by George Moore
The rose of the past is better
Than the rose we ravish to-day;
’Tis holier, purer and fitter
To place on the shrine where we pray
To the secret thoughts we obey, as being suffused with Celtic genius, and gave me a volume of Swinburne to review for him, a task that I achieved with only moderate success. He gave me other books and I did my best with them, my best, however, leaving a feeling in my mind that my articles were draggle-tailed; and I wondered how it was everybody could produce evenly written copy, though he might be my inferior intellectually. I was only sure of myself in verse, and one day a friend at the corner of Wellington Street and the Strand asked me if I believed myself destined to increase the volume of English poetry. He did not intend to affront me, nor did he; I was even grateful to him for his bluntness, for it helped me to make up my mind, not a difficult thing to do for I had begun to hear myself called to story-telling; and the burden of poetry being discharged I applied myself to the shaping of a novel to be called A Modern Lover, turning it over in my mind till one day it took shape suddenly as I left the Gaiety Bar by the swing doors leading into Catherine Street, to which delightful surprise was added the conviction, not less delightful, that I had found at last my real business in life: I was a tale-teller.
He has broken into his last sovereign, I said to myself on my way to Cecil Street, and the dealer who has just refused to buy another sketch sends his shopman after him with an order for a decorative panel representing Venus rising from the sea. But Lewis cannot draw except from the model, and having no money to pay for one he speaks of suicide to a modest young Methodist who lives in the house; and when he brings the decorative panel to the dealer’s shop he is asked to wait, the dealer being at that moment engaged with a customer. And it so happens that the customer has come to ask the dealer if he can recommend an artist to decorate her ballroom. The dealer is fortunately able to supply the young man she is dreaming of; and when the ballroom is finished, Mrs. Bentham buys his pictures and persuades her friends to sit to him for their portraits. And then? This story will run on for about ten years, and in ten years the time will have come to bring in a young woman, Lady Helen, mayhap, who remembers having met Lewis at the tennis party in Sussex. Her family is opposed to the marriage, but Lady Helen will not give way, and once they are married, the family have to get him portraits; and in the end, by a cunningly devised entanglement of circumstance, the three workers have an opportunity of appreciating the artist they have brought into being, which they do according to their different lights.
As I ran upstairs the story of Lewis Seymour continued to shape itself in my mind, and when the wretched text came back to me from Mr. Bentley my hopes drifted on to Mr. Tinsley, who, however, found himself unable to undertake the publication of A Modern Lover unless I agreed to pay him his losses up to forty pounds, a large sum, so I thought, for a man to lose who could reckon only upon the five hundred pounds he had gotten for his trees, the rather as no more money would come out of Irish land. All the same, I signed, and whilst the proofs were undergoing correction the thought of having to draw a cheque instead of receiving one began to frighten me; but my fears gave way and almost disappeared, so favourable were the notices of the book, till one day I left Cecil Street for Catherine Street with the intention of heartening Mr. Tinsley by reading him the review that had appeared that morning in The Spectator. But he seemed lost in despondency of all shapes and sizes as he sat at his bureau, and waving aside the review as something of no importance he told me that Mudie had taken only fifty copies and Smith twenty-five, which meant that sooner or later he would call upon me to pay my debt, and being, like every other man, a mixture of cowardice and courage, regret entered my soul that I had not delayed my campaign against Mudie and Smith till I had made my position secure in English letters. The thought was accompanied by another: that if I had delayed and written books in the tradition that Messrs. Mudie and Smith had imposed upon English letters, I should have become part and parcel of Mudie and Smith and would be unable to withstand them. I must break in here to tell that I had already begun to look upon the freeing of English fiction from the apron strings of Mudie and Smith as my job; for its quick accomplishment it would have been better that they had not discovered their enemy so quickly. But what mischief had been done could not be undone, and the struggle that had begun sooner than I wished for, sooner than I expected, would have to be continued by me unintermittently, and in my way and in no other, for I could not change myself. And whilst these thoughts, or something like them, were passing through my mind Mr. Tinsley sat in his armchair, the very type of the middle-class tradesman, a basket of fish behind him which he was taking home to the family in the suburbs. In which suburb I did not know, and it vexed me to find my thoughts straying into such an unimportant question. “Mr. Tinsley, I said, I suppose you have read the reviews of A Modern Lover, every one of which is complimentary? “and I handed him the two-column article that The Spectator had printed that week and tried to persuade him that it would save the book. But he answered with truth that no number of articles could save a three-volume novel if the libraries did not subscribe freely and circulate it. “Then why not break the libraries by publishing at a popular price?” I asked. “I could not have sold your novels at six shillings,” he replied, “nor at three-and-sixpence, nor at any other price, for Smith owns all the bookstalls and what he will not circulate he will not sell”: an answer that revealed to me the bastions of the fortresses I had undertaken in rash haste to storm. But something had to be done, and on leaving Mr. Tinsley’s office I looked round for a hansom and drove to the library in Oxford Street absorbed in the fear that Mr. Mudie might refuse to see me.
