CHAPTER I

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MEMOIRS OF MY DEAD LIFE

BY

GEORGE MOORE

CONTENTS

APOLOGIA PRO SCRIPTIS MEIS

I. SPRING IN LONDON

II. FLOWERING NORMANDY

III. A WAITRESS

IV. THE END OF MARIE PELLEGRIN

V. LA BUTTE

VI. SPENT LOVES

VII. NINON'S TABLE D'HÔTE

VIII. THE LOVERS OF ORELAY

IX. IN THE LUXEMBOURG GARDENS

X. A REMEMBRANCE

XI. BRING IN THE LAMP

XII. SUNDAY EVENING IN LONDON

XIII. RESURGAM

APOLOGIA PRO SCRIPTIS MEIS

[_The_ APOLOGIA _which follows needs, perhaps, a word of

explanation, not to clear up Mr. Moore's text--that is as delightful,

as irrelevantly definite, as paradoxically clear as anything this

present wearer of the Ermine of English Literature has ever

written--but to explain why it was written and why it is published.

When the present publisher, who is hereinafter, in the words of

Schopenhauer, "flattened against the wall of the Wisdom of the East,"

first read and signified his pride in being able to publish these

"Memoirs," the passages now consigned to "the late Lord ----'s

library" were not in the manuscript. On the arrival of the final copy

they were discovered, and thereby hangs an amusing tale, consisting of

a series of letters which, in so far as they were written with a

certain caustic, humorous Irish pen, have taken their high place among

the "Curiosities of Literature." The upshot of the matter was that the

publisher, entangled in the "weeds" brought over by his_ Mayflower

_ancestors, found himself as against the author in the position of

Mr. Coote as against Shakespeare; that is, the matter was so

beautifully written that he had not the heart to decline it, and yet

in parts so--what shall we say?--so full of the "Wisdom of the East"

that he did not dare to publish it in the West. Whereupon he adopted

the policy of Mr. Henry Clay, which is, no doubt, always a mistake.

And the author, bearing in mind the make-up of that race of Man called

publishers, gave way on condition that this _APOLOGIA_ should

appear without change. Here it is, without so much as the alteration

of an Ibsen comma, and if the _Mayflower_ "weeds" mere instrumental

in calling it forth, then it is, after all, well that they grew_.--THE

PUBLISHER.]

Last month the post brought me two interesting letters, and the reader

will understand how interesting they were to me when I tell him that

one was from Mr. Sears, of the firm of Appleton, who not knowing me

personally had written to Messrs. Heinemann to tell them that the firm

he represented could not publish the "Memoirs" unless two stories were

omitted; "The Lovers of Orelay," and "In the Luxembourg Gardens,"--Messrs.

Heinemann had forwarded the letter to me; my interest in the

other letter was less direct, but the reader will understand that it was

not less interesting when I tell that it came from the secretary of a

certain charitable institution who had been reading the book in question,

and now wrote to consult me on many points of life and conduct. He had

been compelled to do so, for the reading of the "Memoirs" had disturbed

his mind. The reader will agree with me that disturbed is probably the

right word to use. To say that the book had undermined his convictions

or altered his outlook on life would be an exaggeration. "Outlook on life"

and "standard of conduct" are phrases from his own vocabulary, and they

depict him.

"Your outlook on life is so different from mine that I can hardly

imagine you being built of the same stuff as myself. Yet I venture to

put my difficulty before you. It is, of course, no question of mental

grasp or capacity or artistic endowment. I am, so far as these are

concerned, merely the man in the street, the averagely endowed and the

ordinarily educated. I call myself a Puritan and a Christian. I run

continually against walls of convention, of morals, of taste, which

may be all wrong, but which I should feel it wrong to climb over. You

range over fields where my make-up forbids me to wander.

"Such frankness as yours is repulsive, forbidding, demoniac! You speak

of woman as being the noblest subject of contemplation for man, but

interpreted by your book and your experiences this seems in the last

analysis to lead you right into sensuality, and what I should call

illicit connections. Look at your story of Doris! I _do_ want to

know what you feel about that story in relation to right and wrong. Do

you consider that all that Orelay adventure was put right, atoned,

explained by the fact that Doris, by her mind and body, helped you to

cultivate your artistic sense? Was Goethe right in looking upon all

women merely as subjects for experiment, as a means of training his

aesthetic sensibilities? Does it not justify the seduction of any girl

by any man? And does not that take us straight back to the dissolution

of Society? The degradation of woman (and of man) seems to be

inextricably involved. Can you regard imperturbedly a thought of your

own sister or wife passing through Doris' Orelay experience?"

* * * * *

The address of the charitable institution and his name are printed on

the notepaper, and I experience an odd feeling of surprise whenever

this printed matter catches my eye, or when I think of it; not so much

a sense of surprise as a sense of incongruity, and while trying to

think how I might fling myself into some mental attitude which he

would understand I could not help feeling that we were very far apart,

nearly as far apart as the bird in the air and the fish in the sea.

"And he seems to feel toward me as I feel toward him, for does he not

say in his letter that it is difficult for him to imagine me built of

the same stuff as himself?" On looking into his letter again I

imagined my correspondent as a young man in doubt as to which road he

shall take, the free road of his instincts up the mountainside with

nothing but the sky line in front of him or the puddled track along

which the shepherd drives the meek sheep; and I went to my writing

table asking myself if my correspondent's spiritual welfare was my

real object, for I might be writing to him in order to exercise myself

in a private debate before committing the article to paper, or if I

was writing for his views to make use of them. One asks oneself these

questions but receives no answer. He would supply me with a point of

view opposed to my own, this would be an advantage; so feeling rather

like a spy within the enemy's lines on the eve of the battle I began

my letter. "My Dear Sir: Let me assure you that we are 'built of the

same stuff.' Were it not so you would have put my book aside. I even

suspect we are of the same kin; were it otherwise you would not have

written to me and put your difficulties so plainly before me." Laying

the pen aside I meditated quite a long while if I should tell him that

I imagined him as a young man standing at the branching of the roads,

deciding eventually that it would not be wise for me to let him see

that reading between the lines I had guessed his difficulty to be a

personal one. "We must proceed cautiously," I said, "there may be a

woman in the background.... The literary compliments he pays me and

the interest that my book has excited are accidental, circumstantial.

Life comes before literature, for certain he stands at the branching

of the roads, and the best way I can serve him is by drawing his

attention to the fallacy, which till now he has accepted as a truth,

that there is one immutable standard of conduct for all men and all

women." But the difficulty of writing a sufficient letter on a subject

so large and so intricate puzzled me and I sat smiling, for an odd

thought had dropped suddenly into my mind. My correspondent was a

Bible reader, no doubt, and it would be amusing to refer him to the

chapter in Genesis where God is angry with our first parents because

they had eaten of the tree of good and evil. "This passage" I said to

myself, "has never been properly understood. Why was God angry? For no

other reason except that they had set up a moral standard and could be

happy no longer, even in Paradise. According to this chapter the moral

standard is the origin of all our woe. God himself summoned our first

parents before him, and in what plight did they appear? We know how

ridiculous the diminutive fig leaf makes a statue seem in our museums;

think of the poor man and woman attired in fig leaves just plucked

from the trees! I experienced a thrill of satisfaction that I should

have been the first to understand a text that men have been studying

for thousands of years, turning each word over and over, worrying over

it, all in vain, yet through no fault of the scribe who certainly

underlined his intention. Could he have done it better than by

exhibiting our first parents covering themselves with fig leaves, and

telling how after getting a severe talking to from the Almighty they

escaped from Paradise pursued by an angel? The story can have no other

meaning, and that I am the first to expound it is due to no

superiority of intelligence, but because my mind is free. But I must

not appear to my correspondent as an exegetist. Turning to his letter

again I read:

"I am sorely puzzled. Is your life all of a piece? Are your 'Memoirs'

a pose? I can't think the latter, for you seem sincere and frank to

the verge of brutality (or over). But what is your standard of

conduct? Is there a right and a wrong? Is everything open to any man?

Can you refer me now to any other book of yours in which you view life

steadily and view it whole from our standpoint? Forgive my intrusion.

