Complete Works of George Moore

by George Moore

  “It seems to me,” Thompson said, “that the supreme test of an attachment to an idea is to live for it; a much more difficult task than to die for it.”

  “I’ll admit that you’re right, Thompson, for to pursue the argument would involve us very soon in metaphysics; pure reason leaves me indifferent. But I warm up when I fall to thinking that the emotion that Lewis Seymour experienced when he first looked upon his wife in that stupid movement was no less than Titian’s when he saw the woman seated at the edge of the well.”

  “Lewis Seymour always admired that picture more than any other,” Thompson said, “and I remember his talking to me about it, saying that Titian had never seen a woman in that pose. No woman could take the pose, he said, but a woman had appeared to Titian as women might in a dream. The dreamer is the cause of the women who appeared, but he doesn’t know that he is the cause, and he is surprised at seeing them. So did Titian paint, according to Lewis Seymour.”

  “That bears out,” Harding interjected, “my theory that men all feel the same!”

  “But they don’t all feel the same,” interrupted Frazer. “Pain, for instance.”

  “It may require more to make one man feel pain than it does another,” Harding replied, “but the pain they feel is the same.”

  The argument became entangled, drifting from psychology into physiology, but at length Harding, who had been thinking for some time, turning his thoughts over and over, claimed speech.

  “Seymour felt as much as Titian, only he could not express what he felt. His wife’s beauty entranced him while he was looking at it. He was possessed by a vision and by an emotion, but both faded in the passage from the brain to the canvas. I refuse to believe that Lewis Seymour’s vision of his wife naked corresponds in the least with the very moderate picture which Thompson has, with some severity, termed a piece of linoleum. Yet he accepts it as the equivalent.”

  “But does anyone,” Frazer asked, “succeed in transposing his vision exactly as it is on to canvas or paper? It comes out better or worse, but it comes out different.” The point was discussed, and at last Harding, who was tired of standing, said: “I think we have talked of Lewis Seymour long enough for one afternoon.”

  “We have, indeed,” Thompson answered. “The artist doesn’t talk much about art; he leaves aesthetics to critics. His contribution to the subject is the picture he exhibits, and, if he be a writer, the book that he publishes. We know the difference between bad pictures and good ones; and it is really much better to look at the pictures themselves than to stand with our backs to them talking.”

  “There being no pictures to look at,” Harding interjected, “we have to talk.”

  “There are always a few, even at the Academy,” Thompson said. “Come and let us look round the walls, and see if we can find a few pictures in this house of ill-fame that will justify us in continuing to exhibit here.” The group walked round the walls, finding little except their own pictures to interest them, and on going through the turnstile Thompson called his disciples together. “I think you will agree with me it would be well for us to leave this great palace of morals and commercialism. Its splendours oppress us, and if you are all agreeable, we will retire to some little hall in Chelsea and exhibit our pictures to our friends and sympathisers.”

  CHAP. XXXIV.

  THE SUCCESS OBTAINED by the “Bacchante” did not, however, lift Lewis immediately to the rank of an Academician, and the reasons that persuaded the Academicians to overlook his claims were in the first place their dislike to the publication of the naked wife. Rubens’s practice was referred to, but it was pointed out by more than one Academician that Rubens had drawn a cloak about the middle of her body. Moreover, Lewis Seymour was not Rubens, and, though attractive to the public, could not be held to be of such striking merit as to overrule all social usages. “We have had Mrs. Bentham in the Academy in all her fineries,” said an R.A., “and for all we know we may have her without them next year.” And then it came to be whispered that Mr. Carver, of Bond Street, had obtained from Mrs. Bentham a large commission to buy Lewis’s pictures whenever they came into the market. The phrase, “whenever they came into the market,” was picked up by the Academicians. “They never come into the market,” cried an Associate. “Carver bought them off the easel.” Another Academician interjected that the pictures Lewis had painted of the Carver family were charged in whole or in part to Mrs. Bentham; and the fact that they were popular did not justify Carver in threatening to present them to the nation. The reproach of popularity would not have been allowed in any other circumstances; but as nobody wanted to have Lewis Seymour in the Academy — for the moment, at least — the younger men were listened to, and painters of no greater merit than Lewis Seymour were elected one after the other.

