by George Moore
THE END
Celibate Lives
CONTENTS
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WILFRID HOLMES
PRISCILLA AND EMILY LOFFT
ALBERT NOBBS
HENRIETTA MARR
SARAH GWYNN
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THE NEAREST EQUIVALENT to music in literature is the story — an arresting phrase dropped by Robert Louis Stevenson into one of his meditations. The parallel would be perfect, it seems to me, if he had written melody instead of music, but I am not moved to examine the question. I am absorbed by more important considerations, and ask myself quite simply how it was that Stevenson should have been beguiled into a line of thought so much more natural to me than to him. I sit thinking, remembering that every mind is susceptible to the same thoughts, and it might well be that Stevenson’s mind, stirred by the awful suspicion that his own stories lacked inevitable rhythm, overflowed suddenly into a new theory of literary composition. He was given to criticism and analysis, and my guess may be near the truth. Why, then, did he pause and turn aside from a line of original exploration? Because to pursue it would lead him into a confession of the secret that he was not a born story-teller, narrating for the joy of the narrative and able to include all things within the melodic line.
Perhaps I am imputing a money sense to Stevenson which he did not possess except vicariously in the person of Sir Sidney Colvin, who held strict views as to the necessity of Louis writing about the public for the public. I hear him in my thoughts saying: The idea you have dropped inadvertently into your essay will do no harm, my dear Louis, but if you pursue the subject you will find yourself hinting that you’re not quite sure that you are the legitimate successor of Dumas, and the brilliant future which I foresee for you will be lost. Nor is this all. By placing the melodic line in the forefront of literature you might or might not be throwing yourself to the wolves, but you would certainly be throwing Dickens and Thackeray and Eliot to the pack, and the public really would not stand such national reputations as theirs being called into question. I should be unable to direct the press any longer in your favour. And even if you were to refrain from dragging in the names of Dickens, Thackeray, and Eliot, and turn to some great French writer, to Balzac, for instance, you would find yourself very soon obliged to admit that his stories lack, and frequently, the melodic line. In Eugenie Grandet we have it, but you will seek it vainly in a great many volumes of The Human Comedy. You have sown a seed; leave the harvesting, which I foresee will be one of tares rather than of grain, to another. Should anybody write to the press asking you to withdraw your insinuation that Balzac’s music is not equal to Mozart’s, I will answer that even when his tunes are commonplace and trite, the harmony is always beautiful and to the point.
So the illustrious twain might have talked together, and what a subject they would be for one of my imaginary conversations! Why have I not written it? Because Sir Sidney is still alive — a quite inadmissible reason, literature coming before Sir Sidney. He is one of those fated, perhaps, to live into his hundredth year. Be this as it may, he will certainly outlive me, and I must perforce remodel my conversation on different lines. The conversation will be carried on between Stevenson and me, and we shall discuss the presence and the absence of the melodic line in Balzac as best we may. And in talk I shall draw Louis’s attention to the Contes Drolatiques, saying: We find in none of these stories the qualities on which we set great store: cadence of line, balance, proportion, yet we admire them because of Balzac’s mind, which is everywhere, prodigal and intense in every sentence and paragraph, and page after page. I cannot say at the present moment whether I shall attribute to Louis or to myself the description of the terrible fangs and claws wherewith Balzac throws himself upon his subject like a panther on his prey. The panther lifts up his hind legs, embeds them in his victim, and tears downward. And I shall have to consider which of us shall say: Whoever hath claws and fangs may forswear narrative. And should Louis ask me why I never seek to escape from narrative, I shall answer: Lack of talent! but the words: lack of talent, seeming to me a poor end to my sentence, I shall avail myself of the occasion to relate a conversation with Jules Lemaître at Madame Daudet’s. Speaking of the obscurity of a certain poet, and speaking well, I demurred at the tendency on the part of the translator to supply meanings which were not discoverable in the French; but before I had reached the best part of my argument Lemaître interrupted my talkativeness with the question: Etesvous clair ou obscur? and I answered: Je n’ai pas assez de talent pour être obscur, cher maître! Lemaître laughed at my quip, and Robert Louis Stevenson will laugh at it, too, when I write the imaginary conversation now breaking on my mind. Are you for or against adventures? he will ask. Dear master, I do not deal in adventures but in soul cries, I answer, and you (if I may speak plainly to one who sits certainly high in Parnassus) are better without them. At this the master will frown; he has hungered for story all his life; and a little embarrassed I shall hasten to tell him how much I appreciate his daily thoughts and sensations in the Cévennes, on the rivers of France, in an emigrant ship, and afterwards in an emigrant train. But he will soon tire of my praise and will ask me to define my position regarding the melodic line, saying: Recall to my mind some of your writings in which the melodic line can be heard by one whose ear is less sensitive than your own.