You see I don't set myself as a judge, but you sweep away apparently

all my standards. And you take your reader so quietly and closely into

your confidence that you tempt a response. I see your many admirable

points, but your center of living is not mine, and I do want to know

as a matter of enormous human interest what your subsumptions are. I

cannot analyze or express myself with literary point as you do, but

you may see what I aim at. It is a bigger question to me than the

value or force of your book. It goes right to the core of the big

things, and I approach you as one man of limited outlook to another of

wider range."

The reader will not suspect me of vanity for indulging in these

quotations; he will see readily that my desire is to let the young man

paint his own portrait, and I hope he will catch glimpses as I seem to

do of an earnest spirit, a sort of protestant Father Gogarty,

hesitating on the brink of his lake. "There is a lake in every man's

heart"--but I must not quote my own writings. If I misinterpret him

... the reader will be able to judge, having the letter before him.

But if my view of him is right, my task is a more subtle one than

merely to point out that he will seek in vain for a moral standard

whether he seeks it in the book of Nature or in the book of God. I

should not move him by pointing out that in the Old Testament we are

told an eye for an eye is our due, and in the New the rede is to turn

the left cheek after receiving a blow on the right. Nor would he be

moved by referring him to the history of mankind, to the Boer War, for

instance, or the massacres which occur daily in Russia; everybody

knows more or less the history of mankind, and to know it at all is to

know that every virtue has at some time or other been a vice. But man

cannot live by negation alone, and to persuade my correspondent over

to our side it might be well to tell him that if there be no moral

standard he will nevertheless find a moral idea if he looks for it in

Nature. I reflected how I would tell him that he must not be

disappointed because the idea changes and adapts itself to

circumstance, and sometimes leaves us for long intervals; if he would

make progress he must learn to understand that the moral world only

becomes beautiful when we relinquish our ridiculous standards of what

is right and wrong, just as the firmament became a thousand times more

wonderful and beautiful when Galileo discovered that the earth moved.

Had Kant lived before the astronomer he would have been a great

metaphysician, but he would not have written the celebrated passage

"Two things fill the soul with undying and ever-increasing admiration,

the night with its heaven of stars above us and in our hearts the

moral law." The only fault I find with this passage is that I read the

word "law" where I expected to read the word "idea," for the word

"law" seems to imply a Standard, and Kant knew there is none. Is the

fault with the translator or with Kant, who did not pick his words

carefully? The metaphysician spent ten years thinking out the

"Critique of Pure Reason" and only six months writing it; no doubt his

text might be emendated with advantage. If there was a moral standard

the world within us would be as insignificant as the firmament was

when the earth was the center of the universe and all the stars were

little candles and Jehovah sat above them, a God who changed his mind

and repented, a whimsical, fanciful God who ordered the waters to rise

so that his creatures might be overwhelmed in the flood, all except

one family (I need not repeat here the story of Noah's Ark and the

doctrine of the Atonement) if there was one fixed standard of right

and wrong, applicable to everybody, black, white, yellow, and red men

alike, an eternal standard that circumstance could not change. Those

who believe in spite of every proof to the contrary that there is a

moral standard cannot appreciate the beautiful analogy which Kant

drew, the moral idea within the heart and the night with its heaven of

stars above us. "It is strange," I reflected, "how men can go on

worrying themselves about Rome and Canterbury four hundred years after

the discovery that the earth moved, and involuntarily a comparison

rose up in my mind of a squabble between two departments in an office

after the firm has gone bankrupt.... But how to get all these vagrant

thoughts into a sheet of paper? St. Paul himself could not proselytize

within such limitations, and apparently what I wrote was not

sufficient to lead my correspondent out of the narrow lanes of

conventions and prejudices into the open field of inquiry. Turning to

his letter, I read it again, misjudging him, perhaps ... but the

reader shall form his own estimate.

"I honestly felt and feel a big difficulty in reading and thinking

over your 'Memoirs' for you are a propagandist whether you recognize

that as a conscious mission or not. There is in your book a

challenging standard of life which will not wave placidly by the side

of the standard which is generally looked up to as his regimental

colors by the average man. One must go down. And it was because I felt

the necessity of choosing that I wrote to you.

"'Memoirs' is clearly to me a sincere book. You have built your life

on the lines there indicated. And there is a charm not merely in that

sincerity but in the freedom of the life so built. I could not, for

instance, follow my thoughts as you do. I do not call myself a coward

for these limitations. I believe it to be a bit of my build; you say

that limitation has no other sanction than convention--race

inheritance, at least so I gather. Moral is derived from mos. Be it

so. Does not that then fortify the common conviction that the moral is

the best? Men have been hunting the best all their history long by a

process of trial and error. Surely the build of things condemns the

murderer, the liar, the sensualist, and the coward! and how do you

come by 'natural goodness' if your moral is merely your customary? No,

with all respect for your immense ability and your cultured outlook, I

do not recognize the lawless variability of the right and the wrong

standard which you posit. How get you your evidence? From human

actions? But it is the most familiar of facts that men do things they

feel to be wrong. I have known a thief who stole every time in pangs

of conscience; not merely in the fear of detection. There is a higher

and a lower in morals, but the lower is recognized as a lower, and

does not appeal to a surface reading of the code of an aboriginal in

discussing morals. That, I think is only fair. Your artistic sense is

finely developed, but it is none the less firmly based, although there

are Victorian back parlors and paper roses.

"You see you are a preacher, not merely an artist. Every glimpse of

the beautiful urges the beholder to imitation and _vice versa_.

And that is why your 'Memoirs' are not merely 'an exhibition' of the

immoral; they are 'an incitement' to the immoral. Don't you think so?

And thinking so would you not honestly admit, that society (in the

wide sense, of course--civilization) would relapse, go down,

deliquesce, if all of us were George Moores as depicted in your book?"

His letter dropped from my hand, and I sat muttering, "How

superficially men think!" How little they trouble themselves to

discover the truth! While declaring that truth is all important, they

accept any prejudice and convention they happen to meet, fastening on

to it like barnacles. How disappointing is that passage about the

murderer, the sensualist, the liar, and the coward; but of what use

would it be to remind my correspondent of Judith who went into the

tent of Holofernes to lie with him, and after the love feast drove a

nail into the forehead of the sleeping man. She is in Scripture held

up to our admiration as a heroine, the saviour of our nation.

Charlotte Corday stabbed Marat in his bath, yet who regards Charlotte

Corday as anything else but a heroine? In Russia men know that the

fugitives lie hidden in the cave, yet they tell the Cossack soldiers

they have taken the path across the hill--would my correspondent

reprove them and call them liars? I am afraid he has a lot of leeway

to make up, and it is beyond my power to help him.

Picking up his letter I glanced through it for some mention of "Esther

Waters," for in answer to the question if I could recommend him to any

book of mine in which I viewed life--I cannot bring myself to

transcribe that tag from Matthew Arnold--I referred him to "Esther

Waters," saying that a critic had spoken of it as a beautiful

amplification of the beatitudes. Of the book he makes no mention in

his letter, but he writes: "There is a challenging standard of life in

your book which will not wave placidly by the side of the standard

which is generally looked up to as his regimental colors by the

average man." The idea besets him, and he refers to it again in the

last paragraph; he says: "You see, you are a preacher, not merely an

artist." And very likely he is right; there is a messianic aspect in

my writings, and I fell to thinking over "Esther Waters"; and reading

between the lines for the first time, I understood that it was that

desire to standardize morality that had caused the poor girl to be

treated so shamefully. Once Catholicism took upon itself to torture

and then to burn all those it could lay hands upon who refused to

believe with its doctrines, and now in the twentieth century

Protestantism persecutes those who act or think in opposition to its

moralities. Even the saintly Mrs. Barfield did not dare to keep

Esther; but if she sent her servant away, she spoke kindly, giving her

enough money to see her through her trouble; there are good people

among Christians. The usual Christian attitude would be to tell Esther

that she must go into a reformatory after the birth of her child, for

the idea of punishment is never long out of the Christian's thoughts.

It is not necessary to recapitulate here how Esther, escaping from the

network of snares spread for her destruction, takes refuge in a

workhouse, and lives there till her child is reared; how she works

fifteen hours a day in a lodging house, sleeping in corners of

garrets, living upon insufficient food; or how, after years of

struggle, she meets William, now separated from his wife, and consents

to live with him that her child may have a father. For this second

"transgression," so said a clergyman in a review of the book, Esther

could not be regarded as a moral woman. His moral sense, dwarfed by

doctrine, did not enable him to see that the whole evil came out of

standard morality and the whole good out of the instinct incarnate in

her; and he must have read the book without perceiving its theme, the

revelation in the life of an outcast servant girl of the instinct on

which the whole world rests.

