by George Moore
“I’m sorry, Mr. Harding, that I cannot get your opinion regarding a matter that many serious people look upon as of great importance. When you said, ‘If the naked be harmful it must be suppressed, life being more important than art,’ I hoped that we were about to fall to a rational discussion, but I fear—”
“Forgive me for interrupting you, Mr. Leek, but I would remind you that if the naked be harmful we must order the destruction of all our examples of Greek sculpture that have been transported with much cost and labour to the British Museum.”
“Marble is but a slight enticement,” Leek muttered.
“The authorities think otherwise, for a vine-leaf has been hung over the middle of all the male figures. But waiving that point, Mr. Leek, let us consider the National Gallery, which is open two days a week for boys and girls to set up their easels before pictures in which nakedness abounds. If nakedness be harmful, we must order the destruction not only of Greek sculpture, but of all the frescoes of Michael Angelo, the canvases and the panels of Titian — even Raphael will hardly escape, for he has not always draped his saints and angels.”
Leek interposed with a suggestion that “painting of the highest genius raised itself.”
“Not above morality, surely, Mr. Leek. I hope you will not put forward so heretical an opinion as that, and one that cuts the ground from under your feet; for we are not discussing aesthetics, Mr. Leek, but morality, and if certain paintings do harm they must be destroyed, no matter who painted them, life being more important than art — remember that, Mr. Leek. The British Museum, the National Gallery, the Wallace Collection, the Tate Gallery, have now been condemned, and the moralists, having had their way with the plastic arts, should begin at once, if they have not begun already, to turn their eyes towards literature. I read in your journal that much literature is being published that should be prosecuted, and every week I ask myself why you do not apply for a summons against the publisher of Shakespeare, the crudeness of whose speech only yields to Beaumont and Fletcher, whose plays you yourself edited in your younger days and held up to admiration as great poetry. I need not ask you if you have read The Custom of the Country — of course you have, and will admit that from your present point of view no more indecent piece of literature was ever put upon paper. You complain that I cannot be serious. I’m serious, and will ask you to tell me which Leek we are to follow — the Leek of thirty years ago or the present Leek? And then, again, who is to decide between the different Leeks? You would have an interview with me — well, let it be so. Before Beaumont and Fletcher come the Elizabethan poets, and nearly all of them would fall under your present censure. The Restoration dramatists — they, too, would have to be destroyed. Sterne, Fielding, and Smollett, would have to go; Byron, without question; Pepys’s Diary — who is the publisher? How many have published Pepys, how many Byron? Your society must agitate, too, for the suppression of the public libraries. Think of the books they put into the hands of boys and girls — Shakespeare, Boccaccio, Balzac and, last but not least, your own unexpurgated edition of Beaumont and Fletcher. The newspapers are full of divorce court and criminal proceedings of all kinds — all will have to be suppressed. What a holocaust of editors and literature! Nor is the end in sight. You will have to send spies into society who will report all that they see and hear, for we don’t go to evening parties for ideas, Mr. Leek, mind that, but for the pleasure of sex, direct or indirect. Women cut their frocks to their waists, and the food and the drink consumed at these parties inflame our passions; therefore there must be a dietary and a sartorial censorship, and when all these reforms are accomplished, then you will still be confronted with the spring days which are, perhaps, more than the sculpture, the pictures, more than the literature, the wine and the food, more than anything else, an incentive to immorality.”
“You’re speaking very well, Mr. Harding; I like to listen to you, but I don’t agree with a single word you’re saying.”
“Of course, you don’t, Mr. Leek; morality is your foible, and without calling your sincerity in the prosecution of your foible into question, I would ask you if you are not influenced by what may be termed a sort of inverted immorality?”
“You would suggest, Mr. Harding, that money is my motive.”
“No, Mr. Leek, I wouldn’t look into your pocket, but into your heart, and that is why I put that question to you. I read in your paper that you meet your friends in council to consider the books your secretary has collected —— — women with long upper lips, and men with rings of hair under their chins. You ask each other: ‘Now, Mr. So-and-so, may I call your attention to this passage? Do you think such writing should be allowed? Is not our civilisation disgraced by such books?’— ‘We agree with you, Mrs. So-and-so, but it is hard indeed at times like the present to devise any method whereby society can be cleansed.’ And with this I am in agreement, Mr. Leek; it is very difficult, and perhaps the would-be reformers are, before God, the dirtiest parts of the community. We will examine that question.”
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Harding; I have attended a great many of the meetings of our society, and I assure you all our discussions regarding the books that we think should not be read by the general public are conducted with extreme seriousness, and our aim is to preserve the public as far as lies in our power—”
“All those that persecute plead as you do — that they are acting for the public good; but the most disgraceful pages in history are those that tell of ecclesiastical persecutors, and the most sordid motives often hide behind concern for the morals of others. My memory is a good one, Mr. Leek, and I would ask you if it has never seemed to you that if you could look into the minds of the gentlemen collected round the table, you would read stories that conflict strangely with the sentiments that fall from their lips? Have you never caught yourself wondering what was the private life of — ?” and Harding whispered a name in Leek’s ear. “You remember he left a standing order with a procuress for virgins and was convicted at the Old Bailey for inveigling a young cook to Paris.”