  The Academy would not have him as a member; but his portraits pleased. His sitters were nearly all titled folk, and, as an Academician put it, “If we didn’t hang his Countesses we should hear of it in the newspapers.”

  Pictures beget pictures, and every portrait that Lewis Seymour painted brought him another order; and the money that came in put the thought into Lewis’s head that it would be to his advantage to live in a more fashionable part of London. He often mentioned to his wife that he had outgrown Chelsea; but Helen said it would be impossible to find an open space like the Vale in Mayfair, unless, indeed, one were the Duke of Devonshire or Westminster. Helen preferred to live in the Vale in a Georgian house, and “the lovely twain” were often seen driving forth, Lewis extended in the victoria, looking, so a painter once said, like a Venus, a sort of damaged Guido Reni — a remark that amused everybody. When asked what Helen looked like, he compared her to a caryatid; and when asked to make plain his meaning, he said she supports the house; but the criticism did not strike the imagination like the first—” extended in a victoria looking like a Venus or a damaged Guido Reni.” In society the Seymours were always conspicuous. Lady Helen in front of the box at the opera, drawing up her shoulders in front of the audience, and then presenting a view of her back, and in this way becoming known to the general public. In the newspapers her name was mentioned as having been present at all social functions, talking and smiling, encouraging a crowd to assemble about her. At the other end of the room Lewis courted the dowagers. Leaning over the hacks of their chairs, he whispered in their ears, and sometimes turned suddenly upon a woman, and, after staring at her almost rudely for some time, he would say: “Good heavens! What a profile!”

  “You like my profile,” the fair one answered; and then Lewis became the very image and likeness of the spider crying to the fly: “Belle mouche, belle mouche, venez dans ma toile.”

  Season after season went by, and society was beginning to weary of the Seymours, when one day Lewis appeared without his wife, and some time after, suddenly and altogether, people began to notice that Lady Helen was absent from all social functions. A few conjectures were hazarded, and then suddenly everybody whispered: “She is carrying;” and the section of society to which the Seymours belonged fell to discussing how Lewis’s classical studies might he continued after his wife’s lying-in. It was urged that a woman’s figure could not be the same after a birth of a child as before; the lines are always thicker, it was said. “And Lewis’s art is so raffiné,” babbled a number of voices. “Which of us will he ask to sit for him?” the eyes seemed to say; and a young man related all he knew and learnt of the bosom after child-birth. He had seen women that childbearing had robbed of no charm, and he had seen women that even the first child had robbed of all physical charm. There was no rule. Helen might rise from le lit de misère (the language spoken in this society is neither English nor French, but a sort of mule language) the Venus she was a few months ago, or so much changed that she would never be able to pose before her husband again. It all depended upon the figure; and Helen’s figure would probably undergo no change, at which the young girls smiled approval, whereas the matrons looked incredulous; and to break an awkward silence s
omebody said that Lewis spent his evenings at home with his wife, and drew a somewhat fond picture of the twain. He even ventured out into a prediction that the child, which would be born towards the end of the year, would unite them in a deeper love than any they had known in the Twickenham villa, when the parrot, Lewis’s first rival, had bitten his ear. The anecdote had been told again and again at luncheon-tables. All their friends and acquaintances had enjoyed it; and while new luncheon-tables were asking if Lewis’s second rival would prove talkative, Helen was thinking that it was nice to get back to a figure again.

  “Do you think I shall be able to sit for you again, Lewis?”