Not until writing these lines did I ever think of "Esther Waters" as a

book of doctrine; but it is one, I see that now, and that there is a

messianic aspect in my writings. My correspondent did well to point

that out, and no blame attaches to him because he seems to fail to see

that I may be an admirable moralist while depreciating Christian

morality and advocating a return to Nature's. He belonged to the

traditions yesterday, today he is among those who are seekers, and

to-morrow I doubt not he will be among those prone to think that

perhaps Christianity is, after all, retrograde. His lips will curl

contemptuously to-morrow when he hears the cruelty of the circus

denounced by men who would, if they were allowed, relight the bon

fires of the Inquisition; ... he is a Protestant, I had forgotten.

Gladiators have begun to appear to us less cruel than monks, and

everybody who can think has begun to think that some return to pagan

morality is desirable. That is so; awaking out of the great slumber of

Christianity, we are all asking if the qualities which once we deemed

our exclusive possession have not been discovered among pagans--pride,

courage, and heroism. Our contention has become that no superiority is

claimed in any respect but one; it appears that it must be admitted

that Christians are more chaste than pagans, at all events that

chastity flourishes among Christian communities as it has never

flourished among pagan. The Christian's boast is that all sexual

indulgence outside of the marriage bed is looked upon as sinful, and

he would seem to think that if he proclaims this opinion loudly, its

proclamation makes amends for many transgressions of the ethical law.

All he understands is the law; nothing of the subtler idea that the

ethical impulse is always invading the ethical law finds a way into

his mind. Women are hurried from Regent Street to Vine Street, and his

conscience is soothed by these raids; the owners of the houses in

which these women live are fined, and he congratulates himself that

vice is not licensed in England, that, in fact, its existence is

unrecognized. Prostitution thrives, nevertheless; but numbers do not

discourage the moralist, and when he reads in the newspapers of

degraded females, "unfortunates," he breathes a sigh; and if these

reports contain descriptions of miserable circumstance and human

grief, he mutters "how very sad!"

But the assurance that the women are wretched and despised soothes his

conscience, and he remembers if he has not been able to abolish

prostitution, he has at all events divested it of all "glamour." It

would appear that practical morality consists in making the meeting of

men and women as casual as that of animals. "But what do you wish--you

would not have vice respected, would you?" "What you call vice was

once respected and honored, and the world was as beautiful then as

now, and as noble men lived in it. In many ways the world was more

moral than when your ideas began to prevail." He asks me to explain,

and I tell him that with the degradation of the courtesan the moral

standard has fallen, for as we degrade her we disgrace the act of

love. We have come to speak of it as part of our lower nature,

permissible, it is true, if certain conditions are complied with, but

always looked upon askance; and continuing the same strain of

argument, I tell him that the act of love was once deemed a sacred

rite, and that I am filled with pride when I think of the noble and

exalted world that must have existed before Christian doctrine caused

men to look upon women with suspicion and bade them to think of angels

instead. Pointing to some poor drab lurking in a shadowy corner he

asks, "See! is she not a vile thing?" On this we must part; he is too

old to change, and his mind has withered in prejudice and conventions;

"a meager mind," I mutter to myself, "one incapable of the effort

necessary to understand me if I were to tell him, for instance, that

the desire of beauty is in itself a morality." It was, perhaps, the

only morality the Greeks knew, and upon the memory of Greece we have

been living ever since. In becoming _hetairae_, Aspasia, Lais,

Phryne, and Sappho became the distributors of that desire of beauty

necessary in a state which had already begun to dream the temples of

Minerva and Zeus.

The words of Blake come into my mind, "the daring of the lion or the

submission of the ox." With these words I should have headed my letter

to the secretary of the charitable institution, and I should have told

him that many books which he would regard as licentious are looked

upon by me as sacred. "Mademoiselle de Maupin," "the golden book of

spirit and sense," Swinburne has called it, I have always looked upon

as a sacred book from the very beginning of my life. It cleansed me of

the belief that man has a lower nature, and I learned from it that the

spirit and the flesh are equal, "that earth is as beautiful as heaven,

and that perfection of form is virtue." "Mademoiselle de Maupin" was a

great purifying influence, a lustral water dashed by a sacred hand,

and the words are forever ringing in my ear, "by exaltation of the

spirit and the flesh thou shalt live." This book would be regarded by

my correspondent as he regards my "Memoirs," and its publication has

been interdicted in England. How could it be permitted to circulate in

a country in which the kingdom of heaven is (in theory) regarded as

more important than the kingdom of earth? A few pages back the idea

came up under my pen that the aim of practical morality was to render

illicit love as unattractive as possible, and I suppose, though he has

never thought the matter out, the Christian moralist would regard

Gautier as the most pernicious of writers, for his theme is always

praise of the visible world, of all that we can touch and see; and in

this book art and sex are not estranged. I have often wondered if the

estrangement of the twain so noticeable in English literature is not

the origin of this strange belief that bodily love is part of our

lower nature. Our appreciation of the mauve flush dying in the west

has been indefinitely heightened by descriptions seen in pictures and

read in poems, and I cannot but think that if the lover's exaltation

before the curve of his mistress's breast had not been forbidden, the

ugly thought that the lover's ardor is inferior to the poet's would

never have obtained credence. There is but one energy, and the vital

fluid, whether expended in love or in a poem, is the same. The poet

and the lover are creators, they participate and carry on the great

work begun billions of years ago when the great Breath breathing out

of chaos summoned the stars into being. But why do I address myself

like this to the average moralist? How little will he understand me!

In the Orelay adventure which horrified him there was an appreciation

of beauty which he has, I am afraid, rendered himself incapable of.

Myself and Doris were spiritual gainers by the Orelay adventure,

Doris's rendering of "The Moonlight Sonata," till she went to Orelay,

was merely brilliant and effective; and have not all the critics in

England agreed that the story in which I relate her contains some of

the best pages of prose I have written? But why talk of myself when

there is Wagner's experience to speak about? Did he not write to

Madame Wasendonck, "I owe you Tristan for all eternity"? She has not

left any written record of her debt to Wagner, perhaps because she

could not find words to give the reader any idea how great it was.

Histories of human civilization there are in abundance, but I do not

know of any history of the human intelligence. But when this comes to

be written--if it ever should come to be written--the writer will

hesitate, at least I can imagine him hesitating, how much of the

genius of artists he would be justified in tracing back to sexual

impulses. Goethe, as my correspondent informs me, looked upon love of

woman as a means of increasing his aesthetic sensibilities, and my

correspondent seems to think that he did them wrong thereby, whereas I

think he honored them exceedingly. Balzac held the contrary belief, so

Gautier tells us, maintaining that great spiritual elation could be

gained by restraint, and when inquiry was made into his precise

beliefs on this point he confessed that he could not allow an author

more than half an hour once a year with his beloved; he placed no

restriction, however, on correspondence, "for that helped to form a

style." When Gautier mentioned the names of certain great men whose

lives offered a striking refutation of this theory, Balzac answered

they would have written better if they had lived chastely. Gautier

seems to have left the question there, and so will we, remarking only

that Balzac was prone to formulating laws out of his single

experience. I remember having written, or having heard somebody say,

"in other writers we discover this or that thing, but everything

exists in Balzac." And in his conversation with Gautier we do not find

him praising chastity as a virtue, but extolling the results that may

be gotten from chastity as a Yogi might. It is said that English

missionaries in India sometimes drive out in their pony chaises to

visit a holy man who has left his womenfolk, plentiful food, and a

luxurious dwelling for a cave in some lonely ravine. The pony chaise

only takes the parson to the mouth of the ravine, and leaving his wife

and children in charge of his servant, the parson ascends the rocky

way on foot, meeting, perchance, a fat peasant priest from Maynooth

bent on the same mission as himself--the conversion of the Yogi. It is

amusing for a moment to imagine these two Western barbarians sitting

with the emaciated saint on the ledge in front of the cave. Thinking

to win his sympathy, they tell him that on one point they are all

agreed. The Brahman's eyes would dilate; how can this thing be? his

eyes would seem to ask, and it is easy to imagine how contemptuously

he would raise his eyes when he gathered gradually from their

discourse that his visitors believed that chastity was incumbent upon

all men. "But all men are not the same," he would answer, if he

answered his visitors; "I dwell in solitude and in silence, and am

chaste, and live upon the rice that the pious leave on the rocks for

me, but I do not regard chastity and abstinence as possessed of any

inherent merits; as virtues, they are but a means to an end. How would

you impose chastity upon all men, since every man brings a different

idea into the world with him? There are men who would die if forced to

live chaste lives, and there are men who would choose death rather

than live unchaste, and many a woman if she were forced to live with

one husband would make him very unhappy, whereas if she lived with two

men she would make them both supremely happy. But the news has reached

me even here that in the West you seek a moral standard, and this

quest always fills me with wonder. There are priests among you, I can

see that, and soldiers, and fishermen, and artists and princes and

folk who labor in the fields--now do you expect all these men, living

in different conditions of life, to live under the same rule? I am

afraid that the East and the West will never understand each other.