“I had forgotten him,” Leek answered; and he admitted that during the discussions regarding the literature that was to be prohibited and disallowed this gentleman had looked at his watch often, and had often seemed anxious to bring the discussion to a close, pleading appointments of great urgency. “A very strange case, indeed,” Leek interjected; and he asked Harding if he thought that the man joined the society merely to ward off suspicion, or if he recognised the weakness of his own nature, and tried to atone for it by persecuting others?
To which Harding answered that the motive he would prefer if he were obliged to write out the soul of a religious lecher would be the desire to indulge two vices at once — lust and cruelty. “On every persecutor’s heart the suspicion feeds that the alleged motive is but a lie. But no man speaks of his vice, nor does he meditate upon it — he keeps it out of his mind; and your Mr. — shrank from examination of conscience and thought instead of the cook. Are you sure yourself, Mr. Leek, that in prosecuting the inquiries in which you are at present engaged you are not in your subconsciousness influenced by some vanity, some hope of renown or journalistic interest?”
“No man knows himself throughout,” Leek answered, and his face became overcast; “and were we to refrain from all action till we were certain of our own complete sincerity, we should be as inactive as cauliflowers and kidney beans.”
Harding raised his eyes, and the glance was appreciative. “The subject is an intricate one,” he said.
“And that being so,” Leek replied, “I would ask you one more question. Is there no book, no picture, no statue, that you yourself would condemn?”
“I think that the modern writer should remain within the traditions set by Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Elizabethan dramatists, the Bible, and that if he be condemned they should be condemned with him. If the tradition of literature be not accepted as setting the standard of literary morality, I do not know where to look for another. You yourself would not hand ove
r art and literature to personal prejudice and sordid motive. Your own life tells you that opinions change on these matters, and you will admit that a book is valuable for what the author puts into it rather than for what he leaves out. Or am I wrong; is your present aim the merely innocuous? Your own Beaumont and Fletcher—”
At that moment, Mr. Ripple said:
“Hush! there is Lady Helen.”
And Harding was about to go forward to speak to her when Leek laid his hands upon his arm, saying, “Will you not introduce me?”
“Certainly, Mr. Leek; morality and beauty are sisters; though, like sisters, they are not always on speaking terms”; and the introduction being accepted, Lady Helen walked down the room with Leek in attendance.
CHAP. XXXIII.
A FASHIONABLE CROWD continued to pour into the Royal Academy, and for many hours it was difficult to force a passage from room to room; to see the pictures was impossible, but nobody wanted to see them, and after a few remarks regarding somebody’s portrait and somebody else’s landscape, the sightseers directed their remarks to a woman’s hat, to the colour of her dress. One heard: “She is very handsome.”
“Which one?”— “The woman in the yellow dress, walking with the broad-shouldered young man with the black moustache.”
And the chatter continued, till at last the Academy became unbearable. “If the pictures aren’t interesting,” a lady said as she made for the turnstile, “at all events they create a desire for tea. So much to the good! Let’s get out!” And at six o’clock the number of visitors was reduced to some dozen or more people in the small rooms, and to some thirty or forty in the larger rooms.
“Well, Mr. Leek,” Harding began, “what conclusion have you arrived at regarding Lewis Seymour’s ‘Bacchante’? Do you think he has done his wife’s body justice?”
“Only her face is on the canvas,” Leek began.
“Have you had tea?” Harding asked.
The journalist replied that he had had the honour of taking Lady Helen out to tea; and mentioned the shop at the corner of Bond Street.
“And did she admit to having sat for the picture?”
“I’m quite satisfied,” Leek answered, “that she didn’t sit for the figure. In fact, I know she didn’t.”
“How can you be certain of that?” Harding asked.
“Oh, yes, I know!” Leek returned. “I know for certain.”
“How can you know for certain?”
“I asked her, and she told me she had only sat for the head.”
“But,” Harding replied, a little softened at Leek’s innocence, “even if she had sat for the figure, do you think she would have admitted it? She could hardly have said, ‘There is my body... up there; look at it!’”
“Do you think, then,” Leek asked, in a slightly angered tone, “that Lady Helen would tell me a deliberate lie?”
“My dear Mr. Leek, you’ve come from the North, where lies are unknown; but in the sensual South even Duchesses don’t always tell the truth.”
“I’ve no care for Duchesses,” Leek replied.
“But all women Duchesses included are angels in your opinion. Now in The Custom of the Country...”
“I don’t remember any angels in The Custom of the Country,” Leek replied, and Harding, who did not wish to push off again into the raging flood of controversy, answered:
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Leek; I see some friends of mine — Thompson, the great Modernist. You will excuse me, Mr. Leek,” he cried, escaping from the journalist. “I was just saying, my dear Thompson, to Mr. Leek, that we’ve not had an opportunity of saying half a dozen words to each other. I want to congratulate you”; and on these words he took his friend’s arm, and they walked towards a group of painters who were waiting for their chief. “I missed you all day,” Harding continued, addressing the group.