  “So far as I can see, Helen, your figure has not changed in the least; but I won’t express a definite opinion for another two months. I have an order for another picture, something that will go along with the ‘Bacchante’; and if I can get another subject that catches the public taste my election will be secure, if X — and Y — and Z — can be won over....”

  “They shall be won over,” Helen answered; and very soon after, at every dinner and luncheon party, Helen was at work, bestowing smiles on every man, upon Leek and Ripple, upon all of the newspaper kin. She was determined to conquer the Academy, and to do this it might be necessary for them to go to Park Lane. Chelsea was too far to ask the Academicians to come to dinner. But dinner in Park Lane to meet the Grandervilles! A carriage — not a one-horse brougham, but two horses — would overawe; Hilton and Holt, Murray and Bevis, would open their eyes, saying: “Two horses!”

  There were studios within ten minutes’ walk, and a ten minutes’ walk to and fro would keep down Lewis’s figure. He didn’t walk enough, and was beginning to develop — well, a girdlestead. Her father and mother approved of her plans, and it was while spending the week-end with them that she met two young men who had taken her fancy — the taller of the two very smartly indeed; and her father, seeing that she was captivated, took her aside, saying: “ Helen, these young men, though their appearance doesn’t betray them, are not desirable acquaintances for you.”

  “Then why are they here, father?”

  To which Lord Granderville answered: “They are here by mistake, and will never be asked again.”

  Helen was sorry to hear her father speak ill of two such good-looking, well-valeted young men, whose velvetlike black hair was brushed smoothly back from their foreheads, and she was tempted to resent his description of them—” young men out for pleasure, on the watch for money.”

  “I’ve never heard before, father, that a man who marries for money—”

  The word “marry” seemed to embarrass Lord Granderville; and Helen, who had already understood, and was but playing with her father, listened to her aunt, who did not hesitate to make plain what Granderville would have been willing to leave in respectable shadow.

  “A young man of very shady character, indeed, Helen; one of the hand known in the clubs as ‘money-kissers.’”

  “Money-kissers, aunt! What are money-kissers?”

  “One who lives upon women,” Lady Marion answered. “I’ll explain to Helen, Granderville, that she cannot possibly ask young Hepworth to her house”; and, taking Helen aside, she confided to her some worldly knowledge. “The taller man — the one you admire, Helen — is the worser of the two. The shorter man may be all right, I know nothing about him; but he is the intimate friend of the other — the one you admire. He is notoriously an evil liver. One hears of the women he has plundered wherever one goes. For some time past he has been getting money from—” Lady Marion whispered a name in her niece’s ear. There was no reason why she should have whispered it unless walls have ears. They stood alone at the end of a shady saloon almost within the folds of the window curtains, Helen receiving instructions from her aunt, an old lady, garrulous, in a fair wig and a beribboned cap. “Have nothing to do with him, Helen. He is one of a band”; and Helen was told of a number of young men out for pleasure.

  “That is what father says—’ out for pleasure.’”

  “Well, that is just what it is, Helen. Pleasure costs money, therefore money is the one important thing in their eyes. The means they employ to get it are of no moment in their appreciations, and scruple with them is contemptible.”

  “But if the woman has ten thousand a year and the man two hundred, do you think, aunt—”

  “Do I think they should go to Italy together?” Lady Marion interjected. “It all depends; my morality is wide, but I dislike the bird of prey.”

  “The bird of prey,” Helen repeated, “ is certainly undesirable”; and a few minutes afterwards, catching sight of the young man in question walking down the terrace, she was struck by his appearance, and she wondered how it was that the same young man who had pleased and attracted her half an hour before now repelled her. She disliked the neck and shoulders that she had admired, and found fault with his gait. Yet he was the same young man — but was he the same young man? He was transformed from what he was, and by an idea that had been put into her mind. She did not know that she could be influenced, and so easily. How very strange. The young man passed away; she did not wish ever to see him again, but in passing out of her life he seemed to have left something of himself behind; or was it that somebody like him had always been in her mind?— “How very strange! Why do I put such senseless questions to myself?”