The sun is setting, my time for speech is over," and the wise man,

rising from the stone on which he has been sitting, enters into the

cave, leaving the priest and the parson to descend the rocks together

in the twilight, their differences hushed for the moment, to break

forth again the next day.

Schopenhauer has a fine phrase, one that has haunted my mind these

many years, that the follies of the West flatten against the sublime

wisdom of the East like bullets fired against a cliff.

How can it be otherwise? For when we were naked savages the Brahmans

were learned philosophers, and had seen as far into every mystery as

mortal eyes will ever see. We have progressed a little lately; our

universities, it is true, are a few hundred years old, but in

comparison with the East we are still savages; our culture is but

rudimentary, and my correspondent's letter is proof of it. It is

characteristic of the ideas that still flourish on the banks of the

Thames, ideas that have changed only a little since the

_Mayflower_ sailed. It would have been better if Columbus had

delayed his discovery for, let us say, a thousand years. I am afraid

the _Mayflower_ carried over a great many intellectual weeds

which have caught root and flourished exceedingly in your

States--Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Washington. A letter arrived

from Washington some two or three months ago. The writer was a lady

who used to write to me on all subjects under the sun; about fifteen

years ago we had ceased to write to each other, so she began her

letter, not unnaturally, by speaking of the surprise she guessed her

handwriting would cause me. She had broken the long silence, for she

had been reading "The Lake," and had been much interested in the book.

It would have been impolite to write to me without alluding to the

aesthetic pleasure the book had given her, but her interest was mainly

a religious one. About five years ago she had become a Roman Catholic,

she was writing a book on the subject of her conversion, and would

like to find out from me why I had made Father Gogarty's conversion

turn upon his love of woman, "for it seems to me clear, unless I have

misunderstood your book, that you intended to represent Gogarty as an

intellectual man." It is difficult to trace one's motives back, but I

remember the irritation her letter caused me, and how I felt it would

not be dignified for me to explain; my book was there for her to

interpret or misinterpret, as she pleased; added to which her

"conversion" to Rome was an annoying piece of news. Fifteen years ago

she was an intelligent woman and a beautiful woman, if photographs do

not lie, and it was disagreeable for me to think of her going on her

knees in a confessional, receiving the sacraments, wearing scapulars,

trying to persuade herself that she believed in the Pope's

indulgences. She must now be middle-aged, but the decay of physical

beauty is not so sad a spectacle as the mind's declension. "She began

to think," I said, "of another world only when she found herself

unable to enjoy this one any longer; weariness of this world produces

what the theologians call 'faith.' How often have we heard the phrase

'You will believe when you are dying'? She would have had," I said,

"Father Gogarty leave his church for doctrinal rather than natural

reasons, believing scrolls to be more intellectual than the instincts;

Father Gogarty poring over some early edition of the Scriptures in his

little house on the hilltop, reading by the light of the lamp at

midnight and deciding that he would go out of his parish because,

according to recent exegesis, a certain verset in the Gospel had been

added three hundred years after the death of Christ." I fell to

thinking how dry, common, and uninteresting the tale would be had it

been written on these doctrinal lines. Carlyle said that Cardinal

Newman had the brain of a half-grown rabbit, and he was right; Newman

never got further than a scroll, and man must think with his body, as

well as with his brain. To think well the whole man must think, and it

seems to me that Father Gogarty thought in this complete way. Rose

Leicester revealed to him the enchantment and the grace of life, and

his quest became life. Had it been Hose Leicester herself the story

would have merely been a sensual incident. The instinct to go rose up

within him, he could not tell how or whence it came, and he went as

the bird goes, finding his way toward a country where he had never

been, led as the bird is led by some nostalgic instinct. And I do not

doubt that he found life, whether in the form of political or literary

ambition or in some other woman who would remind him of the woman he

had lost; perhaps he found it in all these things, perhaps in none.

Told as I told it the story seems to me a true and human one, and one

that might easily occur in these modern days; much more easily than

the story my correspondent would have had me write. The story of a

priest abandoning his parish for theological reasons is not an

improbable one, but I think such a story would be more typical of the

sixteenth century, when men were more interested in the authenticity

of the Biblical texts than they are in the twentieth. The Bible has

been sifted again and again; its history is known, every word has been

weighed, and it is difficult to imagine the most scrupulous exegetist

throwing a search light into any unexplored corner. Even Catholic

scholarship, if Loisy can be regarded as a Catholic, has abandoned the

theory that the gospels were written by the Apostles. The earliest,

that of Mark, was written sixty years after the death of Christ, and

it is the only one for which any scholar claims the faintest

historical value. With this knowledge of history in our possession

belief has become in modern times merely a matter of temperament,

entirely dissociated from the intellect. Some painter once said that

Nature put him out. The theologian can say the same about the

intellect--it puts him out. Out of a great deal of temperament and a

minimum of intellect he gets a precipitate, if I may be permitted to

drop into the parlance of the chemist, for dregs would be an impolite

word to use, and the precipitate always delights in the fetich. There

will always be men and women, the cleric has discovered, who will

barter their souls for the sake of rosaries and scapulars and the

Pope's indulgences. The two great enemies of religion, as the clerics

know well, are the desire to live and the desire to know. We find this

in Genesis: God: i. e., the clerics, was angry because his creatures

ate of these different fruits. God's comprehension of the danger of

the tree of life is not wonderful, but his foreseeing of the danger of

the tree of knowledge was extraordinary foreseeing, for very little of

the fruit of this tree had been eaten at the time the text was

written. All through the Middle Ages the clerics strove to keep men

from it with tortures and burnings at the stake, and they were so

anxiously striving for success in protecting their flocks from this

tree that they allowed the sheep to wander, the rams to follow the

ewes, and to gambol as they pleased. But the efforts of the clerics

were vain. There were rams who renounced the ewes, and the succulent

herbage that grows about the tree of life, for the sake of the fruit

of the tree of knowledge; all the fences that the clerics had erected

were broken down one by one; and during the nineteenth century a great

feast was held under the tree. But after every feast there are always

ailing stomachs; these denouncing the feast go about in great

depression of spirit, surfeited feasters, saying the branches of the

tree have been plucked bare; others complain they have eaten bitter

fruit. This is the moment for the prowling cleric. Hell is remote, it

has been going down in the world for some time, and biology, if no

conclusions be drawn, serves the clerical purpose almost as well. "The

origins of existence are humble enough, my son, but think of the

glorious heritage," and the faint-hearted sheep is folded again....

The tree of life is more abundant; whenever a fruit is plucked another

instantly takes its place, and all the efforts of the clerics are now

directed to keep their flocks from this tree. "Back to the tree of

knowledge!" they cry. "Hu! Hu! Hu! Both trees," they mutter among

themselves, "are accursed, but this one, from which sweet fruit may

always be plucked, is the worser." And they collect together in groups

to pass censure on their predecessors. "My predecessors were

infallible fools," cries the Pope, "to have permitted praise of this

fatal tree, wasting their energies on such men as Bruno, who said the

earth was round, and Galileo, whom they forced to say he was mistaken

when he said the earth moves. A pretty set of difficulties they have

involved us in with their accursed astronomy. Boccaccio and the

Troubadours should have been burned instead, and if this had been done

all the abominable modern literature which would persuade the faithful

that this world is not all sackcloth and ashes would never have been

written. Away with him who says that the earth is as beautiful as

heaven," and Gautier's phrase, _"Moi, je trouve la terre aussi belle

que le ciel, et je pense que la correction de la forme est la

vertu,"_ has become the heresy more intolerable than any other to

the modern cleric, and to me and to all the ardent and intellectual

spirits of my generation a complete and perfect expression of

doctrine. To some it will always seem absurd to look to Gautier rather

than to a Bedouin for light. Nature produces certain attitudes of

mind, and among these is an attitude which regards archbishops as more

serious than pretty women. These will never be among my disciples. So

leaving them in full possession of the sacraments, I pass on.

