Looking back over the twenty years since "Celibates" was first
published I find that the George Moore of the earlier year is the
George Moore of to-day. The novelist of 1895 and the novelist of 1915
are one and the same person. Each is really interested in himself;
each is more concerned with how the world and its humanity appear to
him than how they appear to the casual observer or how they may be in
themselves. The writer is always expressing himself through the facts
and personalities which have stirred his imagination to creative
effort. George Moore has never been a reporter or a philosopher; he
has always been an artist.
Now to say that the author of "Celibates" is always expressing himself
does not at all mean that he is recording merely his private
sensations, emotions, and moods. Egoist as he is, George Moore could
not write his autobiography. He tried to do this lately in "Ave,"
"Vale," and "Salve," and failed--failed captivatingly. He is always
most himself when he is dealing with what is not himself--with skies
and hills and ocean and gardens and men and women. Moore is a
naturalist in the finest sense of that word. He deals with nature as
the artist must deal with it if nature is to be understood and
enjoyed. For Moore's relationship with nature, and especially with
human nature, is of that rare kind which is the experience of the very
few--of those fine spirits endowed with the highest sympathy--a
sympathy which is not a feeling with or for others but an actual union
with others, a union which brings suffering as well as enjoyment. This
is the artist's burden of sorrow and it is also his privilege. It is
because of it that every true work of art has in it also something of
a religious influence--a binding power which unites the separated
onlookers in an experience of a common emotion. If the artist have not
this peculiar sympathy he can have no vision and will never be a
creator; he will never show us or tell us the new and strange
mysteries of life which nature is continually unfolding. The artist's
mission is to reveal to us the visions he alone has been vouchsafed to
see, and to reveal them so that the revelation is a creation. The men
and women he is introducing to us must be as real and as living to us
as they are to him. That is what George Moore has done in "Celibates"
and that is why I say he is an artist.
"Celibates" consists of three stories--two of women and one of a man.
Mildred Lawson and John Norton are celibates by nature. Agnes Lahens
is a celibate from environment and circumstance. Each of the three is
utterly different from the other, and yet all are alike in that they
are the products of a modern civilization. Mildred and John are
without that compulsive force which is known as the sexual passion. If
they have it at all, it has been diluted by tradition and so-called
culture into a mere sensation. Agnes's passion is an arrested one, so
that what there is of it is easily diverted into an expression of
religious aspiration.
Mildred Lawson would be called a born flirt. She is pretty, charming,
and talented; but she is cold, unresponsive, selfish, and futile. She
is also eminently respectable after the English middle-class manner.
She has ambition, but she lacks the will-power to school herself and
the determination to accomplish. She is rich in goods but very poor in
goodness. She is often moved profoundly by beautiful thoughts and
uplifting emotions of which she herself is the pleasing, pulsating
centre; but her soul is negative, so that her spiritual states
evaporate when the opportunity is given her for transforming them into
acts. She never gets anywhere. She is self-conscious to a degree and
unstable as water. After breaking one man's heart and deadening the
hearts of three other men, she finally accepts an old and rejected
sweetheart, only to be torn by suspicions that he no longer cares for
her and is marrying her only for her money. We leave her a prey to
thoughts of a life which, unconsciously, she has brought on herself.
John Norton might be called the born monk. He is, however, but the
male embodiment of that cultured selfishness of which Mildred Lawson
is the female expression. He is not a flirt. He takes life too
seriously to be that; but he takes it so seriously that there is only
room in the world for himself alone. He comes of a fine old English
stock, is rich, and is his own master. He treats his mother as a cold-
blooded English gentleman, with Norton's peculiar nature, would treat
a mother--with polite but firm disregard of her claims. He has enough
and to spare of will-power, but it is become degenerated into
obstinacy. He fails because he wants too much, because he is unsocial
at heart, and does not understand that life means giving as well as
taking. His sexual passion finds expression in a religious fanaticism
which is but the expression of utter selfishness, as all sexual
passion is. In the company of Kitty he has moments of exaltation, when
his degenerate passion scents the pure air of love; but he can never
let himself go. When, on one occasion, he so far forgets himself as to
allow his heart to be responsive to Kitty's natural purity and he
kisses her, he is so shocked at what he has done that he runs away and
leaves the girl to a terrible fate. We leave him also a prey to
thoughts of what he might have prevented. He, too, like Mildred
Lawson, must henceforth face a life of his own unconscious making.
Agnes Lahens is the victim of a heartless, selfish society in which
the abuse of love has made its world a desert and its products Dead
Sea fruit. Out of a sheer impulse for self-protection she flies to the
nunnery, which is ready to give her life at the price of her womanhood
and her self-sacrifice.
As portraits, these of Mildred Lawson and John Norton are exquisitely
finished. They are half-lengths, with a quality of coloring
fascinating in its repelling truth. Every tint and shade have been
cunningly and caressingly laid in, so that the features, living and
animated, are yet filled with suggestions of the spiritual barrenness
in the originals. Very human they are, and yet they are without those
gracious qualities which link humanity with what we feel to be divine.
There is the touch of nature here, but it is not the touch which makes
the whole world kin. That touch we ourselves supply; and it speaks
eloquently for Moore's art that in picturing these unlovely beings he
throws us back on our better selves. Beyond the vision of these
celibates here revealed we see a passionate humanity, working, hating,
sorrowing, and dying, yet always loving, and in loving finding its
fullest life in an earthly salvation. True love is a mighty democrat.
Knowing these "Celibates," we welcome the more gladly those who, even
if less gifted, are ready to walk with us, hand in hand, along the
common human highway of the "pilgrim's progress."