Complete Works of George Moore

by George Moore

  “My dear Moore, you have not changed your mind; you have merely conceded a point, that is all.”

  “Les Concessions d’un Enfant du Siècle,” I answered plaintively, and Gosse began to improvise an amusing book, till breaking off suddenly, tired of the joke, he asked me if I thought of omitting any of the hooks I had written in Ireland; and I answered him that I was particularly satisfied with the books I had written in Ireland, Ireland having thrown me back upon primitive people. “Among whom your talent is more at home than among the cultured,” he interjected. “The Untilled Field,” I said, “came out of my memories of the peasants that collected about Moore Hall;” and we discussed the advisability of publishing The Lake in the same volume, both having come out of the same inspiration. But I am repeating or paraphrasing what has already been said in the preface to the new edition of The Lake; and of the three volumes of autobiography entitled Hail and Farewell I can only say that whilst writing these books I dreamed the Syrian story conceived from end to end in a five-minutes’ conversation with W. K. Magee in the National Library, trying it in the form of a play so that I might save myself the tedium of a long journey to Palestine, it becoming plain to me at last that the story could not he written even in the form of a play without my seeing the country. “You have been wishing,” a wise friend said to me, “to write this book for years; go to Palestine; the season is coming in for the journey.” I think she uttered a warning that the journey would become more difficult to me every year, and I owe to her The Brook Kerith, for January 1914 was the last possible moment for me to visit Palestine, whence I returned in May (two months before the War), the long ride through the desert from Jerusalem to the desolate shores of the Dead Sea, and the longer ride from Jerusalem to the harp-shapen lake in the north, having set my story flowing, here a trickle, there a pool, with suddenly a cascade of story from the face of the high rock. A pretentious imagery, I fear, but a true one, for during my journey home and the fifteen months that I spent writing The Brook Kerith, the story continued to pour into my mind without interruption, the incident that I could not find in the evening revealing itself to me in the morning, and so on and so on till the last proofs were corrected, without, however, attaining the language I had in mind, neither an archaic nor a modern language; for this I had to wait for the Carra edition. Of course mistakes can be discovered always if sought, and on this note of warning I turn from textual revisions to the fright the book caused, the absence of the usual ringlets that Jesus had worn, from Dürer to Holman Hunt, stampeding the critics. Again and again the book was returned to the editors who had sent it out. It would seem that the critics had expected something of the eighteenth-century abbé that Renan painted from himself in the looking-glass with some remembrances of his sister Henrietta, and it was noised in Fleet Street that the Jesus of The Brook Kerith was a beggar-man that Joseph met by the lake shores hurrying to Capernaum to Peter’s house, in which he lodged. Peter’s lodger — what a profanation! But a way out had to be discovered, and that is why eulogies were printed of the opening chapters, with many regrets that Mr. Moore was not able to continue the book as he began it. But at the end of three weeks the critics discovered suddenly that every Christian sect was speaking of the restraint and reverence with which the book was written, whereupon the opening chapters, which were thought so charming three weeks ago, became long and tedious, and it was not till Jesus appeared that the story began to hold the reader. And what a vision of old Palestine when he returned to the Brook Kerith after the crucifixion to resume his shepherd’s life, leading his flock over the hills from pasture to pasture, and what drama and clash of character when Paul came to the cavern of the Essenes seeking refuge from the Jews, who sought to drown him in the river Jordan! But whilst I tell of the shifting views of the journalists the reader is asking himself how Mudie and Smith regarded The Brook Kerith, and I am in the sad plight of not being able to tell him, my interest in these firms having dwindled till they were well-nigh forgotten. And their names might not have appeared in this Apologia if The Brook Kerith had not roused a new enemy as malignant as they, a convert to Rome, who applied to the magistrate at Bow Street for a warrant against the book on the grounds of blasphemy, which the magistrate refused to grant, saying it had long been decided that British subjects were free to accept Jesus as God or man as it pleased their fancy; he seems to have pointed out that if The Brook Kerith were forbidden, some ten or twenty, maybe a hundred thousand volumes would have to be interdicted, to which the applicant (so it was reported in the evening papers) replied that he would not have objected to the divinity of Christ being denied in a scientific book, but The Brook Kerith was a story. And whilst readers no doubt lay back in their chairs wondering what spite, malice, envy, hatred, direct or derivative, could have propelled a man on to such a forlorn quest as a warrant for the interdiction of a Syrian story related from a different point of view from the one which some churchmen think prevails in the synoptic gospels, I lay back in mine, asking myself how much money the applicant had had to pay for wasting the magistrate’s time; and upon inquiry I learnt that the application probably cost him ten pounds. But he must have known, said I, that the application would be dismissed; his solicitors must have told him; so why did he insist upon throwing away ten pounds? For the sake of an advertisement, perhaps. Whereupon I began to congratulate myself that my publisher was a man of restraint, for had he been more go-ahead he might have arranged for a copy of The Brook Kerith to be soaked in paraffin and burnt in Hyde Park in front of a cinematograph camera. If this had happened, I should have had to begin an action at law. Mr. Werner Laurie was, however, satisfied with the advertisement given to him gratuitously by Rome’s convert — Rome gathers them all into her fold, especially those whose careers are behind them; and the application for a warrant faded from my mind till a music-hall singer brought an action against my publisher, Mr. Heinemann, for the use of the name, Lewis Seymour, in the title of my book: Lewis Seymour and Some Women. An old enemy or a new one, I said, and one that comes in strange guise, for the suggestion of success among the ladies should not be distasteful to one who gets his living on the alls. And thought linking into thought, it came to me to consider blackmail as a motive, but as time went by without bringing a proposal from Mr. Seymour’s solicitors to settle the alleged libel out of court, the motive of blackmail was superseded by the advertisement motive; but this, like the blackmail motive, had to be dropped: For no fruitful advertisement can be gotten from a libel case dismissed with costs. “But you don’t know that it will be dismissed with costs.”