My generation was in sympathy with "Mademoiselle de Maupin" and it did

more than to reveal and clarify the ideas we were seeking. It would be

vain for me, as for any other man, to attempt to follow the course of

an idea and to try to determine its action upon life. Perhaps the part

of the book which interested us the least was that very part which

would be read aloud in court if a prosecution were attempted: I am

alluding to the scene when Mademoiselle de Maupin comes into Albert's

room. This scene was, however, inevitable, and could not be omitted,

for does it not contain that vision of beauty which Albert had been

seeking and which was vouchsafed to him for a little while? Never did

he see Mademoiselle de Maupin afterwards, she was but a phantom of his

own imagination made visible by some prodigy to him. For a still

briefer space Rosette shared Albert's dream, and man and wife remained

faithful to each other. It is easy to imagine the vileness which a

prosecuting counsel could extract from these beautiful pages made

entirely of vision and ecstasy. How false and shameful is the whole

business. We are allowed to state that we prefer pagan morality to

Christian, but are interdicted from illustrating our beliefs by

incident. So long as we confine ourselves to theory we are unmolested.

But these are subtleties which do not trouble the minds of the members

of vigilance associations, the men and women who gather together in

back parlors with lead pencils to mark out passages which they

consider "un-Kur-istean" (a good strong accent on the second

syllable). Their thoughts pursue beaten tracks. Books like

"Mademoiselle de Maupin" they hold would act directly on the

temperament, and we know that they do not do this, we know that the

things of the intellect belong to the intellect and the things of the

flesh to the flesh. Were it otherwise Rose Leicester, the pretty

school mistress, might have been left out of my story entitled "The

Lake," and her place taken by a book. My lady correspondent, it will

be remembered, was in favor of some doctrinal difficulty. My second

correspondent, the secretary of the charitable institution, would have

chosen as the cause of Father Oliver's flight a sensual book. His

choice might have been Burton's "Arabian Nights"; better still

Casanova's "Memoirs," for this is a book written almost entirely with

the senses; the intellect hardly ever intrudes itself; and instead of

an emaciated priest poring over a dusty folio we should have had an

inflamed young man curled up in an armchair reading eagerly, walking

up and down the room from time to time, unable to contain himself, and

eventually throwing the book aside, he would find his way down to the

lake.

These two versions of "The Lake," as it might have been written by my

correspondents, will convince, I think, almost anyone, even them, that

the desire of life which set Father Gogarty free could have been

inspired only by a woman's personality. It was not necessary that he

should go after the woman herself--but that point has already been

explained. What concerns us now to understand is how the strange idea

could have come into men's minds that literature is a more potent

influence than life itself. The solving of this problem has beguiled

many an hour, but the solution seems as far away as ever, and I have

never got nearer than the supposition that perhaps this fear of

literature is a survival of the very legitimate fear that prevailed in

the Middle Ages against writing. In my childhood I remember hearing an

old woman say that writing was an invention of the devil, and what an

old woman believed forty years ago in outlying districts was almost

the universal opinion of the Middle Ages. Denunciations and burnings

of books were frequent, and ideas die slowly, finding a slow

extinction many generations after the reason for their existence has

ceased. In the famous trial of Gille de Rais we have it on record that

the Breton baron was asked by his ecclesiastical judges if pagan

literature had inspired the strange crimes of which he was accused, if

he had read of them in--I have forgotten the names of the Latin

authors mentioned, but I remember Gille de Rais' quite simple answer

that his own heart had inspired the crimes. Whereupon the judges not

unnaturally were shocked, for the conclusion was forced upon them that

if Gille's confession were true they were not trying a man who had

been perverted by outward influence but one who had been born

perverted. Who then was responsible for his crimes? Lunacy sometimes

in these modern days serves as a scapegoat, but the knowledge of

lunacy in the fifteenth century was not so complete as it is now and

the judges preferred to believe that Gille was lying. And about ten

years ago London found itself in the same moral quandary. Three or

four little boys were discovered to have planned the murder of one of

their comrades--sixpence, I think, was the object of the murder; not

one was over eight, yet they planned the crime skillfully and very

nearly succeeded in avoiding detection. To credit these little boys

with instinctive crime was intolerable, and just as in the Middle Ages

a scapegoat had to be found. Apuleius and his Ass were out of the

question, but the little boys admitted having read penny dreadfuls;

London breathed again, the way now was clear, these newspapers must be

prosecuted, and this recrudescence of wickedness in the heart of a

little boy would never be heard of again. A little later or maybe it

was a little earlier, I relate these things in the order in which they

come into my mind, the London Vigilance Association instituted a

prosecution against Mr. Henry Vizetelly, a man of letters and the

publisher of Zola's novels. With the exception of Mr. Robert Buchanan

and myself not a single man of letters could be found to speak in Mr.

Vizetelly's defense. Everybody urged some excuse, his wife was ill,

his children were at the seaside and he had to go down to see them, or

that he had never cared much about naturalistic literature; whereas,

if the prosecution had been directed against something romantic,

etc.--Stranger still is the fact that it was almost impossible to find

a counsel willing to defend Mr. Vizetelly. One man threw up the case,

giving as his reason that he would have to read the books, another

said that it would be impossible to adequately defend Mr. Vizetelly's

case because no one could say what one had a right to put into a book.

This remark seemed to me at the time contemptible, but there was more

in it than I thought, for will it be believed that when the case came

into court the judge ruled that the fact that standard writers had

availed themselves of a great deal of license could not be taken as a

proof that such license was permissible? Two wrongs do not make a

right he said. In these circumstances perhaps counsel was wise to tell

Mr. Vizetelly to plead guilty to having published an indecent libel;

but the advice seemed so cruel that, justly or unjustly, I suspect the

lawyer of a wish to escape the odium that would have attached to him

if he had defended a book accused of immorality. The old man was

heavily fined. On going out of court he set to work to have the books

revised, spending hundreds of pounds having the plates altered, but

the Vigilance Association attacked him again, and this time they

succeeded in killing him. Mr. Vizetelly was over seventy years of age

when he went to prison, and the shame, anxiety, and three months of

prison life killed him. Five years afterwards the Authors' Society,

who would not say a word in his favor, voted a great banquet for Zola

when he came to London. Zola received every homage that could be paid

to a man of letters. The Vigilance Association raised no protest, and

I do not blame them. None would have been heard. But while the

banquets were held and the speeches were published in the newspapers

some of the members of the Association must have meditated sadly on

the futility of their efforts and the death of Mr. Vizetelly. It

requires a heavy blow of a very heavy mallet to get anything into some

people's heads, and nothing short of the reception that was given to

Zola could have affected the minds of the Vigilance Association. The

significance of the judge's words that the fact that classical writers

had availed themselves of a certain license could not be taken as

proof that such license was permissible escaped them altogether, for

some time afterwards the question of immorality in literature arose

again--I have forgotten the circumstances of this case--but I remember

that Mr. Coote, the secretary of the Association, was asked if

Shakespeare had not written many very reprehensible passages. Mr.

Coote was obliged to admit that he had, and when asked why the

Association he represented did mot proceed against Shakespeare he

answered because Shakespeare wrote beautifully. A strangely immoral

doctrine, for if the license of expression that Shakespeare availed

himself of be harmful, Shakespeare should be prosecuted; that he wrote

beautifully is no defense whatever. Life comes before literature, and

the Vigilance Association lays itself open to a charge of neglect of

duty by not proceeding at once against Shakespeare and against all

those who have indulged in the same license of expression. The members

and their secretary have indeed set themselves a stiff job, but they

must not shrink from it if they would avoid shocking other people's

moral sense by exhibiting themselves in the light of mere busybodies

with a taste for what boys and old men speak of as "spicy bits."

Proceedings will have to be taken against all the literature that Mr.

