Complete Works of George Moore

by George Moore

  Furnivall is right. Style and presentation of character and a fine taste in the selection of words are secondary gifts; and secondary gifts may be acquired, may be developed at least, but the story-teller comes into the world fully equipped almost from the first, finding stories wherever he goes as instinctively as the reaper in the cornfield discovers melodies that the professor of counterpoint and harmony strives after vainly in his university. In like manner Robert Louis Stevenson strove after stories, suspecting all the while that his were not instinctive melodies. He says in one of his essays that the nearest equivalent to literature in music is the story. I should be puzzled to give a reason for my belief that a doubt regarding himself is implicit in these words, but I feel them to be full of suspicion that his gift of storytelling was not as natural as the reaper’s, who sings a song in the morning in the cornfield and tells a story at night, hushing the fireside, for his is a heartfelt story, significant of human life as it passes down the ages, an artless thing, a wayside weed, but one that we turn to and find a pleasure in when wearied of artificial flowers. Stevenson’s are cunningly fashioned and coloured, for he was a great man of letters with every literary gift but one that he could well have done without, so well, indeed, that we must all regret the time he wasted among islands, lying about veiled in grey and azure haze, peopled with dummy pirates and slave-drivers: poor substitutes, indeed, for his own winning personality. As long as he was faithful to himself he wrote with a teeming fancy; but as soon as he left the circle of his own experience he wandered in wastes so desert that it may be doubted if Arabia could furnish more barren spots than his stories, and I offer up thanks that he did not try to introduce a narrative into The Amateur Emigrant. Everything is there: atmosphere, characters, wit, humour, fine perception of life; but all these admirable qualities would have been destroyed by one drop of story. “ How extraordinary!” we say, and fall to thinking. But however closely we look into Robert Louis Stevenson’s talent, we find that we cannot unriddle it and say why a man of such high literary attainments should show himself inferior again and again to the ignorant harvester. The good fairy came in at the window with her presents, and as soon as she had laid them by the child’s cradle she departed; but no sooner was she out of sight than the wicked fairy descended by the chimney, and, standing by the cradle, said: “I cannot take away the gifts that the good fairy has given thee, but I can blight them for ever in thine eyes. Thou shalt never write a story that does not seem toshery to thee.” If this fairy-tale explanation of a strange stint be deemed inacceptable by grown-up people, to satisfy them we will say that the personality of Robert Louis Stevenson was so intense that the light he shed blinded him to all other human personalities.

  Without human feeling and sentiment, story-telling becomes almost meaningless; and not finding these qualities in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Master of Ballantrce, Catriona, and Weir of Hermiston, I railed against the admiration of my friends for a truly great literary genius, and strove to discredit him in my critical writings. But if our acquaintance, instead of beginning with these dry books, had begun with Travels with a Donkey, all would have been different. We would have become friends. My life would have been enriched, and I should have had the pleasure of saying to his face: “I have just read the most entrancing book in the English language.” But Fate was not kind to me. It was only last year that I read Travels with a Donkey. Immediately afterwards I read The Inland Voyage, and my pleasure in this second book was no less than my pleasure in the first. After that I read all Stevenson’s essays, and look forward to writing an essay in which I shall try to reveal the genius of Robert Louis Stevenson as I see it now.... The little monosyllable “ now” reminds me that I have indulged in a long digression, and that my present purpose is a preface to Lewis Seymour and Some Women — a much less delectable task than an essay on Robert Louis Stevenson, for Lewis Seymour and Some Women is a story, and stories do not need prefaces, but stories cannot be published without publishers, and publishers like prefaces, so here goes.