  It was not till some days later that she remembered that Lewis had been in love with Lucy Bentham. She had always known of this old attachment, and could not understand how it was that this clandestine love story should appear to her in a new and almost menacing light. The book dropped from her lap, and she fell to thinking, and a connection of ideas soon formed in her mind. She remembered things she had forgotten or that had remained hidden at the back of her mind. Lewis had accepted money from a woman, just as the young man she had met at her father’s house had done. He may have accepted money from many women, and she sat surprised that she had never thought of these things before. She seemed to understand Lewis for the first time, and she compared his physical appearance as she remembered it with the appearance of the young man that her aunt had warned her against, and, finding him true to type, she began to hate the very aspects that once attracted her — the shoulders, the waist, the gait.

  A visitor was announced, and Helen started so abruptly out of her chair that the visitor could not do else than express regret for having awakened her.

  “I was not asleep,” she answered, “only thinking; but of what I was thinking I haven’t the faintest notion. I was away, that is all. You’ll have tea? I’m longing for a cup”; and the two women talked of indifferent things for about half an hour; and when her visitor left her, Helen remembered that when her aunt had told her that the young man at Ham was kept by — Helen had forgotten the lady’s name — she had said: “But if a woman has ten thousand a year and wants to go to Italy, I don’t see why, if the man cannot afford the journey, the woman should not pay for it.” Her aunt had seen no harm in the arrangement.... Society doesn’t think the worse of a man if he marries a rich woman. Why should society forbid a rich mistress? “Society doesn’t,” Aunt Marion had answered, “but Society doesn’t like birds of prey.” Lewis wasn’t a bird of prey. She was sure of that. A weak, sensual man, perhaps, but not a bird of prey. The young men at Ham were “out for pleasure”; her aunt’s very words — week-ends, tennis, fashionable restaurants, race meetings, and such like. But Lewis was devoted to his art — no one had striven harder than he. How unjust she was! Lewis had never pretended to her that he was a virgin, and she had not hoped to marry one. All the same, she would have liked a man who was himself, and nothing but himself. If a stream has many affluents, the quality of the original water becomes less and less pure, and so it is with human beings. If Lewis had merely kissed Lucy Bentham once or twice, three times, or half a dozen times, it would not have mattered. But he had lived with her for years, absorbing her personality, till a great part of himself was lost. She had married Lewis Seymour plus Lucy B
entham. She had not a lover, only part of a lover. Of the original Lewis Seymour nothing was left; and considering her husband closely, she noticed how he had been woven along and across by other influences, principally by Lucy Bentham. He spoke like Lucy Bentham on many occasions. She had never noticed it before; or, if she had noticed it, her knowledge of the adulteration remained in her subconsciousness, but now it was apparent, and it was her fate to bear with it.

  She had not got a genuine article — that was the long and the short of it. Many had preceded and many would follow her, and they that had preceded her had, no doubt, tried to make the best of it, and those that followed her would do the same. She couldn’t do else. She had a child, and she must be content with the husband for the sake of her child. How strange it all seemed, and what a deception life was for everybody! She seemed to understand many things which she had never understood before, and was soon asking herself if life had come to seem to Lewis as shallow as it had come to seem to her. She was minded to ask him, and remembered that there are secrets which one cannot disclose to anybody. Life was but make-believe, a discovery which she must keep locked in her heart while she went about trying to cajole the Academicians to elect her husband a member of the Academy. It was her duty to do this; and she was conscious of a deep impulse in her to contribute to her husband’s fortune and reputation. She was conscious also of the feeling that as soon as he was elected a member of the Academy she would be free. She asked herself why she was not free now, and as her heart did not answer her, it seemed that her thoughts were nonsense.... We live, she said, in a nonsense world — the silliest that whirls through the Milky Way.