Coote believes to be harmful (I accept him as the representative of

the ideas of his Association), and the plea must not be raised again

that because a reprehensible passage is well written it should be

acquitted. We must consider the question impartially. It is true that

a magistrate may be found presiding at Bow Street who will refuse to

issue a warrant against the publishers, let us say of Byron, Sterne,

the Restoration, and the Elizabethan dramatists. The Association will

have to risk the refusal; but I would not discourage the Association

from the adventure. It must not abandon the tope of finding a

magistrate who, anxious to prove himself no moral laggard, will do all

that is asked of him. A very pretty selection of "spicy bits" can be

picked from "Don Juan," and toward this compilation every member, male

and female, might contribute. The reading of these selections in Bow

Street in a crowded court would prove quite a literary entertainment,

and if the magistrate refused to issue a warrant he could only do so

on the pretext that the book had been published a long while, a

pretext which can hardly be held to be more valid than the pretext put

forward by Mr. Coote for not prosecuting Shakespeare. Of one thing

only would I warn the Society which I seem to be taking under my wing,

and that is, even if it should succeed in interdicting two-thirds of

English literature its task will still be only half accomplished. The

newspaper question will still have to be faced. Books are relatively

expensive, but the newspaper can be bought for a halfpenny, and it

will be admitted that no author is as indecent as the common reporter.

The reader thinks that I am going to draw his attention to some

celebrated divorce case, an account of which was reported in full in

the columns of some daily paper under a large heading "Painful

Details," the details being the account the chambermaid gave the

outraged husband of--I will spare my reader.

About fifteen years ago I was asked if I would care to go over to ----

College to see the sports. We walked across the downs, and while

watching the racing I was accosted by the head master, who asked me if

I would like to see the college. The sports were more interesting than

refectories and dormitories, but it seemed a little churlish to refuse

and we went together. No doubt we visited the kitchens and the chapel,

but what I remember was a long hall wainscoted with oak and furnished

with oak tables and chairs and benches, In this hall there were some

thirty or forty boys, of ages varying from twelve to eighteen, reading

the newspapers, reading the reports of the Oscar Wilde trial; each

daily paper contained three or four columns of it. I asked the head

master if it were right to allow the boys to read such reports and he

answered that lately the newspapers contained a great deal of

objectionable matter, "But how am I to keep the daily papers out of

the college?" Now I am not easily scandalized, but I could not help

feeling that a grave scandal was being committed in allowing these

boys to read the newspapers during the week of that trial. But if you

admit the newspapers one day how can you forbid them on another

occasion? And while appreciating the head master's difficulty I walked

out into the open air unable to take any further interest in the

sports. Nor has time obliterated anything of the shame I felt that

day. I don't want to make a fuss, I don't want to pose as a moralist,

but I cannot help thinking that while newspapers continue to be

published, the Vigilance Society need not trouble lest certain books

should fall into the hands of young people. My correspondent forgot

that thousands of newspapers are published to-day when he wrote to me

saying that my book roused sensuality. I am afraid I omitted the

passage in which these words occur, fearing to burden my article with

quotation. Here it is:

"The perusal of the episodes (Doris' Orelay experiences) does

certainly not ennoble me, it rouses sensuality, it lowers woman from a

friend and helpmeet into a convenience and a minister to pleasure. I

am less able and less willing to think 'high' after your book; poetry

is distasteful, art is narrowed, I look out for the licentious, the

suggestive, the low, and the mean; and don't you? You seem in passage

after passage to be world-weary in a sense that no sane man ought to

be, sated, disgusted, tired of life--is it not so? You see I speak

from what I am sure you will regard as a narrow platform, my ideals

are certainly not yours but I am simply and frankly curious as to the

ultimates in your book and in yourself."

Let us suppose now that the Vigilance Association after a sharp

crusade has succeeded in redeeming our literature from all

reprehensible matter, and flushed with success has attacked the

newspapers and obtained an interdiction against the publication of all

reports of sexual crimes and misdemeanors. And having extended our

imagination so far we may presume as the sequence a world of such

highly developed moral susceptibilities that Miss Austen's novels are

beginning to cause uneasiness. Miss Austen's novels are still

permitted, but in current literature nothing is said that would lead

the reader to suppose that men and women are not of the same sex. But

men and women still continue to meet and hold conversation. Only some

advanced members of the Association are in favor of that complete

separation of the sexes which obtains in Ireland in the rural

districts. In the imaginary time of which I am writing the Association

has only obtained complete control over literature. The theaters are

either closed or given over to the representation of plays on

religious subjects; but private life has not been invaded by the

Puritan missionary, and waltz tunes are still heard and figures seen

whirling past lighted windows in Grosvenor Square and Fifth Avenue.

Mr. Coote has at this time become a moderate, he is no longer among

the progressives, and is in danger of losing his post, so I have no

difficulty in imagining what he would do in such a dilemma. He would

disguise himself as a waiter and at the next meeting of the Society

tell how he had until now showed some reluctance to--the sentence

would be a difficult one to finish, perhaps Mr. Coote would break off

and say--reluctance to put restraint on the action of men and women as

long as they kept within their own doors, but after what he has seen,

he finds himself obliged to pass from the moderates to the

progressives. What has Mr. Coote seen. How would he tell his tale?

He would tell of the length and the breadth of the ball room, of the

parquet floor usually covered with an aubusson carpet but the carpet

had been lifted and the gilded furniture taken away; the windows and

the recesses had been filled with flowers, and to keep these fresh,

great blocks of ice had been placed in the niches. He would tell of

the lighting arrangements, for are not flowers and lights incentives

to immorality? But his descriptions of the roses and the lilies would

only lead up to his descriptions of the shameless animality that came

up the staircase between twelve and one. A half-naked lady, the

hostess, stood at the head of the stairs receiving her guests with

smiles and words of welcome. The dresses the women wore resembled the

dress worn by the hostess; young and old alike went about their

pleasure with necks and bosoms and arms uncovered, and he saw these

undressed creatures slip into the arms of men who whirled them round

and round; it was but a whirling of silk ankles and a shuffling of

glazed shoes; and every now and then the men and women looked into

each other's eyes, and the whole scene was reflected shamelessly in

tall mirrors. Notwithstanding the fact that most of Mr. Coote's time

was spent behind the buffet serving out ices, he nevertheless

contrived to find a spare moment for investigation. On the pretext of

seeking a lady who had dropped a handkerchief he had crossed the ball

room and was therefore in a position to give an accurate account of

the waltzes he had heard, dulcet, undulating, capricious measures, far

more provocative than Beethoven's "Kreutzer Sonata" which Tolstoy has

denounced. The lady that Mr. Coote sought was not in the ball room,

and so he had an opportunity of investigating all the retiring rooms,

and I need not describe the pensive and shocked faces that listened to

his descriptions of the shady nooks. Sometimes it was a screen,

sometimes it was a palm that was employed to hide the couple from

observation. Mr. Coote at last discovered the owner of the

handkerchief in one of those shady nooks, she was there with a

gentleman.... Mr. Coote, of course, would refuse to relate what he

saw, he would hesitate, but the members of his Association would

insist upon knowing everything, and he would at last confess: "Well,

the gentleman had kissed the lady on the point of her shoulder." From

this scandalous incident he would pass to tell all that he remembered

of the conversation he had heard at the table round which he had

worked till nearly four o'clock in the morning handing cutlets,

chicken patties, and other delicacies, the names of which he was not

acquainted with.

Mr. Coote's description of what he saw may be ingenuous, but is his

description untrue? And when Mr. Coote finished up his speech as I

imagine him finishing it, by stating that the dancing, the music, the

dresses, the wines, and the meats were arranged and learnedly chosen

for one purpose and one only, the stimulation of sexual passion, I

cannot imagine anyone accusing him of having spoken an untruth. Mr.

Coote added that no one went to the ball for the pleasure of the

conversation--he was convinced that old and young derived their

pleasure, consciously or unconsciously, from sex.

