THE REFORMATION OF GEORGE MOORE
I
Dear naughty George Moore--sad, bad, mad--has reformed. He tells us
why in his book, Vale, the English edition of which I was lucky
enough to read; for, the American edition is expurgated, nay,
fumigated, as was the Memoirs of My Dead Life by the same Celtic
Casanova. Vale completes the trilogy; Hail and Farewell, Ave and
Salve being the titles of the preceding two. In the first, Moore is
sufficiently vitriolic, and in Salve he serves up George Russell,
the poet and painter, better known as "AE." in a more sympathetic
fashion. When Vale was announced several years ago as on the brink
of completion I was moved to write: "I suppose when the final book
appears it means that George Moore has put up the shutters of his
soul, not to say, his shop. But I have my serious doubts." After
reading Vale I still had them. Only death will end the streaming
confessions of this writer. He who lives by the pen shall perish by
the pen. (This latter sentence is not a quotation from the sacred
books of any creed, merely the conviction of a slave chained to the
ink-well.)
I said that Vale is expurgated for American consumption. Certainly.
We are so averse to racy, forcible English in America--thanks to the
mean, narrow spirit in our arts and letters--that a hearty oath
scares us into the Brooklyn backyard of our timid conscience. George
calls a spade a spade, and he delights on stirring up rank
malodorous soil with his war-worn agricultural implement. When he
returned some years ago to Dublin, there to help in the national
literary and artistic movement, he found a devoted band of brethren:
William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, Douglas Hyde, John M. Synge,
Edward Martyn, Russell, and others.
I shan't attempt even a brief mention of the neo-Celtic awakening.
Yeats was the prime instigator, also the storm-centre. He literally
discovered Synge, the dramatist--in reality the only strong man of
the group, the only dramatist of originality--and, with his
exquisite lyric gift, he, also discovered a new Ireland, a fabulous,
beautiful Erin, unsuspected by Tom Moore, Samuel Lover, Carleton,
Mangan, Lever, and the too busy Boucicault.
As I soon found out, when there, Dublin is a vast whispering
gallery. Delightful, hospitable Dublin is also a provincial town,
given to gossip and backbiting. Say something about somebody in the
smoking-room of the Shelbourne, and a few hours later the clubs
will be repeating it. Mr. Moore said things every hour in the day,
and in less than six days he had sown for himself a fine crop of
enemies. To "get even" he conceived the idea of writing a series of
novels, with real people bearing their own names. That he hasn't
been shot at, horsewhipped, or sued for libel thus far is just his
usual good luck. Vale is largely a book of capricious insults.
But then the facts it sets down in cruel type! When the years have
removed the actors therein from the earthly scene, our grandchildren
will chuckle over Moore's unconscious humour and Pepys-like
chronicling of small-beer. For the social historian this trilogy
will prove a mine of gossip, rich veracious gossip. It throws a
calcium glare on the soul of the author, who, self-confessed, is now
old, and no longer a dangerous Don Juan. In real life he was, as far
as I can make out, not particularly a monster of iniquity; but, oh!
in his Confessions and Memoirs what a rake was he. How the
"lascivious lute" did sound. Some of the pages of the new volume
(see pp. 274-278, English edition), in which he describes his
tactics to avoid a kiss (kissing gives him a headache in these
lonesome latter years, though he was only born in 1857), is to set
you wondering over the frankness of the man. Walter Pater once
called him "audacious George Moore," and audacious he is with pen
and ink. Otherwise, like Bernard Shaw, he is not looking for
physical quarrels.
He once spoke of Shaw as "the funny man in a boarding-house," though
he never mentions his name in his memoirs. He doesn't like Yeats;
what's more, he prints the news as often and as elaborately as
possible. In the present book he doesn't exactly compare Yeats to a
crane or a pelican, but he calls attention to the fact that the poet
belonged to the "lower middle-class." It seems that Yeats had been
thundering away at the artistic indifference of the Dublin
bourgeoisie. Now, looking at Yeats the night when John Quinn gave
him a dinner at Delmonico's, you could not note any resemblance to
exotic birds, though he might recall a penguin. He was very solemn,
very bored, very fatigued, his eyes deep sunken from fatigue. Posing
as a tame parlour poet for six weeks had tired the man to his very
bones. But catch him in private with his waistcoat unbuttoned--I
speak figuratively--and you will enjoy a born raconteur, one who
slowly distils witty poison at the tip of every anecdote, till,
bursting with glee, you cry: "How these literary men do love each
other! How one Irishman dotes on another!" Yeats may be an exception
to the rule that a poet is as vain and as irritable as a tenor. I
didn't notice the irritability, finding him taking himself
seriously, as should all apostles of culture and Celtic twilight.
