THE RECANTATIONS OF GEORGE MOORE

I had intended writing of the tragic Chopin to-day, but George Moore supervened; he and Atlantic City—an odd combination. Man cannot live in music alone, and when Maurice Speiser met me on the boardwalk and lent me his copy of Avowals (numbered eighty and privately printed for subscribers), I shooed Chopin to the backyard of my consciousness and proceeded to reread Mr. Moore. I say reread because much of the subject-matter in this new, bulky volume saw the light of publication years ago in various English and at least one American periodical: Lippincotts’, the Fortnightly, et al. Still, it is, all of it, worthwhile, notwithstanding the fact the old nurse of the County Mayo author wouldn’t have blushed at a line therein. Why the book was published as “wicked” by implication is difficult to discover. It should be given to the world at large, after several minor excisions. The one gay anecdote is related in France, and it is so mildly diverting that it will bear repeating here. An eccentric nobleman adorns himself with peacock’s feathers for the edification of his peahens! Yet people subscribe for the pleasure of such innocent foolery. By all means, let us have Avowals naked and unashamed. Only good Moorovians will endure its leagues of technical literary criticism. The Story Teller’s Holiday of last year was another kind of a book. Rather blistering than elevating. But amusing always.

There was a time when Mr. Moore was content to be called the Irish Flaubert; nowadays he is evidently after the title of the Celtic Casanova, though hardly in these new avowals. They will never rank in interest with Memoirs of My Dead Life; or, indeed, with his Hail and Farewell Trilogy. For one thing, printed dialogue makes slow reading, even when the prose is the incomparable prose of Walter Savage Landor. The opening chapters are devoted to discussions, purely academic, between Edmund Gosse and George Moore. English prose narrative is the weakest part of English literature—a paradoxical contention. Mr. Gosse puts up a good fight, but is pulverized by his opponent, who leaves him gasping on a balcony wrapped in a shawl, feebly expostulating. The Moore dialectic is fairly familiar to his admirers. It is one-third lack of logic and two-thirds persuasion and browbeating. Need I add that the persuasiveness is not wholly divested of a certain veiled Donnybrookishness? Mr. Moore goes for the hated Sassenach, and only those Englishmen who seem to resemble him are treated with consideration; the Rev. Laurence Sterne, whose wheedling prose style is admirably wedded to his prurient themes (“Are you Jewish or ticklish?” he was asked by a critic long ago), is praiseworthy in the eyes of our critic.

I should have preferred to pose as an adversary to Mr. Moore the redoubtable Prof. George Saintsbury, who with a Sam Johnson bluffness would have smashed the Irishman’s arguments at the very first throw out of the box. No doubt about that. Mr. Moore admits the genius of Landor, Pater, Lamb, De Quincey, in the essay form; but it is fiction narrative he centres upon, and despite De Foe, Fielding, Jane Austen, not to speak of Dickens, Thackeray and Meredith, he finds no good has come forth from that British Nazareth. Of the exquisite prose patterns which Cardinal Newman has woven for us he speaks no word; elsewhere, years past, he has expressed his dislike of Newman’s flowing style; the “style coulant” abhorred of Charles Baudelaire, especially when it issued from the pen of George Sand. Yet Mr. Moore’s Keltic prose (spell it with a K, Samivel!) is like Newman’s in so far as both are subtle, sensitive, and rippling; both avoid dynamic contrasts, both persuade rather than assault. And there is a suspicion of the serpentine in the writings of both men. The spiral prose of The Brook Kerith is a case in point. Can’t you see that minotaur of English literary criticism—or should I say Torquemada?—George Saintsbury frowning and thundering on Mr. Moore, and quoting from his History of English Prose-Rhythms! A battle of the bookmen, indeed.

