas; he

improves on his first attempts, that is all; and I found "The Seamy

Side" so very common, that I cannot believe for a moment that its author

or authors could write a line that would interest me.

Mr Robert Buchanan is a type of artist that every age produces

unfailingly: Catulle Mendès is his counterpart in France,--but the

pallid Portuguese Jew with his Christ-like face, and his fascinating

fervour is more interesting than the spectacled Scotchman. Both began

with volumes of excellent but characterless verse, and loud outcries

about the dignity of art, and both have--well...Mr Robert Buchanan has

collaborated with Gus Harris, and written the programme poetry for the

Vaudeville Theatre; he has written a novel, the less said about which

the better--he has attacked men whose shoe-strings he is unworthy to

tie, and having failed to injure them, he retracted all he said, and

launched forth into slimy benedictions. He took Fielding's masterpiece,

degraded it, and debased it; he wrote to the papers that Fielding was a

genius in spite of his coarseness, thereby inferring that he was a much

greater genius since he had sojourned in this Scotch house of literary

ill-fame. Clarville, the author of "Madame Angot," transformed Madame

Marneff into a virtuous woman, but he did not write to the papers to say

that Balzac owed him a debt of gratitude on that account.

The star of Miss Braddon has finally set in the obscure regions of

servantgalism; Ouida and Rhoda Broughton continue to rewrite the books

they wrote ten years ago; Mrs Lynn Linton I have not read. The "Story of

an African Farm" was pressed upon me. I found it sincere and youthful,

disjointed but well-written; descriptions of sandhills and ostriches

sandwiched with doubts concerning a future state, and convictions

regarding the moral and physical superiority of women: but of art

nothing; that is to say, art as I understand it,--rhythmical sequence of

events described with rhythmical sequence of phrase.

I read the "Story of Elizabeth" by Miss Thackeray. It came upon me with

all the fresh and fair naturalness of a garden full of lilacs and blue

sky, and I thought of Hardy, Blackmore, Murray, and Besant as of great

warehouses where everything might be had, and even if the article

required were not in stock it could be supplied in a few days at latest.

These are exquisite little descriptions, full of air, colour, lightness,

grace, the French life seen with such sweet English eyes, the sweet

little descriptions all so gently evocative. "What a tranquil little

kitchen it was, with a glimpse of the courtyard outside, and the cocks

and hens, and the poplar trees waving in the sunshine, and the old woman

sitting in her white cap busy at her homely work." Into many wearisome

pages these simple lines have since been expanded, without affecting the

beauty of the original. "Will Dampier turned his broad back and looked

out of the window. There was a moment's silence. They could hear the

tinkling of bells, the whistling of the sea, the voices of the men

calling to each other in the port, the sunshine streamed in; Elly was

standing in it, and seemed gilt with a golden background. She ought to

have held a palm in her hand, poor little martyr!" There is sweet wisdom

in this book, wisdom that is eternal, being simple; near may not come

the ugliness of positivism, nor the horror of pessimism, nor the

profound greyness of Hegelism, but merely the genial love and reverence

of a beautiful-minded woman.

Such charms as these necessitate certain defects, I should say

limitations. Vital creation of character is not possible to Miss

Thackeray, but I do not rail against beautiful water-colour indications

of balconies, vases, gardens, fields, and harvesters because they have

not the fervid glow and passionate force of Titian's Ariadne; Miss

Thackeray cannot give us a Maggie Tulliver, and all the many profound

modulations of that Beethoven-like countryside: the pine wood and the

cripple; this aunt's linen presses, and that one's economies; the boy

going forth to conquer the world, the girl remaining at home to conquer

herself; the mighty river holding the fate of all, playing and dallying

with it for a while, and bearing it on at last to final and magnificent

extinction. That sense of the inevitable which the Greek dramatists had

in perfection, which George Eliot had sufficiently, that rhythmical

progression of events, rhythm and inevitableness (two words for one and

the same thing) is not there. Elly's golden head, the background of

austere French Protestants, is sketched with a flowing water-colour

brush, I do not know if it is true, but true or false in reality, it is

true in art. But the jarring dissonance of her marriage is inadmissible;

it cannot be led up to by any chords no matter how ingenious, the

passage, the attempts from one key to the other, is impossible; the true

end is the ruin, by death or lingering life, of Elly and the remorse of

the mother.