  Three women undertake to work for a young man’s welfare: a work-girl, a rich woman, and a lady of high degree. All contribute something, and the young man is put on a high pedestal. One worshipper retains her faith, one loses hers partially, and one altogether. “An anecdote that the folk behind me invented, and that the artist in front of them developed, and so true and beautiful,” I said, “that it has carried a badly written book into my collected works.” And many days were passed in doleful meditations and qualms of conscience that the religious man who can appreciate the fear of those that have sinned against the Holy Ghost, but is without sympathy for those that have sinned against Apollo, will not understand. Our gods are different, but our trouble is the same no matter from what source it proceeds. Again and again I took up A Modern Lover and threw it from me after reading a page, saying, “Such jargon as this is beyond hope of revision”; and weary with argument and striving with myself, I turned quickly out of my secretary’s room, leaving the poor girl alarmed lest a morbid sense of literary imperfection should impinge upon and undermine my usual excellent health. But we are so constituted that we cannot remain permanently unhappy. And one day, while bathing, it occurred to me suddenly that though it was impossible to revise the text of A Modern Lover, a new novel might be written round an anecdote which appealed to my aesthetic sense to-day as much as it did when I first discovered it thirty-five years ago. “A new book,” I said, “may be remoulded about it — a book that will need a new title, Lewis Seymour and Some Women. A delightful title, if not as original as my many other titles, full of suggestion”; and the new book having taken possession of me, I stepped out of my bath with all kinds of lovely scenes rising in the imagination, and so impatient to be written, that I dried and dressed myself hurriedly and ran downstairs to begin the dictation while the rashers were roasting.

  After breakfast the dictation was resumed, and the composition flowed on steadily and easily, swayed by the anecdote; descriptions and dialogue rolled themselves into my secretary’s notebook like a summer sea over a long white strand with here and there a rock around which the tide swirled day after day — halcyon days of fifteen hundred, two thousand, sometimes two thousand five hundred words in the day. A joyous composition Lewis Seymour and Some Women was, surely; begun and finished in three months, written out of the heart’s abundance without interruptions of barren days of doubts. I take my hat off to A Modern Lover, for it was to it, my first book, that I owe my last literary happiness, and fall to telling that it was not till the last pages were written that trouble began again. Not till then did I ask myself if the book I had written could be described as a new book. Which is it — an oldtime lamp with a smoking wick that I have endeavoured to trim, or a new lamp full of oil and burning brightly?

  My heart gave back no answer; but at last a friend said: “However much you may change the book, some will say you have not changed it enough.”

  “And if I were to publish it under the title of A Modern Lover? “ I asked. My friend answered:— “If you were to do that, as many critics would say that you were foisting a new book upon the public in place of an old one — a thing, it would be said, you had no right to do.”

  “But your answer, dear friend, doesn’t carry me any further”; to which he answered:— “Is Lewis Seymour and Some Women to you a new book or an old book revised?”

  “To me it is a new book from end to end.”

  “Then,” he said, “call it a new book, only tell your story clearly in your preface, omitting no detail.”

  This I have striven to do, and I hope the small but select circle of readers who find pleasure in my writings will approve this decision, arrived at after due consideration by myself and competent authority.

  CHAP. I.

  “YOU CAN HAVE it for fifteen shillings.”

  “I dare say, but I don’t intend to buy any more water-colours of you.”

  “You have hardly looked at this one....”

  “
No, I really can’t; I have at least a hundred and odd drawings by you, and half of them aren’t even numbered.”

  “If you don’t buy this one I’m afraid you’ll never have the chance of buying another.”

  At these words the picture dealer, a tall gaunt man, white-haired and bold, turned and stared at a tall thin young man whose melting eyes had often provoked his sympathies. There was a strange glitter in these dark blue-grey eyes, and the young man seemed to be aware of the influence his eyes could exercise, for he opened them very wide and fixed them upon Bendish. His eyes had wheedled many a sovereign out of the picture dealer, and the young man’s high forehead, prominent at each temple, had somehow put a belief into Bendish’s mind that Lewis Seymour would discover a new genius to the world one of these days. He had been expecting him to break out into an altogether original style of painting for the last three years, but Lewis had so far failed to realise Bendish’s hopes, and the painting that he was now offering for sale did not differ from the two hundred water-colours that had preceded it. “Why should I buy?” the old man was asking himself, and reading hesitation in the dealer’s eyes, Lewis Seymour repeated his words:

  “You had better buy now, for I’m afraid you will never have a chance of buying another.”

