Mr. George Moore began his literary career by writing his personal
confessions; nor is there any harm in this if he had not continued them
for the remainder of his life. He is a man of genuinely forcible mind
and of great command over a kind of rhetorical and fugitive conviction
which excites and pleases. He is in a perpetual state of temporary
honesty. He has admired all the most admirable modern eccentrics until
they could stand it no longer. Everything he writes, it is to be fully
admitted, has a genuine mental power. His account of his reason for
leaving the Roman Catholic Church is possibly the most admirable
tribute to that communion which has been written of late years. For the
fact of the matter is, that the weakness which has rendered barren the
many brilliancies of Mr. Moore is actually that weakness which the
Roman Catholic Church is at its best in combating. Mr. Moore hates
Catholicism because it breaks up the house of looking-glasses in which
he lives. Mr. Moore does not dislike so much being asked to believe in
the spiritual existence of miracles or sacraments, but he does
fundamentally dislike being asked to believe in the actual existence of
other people. Like his master Pater and all the aesthetes, his real
quarrel with life is that it is not a dream that can be moulded by the
dreamer. It is not the dogma of the reality of the other world that
troubles him, but the dogma of the reality of this world.
The truth is that the tradition of Christianity (which is still the
only coherent ethic of Europe) rests on two or three paradoxes or
mysteries which can easily be impugned in argument and as easily
justified in life. One of them, for instance, is the paradox of hope or
faith—that the more hopeless is the situation the more hopeful must be
the man. Stevenson understood this, and consequently Mr. Moore cannot
understand Stevenson. Another is the paradox of charity or chivalry
that the weaker a thing is the more it should be respected, that the
more indefensible a thing is the more it should appeal to us for a
certain kind of defence. Thackeray understood this, and therefore Mr.
Moore does not understand Thackeray. Now, one of these very practical
and working mysteries in the Christian tradition, and one which the
Roman Catholic Church, as I say, has done her best work in singling
out, is the conception of the sinfulness of pride. Pride is a weakness
in the character; it dries up laughter, it dries up wonder, it dries up
chivalry and energy. The Christian tradition understands this;
therefore Mr. Moore does not understand the Christian tradition.
For the truth is much stranger even than it appears in the formal
doctrine of the sin of pride. It is not only true that humility is a
much wiser and more vigorous thing than pride. It is also true that
vanity is a much wiser and more vigorous thing than pride. Vanity is
social—it is almost a kind of comradeship; pride is solitary and
uncivilized. Vanity is active; it desires the applause of infinite
multitudes; pride is passive, desiring only the applause of one person,
which it already has. Vanity is humorous, and can enjoy the joke even
of itself; pride is dull, and cannot even smile. And the whole of this
difference is the difference between Stevenson and Mr. George Moore,
who, as he informs us, has “brushed Stevenson aside.” I do not know
where he has been brushed to, but wherever it is I fancy he is having a
good time, because he had the wisdom to be vain, and not proud.
Stevenson had a windy vanity; Mr. Moore has a dusty egoism. Hence
Stevenson could amuse himself as well as us with his vanity; while the
richest effects of Mr. Moore’s absurdity are hidden from his eyes.
If we compare this solemn folly with the happy folly with which
Stevenson belauds his own books and berates his own critics, we shall
not find it difficult to guess why it is that Stevenson at least found
a final philosophy of some sort to live by, while Mr. Moore is always
walking the world looking for a new one. Stevenson had found that the
secret of life lies in laughter and humility. Self is the gorgon.
Vanity sees it in the mirror of other men and lives. Pride studies it
for itself and is turned to stone.
It is necessary to dwell on this defect in Mr. Moore, because it is
really the weakness of work which is not without its strength. Mr.
Moore’s egoism is not merely a moral weakness, it is a very constant
and influential aesthetic weakness as well. We should really be much
more interested in Mr. Moore if he were not quite so interested in
himself. We feel as if we were being shown through a gallery of really
fine pictures, into each of which, by some useless and discordant
convention, the artist had represented the same figure in the same
attitude. “The Grand Canal with a distant view of Mr. Moore,” “Effect
of Mr. Moore through a Scotch Mist,” “Mr. Moore by Firelight,” “Ruins
of Mr. Moore by Moonlight,” and so on, seems to be the endless series.
He would no doubt reply that in such a book as this he intended to
reveal himself. But the answer is that in such a book as this he does
not succeed. One of the thousand objections to the sin of pride lies
precisely in this, that self-consciousness of necessity destroys
self-revelation. A man who thinks a great deal about himself will try
to be many-sided, attempt a theatrical excellence at all points, will
try to be an encyclopaedia of culture, and his own real personality
will be lost in that false universalism. Thinking about himself will
lead to trying to be the universe; trying to be the universe will lead
to ceasing to be anything. If, on the other hand, a man is sensible
enough to think only about the universe; he will think about it in his
own individual way. He will keep virgin the secret of God; he will see
the grass as no other man can see it, and look at a sun that no man has
ever known. This fact is very practically brought out in Mr. Moore’s
“Confessions.” In reading them we do not feel the presence of a
clean-cut personality like that of Thackeray and Matthew Arnold. We
only read a number of quite clever and largely conflicting opinions
which might be uttered by any clever person, but which we are called
upon to admire specifically, because they are uttered by Mr. Moore. He
is the only thread that connects Catholicism and Protestantism, realism
and mysticism—he or rather his name. He is profoundly absorbed even
in views he no longer holds, and he expects us to be. And he intrudes
the capital “I” even where it need not be intruded—even where it
weakens the force of a plain statement. Where another man would say,
“It is a fine day,” Mr. Moore says, “Seen through my temperament, the
day appeared fine.” Where another man would say “Milton has obviously a
fine style,” Mr. Moore would say, “As a stylist Milton had always
impressed me.” The Nemesis of this self-centred spirit is that of being
totally ineffectual. Mr. Moore has started many interesting crusades,
but he has abandoned them before his disciples could begin. Even when
he is on the side of the truth he is as fickle as the children of
falsehood. Even when he has found reality he cannot find rest. One
Irish quality he has which no Irishman was ever without—pugnacity; and
that is certainly a great virtue, especially in the present age. But he
has not the tenacity of conviction which goes with the fighting spirit
in a man like Bernard Shaw. His weakness of introspection and
selfishness in all their glory cannot prevent him fighting; but they
will always prevent him winning.