One of the few writers of fiction who seems to me to possess an ear for

the music of events is Miss Margaret Veley. Her first novel, "For

Percival," although diffuse, although it occasionally flowed into

by-channels and lingered in stagnating pools, was informed and held

together, even at ends the most twisted and broken, by that sense of

rhythmic progression which is so dear to me, and which was afterwards so

splendidly developed in "Damocles." Pale, painted with grey and opaline

tints of morning passes the grand figure of Rachel Conway, a victim

chosen for her beauty, and crowned with flowers of sacrifice. She has

not forgotten the face of the maniac, and it comes back to her in its

awful lines and lights when she finds herself rich and loved by the man

whom she loves. The catastrophe is a double one. Now she knows she is

accursed, and that her duty is to trample out her love. Unborn

generations cry to her. The wrath and the lamentation of the chorus of

the Greek singer, the intoning voices of the next-of-kin, the pathetic

responses of voices far in the depths of ante-natal night, these the

modern novelist, playing on an inferior instrument, may suggest, but

cannot give: but here the suggestion is so perfect that we cease to

yearn for the real music, as, reading from a score, we are satisfied

with the flute and bassoons that play so faultlessly in soundless dots.

There is neither hesitation nor doubt. Rachel Conway puts her dreams

away, she will henceforth walk in a sad and shady path; her interests

are centred in the child of the man she loves, and as she looks for a

last time on the cloud of trees, glorious and waving green in the sunset

that encircles her home, her sorrow swells once again to passion, and,

we know, for the last time.

The mechanical construction of M. Scribe I had learnt from M. Duval; the

naturalistic school had taught me to scorn tricks, and to rely on the

action of the sentiments rather than on extraneous aid for the bringing

about of a _dénouement_; and I thought of all this as I read

"Disenchantment" by Miss Mabel Robinson, and it occurred to me that my

knowledge would prove valuable when my turn came to write a novel, for

the _mise en place_, the setting forth of this story, seemed to me so

loose, that much of its strength had dribbled away before it had rightly

begun. But the figure of the Irish politician I accept without reserve.

It seems to me grand and mighty in its sorrowfulness. The tall,

dark-eyed, beautiful Celt, attainted in blood and brain by generations

of famine and drink, alternating with the fervid sensuousness of the

girl, her Saxon sense of right alternating with the Celt's hereditary

sense of revenge, his dreamy patriotism, his facile platitudes, his

acceptance of literature as a sort of bread basket, his knowledge that

he is not great nor strong, and can do nothing in the world but love his

country; and as he passes his thirtieth year the waxing strong of the

disease, nervous disease complex and torturous; to him drink is at once

life and death; an article is bread, and to calm him and collect what

remains of weak, scattered thought, he must drink. The woman cannot

understand that caste and race separate them; and the damp air of spent

desire, and the grey and falling leaves of her illusions fill her life's

sky. Nor is there any hope for her until the husband unties the awful

knot by suicide.

I aver that Mr R.L. Stevenson never wrote a line that failed to delight

me; but he never wrote a book. You arrive at a strangely just estimate

of a writer's worth by the mere question: "What is he the author of?"

for every writer whose work is destined to live is the author of one

book that outshines the other, and, in popular imagination, epitomises

his talent and position. Ask the same question about Milton, Fielding,

Byron, Carlyle, Thackeray, Zola, Mr Swinburne.

I think of Mr Stevenson as a consumptive youth weaving garlands of sad

flowers with pale, weak hands, or leaning to a large plate-glass window,

and scratching thereon exquisite profiles with a diamond pencil. His

periods are fresh and bright, rhythmical in sound, and perfect

realizations of their sense; in reading you often think that never

before was such definiteness united to such poetry of expression; every

page and every sentence rings of its individuality. Mr Stevenson's style

is over-smart, well-dressed, shall I say, like a young man walking in

the Burlington Arcade? Yes, I will say so, but, I will add, the most

gentlemanly young man that ever walked in the Burlington. Mr Stevenson

is competent to understand any thought that might be presented to him,

but if he were to use it, it would instantly become neat, sharp,

ornamental, light, and graceful, and it would lose all its original

richness and harmony. It is not Mr Stevenson's brain that prevents him

from being a thinker, but his style.