He "got even" with George Moore's virulent attacks by telling a
capital story, which he confessed was invented, one that went all
over Dublin and London. When George felt the call of a Protestant
conversion he was in Dublin. He has told us of his difficulties,
mental and temperamental. One day some question of dogma presented
itself and he hurried to the Cathedral for advice. He sent in his
name to the Archbishop, and that forgetful dignitary exclaimed:
"Moore, Moore, oh, that man again! Well, give him another pair of
blankets." In later versions, coals, candles, even shillings, were
added to the apocryphal anecdote--which, by the way, set smiling the
usually impassive Moore, who can see a joke every now and then.
Better still is the true tale of George, who boasts much in Vale of
his riding dangerous mounts; and when challenged at an English
country house did get on the back of a vicious animal and ride to
hounds the better part of a day. He wouldn't, quite properly, take
the "dare," although when he reached his room he found his boots
full of blood. So there is sporting temper in him. Any one reading
his Esther Waters may note that he knows the racing stable by heart.
In Vale he describes his father's stable at Castle Moore, County
Mayo.
Of course, this is not the time to attempt an estimate of his
complete work, for who may say what fresh outbursts, what new
imprudences in black and white, we may expect? He has paid his
respects to his fellow countrymen, and is heartily despised by all
camps, political, religious, artistic. He has belittled the work of
Lady Gregory, Yeats, and Edwin Martyn, and has rather patronised
John M. Synge; the latter, possibly, because Synge was "discovered"
by Yeats, not Moore. Yet do we enjoy the vagaries of George Moore. I
only saw him once, a long time ago, to be precise in 1901, at
Bayreuth. He looked more like a bird than Yeats, though his beak is
not so predaceous as Yeats's; a golden-crested bird, with a chin as
diffident as a poached egg, and with melancholy pale-blue eyes, and
an undecided gait. He talked of the Irish language as if it were the
only redemption for poor unhappy Ireland. In Vale there is not the
same enthusiasm. He dwells with more delight on his early Parisian
experiences--it is the best part of the book--and to my way of
thinking the essential George Moore is to be found only in Paris;
London is an afterthought. The Paris of Manet, Monet, Degas,
Whistler, Huysmans, Zola, Verlaine, and all the "new" men of
1880--what an unexplored vein he did work for the profit and
delectation of the English-speaking world. True critical yeoman's
work, for to preach impressionism twenty-five years ago in London
was to court a rumpus. What hard names were rained upon the yellow
head of George Moore--that colour so admired by Manet and so
wonderfully painted by him--in the academic camp. He replied with
all the vivacity of vocabulary which your true Celt usually has on
tap. He even "went for" the Pre-Raphaelites, a band of overrated
mediocrities--on the pictorial side, at least--though John Millais
was a talent--and for years was as a solitary prophet in a city of
Philistines. The world caught up with Moore, and to-day the shoe
pinches on the other foot--it is George who is a belated critic of
the "New Art" (most of it as stale as the Medes and Persians), and
many are the wordy battles waged at the Cafe Royal, London, when
Augustus John happens in of an evening and finds the author of
Modern Painting denouncing Debussy in company with Matisse and other
Post-Imitators. Manet, like Moore, is "old hat" (vieux chapeau) for
modern youth. It's well to go to bed not too late in life, else some
impertinent youngster may cry aloud: "What's that venerable
granddaddy doing up at this time of night?" To each generation its
critics.
II
In one of his fulminations against Christianity Nietzsche said that
the first and only Christian died on the cross. George Moore thinks
otherwise, at least he gives a novel version of the narrative in the
synoptic Gospels. The Brook Kerith is a fiction dealing with the
life of Christ. It is a book that will offend the faithful, and one
that will not convince the heterodox. In it George Moore sets forth
his ideas concerning the Christ "myth," evoking, as does Flaubert in
Salammbo, a vanished land, a vanished civilisation, and in a style
that is artistically beautiful. Never has he written with such
sustained power, intensity and nobility of phrasing, such finely
tempered, modulated prose. It is a rhythmed prose which first peeped
forth in some pages of Mr. Moore's Evelyn Innes when the theme
bordered on the mystical. Yet it is of an essentially Celtic
character. Mysticism and Moore do not seem bedfellows. Nevertheless,
Mr. Moore has been haunted from his first elaborate novel, A Drama
in Muslin, by mystic and theological questions. A pagan by
temperament, his soul is the soul of an Irish Roman Catholic. He can
no more escape the fascinating ideas of faith and salvation than did
Huysmans. (He has taken exception to this statement in an open
letter.) A realist at the beginning, he has leaned of late years
heavily on the side of the spirit. But like Baudelaire, Barbey
d'Aurevilly, Villiers de L'Isle Adam, Paul Verlaine, and Huysmans,
Mr. Moore is one of those sons of Mother Church who give anxious
pause to his former coreligionists. The Brook Kerith will prove a
formidable rock of offence, and it may be said that it was on the
Index before it was written. And yet we find in it George Moore
among the prophets.