“I have called to see Mr. Mudie.” The attendant at the counter said he would take up my name, and I paced the waiting-room till a dull, almost lifeless, thick-set, middle-aged man entered. I knew that I should make no impression on him, but we were face to face and I began to speak all I could remember of Zola’s Roman Expérimental, to which he gave a stupid, listless ear. It may be as well to say here that he dropped a few years later into lunacy, and I almost became aware of his impending end when he put forward the suggestion that I should take Trollope for my model. “I will wreck this big house of yours, Mr. Mudie!” I cried, and seeing me look round the room, and judging me to be measuring the strength of the architecture, a faint smile lighted up his face for a moment, and I began to ask myself if other authors had threatened him before. “My next novel will be issued at a popular price,” I cried; “I will appeal to the public.” To which he answered that popular prices would suit his business better than the conventional three-volume novel, price thirty-one-and-six; and I left his emporium to start a few days afterwards for Ireland to write A Mummer’s Wife in dear Edward’s Galway castle. The story that possessed me this time was a better one than A Modern Lover. I was thinking of a soft, sentimental woman of the lower middle class, to whose house the manager of a travelling opera comes in search of lodgings and whom the mummer carries out of a world of work into one of pleasure and excitement; a story of decline and fall, with this inference for philosophy: that to change our circumstance is to change a good many of our ideas.
My new publisher, Henry Vizetelly, of whom I would speak here if I had not spoken out my mind concerning him in Avowals, seemed impressed by my description of the book. And remember, I continued, “that though adultery is as frequent in England as in any other country, our literary convention is that the people of novels are chaste and never miss church, and any violation of this code will assuredly cause the book to be banned by the libraries. Our appeal must be made to the common-sense of the country; we must publish at a popular price.” And opening my manuscript I drew his attention to Kate Ede’s enjoyment of every hour of her new life, especially of the long talks before turning into bed and the morning stirrings in a room already warm with sunlight. “Never,” I said, “will Mudie and Smith circulate a book in which a ma
n is represented living in lodgings with a woman who is not his wife; remember the subterfuges that Thackeray had to stoop to, and the many books that have been written to prove that Becky never side-stepped.”
“But you tell me your book is soberly written,” interjected Henry Vizetelly. “Be that as it may, Mudie and Smith will take objection to it and gain credit for so doing,” I answered: a prediction that came to pass, despite the fact that the book was earnestly acclaimed by the entire Press. But Mudie and Smith were autocrats and stood shoulder to shoulder, never allowing a copy into the library or upon the bookstalls, and it was to outwit them that I arranged for my next book, Muslin, to appear in a newspaper, saying to myself: “Smith will not dare to ban a newspaper, and if he does not refuse to sell The Court and Society Review on his bookstalls, his librarian can hardly refuse to admit the book into the library.” It was with this argument in my head that I called upon Mr. Faux, who answered that the gentleman in charge of the stalls sold what he liked, and that he, Mr. Faux, being in charge of the library, distributed what he liked. “But will you tell me, Mr. Faux, what your objection is to Muslin?” Mr. Faux answered that the character of Alice Barton represented part of his objection to the story, saying: “She does not believe in the divinity of our Lord and refuses to go to church—”
“But her character is exemplary,” I interjected. “Quite so,” he replied; “but there is a girl in your book who has a baby, an unmarried girl who is a believing Christian. Your point, I suppose, is that religious teaching is worse than useless; a view which I do not think would be accepted by the majority of the subscribers to our library.” And then his tone changing from grave to gay, he began to gossip about the books he had banned, telling indecent stories to which I listened in amazement, it seeming to me strange that a man’s private life should differ from his public. I heard afterwards that publishers collected indecent stories for his amusement and that if he had not heard them before, they were rewarded with large orders. And recalling this interview to my remembrance, I can see in my thoughts, and distinctly, a tall, thin, sallow, unhealthy-looking man, with a large mouth full of shaky false teeth, a bald crown covered with faded hair, ambiguous blue eyes that lighted up when certain words were pronounced, and a name in accordance with his character: Faux; he pronounced it Fox, thereby trying vainly to escape from the by-name that some original French ancestor had earned for qualities which an inexorable law had transmitted to his descendant of 1880.
My next book was Confessions of a Young Man, and the excuse that Mr. Faux gave for banning it was that Mr. Wilson Barrett, an actor of some celebrity in those days, was spoken of as playing to the gallery, but as my books continued to be received with favour the prejudice that Mudie and Smith had stirred up against me was beginning to decline, the twain being looked upon as stupid fellows; and I can only think it was the despair caused by finding himself obliged to refuse to supply a book that everybody wanted to read that provoked Mr. Faux to take the Press into his confidence, for one day when a reporter came to ask him to give his reasons for banning Esther Waters, he answered: “For certain pre-Raphaelite nastiness that Mr. Moore cannot keep out of his writings”; an answer that counsel would be puzzled to justify, so I was told, and was pressed to begin an action. Smith will not allow the case to go into Court; he will apologise and pay. But I could not be persuaded, though the pleasure of interrogating Mr. Faux in the witness-box tempted me; instead of a lawyer I called in an accountant who, after checking the sales and reckoning the rebate that Smith’s monopoly allows him to ask and get, sent in a report that Smith had lost probably fifteen hundred pounds by refusing to deal in Esther Waters. It was after the publication of these figures that I had the satisfaction of hearing that the partners of the firm, whilst congratulating themselves at having escaped a mulct in damages, sent word to their librarian that it would be well in the future to avoid heavy losses by banning books, especially books that Mr. Gladstone was likely to read and to express his approval of in The Westminster Gazette.