MOORE: It would indeed be an impertinence, sir, for me to draw your attention to a quality which may exist only in my imagination and not in the work itself. But I may mention one of my stories in which the melodic line is lacking: “Hugh Monfert.”
STEVENSON: A story that you kept by you for several years and then cast into the fire?
MOORE: Alas, it appeared in a volume entitled In Single Strictness.
STEVENSON: We cannot adapt Shakespeare. You would do well to change the title.
MOORE: The new title is Celibate Lives.
STEVENSON: Why not Celibates?
MOORE: Balzac, dear master.
STEVENSON: I had forgotten. So Celibate Lives is a reprint of In Single Strictness?
MOORE: Not exactly, for “Hugh Monfert” has been omitted from the volume. But to omit a story of over a hundred pages cannot be done with impunity, and for the last six months I have been thinking how I might compensate the reader for the omission of so much text. I need not trouble you, sir, with the many projects that rose up in my mind and were abandoned as impracticable, and will confine myself to telling that I have transferred the story of “Albert Nobbs” from A Story-Teller’s Holiday to the new volume, Celibate Lives.
STEVENSON: But will not this be robbing Peter to pay Paul?
MOORE: I have written a new story about nuns and priests in mediaeval Ireland, “Dinoll and Crede,” which will be printed in a new edition of A Story-Teller’s Holiday after Alec Trusselby’s spirited relation of the strange death that befell Tadhg ODorachy, the gleeman.
STEVENSON: In what story does Tadhg appear?
MOORE: In Ulick and Soracha.
STEVENSON: A story that has not yet reached us.
I shall use my influence with the librarian now that wireless ——
A darling yellow cat that visits at my house jumped off my knees, and I was “cut off.”
GEORGE MOORE.
LONDON.
WILFRID HOLMES
WILFRID HOLMES WAS by many years younger than his brothers and sisters, all of whom were making their way in the world, the girls marrying and the boys doing well in different professions; the Army had claimed one, the Law another, and as a Civil Servant the third was helping to run the Empire in India.
The Holmes were tall men with long faces and small eyes. Wilfrid, the last, was larger-framed, more heavily built than his brothers; his long, oval face was fuller, and in him the family eyes were not less intelligent than his brothers’ eyes, but weaker, announcing an indolence of mind and body so inveterate that he had just grown up in it without struggle, passing from childhood into boyhood and from boyhood in
to manhood clinging to the widow’s skirts. Mrs. Holmes’s husband having died when Wilfrid was a small child, Wilfrid had known a father’s influence and authority only derivatively through his eldest brother, whom he dreaded, for every time Hector returned to pay his mother a visit at Bushfield, the family place, the question was asked:
What is Wilfrid going to do with himself? Has he not yet decided on a profession?
Mrs. Holmes tried to soften criticisms of her spoilt child with stories of Wilfrid’s different aspirations, and she told these with a gentle humour. Wilfrid, she said, is thinking of entering the Consular Service, and if you could get a letter from your old friend — But, said the brother, who was staying at Bushfield at the moment, will Wilfrid try to pass the examination, for there is one? Mrs. Holmes parried the question, and when Hector returned six months or a year later and Wilfrid’s future was again discussed, she told with the same gentle humour that he was now thinking of astronomy as a profession, and had gone so far as to purchase a telescope. Every uncloudy night, she said, he has it out on the steps; Jupiter’s Satellites can be seen through it, and Saturn’s Ring. He knows the names of most of the stars, and speaks of the different ascensions. But, mother, what you tell me is mere star-gazing, otherwise idleness. Modern astronomy is little more than mathematics, and Wilfrid never showed any interest in mathematics at school, nor in classical studies, nor in games. Mrs. Holmes defended her yoe lamb, and spoke of a cricketing suit she had bought for Wilfrid — bats and wickets, shoes and gloves. Oh, he may have liked all these things, Hector answered, but not the game itself! And now that he has left school and come here to live with you, has he taken to riding or shooting? When you go to London does he attend dancing classes? You would like to know, Hector, if he wastes his time with young women? I am glad to say he does not.