The recantations of George Moore become increasingly numerous with the passage of the years. I had expected the inclusion in Avowals of his top-notch in criticism, not dealing with the plastic arts—naturally his stronghold—a criticism that appeared about twenty years ago in Cosmopolis, an international magazine edited, if I remember aright, by Lady Randolph Churchill. Far finer than his study of Zola is this study of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, entitled A Tragic Novel, the tragedy of drab, commonplace living, not that of high heroics or tragic and romantic gestures. But Mr. Moore violently repudiates his Flaubert worship and explains why he doesn’t reprint the splendid pages of that particular criticism. Flaubert, it seems, is not a novelist, only a satirist—he says something of the same sort earlier concerning George Meredith—and he places him far below Balzac as a creator of character, below Turgénieff as a teller of tales; he even decries his style—the sanity, simplicity, which, allied to its sonorous harmonies, is one of the most fascinating in French literature. I fancy Mr. Moore suffered from the revulsion which often attacks critical pioneers; as soon as the public, wooed or banged into submission by the critic, begins to admire them the critic moves on; his object accomplished, newer idols must be sought, fresher victories achieved; the old idol is again become a block of wood. Mr. Saintsbury fought for Baudelaire and Flaubert before George Moore; nevertheless, Mr. Moore was the first English-writing novelist who adopted Flaubert’s methods; recall Untilled Fields and Evelyn Inness—the manner, of course, not the matter. And there is Swinburne, who after extravagantly praising Walt Whitman violently repudiated the Camden “bard,” later inventing the word “Whitmaniac” to signify his contempt for Walt’s comical yawping. In humbler fashion I may give as an example of this critical dog-in-the-manger attitude my own case. In 1877 I went as a lad to visit Walt across the Delaware River from my home, and from him received the kiss of peace and went away with the glowing brow of the neophyte. I became an ardent Whitmaniac in my teens, and for two decades or more I wrote of W. W. as if he were really a great poet. I can’t read him now, nor can I read the effusions of his followers. He has been a disruptive force, still is one; to imitate his “poetry” is so easy that an entire new school of lads and lassies are murdering English prosody and filling the urn with their lascivious caterwaulings. Walt is to blame. He did it first in his Children of Adam.

Flaubert is not the only writer from whom Mr. Moore has seceded. Being a peculiarly susceptible Celt, he is always changing his opinions, which is a legitimate function of the male as well as the female intellect. At one epoch Dublin never knew when beginning a fresh day whether her favorite son was a Catholic or a Protestant. It was like a barometrical puzzle. He recanted his Catholicism—decanted might be a better word—and he changed his mind every morning about his best friend, the poet, William Yeats. The New Irish movement was to be George Moore or it was to be nothing. Finally John Millington Synge appeared, and the movement, luckily enough, became Synge. Being dead, this master is spared from the scarifications to which Moore subjected Yeats, Edward Martyn, and Lady Gregory. Ireland is no longer Erin go bragh! and the Lord knows what he thinks of Sinn Fein. In fact, since Ireland did not appreciate the genius of George Moore, he abandons Ireland—as he abandoned England during the Boer Rebellion. We hear no more of Douglas Hyde or the revival of Erse—says the Shan Van Vocht!

He sharply criticised Jane Austen and women writers generally in articles published in the North American Review, but in Avowals Jane is given her just dues, which is well. George Eliot and the Brontës he won’t have. He rightfully rates Tolstoy and his absence of true spirituality. The great Russian writer is not a prober of the human soul, despite the accepted belief to the contrary; that is, he doesn’t deeply probe. His rendering of reality borders on hallucination. Simply prodigious is his mastery of realism. Yet Dostoievsky is the profounder man of the pen. He lived and suffered the life that Tolstoy only wrote about but never experienced. His novels, tedious, explosive, tumultuous, may be the “psychological mole-runs” of Turgénieff’s dictum; nevertheless they are aglow with vitality, palpitating with pity for the downtrodden and humiliated, and pullulating with humanity. Dostoievsky, an essentially morbid man, as was Nietzsche, by reason of this very deviation from normality, was enabled to sink his plummet into the darkest recesses of the soul. His self-cruelty had a sadistic tinge. But he is the real psychologist, not Tolstoy. Deploring Tolstoy’s dodging of psychological issues—for his religion was of the old intolerant order and he was suffering from an excess of moralic acid in the blood, which finally killed his art—Mr. Moore yet refuses to give Dostoievsky a truly exalted position. He better likes Turgénieff, nor need we quarrel with him on this score. Turgénieff represents the almost perfect artist, blithe, Greek, charming, while his rival, a Prometheus of the inkpot, groans in travail as he shows us his wounded soul. In the Confessions of a Young Man the author speaks of Dostoievsky as “Gaboriau with psychological sauce.” When he wrote an introduction to a translation of Poor Folk he had evidently seen a great light. But in Avowals he is back in the Gaboriau trenches.