Till the publication of Esther Waters I had lived in a small corner of the Temple, giving two days of the week to writing articles. Modern Painting was written on Tuesdays for The Speaker, a newspaper that represented the liberalism of the ‘nineties, and every evening I went forth, usually alone, to spend three or four shillings in one of the City inns, The Cock, The Rainbow, or The Cheshire Cheese. A hard, industrious life mine was for many years, one that astonished Thomas Ruttledge, who called at 8, King’s Bench Walk one hot summer day and found me writing in my shirt-sleeves. It came to my ears some months afterwards that Tom had said he had never known anybody so frugal as George, an appreciation that surprised me, for I was not aware that my conduct was exceptional. A man on an errand is conscious of little else, and it was not for weariness of a strait life that I left the Temple to live in a commodious flat in Victoria Street, where I could keep servants, but in the hope that easier conditions of life would enable me to accomplish the overthrow of Mudie and Smith, whom I identified with the slavery of English literature. Zola had often told me that the libraries would give way as soon as the demand for my books compelled them to do so, and not before. “Mudie has surrendered to Esther Waters,” I said, “and Smith will hold up his hands at the next book if it be a success.” But the thought of writing popular literature was repugnant to me, and I sat asking myself which I would choose: a great work of art or the freedom of literature. The answer came: for a great work of art I would consent that Mudie and Smith should live, yes, and thrive. And amused at my own wantonness I continued the composition of Sister Teresa to succumb very soon to a temptation more malignant than the first, for after hearing Yeats and dear Edward talking continually of a Celtic Renaissance, it had come to be believed by me that the English language was threadbare, falling to pieces like an old coat, and soiled with wear; and I began to dream of exchanging my lot, the overthrow of Mudie and Smith, for the revival of an old language that too frequent child-bearing had not over-worn.
We play with a thought as with a snake; it coils and uncoils, a seemingly harmless thing, till suddenly its coils tighten and we are overcome. I sold my flat in Victoria Street, and often stopped in my walks in Dublin to ask myself if it were the destiny of the Irish language to bring forth a new literature. But the struggle of the artist with the patriot could end only in the overthrow of the patriot, and whosoever would read the story of the match can do so in the volumes entitled Hail and Farewell. For me to remember that there was a struggle is enough for the purpose of this apologia, and I return to Evelyn Innés and Sister Teresa, to tell how after altering these books in every edition, Continental, English and American, I came suddenly into a resolution to rewrite them from the first pages to the last, thereby wasting two years, for the new versions disappointed me as soon as they were printed, which is strange, for I excel in corrections, and the only explanation I can give of my failure is that a superficial subject had better be written superficially. Be this as it may, Evelyn left me no peace; she continued to intrude herself upon me during the whole of my stay in Ireland, claiming my attention for some new aspect of her character, without, however, persuading me to follow her again; and it was in the hope of ridding myself of her that I refused all proposals for a collected edition that included the two books, whereupon publishers withdrew from a proposition which, in their own words, was not a practical one. Even if these hooks were left out, I said to myself, there would be a hiatus which I should feel, and if, after all, the public should prove right!
It was about a year ago that Mr. Liveright wrote to me about the collected edition, and when he came to see me in London he demanded not only Evelyn Innés but a number of trivial books and a long list of short stories and articles. “But even if all that your industry could discover from ancient files of newspapers were published,” I said to him, “a great deal would still remain uncollected.” Mr. Liveright bowed before my argument, which indeed was unanswerable, and so did my old friend, Mr. Edmund Gosse
, to whom I went at the end of the week. Mr. Gosse answered me: “You are quite right to reject certain volumes as casual and unrepresentative, but since you ask me, I do not think that it is possible for you to omit Evelyn Innés and Sister Teresa, for they form a large part of your literary thought and development. You asked for my opinion—” And feeling myself pressed from every side, I said: “My dear Gosse, when I ask you for an opinion it is to take it. To-morrow I will sign an agreement with Mr. Liveright for twenty volumes, and the agreement shall not only include the two volumes, Evelyn Innés and Sister Teresa, but I promise you that they shall be published from the original editions, without the alteration of a comma. After all, the public liked them in their first versions, and as I do not like them in any of the versions it is better that somebody should be pleased. I think that is reasonable. Everything comes to pass if one lives long enough, and here am I accepting public opinion about a book. It is true, Gosse, that you have made yourself the spokesman of it, else I should have listened contemptuously, and I shall make you publicly responsible for the inclusion of these two books into the canon.”
