George Moore
BY E. F.
BENSON.
IT is strange that a man who for fifty years devoted himself to the writing of English prose, and excluded from his mind all other intellectual pursuits, should not have discovered his destiny till he was nearly thirty. At the age of fifteen he read Adam Bede and came to the conclusion that George Eliot misunderstood mother- hood altogether, and this, he maintained, was an obsession with him till, at the age of forty, he wrote Esther Waters to refute her. Yet when on the death of his father he became his own master at the- age of eighteen, he went to Paris in order to study painting, and it was ten years before he convinced himself that he had no talent for that. During this period he had tried his hand at poetry, and before settling down to the work of this life, he published two volumes of verse. These books, Flowers of Passion and Pagan Poems, are probably the same in contents as those he had projected in Paris under the titles of Roses of Midnight and Poems of Flesh and Blood.
Then came a moment of self-revelation. He left Paris, he left his belongings, including the python which he used to feed with live guinea-pigs on its awakening from its winter torpor, to be sold by auction, and migrated to London, settling in lodgings in the Strand. He was not, as has been often stated, forced to support himself by his pen, for he had an Irish estate, and he expressly tells us that he was of adequate independent means. But now he had read, like the writing on the wall, the runes of his destiny, and henceforth his destiny was his passion. The first thing to be done, since English was to be his vehicle, was to cast off all French influence. That was easy, for though he had been under the spell of Zola, of Flaubert and of Gautier, those masters had become to him " sickly as faces grown old in gaslight," and he turned off the gas. Then he must soak himself in English fiction, and his landlady lent him some books by George Meredith. He read Rhoda Fleming, and his mind " astonished at receiving no sensation cried aloud like a child at a milkless breast." He read Thomas Hardy and found in him nothing but an efficient journalist reporting the conversations at public-houses in the rural districts. He read Henry James, whose books reminded him of polite evening parties, void of incident He read R. L. Stevenson and figured him as an urbane well-dressed young man strolling in the Burlington Arcade. He re-read George Eliot, and thought of her (I cannot recall the exact phrase) as a sort of policeman of morals. Then he read Marius the Epicurean, by Walter • Pater, and here at last was someone who could make music in the English tongue, and who satisfied the artistic sense : English could be a vehicle for self-expression. The works of Miss Margaret Veley, For Percival and Damocles, confirmed this con- viction. She had that " rhythmic progression " for which he sought. Few people nowadays read Walter Pater (and thereby are the losers) and nobody, as far as I am aware, reads Miss Margaret Veley, but we owe them our gratitude, for they seem to have been the god-parents, making promises in his name, of the young man who enriched the literature of England with works that were presently hailed as classics. And may possibly (who can tell ?) rank among the immortals.
But the works of others interested George Moore very little : there was nothing in English fiction that approached perfection, and he cared for nothing that fell short of that. He could be perversely enthusiastic over such a book as The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and maintain that Anne Brontë, in the first half of that forgotten book, easily surpassed her sisters, but it was really perversity rather than enthusiasm that led him to make so singular a statement. Never perhaps has there been a writer, literary to his fingers' ends, who cared so little for books. In later life he read practically nothing, and therefrom drew the conclusion that nothing in modem English literature was worth reading. He built his own shrine, and as priest served at the altar which he dedicated to himself. Therein he showed his wisdom, for, indeed, there was no external influence that could have bettered what was brewing. His style
was native and wholly self-evolved, and the beauty of it, in ferment already when he began to write prose, was its slicer simplicity : he said what he had to say with a supreme directness and economy, and to learn from others would have been a loss of his instinctive self-knowledge. Fiction and autobiography were the first fields for his tilling, and at once it was evident that there was a fresh force in English literature, underived from Walter Pater or any other. A Modern Lover and A Mummer's Wife appeared : they were banned by the English libraries, and he never forgave them for this matchless advertisement. A. Drama in Muslin followed, and then in 1894 he published Esther Waters. Whatever evolution may be in store for the art of story-telling, it is impossible to imagine one that will threaten its security as a classic.
The South African War, he proclaimed, rendered residence in England intolerable : he could not eat the bread of so tyrannical a country, and he went back home to Ireland, the very thought of which, he had previously declared, filled him with nausea. This self- imposed exile turned his mind back to autobiographical work, and its main fruits were the trilogy of Hail and Farewell. They were formless, they were exquisite, they were the lovely, cantankerous musings of a man essentially solitary, infinitely sensitive, vindictive and abusive of most of his best friends, they were musings morally indefensible, but aesthetically irresistible. We read, we revel and we rebel, but how impotent is our insurrection ! He " weaves a circle round us thrice," and the magic binds us head and heart, and we glut ourselves on the honey-dew of bitter herbs.
It is not only style that renders this trilogy and his other confessions masterpieces which he never surpassed : they render also a finished portrait, impressionistic and yet scrupulously detailed of himself or rather of his own view of himself. The biographer who founded his Life of George Moore on his various autobiographies would
certainly produce a most misleading document. Memoirs of My Dead Life, for instance, is no more than a picture, painted with matchless charm and candour, of his reactions to situations which were coloured by his imagination, and we may guess that he never regarded than as more than a mirror of moods. He told stories of such to himself, he gave them a realistic setting, and some of the folk, such as Edmund Gosse, with whom he pictured himself conversing in Ebury Street strenuously denied that any such talks had ever taken place. Again, he was certainly jealous of authors who commanded a larger audience than himself, but he did not find it inconsistent to publish his later books in limited editions and at prices that made the purchase of them prohibitive to the ordinary reader. He despised the taste of the public and wrote, he said for the few, his family, his clan, and while taking all possible steps to keep it small was bitter at its not being more numerous.
But how beautifully it was done, how infinite the pains be took to put forth a flawless production ! He wrote and he re-wrote, he revised and revised his revision, and the type must be worthy of the words, and the paper of the type. To his late period, which saw him lonely and indefatigable, belong The Brook Kerith, The Story-Teller's Holiday, Daphnis and Chloe and Aphrodite in Aulis. Yet was he ever a citizen of the Greek Republic of letters, and did he ever attain that instinct of unconscious nudity ? To lay bare the soul or to lay bare the body was with him an affair to be conducted in the study or the studio, and he never quite got rid of the desire to shock others by the strippings which to the Greek were matters of course. As for The Brook Kerith the style alone supports those who can follow its interminable wanderings. Perhaps he recognized its essential defects, and strove to remedy them by an endless decoration of its banks.
A great artist has passed. We hail him as he passes, but as long as words can minister to our sense of beauty, we shall not say Farewell.
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