  “You mean, Mr. Seymour, that if I don’t buy your drawing you’ll fling yourself over one of the bridges. How many times do you think I’ve heard that story, and where do you think I’d be if I had listened to it every time it was told? In the workhouse.”

  “I suppose that is so,” Lewis answered; “all the same, what I say is nearer the truth than you think for.” And he looked into old Bendish’s piercing eyes inquiringly. “He thinks he can get it for seven and six,” Lewis said to himself; and while watching Bendish’s long gnarled nose, he held his tongue in the hope that silence might exasperate him to suggest a price. But the picture dealer had conquered the light temptation to succour the young man that had oppressed him, and he pretended a close investigation of a pile of engravings, holding each up to the light for a moment, and then throwing it back into the heap.

  “He is trying to pretend he is busy so that he may get rid of me,” Lewis muttered, and his heart began to fail him: “or it may be that he will not buy at any price. But how can this be,” he said to himself, “for he would always buy at a price.”

  His need was greater to-day than it had ever been, and in his nervousness he looked round and began to wonder how much money Bendish had spent upon the multifarious and incoherent collection piled about the walls: to ask himself what taste or principle guided the picture dealer in his purchases. Why that Virgin in red and blue draperies? And if he liked that kind of picture, why did he buy that set of racing sketches? And if he liked the racing sketches, why did he buy that group of peasants collected before an altar bowing before the Host that the priest, standing under a canopy, exhibited to the congregation? Lewis recognised this picture as a possible Goya, but did Bendish? And if he liked that picture, why did he buy those modern pictures — the pictures of the school that called themselves “The Moderns”? How did he reconcile Goya with Thompson, from whom he had bought a hundred pictures and sketches? And to please old Bendish and to persuade him to purchase his water-colour, Lewis began to speak of Thompson, the leader of the modern movement. And it seemed to him that the trick was about to succeed, for Bendish broke the depressing silence at once. “Thompson,” he said, “has come along wonderfully,” and he held forth saying that if the new school calling themselves “The Moderns” ever succeeded in gaining the public taste, the Fitzroy Square collection would excite the envy of the dilettanti of Europe.

  Lewis looked at him and wondered. How could a man talk of a new artistic movement, and at the same time buy every sort of rubbish if the seller abated his price sufficiently?— “He is as ignorant of art as a carp,” he said to himself; “he wouldn’t know a millet from a Corot, a Raphael from a Rubens, and yet his pleasure is to collect pictures. But what is his ignorance or his wisdom to me if he will not buy from me?” And he waited an occasion of getting back to the subject of his water-colour drawings.

  At last his chance came: the old man changing the conversation, abruptly asked him why he had deserted the new school? This was not so; as Lewis explained he could show a drawing as modern as anything Thompson had done, and he searched his portfolio. But the drawing he drew forth failed to persuade Bendish out of his ugly humour; and Lewis was forced to throw himself upon the old man’s charity.

  “I shall not be able to live through the next week if you do not advance a few shillings.”

  “I shan’t buy any more at present,” Bendish returned, and he spoke so sharply that Lewis felt that he would be prejudicing future chances if he persisted. But had he any future beyond the next few hours? A look of horror and helplessness passed over the young man’s face; he said nothing, but took up his drawings, leaving the old man still fumbling through his portfolios in the failing light.

  It was not raining, but there was a mist about, and occasionally a leaf fluttered down into the sloppy street.

  “I can bear it no longer,” he muttered; “the struggle is too great. It is frightful. Life is not worth it. The most I can hope for is a bare existence; life isn’t worth the struggle.” At the same moment he experienced in imagination the chill of the water and its taste. “But, after all, the moment isn’t a long one. Can I face it? And if I can’t?”

  His resources were exhausted, his clothes were pawned, and he did not know who would lend him a sixpence; he had borrowed till he had turned every friend into a creditor, and he remembered that everybody avoided him.