  “It will be, or the art of fiction will become extinct” — my words to Mr. Heinemann. “A new enemy has come up or an old one in disguise,” I continued, “for this case does not square with the Artemus Jones case. The plaintiff only acquired the name of Lewis Seymour some three years ago, and he was three when A Modern Lover was published.”

  “So the name is the same in both books?” Mr. Heinemann inquired, and I answered that it was; whereupon Mr. Heinemann mused, and to awake him from his meditation, I said: “The story is the same; but the text was so poor that I had to rewrite it.”

  And during the months that had to pass before the case came into court, we often wondered in Bedford Street what the grounds for complaint would be, and when I called at Sir George Lewis’s office and the case was discussed between us, I remember his saying: “If Lewis Seymour gets a verdict he will be in the position to bring another action.”

  “How is that?” I asked. “By changing his name to Tom Jones he will be able to get a good mulct from the publishers of Fielding’s novel, and novelists will have to call their characters A, B, C, D, or 1, 2, 3, 4.”— “But he cannot get a verdict,” I interjected, and Sir George spoke of the possibility of the case being tried by a stupid jury and a weak judge. “And then,” I answered, “we shall have to go to Appeal, else the art of fiction will become extinct in England, which is impossible, stories being as natural to man as breath. A verdict fo
r Lewis Seymour must be reversed by the Court of Appeal; why then should he persist in this action? His solicitors must have told him that he will be defeated in the end if not in the beginning. A music-hall singer is rarely a rich man. Who then is putting up the money?” Sir George was unable to answer my questions, and when in course of time it came for me to go into the witness-box, I found myself confronted by a little, round, dumpling Jew, who began: “Now, Mr. Moore, you are a very superior sort of novelist, aren’t you? All the same, I venture to think you would like to increase the number of your readers.”

  “On the contrary,” I answered, “I try to limit them;” whereupon the little man began to fumble among his papers. After an interval he raised his head, and looking me full in the face, he said: “You tell the court that your aim is not to extend the number of your readers but to reduce them?” I acquiesced. “Now what does Mr. Heinemann say to that?” he inquired. “Mr. Heinemann is my publisher and not my literary confidant,” I answered, and the judge informed Mr. Lewis Seymour’s counsel that my conversations with Mr. Heinemann could not be taken as evidence. “You must put your question to Mr. Heinemann when he goes into the witness-box,” he said to the little man, who again buried his face in his brief, and whose next question was: “You will admit that Lewis Seymour and Some Women is a suggestive title?”