Perhaps Mr. Moore has read the critical work of Professor Arthur
Drews, The Christ Myth. It is a masterpiece of destruction. There
are many books in which Jesus Christ figures. Ernest Renan's Life,
written in his silky and sophisticated style, is no more admired by
Christians than the cruder study by Strauss. After these the deluge,
ending with the dream by the late Remy de Gourmont, Une Nuit au
Luxembourg. And there is the brilliant and poetic study of Edgar
Saltus, his Mary Magdalen. Anatole France has distilled into his The
Revolt of the Angels some of his acid hatred of all religions, with
blasphemous and obscene notes not missing. It may be remembered that
M. France also wrote that pastel of irony The Procurator of Judea,
in which Pontius Pilate is shown in his old age, rich, ennuied,
sick. He has quite forgotten, when asked, about the Jewish agitator
who fancied himself the son of God and was given over to the Temple
authorities in Jerusalem and crucified. Rising from the tomb on the
third day he became the Christ of the Christian dispensation, aided
by the religious genius of one Paul, formerly known as Saul the
Tent-maker of Tarsus. Now Mr. Moore does in a larger mould and in
the grand manner what Anatole France accomplished in his miniature.
The ironic method, a tragic irony, suffuses every page of The Brook
Kerith, and the story of the four Gospels is twisted into something
perverse, and for Christians altogether shocking. It will be called
"blasphemous," but we must remember that our national Constitution
makes no allowance for so-called "blasphemers"; that the mythologies
of the Greeks and Romans, Jews and Christians, Mohammedans and
Mormons may be criticised, yet the criticism is not inherently
"blasphemous." America is no more a Christian than a Jewish nation
or a nation of freethinkers. It is free to all races and religions,
and thus one man's spiritual meat may be another's emetic.
Having cleared our mind of cant, let us investigate The Brook
Kerith. The title is applied to a tiny community of Jewish mystics,
the Essenes, who lived near this stream; perhaps the Scriptural
Kedron? This brotherhood had separated from the materialistic
Pharisees and Sadducees, not approving of burnt sacrifices or Temple
worship; furthermore, they practised celibacy till a schism within
their ranks drove the minority away from the parent body to shift
for themselves. A young shepherd, Jesus of Nazareth, son of Joseph,
a carpenter in Galilee, and of Miriam, his mother--they have other
sons--is a member of this community. But too much meditation on the
prophecies of Daniel and the meeting with a wandering prophet, John
the Baptist, the precursor of the long-foretold Messiah, lead him
astray. Baptised in the waters of Jordan, Jesus becomes a
theomaniac--he believes himself to be the son of God, appointed by
the heavenly father to save mankind; especially his fellow Jews.
Filled with a fanatical fire, he leads away a dozen disciples, poor,
ignorant fishermen. He also attracts the curiosity of Joseph, the
only son of a rich merchant of Arimathea. Two-thirds of the novel
are devoted to the psychology of this youthful philosopher, who,
inducted into the wisdom of the Greek sophists, is, notwithstanding,
a fervent Jew, a rigid upholder of the Law and the Prophets. The
dialogues between father and son rather recall Erin, hardly Syria.
Joseph becomes interested in Jesus, follows him about, and the fatal
day of the crucifixion he beseeches his friend Pilate to let him
have the body of his Lord for a worthy interment. Pilate demurs,
then accedes. Joseph, with the aid of the two holy women Mary and
Martha, places the corpse of the dead divinity in a sepulchre.
If Joseph hadn't been killed by the zealots of Jerusalem (heated to
this murder by the High Priest) the title of the book might have
been "Joseph of Arimathea." He is easily the most viable figure.
Jesus is too much of the god from the machine; but he serves the
author for the development of his ingenious theory. Finding the
Christ still alive, Joseph carries him secretly and after dark to
the house of his father, hides him and listens unmoved to the
fantastic tales of a resurrection. But the spies of Caiaphas are
everywhere, Jesus is in danger of a second crucifixion, so Joseph
takes him back to the Essenes, where he resumes his old occupation
of herding sheep. Feeble in mind and body, he gradually wins back
health and spiritual peace. He regrets his former arrogance and
blasphemy and ascribes the aberration to the insidious temptings of
the demon. It seems that in those troubled days the cities and
countryside were infested by madmen, messiahs, redeemers, preaching
the speedy destruction of the world. For a period Jesus called
himself a son of God and threatened his fellow men with fire and the
sword.
Till he was five and fifty years Jesus lived with his flocks. The
idyllic pictures are in Mr. Moore's most charming vein; sober, as
befits the dignity of the theme. He has fashioned an undulating
prose, each paragraph a page long, which flows with some of the
clarity and music of a style once derided by him, the style coulant
of that master of harmonies, Cardinal Newman. He is a great
landscape-painter.