We will imagine the members of Mr. Coote's Society being greatly moved

by his description, and the sudden determination of everybody that

dancing must be stopped. Had not Byron declared the waltz to be "half

a whore"? Tolstoy has gone one better and asked people to say if a

woman can remain chaste if a low dress is permitted and Beethoven's

"Kreutzer Sonata" is played. Forgetful, of course, that they have

prosecuted "Don Juan," the Society accepts Byron's dictum as their war

cry, and henceforth the business of Mr. Coote is to inquire into what

is immoral in dress, in music, in wine, and in food. After a long

consultation with experts and expensive law proceedings the Vigilance

Association has (in our imagination) succeeded in reforming society as

completely as it succeeded in reforming literature; and the months go

by, October, November, December, January, February, March ... but one

night the wind changes, and coming out of our houses in the morning we

are taken with a sense of delight, a soft south wind is blowing and

the lilacs are coming into bloom. My correspondent says that my book

rouses sensuality. Perhaps it does, but not nearly so much as a spring

day, and no one has yet thought of suppressing or curtailing spring

days. Yet how infinitely more pernicious is their influence than any

book! What thoughts they put into the hearts of lads and lasses! and

perforce even the moralist has to accept the irrepressible feeling of

union and growth, the loosening of the earth about the hyacinth shoots

and the birds going about their amorous business, and the white clouds

floating up gladly through the blue air. Why, then, should he look

askance at my book, which is no more than memories of my spring days?

If the thing itself cannot be suppressed, why is it worth while to

interfere with the recollection? What strange twist in his mind leads

him to decry in art what he accepts in nature? A strange twist indeed,

one which may be described as a sort of inverted sexuality, finding

its pleasure not in the spring day, but in odd corners of ancient

literature read only for the sake of passages which he declares to be

disgusting, and in spying on modern literature, seeking out passages

and expressions which might be denounced in the newspapers or

proceeded against in the police court. The psychology of one of these

purity mongers is more interesting to the alienist than to a man of

letters. Let us take a typical case, that of the late Lord ----. Forty

or fifty years ago he was one of the most strenuous advocates of

purity in literature, and more shops were raided at his instigation

than at any other; yet when he died his library was found to contain

the finest collection of impure literature in Europe, and his

executors were left wondering whether the prosecutions were prompted

by a desire to increase the value of his collection by the destruction

of rare books, copies of which were in his possession, or whether he

had been moved by conscientious scruples; a man might bamboozle

himself in this way: "I am a man of letters and possess these books

because they are rare, a curious corner of literature, but it would be

highly inexpedient for others to possess them." His conscience might

take a still more curious turn, leading to a dizzier height: "I am a

sinner; that, alas! is so; but I can prevent others from sinning

likewise." No doubt the greater part of the literature which the noble

lord collected with so much industry was of that frankly indecent kind

which is debarred from every library, Continental as well as English

and American. There is a literature which does not come within the

scope of the present inquiry, and there is what may perhaps be called

a border literature, books which are found in public libraries in the

German, the French, and the Italian texts. It seems pertinent to ask

why a little knowledge of French and German and Italian should procure

the right to read Brantôme's "Femmes Gallantes." It would be difficult

for anybody to say that this book is not frankly obscene, and yet in

the French text I suppose every library contains it. Casanova's

"Memoirs" is another book of the same kind; I am not aware of any

complete translation of Boccaccio's tales, but every library possesses

an edition in the original Italian. The only reason that can be put

forward for the suppression of a book is that it is harmful, and if

Brantôme, Casanova, and Boccaccio are harmful in English, they do harm

to those who can read them in the original texts. But perhaps I have

pointed out enough inconsistencies, and the reader, growing weary, may

say: "Are you so young, then, that you don't know that the world is a

mass of contradictions? that life is no more than a tale told by an

idiot full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing?" Shakespeare did

no more than to put into eloquent language every man's belief, that we

are all mad on one subject or another. If this be so, every race is

mad on some point, for have we not often heard that what is true of

the individual is true of the race? Anglo-Saxon madness is book

morality. Madness has been defined as a lack of consequence in ideas,

and can anything be less consequent than--we need look no further back

than Ibsen? The great genius who died in May last was decried by the

English people as one of the most immoral of writers; for twenty years

at least this opinion obtained in the press, and even among men of

letters; suddenly the opinion disappeared, it went out like the flame

of a candle; the text is the same, not a comma has been changed, yet

now everybody reads it differently. But I must not allow myself to be

drawn into speaking of the moral crusades directed against other

writers; the task is tempting, and I hope it will be undertaken one of

these days. Here, at all events, my concern is with my own writings,

as indicated by the title of the article, and it is doubtful if

reference to any book would make my point clearer than the tale of

what happened in America to my own book, "Esther Waters." The proof

sheets were sent in turn to three leading firms, Scribner, Harper, and

Appleton, and all three refused the book on the ground that, while

recognizing, etc., they did not think it was exactly the kind of book,

etc. Even experts make mistakes; this is not denied; what makes my

story so remarkable is that all three firms offered to publish an

authorized edition of the book as soon as news of its success in

England had been cabled to New York. Mr. Appleton, whom I met in

Paris, expressed his regret that expert opinion regarding this book

had been at fault. "The book," he said, "was quite a proper book to

publish, a most admirable book, which would do honor to any firm." I

answered: "Very likely all you say, Mr. Appleton, is true, but three

weeks ago the experts thought differently. How is it that an immoral

book can become moral in three weeks?" My next book, "Evelyn Innes,"

disturbed the house of Appleton as much as "Esther Waters," and a

gentleman of leisure connected with the firm was deputed to mark out

not the passages to which he himself took exception, but to which,

being an expert, he felt sure that others would take exception. The

gentleman was kind enough to insist on submitting his marked copy to

me, and my wonderment increased as I turned over the pages, and it

reached a climax when I happened upon the following passage, which had

been marked to be omitted by the American printer. The passage was:

"... in her stage life Evelyn was an agent of the sensual passion, not

only with her voice, but in her arms, her neck, and hair, and in every

expression of her face; and it was the craving music that had thrown

her into Ulick's arms. If it had subjugated her how much more would it

subjugate and hold within its persuasion the listener--the listener,

who perceived in the music nothing but its sensuality?" "But for what

reason," I asked the expert, "do you suggest the elimination of this

passage? This is the Puritan point of view. I thought that your

proposal was to draw my attention to the passages to which you thought

the Puritan would object." "Ah," he said, "that is how I began, but as

I got on with the work I thought it better to mark every passage that

might give offense." "And to whom would this passage give offense?" I

said. "Certainly not to any religious body?" "No," he answered, "not

to any religious body, but it would give offense to the subscribers to

the New Opera House. If parents read that the music of 'Tristan' threw

Evelyn Innes into the arms of Ulick Dean, they would not care to bring

their daughters to hear the opera, and might possibly discontinue

their subscriptions." Everybody will agree that "expert opinion" can

hardly go further, yet the folly which this "expert" was betrayed into

did not arise from any congenital stupidity; it is the mistake that

you and I, every one of us, would make when we seek the truth in our

casual experience instead of in our hearts.

One would have thought that my pointing out the absurdity of this

expurgation of "Evelyn Innes" to the house of Appleton would have

saved it ever afterwards from similar folly, and forgetful that

experience is, as Coleridge describes it, only a lamp in a vessel's

stern which throws a light on the waters we have passed through, none

on those which lie before us, the publication of "The Lake" was issued

by Messrs. Appleton with my consent. The book, as the American public

already know, is free from all matter to which the most severe

moralist could take exception, yet the American edition did not

conform entirely with the English; a dedication written in French was

omitted, for what reason I do not know, but it was omitted. The matter

may seem a small one, and it may seem invidious to allude to it at

all, but on an occasion like the present nothing must be passed over.

The English proofs of the "Memoirs" were read, and the book was

accepted, but when it was set up in America it did not seem quite so

moral in the American type as it did in the English and difficulties

arose; these have been alluded to in the first paragraph of this

article, and perhaps wrongly I agreed that the two stories, "The

Lovers of Orelay" and "In the Luxembourg Gardens," should be left out.

On September 28th I wrote, suggesting that "In the Luxembourg Gardens"

might be retained, that it was only necessary to drop out a few

sentences to make it, as the expert would say, "acceptable to the

American public," but it never occurred to me that "The Lovers of

Orelay" could be published in any form except the form in which I

wrote it. This morning I received a letter from Mr. Sears.

October 8, 1906. DEAR MR. MOORE:

Your letter of September 28th has just arrived this morning. I hope

that by the time you receive this I shall have the open letter which

we are to print in "Memoirs of My Dead Life." The book is all ready,

waiting for it. As a matter of fact, we have not cut out either "In

the Luxembourg Gardens" or "The Lovers of Orelay." We simply have

taken out parts of each. Very truly yours, J. H. SEARS.