Another thing that strikes me in thinking of Stevenson (I pass over his

direct indebtedness to Edgar Poe, and his constant appropriation of his

methods), is the unsuitableness of the special characteristics of his

talent to the age he lives in. He wastes in his limitations, and his

talent is vented in prettiness of style. In speaking of Mr Henry James,

I said that, although he had conceded much to the foolish, false, and

hypocritical taste of the time, the concessions he made had in little

or nothing impaired his talent. The very opposite seems to me the case

with Mr Stevenson. For if any man living in this end of the century

needed freedom of expression for the distinct development of his genius,

that man is R.L. Stevenson. He who runs may read, and he with any

knowledge of literature will, before I have written the words, have

imagined Mr Stevenson writing in the age of Elizabeth or Anne.

Turn your platitudes prettily, but write no word that could offend the

chaste mind of the young girl who has spent her morning reading the

Colin Campbell divorce case; so says the age we live in. The penny paper

that may be bought everywhere, that is allowed to lie on every table,

prints seven or eight columns of filth, for no reason except that the

public likes to read filth; the poet and novelist must emasculate and

destroy their work because.... Who shall come forward and make answer?

Oh, vile, filthy, and hypocritical century, I at least scorn you.

But this is not a course of literature but the story of the artistic

development of me, George Moore; so I will tarry no longer with mere

criticism, but go direct to the book to which I owe the last temple in

my soul--"Marius the Epicurean." Well I remember when I read the

opening lines, and how they came upon me sweetly as the flowing breath

of a bright spring. I knew that I was awakened a fourth time, that a

fourth vision of life was to be given to me. Shelley had revealed to me

the unimagined skies where the spirit sings of light and grace; Gautier

had shown me how extravagantly beautiful is the visible world and how

divine is the rage of the flesh; and with Balzac I had descended circle

by circle into the nether world of the soul, and watched its

afflictions. Then there were minor awakenings. Zola had enchanted me

with decoration and inebriated me with theory; Flaubert had astonished

with the wonderful delicacy and subtlety of his workmanship; Goncourt's

brilliant adjectival effects had captivated me for a time, but all these

impulses were crumbling into dust, these aspirations were etiolated,

sickly as faces grown old in gaslight.

I had not thought of the simple and unaffected joy of the heart of

natural things; the colour of the open air, the many forms of the

country, the birds flying,--that one making for the sea; the abandoned

boat, the dwarf roses and the wild lavender; nor had I thought of the

beauty of mildness in life, and how by a certain avoidance of the

wilfully passionate, and the surely ugly, we may secure an aspect of

temporal life which is abiding and soul-sufficing. A new dawn was in my

brain, fresh and fair, full of wide temples and studious hours, and the

lurking fragrance of incense; that such a vision of life was possible I

had no suspicion, and it came upon me almost with the same strength,

almost as intensely, as that divine song of the flesh,--Mademoiselle de

Maupin.

Certainly, in my mind, these books will be always intimately associated;

and when a few adventitious points of difference be forgotten, it is

interesting to note how firm is the alliance, and how cognate and

co-equal the sympathies on which it is based; the same glad worship of

the visible world, and the same incurable belief that the beauty of

material things is sufficient for all the needs of life. Mr Pater can

join hands with Gautier in saying--_je trouve la terre aussi belle que

le ciel, et je pense que la correction de la forme est la vertu_. And I

too join issue; I too love the great pagan world, its bloodshed, its

slaves, its injustice, its loathing of all that is feeble.

But "Marius the Epicurean" was more to me than a mere emotional

influence, precious and rare though that may be, for this book was the

first in English prose I had come across that procured for me any

genuine pleasure in the language itself, in the combination of words for

silver or gold chime, and unconventional cadence, and for all those

lurking half-meanings, and that evanescent suggestion, like the odour of

dead roses, that words retain to the last of other times and elder

usage. Until I read "Marius" the English language (English prose) was to

me what French must be to the majority of English readers. I read for

the sense and that was all; the language itself seemed to me coarse and

plain, and awoke in me neither æsthetic emotion nor even interest.

"Marius" was the stepping-stone that carried me across the channel into

the genius of my own tongue. The translation was not too abrupt; I found

a constant and careful invocation of meaning that was a little aside of

the common comprehension, and also a sweet depravity of ear for

unexpected falls of phrase, and of eye for the less observed depths of

colours, which although new was a sort of sequel to the education I had

chosen, and a continuance of it in a foreign, but not wholly unfamiliar

medium, and so, having saturated myself with Pater, the passage to De

Quincey was easy. He, too, was a Latin in manner and in temper of mind;

but he was truly English, and through him I passed to the study of the

Elizabethan dramatists, the real literature of my race, and washed

myself clean.