  “Every good title,” I answered, “is suggestive.”

  “I do not mean suggestive in a general sense,” he replied, “ but in a particular.”

  “The title is suggestive of men and women,” I said, mentioning for his instruction that nearly all prose narrative in literature was about men and women, a view that Mr. Justice Darling developed in his address to the jury, making too much of the fact that my literary conventions were not those of Anthony Trollope, an almost aggressive attitude, which he would not have adopted towards the book if Mr. Heinemann’s counsel had asked me how the original book, A Modern Lover, was received by the Press, for I should have been able to tell him that it was received everywhere with approbation, in The Spectator in a two-column review, an honour that a first novel seldom receives, and, a still rarer honour, in an article in The Fortnightly Review. As it cannot be disagreeable to Sir Henry Norman to be mentioned as the writer of the article, I will take this opportunity to thank him for it; and after this brief interruption in our narrative, I return to tell how the inadequate intelligence of our counsel obscured the case so completely that the jury would have retired to consider their verdict with the very vaguest notion of the story they had been listening to all day, and the music-hall singer might have gotten his verdict, if Mr. Justice Darling had not rescued our case from the darkness into which the irrelevant speeches and the irrelevant cross-examination of Mr. Lewis Seymour and his two witnesses, a chauffeur and a hairdresser, had dragged it. His references to different writers, to Fielding and Thackeray, Dickens and Eliot, and to their use of names, were interesting and instructive, and it is to be regretted that the newspapers printed no adequate report of his speech, for sooner or later another case of a like kind will come into the Law Courts, and should the jury prove stupid and the judge weak, a verdict may he returned that will have to be revised in the Court of Appeal. As the jury retired to consider their verdict one of them reminded the judge as he went by that they had not read the book. “You have heard enough of it,” the judge answered, and a few moments after the twelve returned with a verdict of no libel and no damages. “But shall we get our costs?” Mr. Heinemann asked Sir George Lewis, who answered that he would make every effort to get them; but a few days later he wrote to say that there was no chance of our getting our costs from Mr. Lewis Seymour, and two hundred and seventy-five pounds was generously subscribed by friends of literature, the larger portion being paid by Mr. Heinemann and me.

  “But why, my dear George Moore,” the reader asks, “do you stoop to rake up the details of a sordid law case?”

  “Because, dear reader, I think it necessary to draw your attention to the instinct that prompted me to tell Mr. Seymour’s counsel that it was my intention to limit the circulation of my books rather than to increase it.” When I spoke the words I did not know how this was to be done, but the oftener I pondered them the clearer it became to me that my instinct had taken me by the hand. For thirty years I had resisted Mudie and Smith, a persecution sometimes violent and libellous, always continuous, and as Mr. Heinemann refused to believe that a new enemy had come to take their places, I said: “Well, we have nothing but our instincts to guide us; we must trust to them,” and I brought the volume entitled A StoryTeller’s Holiday to Mr. Werner Laurie with a few lines taking leave of the general public.