  “There is no hope, not a particle.” He only saw the passengers along the street as phantoms, and he walked like one in a nightmare till the light, which the flaring windows of half a dozen public-houses threw over the wet pavement, awoke him, and he realised again, and more bitterly, that he was lost. A few moments after he was caught in a crowd that poured through the entrance of a fashionable theatre, and the clear voices of two young men sounded shrill in his ears.

  They were in evening dress, and the white cravats and patent-leather shoes brought back to him the dream of life and pleasure and luxury he so ardently desired, and out of which fate was hurrying him. “But is it true that I’m going to the river... to the river,” he repeated, unable to believe that the river was the only possible loosening of the coil in which he was entangled; yet it did not seem to him that he was going to die that night, and, losing sight of his own personality, suddenly he began to see the scene as a picture to be called “Suicide.”

  “In the foreground,” he said, “just out of the way of a fashionable crowd going into a theatre, two young men discuss whether they shall seek amusement there or elsewhere, whilst a ragged wight stands reading a notice posted on the walls:

  “Two POUNDS REWARD.

  “Yesterday, at nine o’clock, a young man drowned himself from the parapet of Waterloo Bridge. The above reward will be paid to anyone giving such information as will lead to the recovery of the body.”

  The idea fascinated him, and he wondered if it would be possible to make plain in a picture that the poor man reading the notice recognised the fact that dead he was was worth two pounds, but alive he was merely an outcast, in whom no one took the least interest.

  He continued to think of his picture all the way down Catherine Street till he came to the Strand, and remembered suddenly that the river was not many yards away. Should he jump from the parapet or steal down a flight of steps to the water’s edge? Again his thoughts drifted, and looking at the women as they went by wrapped up in silk, the rose-colour of their feet visible through the open lace stockings as they stepped from their broughams, he began to wonder how it was that none of this elegant sensuality was for him. All these people had money, and there must be many among the fashionable crowd that would like to save a young artist, perhaps a man of genius. Such things had happened before, and he looked into the faces going
by, hoping to awaken the heart of the richest and most beautiful woman to his necessity. If he could only make his necessity known; but that was what he could not do. It seemed to him that a certain woman was about to speak, but a man followed her, and they went into the theatre, leaving him in his misfortune; and still wondering what the spectacle meant, he stood looking vacantly into the passing faces, hoping to awaken pity in a passer-by, though he knew there was no hope.

  At last he was hustled into the street, and then, waking up suddenly, he found he had to cross it to avoid being run over. But would it not have been better to have allowed the omnibus to pass over him? It would have saved him from the pain of coming to a decision. Be that as it may, he was nearer the Thames than he was before. He was in Wellington Street, and at the end of it within a few yards was the river.

  “I suppose I am going to drown,” he said, “or else go to the workhouse — one or the other”; and leaning his arms on the parapet, he examined the countless crustations of the stone sparkling in the rays of the electric light. But in a moment remembering himself, and thinking his conduct unworthy of a man who contemplated committing suicide, he looked down into the whirl of the water, and it began to seem to him that he really desired peace, and he wished that somebody as miserable as he were by, determined to drown herself, any woman or young girl for preference. They might bind themselves together with a scarf. He dwelt on the idea, thinking it a beautiful one, saying to himself: “To-morrow or to-day — what matters, since death is the end of all?” And then, the magnetism of the water taking possession of him, he fell to thinking that his last day had come and gone; he saw monuments, bridges, and lights in a mist that seemed to descend, and in turn to pass into the river. Clutching on to the parapet, he tried to climb over it; but a policeman’s step warned him in time, and while waiting for the officer’s disappearance into the mist, he remembered that the day was Friday: to-morrow Gwynnie Lloyd would have fifteen shillings; and thinking she would not refuse to share it with him, he stood irresolute, much relieved at the respite, though somewhat disappointed to find that he lacked courage to free himself from the disagreeable coil; for after all, though she might lend him five shillings, Gwynnie could not support him. He would have to apply himself to the task of getting his own living. But he had tried, and failed. Ah, if it hadn’t been for that policeman, the trouble would all be over... by now.