Jesus is aging. He gives up his shepherd's crook to his successor
and contemplates a retreat where he may meditate the thrilling
events of his youth. Then Paul of Tarsus intervenes. He is
vigorously painted. A refugee from Jerusalem, with Timothy lost
somewhere in Galilee, he invades the Essenian monastery. Eloquent
pages follow. Paul relates his adventures under the banner of Jesus
Christ. A disputatious man, full of the Lord, yet not making it any
easier for his disciples. You catch a glimpse of Pauline
Christianity, differing from the tender message of Jesus; that Jesus
of whom Havelock Ellis wrote: "Jesus found no successor. Over the
stage of those gracious and radiant scenes swiftly fell a fireproof
curtain, wrought of systematic theology and formal metaphysics,
which even the divine flames of that wonderful personality were
unable to melt."
If this be the case then Paul was, if not the founder, the
foster-father of the new creed. A seer of epileptic visions--Edgar
Saltus has said of the "sacred disease" that all founders of
religions have been epileptics--Paul, with the intractable
temperament of a stubborn Pharisee, was softened by some Greek
blood, yet as Renan wrote of Amiel: "He speaks of sin, of salvation,
of redemption and conversion, and other theological bric-a-brac, as
if these things were realities." For Paul and those who followed him
they were and are realities; from them is spun the web of our modern
civilisation. The dismay of Paul on learning from the lips of Jesus
that he it was who, crucified, came back to life may be fancy. The
sturdy Apostle, who recalled the reproachful words of Jesus issuing
from the blinding light on the road to Damascus: "Paul, Paul, why
persecutest thou me?" naturally enough denounced Jesus as a madman,
but accepted his services as a guide to Caesarea, where, in company
with Timothy, he hoped to embark for Rome, there to spread the glad
tidings, there to preach the Gospel of Christ and Him crucified.
On the way he cautiously extracts from Jesus, whose memory of his
cruel tormentors is halting, parts of his story. He believes him a
half-crazy fanatic, deluded with the notion that he is the original
Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus gently expounds his theories, though George
Moore pulls the wires. A pantheism that ends in Nirvana, Neant,
Nada, Nothing! Despairing of ever forcing the world to see the
light, he is become a Quietist, almost a Buddhist. He might have
quoted the mystic Joachim Flora--of the Third Kingdom--who said that
the true ascetic counts nothing his own save only his harp. ("Qui
vere monachus est nihil reputat esse suum nisi citharam.") When a
man's cross becomes too heavy a burden to carry then let him cast it
away. Jesus cast his cross away--his spiritual ambition--believing
that too great love of God leads to propagation of the belief, then
to hatred and persecution of them that won't believe.
The Jews, says Jesus, are an intolerant, stiff-necked people; they
love God, yet they hate men. Horrified at all this, Paul parts
company with the Son of Man, secretly relieved to hear that he is
not going, as he had contemplated, to give himself up to Hanan, the
High Priest in Jerusalem, to denounce the falseness of the heretical
sect named after him. Paul, without crediting the story, saw in
Jesus a dangerous rival. The last we hear of the divine shepherd is
a rumour that he may join a roving band of East Indians and go to
the source of all beliefs, to Asia, impure, mysterious Asia; the
mother of mystic cults. Paul too disappears, and on the little coda:
"The rest of his story is unknown." We are fain to believe that the
"rest of his story" is very well known in the wide world. The book
is another milestone along Mr. Moore's road to Damascus.
If, as Charles Baudelaire has said, "Superstition is the reservoir
of all truths," then, we have lost our spiritual bearings in the
dark forest of modern rationalism. To be sure, we have a Yankee Pope
Joan, a Messiah in petticoats who has uttered the illuminating
phrase, "My first and for ever message is one and eternal," which is
no more a parody of Holy Writ than The Brook Kerith, a book which
while it must have given its author pains to write--so full of
Talmudic and Oriental lore and the lore of the apocryphal gospels is
it--must have been also a joy to him as a literary artist. The
poignant irony of Paul's disbelief in the real Jesus is
understandable, though it is bound to raise a chorus of
protestations. But Mr. Moore never worried over abuse. He has, Celt
that he is, followed his vision. In every man's heart there is a
lake, he says, and the lake in his heart is a sombre one, a very
pool of incertitudes. One feels like quoting to him--though it would
be unnecessary, as he knows well the quotation--what Barbey
d'Aurevilly once wrote to Baudelaire, and years later of Joris-Karel
Huysmans, that he would either blow out his brains or prostrate
himself at the foot of the cross. Mr. Moore has in the past made his
genuflections. But they were before the Jesus of his native
religion; the poetic though not profound image he has created in his
new book will never seem the godlike man of whom Browning said in
Saul: "Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee. See the
Christ stand!"