“We’ve seen you, however,” Frazer answered, “and have been asking ourselves how it is that you care to waste time on an uninteresting vegetable.”
“You think of him, then,” Harding said, “as a vegetable, and not as a small aperture through which liquid percolates?” And turning to Thompson he asked him which definition he preferred.
Thompson raised his eyebrows, and without troubling to answer the question that had been put to him he said: “We saw him passing up and down the room in conversation with Lady Helen Seymour, the model for the ‘Bacchante.’ We used to know Seymour in bygone years, before he took up with a rich grass-widow. Do you remember, Harding?”
And Harding answered that he remembered a certain luncheon in the Gaiety bar. “We were all there, and Lewis Seymour had just come from a shop in Bond Street very flushed and excited. He had taken a small panel picture there and had been asked by the rich grass-widow, Lucy Bentham, to decorate her ballroom. That was the first rung of the ladder, and he’s been climbing ever since. You used to think well of him, Thompson. I believe that you once hoped to keep him in the path that he was not destined by nature to walk in.”
“We’re all falling into that mistake, Harding, yourself as much as another. Lewis Seymour goes to make up the world as we do. A plausive, pleasant fellow, with a temperament not unlike Leek’s, and who might have been Leek if he had not brought into the world a certain gift of hand that enables him to turn out an article that ladies and gentlemen like. He could always express himself like the journalist. He used to speak of his gift of expression, and he could talk as well as Leek or Ripple — a great deal better, for however bad a painter may be he knows more about paint than one who has never tried to paint, and he admired the best things. The National Gallery was known to him as none of us here know it.” And Thompson began laughing, and when asked at what he was laughing he told a story, how one day Seymour had come up to his studio with four or five figures, heads, landscapes, and that while exhibiting these on the easel for Thompson to criticise he had said: “Of course, you recognise whence they have come — the master. Yes, the master is unforgettable.”
“I made no answer, and putting up another picture on the easel Seymour continued: ‘There is no getting away from him, is there? Once he gets hold of you he has you for ever.’ As I could see no trace of any master in the pictures I was looking at, I was sorely tempted to ask Seymour who the master was, but not wishing to hurt his feelings I asked him to stay and have some luncheon with me, which he did, and at every opportunity he spoke of the master, of the influence he exercised, sometimes admitting the influence to be regrettable. ‘One should be influenced by nobody, of course,’ he said; ‘but everybody is influenced by somebody, and after all, the best thing to do is to be influenced by the best.’ So he continued. We were still talking of the master over our cigarettes, myself wondering who the master could be, till at last my curiosity got the better of me, and I said: ‘I don’t know what master you are speaking of’ — not so suddenly as that, for I didn’t wish to offend him, but as delicately as the question could be put. An embarrassed look came into his face and he said, ‘Well, Titian, of course. Didn’t you see?’ Whereupon I said: ‘Oh! of course, of course.’”
“No, Thompson; you didn’t answer, ‘Of course, of course.’ You just looked embarrassed.” And Thompson answered that it was a long time ago, and that he didn’t remember what answer he had given, only that he felt very disconcerted.
“But he must have been a fool to think that he was painting like Titian.”
“He didn’t mean that he was painting like Titian, but that he was thinking all the time of Titian. I suppose the belief somehow found a way into his mind that the romantic figures he introduced into the dark backgrounds were derived from Titian. How he could think such a thing, I don’t know; but he could talk about Titian better than Titian could have talked about himself. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anybody talk art with the same fluency. A certain gift of facile drawing robbed the world of an excellent art critic.”
“But I thought you despised criticism, Thompson?”
“I like it better than
the picture we are looking at.”
“It is very pathetic,” Harding broke in, “very pathetic;” and the painters, looking up, waited for him to continue, for the pathos of Lewis Seymour’s career was not obvious to them. And nothing loath, Harding began: “Who shall say that the green-grocer’s assistant, when he takes out his sweetheart for a walk, doesn’t feel as deeply as Wagner did when, on the occasion of the first writing of ‘Tristan,’ Mathilde fell into his arms, unable to bear the love any longer that she had been smothering for many months past? Wagner declared again and again that ‘Tristan’ would never have been written if Mathilde had withheld her caresses, and no doubt Mathilde’s caresses differed very little in intensity from the caresses that the green-grocer’s assistant receives at the end of the evening’s walk; but in one case the caresses brought forth a masterpiece and in the other — let us hope — brought forth no artistic flower or fruit, not even occasional verses in the poet’s corner, only a little break after keeping company for two years, or a little marriage in a registry office. I’ve tried to believe, but cannot, that artistic expression springs from intensity of feeling; it must be an independent gift, for were it else we should have to suppose that Wagner experienced a much deeper emotion than the grocer’s assistant. But we know he didn’t, for though he was often tempted to throw himself into the canal at Venice, he returned home to finish the song that he had composed to her words, ‘Dreams.’ The grocer’s assistant very often kills himself, and it is difficult to say that a man who dies for an idea has not given ultimate proof of his attachment to it.”