"Simply have taken out parts of each!" My book, then, is a sort of

unfortunate animal, whose destiny was to be thrown on the American

vivisecting table and pieces taken out of it. Well, I raise no

objection. The promise that this preface will be published without

alteration soothes me (it is the anaesthetic), and after all, is it

not an honor to be Bowdlerized? Only the best are deemed dangerous....

I am not aware that anybody ever took liberties with Miss Braddon's

texts. And the day of the Bowdlerizer is a brief one! Sooner or later

the original text is published. This is the rule, and I am confident I

shall not prove an exception to the rule.

GEORGE MOORE.

MEMOIRS OF MY DEAD LIFE

CHAPTER I

SPRING IN LONDON

As I sit at my window on Sunday morning, lazily watching the

sparrows--restless black dots that haunt the old tree at the corner of

King's Bench Walk--I begin to distinguish a faint green haze in the

branches of the old lime. Yes, there it is green in the branches; and

I'm moved by an impulse--the impulse of Spring is in my feet;

india-rubber seems to have come into the soles of my feet, and I would

see London. It is delightful to walk across Temple Gardens, to

stop--pigeons are sweeping down from the roofs--to call a hansom, and

to notice, as one passes, the sapling behind St. Clement's Danes. The

quality of the green is exquisite on the smoke-black wall. London can

be seen better on Sundays than on week-days; lying back in a hansom,

one is alone with London. London is beautiful in that narrow street,

celebrated for licentious literature. The blue and white sky shows

above a seventeenth-century gable, and a few moments after we are in

Drury Lane. The fine weather has enticed the population out of grim

courts and alleys; skipping-ropes are whirling everywhere. The

children hardly escape being run over. Coster girls sit wrapped in

shawls, contentedly, like rabbits at the edge of a burrow; the men

smoke their pipes in sullen groups, their eyes on the closed doors of

the public house. At the corner of the great theatre a vendor of cheap

ices is rapidly absorbing the few spare pennies of the neighbourhood.

The hansom turns out of the lane into the great thoroughfare, a bright

glow like the sunset fills the roadway, and upon it a triangular block

of masonry and St. Giles's church rise, the spire aloft in the faint

blue and delicate air. Spires are so beautiful that we would fain

believe that they will outlast creeds; religion or no religion we must

have spires, and in town and country--spires showing between trees and

rising out of the city purlieus.

The spring tide is rising; the almond trees are in bloom, that one

growing in an area spreads its Japanese decoration fan-like upon the

wall. The hedges in the time-worn streets of Fitzroy Square light

up--how the green runs along? The spring is more winsome here than in

the country. One must be in London to see the spring. One can see the

spring from afar dancing in St. John's wood, haze and sun playing

together like a lad and a lass. The sweet air, how tempting! How

exciting! It melts on the lips in fond kisses, instilling a delicate

gluttony of life. It would be pleasant in these gardens walking

through shadowy alleys, lit here and there by a ray, to see girls

walking hand in hand, catching at branches, as girls do when dreaming

of lovers. But alas! the gardens are empty; only some daffodils! But

how beautiful is the curve of the flower when seen in profile, and

still more beautiful is the starry yellow when the flower is seen full

face. That antique flower carries my mind back--not to Greek times,

for the daffodil has lost something of its ancient loveliness; it is

more reminiscent of a Wedgwood than of a Greek vase. My nonsense

thoughts amuse me; I follow my thoughts as a child follows

butterflies; and all this ecstasy in and about me, is the joy of

health--my health and the health of the world. This April day has set

brain and blood on fire. Now it would be well to ponder by this old

canal! It looks as if it had fallen into disuse, and that is charming;

an abandoned canal is a perfect symbol of--well, I do not know of

what. A river flows or rushes, even an artificial lake harbours

waterfowl, children sail their boats upon it; but a canal does

nothing.

Here comes a boat! The canal has not been abandoned. Ah! that boat has

interrupted my dreams, and I feel quite wretched. I had hoped that the

last had passed twenty years ago. Here it comes with its lean horse,

the rope tightening and stretching, a great black mass with ripples at

the prow and a figure bearing against the rudder. A canal reminds me

of my childhood; every child likes a canal. A canal recalls the first

wonder. We all remember the wonder with which we watched the first

barge, the wonder which the smoke coming out of the funnel excited.

When my father asked me why I'd like to go to Dublin better by canal

than by railroad, I couldn't tell him. Nor could I tell any one to-day

why I love a canal. One never loses one's fondness for canals. The

boats glide like the days, and the toiling horse is a symbol! how he

strains, sticking his toes into the path!

There are visits to pay. Three hours pass--of course women, always

women. But at six I am free, and I resume my meditations in declining

light as the cab rolls through the old brick streets that crowd round

Golden Square; streets whose names you meet in old novels; streets

full of studios where Hayden, Fuseli, and others of the rank

historical tribe talked art with a big A, drank their despair away,

and died wondering why the world did not recognise their genius.

Children are scrambling round a neglected archway, striving to reach

to a lantern of old time. The smell of these dry faded streets is

peculiar to London; there is something of the odour of the original

marsh in the smell of these streets; it rises through the pavement and

mingles with the smoke. Fancy follows fancy, image succeeds image;

till all is but a seeming, and mystery envelops everything. That white

Arch seems to speak to me out of the twilight. I would fain believe it

has its secret to reveal. London wraps herself in mists; blue scarfs

are falling--trailing. London has a secret! Let me peer into her

veiled face and read. I have only to fix my thoughts to

decipher--what? I know not. Something ... perhaps. But I cannot

control my thoughts. I am absorbed in turn by the beauty of the Marble

Arch and the perspective of the Bayswater Road, fading like an

apparition amid the romance of great trees.

As I turn away, for the wind thrills and obliges me to walk rapidly, I

think how fortunate I am to experience these emotions in Hyde Park,

whereas my fellows have to go to Switzerland and to climb up Mont

Blanc, to feel half what I am feeling now, as I stand looking across

the level park watching the sunset, a dusky one. The last red bar of

light fades, and nothing remains but the grey park with the blue of

the suburb behind it, flowing away full of mist and people, dim and

mournful to the pallid lights of Kensington; and its crowds are like

strips of black tape scattered here and there. By the railings the

tape has been wound into a black ball, and, no doubt, the peg on which

it is wound is some preacher promising human nature deliverance from

evil if it will forego the spring time. But the spring time continues,

despite the preacher, over yonder, under branches swelling with leaf

and noisy with sparrows; the spring is there amid the boys and girls,

boys dressed in ill-fitting suits of broadcloth, daffodils in their

buttonholes; girls hardly less coarse, creatures made for work,

escaped for a while from the thraldom of the kitchen, now doing the

business of the world better than the preacher; poor servants of

sacred Spring. A woman in a close-fitting green cloth dress passes me

to meet a young man; a rich fur hangs from her shoulders; and they go

towards Park Lane, towards the wilful little houses with low balconies

and pendent flower-baskets swinging in the areas. Circumspect little

gardens! There is one, Greek as an eighteenth-century engraving, and

the woman in the close-fitting green cloth dress, rich fur hanging

from her shoulders, almost hiding the pleasant waist, enters one of

these. She is Park Lane. Park Lane supper parties and divorce are

written in her eyes and manner. The old beau, walking swiftly lest he

should catch cold, his moustache clearly dyed, his waist certainly

pinched by a belt, he, too, is Park Lane. And those two young men,

talking joyously--admirable specimens of Anglo-Saxons, slender feet,

varnished boots, health and abundant youth--they, too, are

characteristic of Park Lane.

Park Lane dips in a narrow and old-fashioned way as it enters

Piccadilly. Piccadilly has not yet grown vulgar, only a little modern,

a little out of keeping with the beauty of the Green Park, of that

beautiful dell, about whose mounds I should like to see a comedy of

the Restoration acted.

I used to stand here, at this very spot, twenty years ago, to watch

the moonlight between the trees, and the shadows of the trees floating

over that beautiful dell; I used to think of Wycherly's comedy, "Love

in St. James's Park," and I think of it still. In those days the

Argyle Rooms, Kate Hamilton's in Panton Street, and the Café de la

Régence were the fashion. But Paris drew me from these, towards other

pleasures, towards the Nouvelle Athènes and the Elysée Montmartre; and

when I returned to London after an absence of ten years I found a new

London, a less English London. Paris draws me still, and I shall be

there in three weeks, when the chestnuts are in bloom.