  My apologia may be said to end here, but the occasion to speak of one’s life work does not occur twice in a lifetime, and I would tell the reader that he is asked to begin the series with Lewis Seymour and Some Women, an admittedly youthful work, because A Mummer’s Wife, my second book, is the hook of a man. At one stride I had come into whatever talent I brought into the world; a stepping-stone was needed, and as none other but Lewis Seymour and Some Women presented itself I began to remember that though the craft of the writing be rudimentary, Mrs. Bentham, the maternal mistress, is among the rudiments of the world, and for that reason, perhaps, was not discovered by Trollope, Black, or Henry James, of whose portrait of a lady I would remind the reader, asking him to consider if she who flies from Florence (or was it Rome?) because an admirer kisses her (I think he succeeds in kissing only the brim of her hat), represents as deep humanity as Mrs. Bentham. And after having considered the portraits of two ladies, the critic will do well to pass on to A Mummer’s Wife, for he will meet in this book a man in all his instincts and habits, a great hunch of unintellectualised humanity, about whom he may only say in disparagement that a better correspondent for Dick Lennox than the almost hag who sends him hexameters would have been a beautiful girl in her teens; her love of Dick would have added an accent, one that might have revealed him more fully. But I refrained from remoulding this book, even from sharpening the minor characters, and I pass on to Muslin to tell the critic that he will find a hint of Esther Waters in Alice Barton. Spring Days will take him from Dublin to Sussex to make the acquaintance of some young women who have begun to look round, to the great distress of their parents; in Esther Waters, the scene is laid partly in Sussex, and he will find himself among servant girls, owners of race-horses, trainers and jockeys, and when the scene moves from Sussex to London he will watch by a bedside in Queen Charlotte’s Hospital. In Evelyn Innés he will assist at the rehearsals and performances of Wagner’s operas, and in the next book, Sister Teresa, he will penetrate into convents. Again the scene will change to Ireland, and this time the show will be peasants going forth to dig in lonely fields, returning home in the dusk, their loys over their shoulders, peasants driving pigs and bullocks to the fair on week-days, and peasants going to the grey church whose bell calls over desolate lands for worship. From The Lake the reader will learn how the Irish priest lives in single strictness, how he sometimes flies from it or takes to drink; in Hail and Farewell he will shake hands with dear Edward, and in Memoirs of My Dead Life he will read many love stories. The very name of The Brook Kerith evokes prophets, and in A StoryTeller’s Holiday he will listen to yarns told by an Irish vagrant in his own rustic English. In Confessions of a Young Man and in Avowals (the volumes are printed together), the reader will hear some of the greatest painters of the nineteenth century talking of Impressionism in the Nouvelle Athènes, and in Victor Hugo’s house in the rue Blanche he will catch some echoes of Banville improvising at the poet’s dinner table. In these and other books there will be a great number of courtesans of high and low degree; in Héloïse and Abélard troubadours and relic-sellers foison, and in In Single Strictness, my last book up to the present, sex is revealed in perversities, women who do not love men and men who do not love women.

  A great variety, no doubt, cries a reader, but style demands uniformity rather than variety. My dear
reader, it is you who must decide whether the variety is moulded into one thought. But, the caviller insists, are all these hooks works of art? That your intentions may have been to write works of art I doubt not, but are they? Answer me yes or no, and not by equivocatory replies that you are debarred from opinions and such like. Your question, caviller, demands the definition of what art is, one that Tolstoy asked in vain, discovering, however, by persistent questions that he had come to detest art. But though art may not be defined, it is easily recognised, and there will always be some who will stop like the dowser and point, saying: “Here, and not there;” and these will tell the people in time to come how little or how much Apollo has guided my band. But if I cannot claim art for my books I may be allowed to have accomplished yeoman service by returning from the conventions of Vanity Fair and The Small House at Allington to those that inspired the writing of Shakespeare’s plays and the Bible. Conventions there must he; we find them in savage as well as in civilised life; but man’s instincts are always invading the moral law, and may loosen the conventions of prose narrative still further, and this Apologia serve as a rallying cry for seekers of a thoughtful and personal prose.

  GEORGE MOORE.

  PREFACE TO LEWIS SEYMOUR AND SOME WOMEN

  A MODERN LOVER was the book of a young man who, in a moment of inspiration, hit upon an excellent anecdote, and being without literary skill to unfold it, devised a strange text out of his memories of Balzac, Zola, and Goncourt.

  This is a severe but just appreciation of my first prose work, formed after looking through it with a view to republication.

  “Extraordinary,” I said to myself, “is the power of the anecdote; though imperfectly written and illustrated with characters only faintly sketched, this first book has survived the vicissitudes of thirty-five years.” And I fell to thinking of a story that I heard from Granville Barker when he lay in bed in Dublin recovering from typhus fever: how, cycling, one day, he had overtaken a tall, gaunt man at the foot of a hill — Furnivall, who, being old, had stepped down from his machine, and Barker, desirous of talk, stepped down from his; and pushing their machines in front of them, they discoursed literature, probably one of Barker’s plays — something that he had written or was minded to write. Barker relates that he tarried over the mentality of his characters, and that Furnivall cried out: “Get on with the story: it’s the story that counts.”