A more definite recantation is his present view of Tolstoy. The first avowals, in periodical form, saw him a worshipper at the shrine. I well remember his essay, Since the Elizabethans, and its contemptuous comparison of Tolstoy and Thackeray. English fiction, he said, in effect, never dives below the surface; it is an affair of decoration, never of depth. Well and good. Tolstoy, like Balzac, has no counterpart in English literature, Mr. Moore says, and maintains his argument with admirable examples. Musical analogies are employed. Verdi or Donizetti, never the passionately profound harmonies of Wagner, are overheard in English fiction. With a sense of relief I find that Mr. Moore is still faithful to Walter Pater. The best pages in the volume are those in which he describes the art and personality of the shy, complex author of Marius. It may be remembered, his eulogy of Marius in the early confessions. From this faith he has never swerved. Of Henry James he was not an admirer. He seems not to have gone further than The Portrait of a Lady. He encountered Mr. James at the home of the Robinson girls, Mary and Mabel. Here is a portrait of our famous countryman: “And these thoughts drew my eyes to the round head, already going bald, to the small, dark eyes, closely set, and to the great expanse of closely shaven face. His legs were short, and his hands and feet large, and he sat portentously in his chair, speaking with some hesitation and great care, anxious that every sentence, or if not all, at least every third or fourth, should send forth a beam of humor.” Apart from the fact that the eyes of Henry James were not small, but large and heavy lidded, eyes in which were pictured an entire social world, his description is not without a certain malicious verisimilitude. The two men were, naturally enough, antipathetic to each other. Mr. James failed to recognize the greatness of Esther Waters, and Mr. Moore hated humor. He objurgates humor in a writer. Yet he is, consciously or unconsciously, humorous. And what a bon mot was his summing up of Bernard Shaw as being only the “funny man in a boarding house.” Perhaps. But at the time that boarding house comprised Europe and America.

Moore and Whistler were always clawing and scratching. Both feline, both tenors, and possessing the tenor temperament, how could they be expected to sing in amiable ensemble? Moore relates that James the Butterfly presented him with a copy of his Ten o’Clock, inscribed: “To George Moore—for furtive reading,” which is the epitome of irony. But George never began to repeat the epigrams of “Jemmy,” as did Jemmy those of Oscar Wilde. Whistler, according to friends who knew, would sit up half the night manufacturing witticisms. It was to himself, not to Oscar, that he should have applied the remark: “But you will, Oscar, you will.” The Irishman was as spontaneous in his wit as the American constipated. However, “furtive reading” is distinctly good. George Moore paid off his score in his Modern Painting when he wrote of Whistler that if he had been fifty pounds heavier he might have painted as well as Velasquez. And weight and substance are precisely the qualities lacking in the Whistlerian canvases, which are becoming more attenuated, more ghostly as the years wear on. If it were not for the etchings the next generation would have cause for wonderment over the exaggerated praise bestowed upon a painter whose originality principally derives from his Paris friend, Fantin-Latour, and from the Japanese.

But Avowals is good fun. It should be placed on the general market. It’s too decent to be locked away in the “enfer” of a bibliophile. Apropos of nothing, did you hear George Moore on the League of Nations? He is convinced enough on that score to exclaim: “There’s only one way of bringing about the League. Leave off talking about the President and hang the Kaiser.”