A man —— It was on Hector’s lips to say that a man who is indifferent to women is indifferent to all things, but he felt that words were unavailing and that Wilfrid would have to follow the course of his life like another. And to make his last days at home a pleasant thought for his mother — Hector was returning to India — he spoke kindly to Wilfrid, saying-I shall always remember, Wilfrid, your showing me your telescope. In the train (his mother and brother were accompanying him to Portsmouth) he spoke of he canals in Mars, his words awakening certain qualms of conscience in him lest they should influence Wilfrid to worry his mother to buy him another telescope; but that night at the Theatre Royal, Portsmouth, one of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettes swept the firmament for ever from Wilfrid’s mind, and his last words to Hector, whom he accompanied on board, were: I think I shall sell that telescope and buy a flute, words that darkened Hectors face. The cry: All ashore, however, enabled Wilfrid to escape without rebuke, and all that day and the next and till the end of the week Wilfrid could talk of nothing but flutes, and many and long were the walks that he and his mother took from instrument-maker to instrument-maker, Wilfrid never satisfied, till at last she said: Now, Wilfrid, you must make up your mind what flute you want. And it was after the purchase of two flutes and a piccolo mat mother and son returned to Bushfield Park, Wilfrid with the intention of devoting his life to musical composition.
As there was no teacher in the neighbourhood of whom he approved, he sent to London for the score of the opera he had heard at Portsmouth, and by comparing the notes that his flute uttered with those upon paper he learnt their values, approximately, as he confessed to his mother one day on her asking him if he was reading or playing by ear. I can read at sight now, mother, for I have discovered that it makes a great deal of difference if the note is black or white. Yes, Wilfrid, it does; but you are giving yourself a great deal of trouble trying to learn by yourself what anybody could teach you in a few weeks. She spoke to him of her old governess, whom she would like to ask to Bushfield for her holidays. A music-master, he said, could teach him better than a woman; all the same, he learnt from Miss McCabe how to play the piano a little; and he continued his studies afterwards in London with an ancient bandmaster selected by himself, reaching within a year the stage of being able to write down a tune when it was dictated to him, without asking that it should be repeated unduly — three or four times were enough, if it was repeated slowly, and if he gave his ear, which was a slow one, wholly to the capture of it. His mother allowed him three pounds a week, one of which went to pay for his music lessons; and when his mother climbed the five flights that led to him one morning between ten and eleven (Wilfrid was rarely able to persuade himself out of the bedclothes before eleven) he came to the door, in answer to her repeated knocking, in his shirt and trousers, asking in an aggrieved tone who was there. Oh, mother, I didn’t know it was you! he said, recognising her voice. Come in quickly, for I am making my cocoa, and if the milk boils over it will be spoilt. And the milk happening to boil over during his absence at the door, Mrs. Holmes expressed her regret. You will take an hour to dress yourself. Let me go and fetch the milk for you. It was my fault. She often spoke of this visit afterwards, mildly amused at his solicitude for his cocoa, imitating very well the tone of his voice when he said: I must go at once to fetch some more milk. And she told how she had sat watching Wilfrid stirring his cocoa, hearing him say that it took a long time to find out when the cocoa was properly mixed, and that it was hardly less difficult to make tea. To make tea properly, he said, the water has to be really boiling. And he told a long story of what he had suffered from a charwoman, who not only forgot to pour his tea into a second teapot within two minutes (anything over two minutes made the tea worthless, undrinkable), but left it on the hob, to keep it ‘ot, she said; and when she did remember to put it into the second teapot she forgot to heat the pot first, and hotted it up upon the hob. I will make your tea for you in the future you leave this garret and return with me to Bushfield, the mother answered. But she could not persuade her son to leave his garret. He was still attached to music, and had composed a number of Celibate Lives airs which he played to her on his flute whenever she called to see him. She listened to him patiently, like a mother, and after each tune she said: I like that; that’s very pretty, a very pretty tune indeed; sometimes venturing upon a criticism: But is not the last tune somewhat like the first that you played to me? Wilfrid played the two tunes over again and thought his mother fastidious, and she restrained herself always from saying: But, Wilfrid, the top line is not enough. Modern music is in the harmony.
Harmony was a word that rarely came into Wilfrid’s talk about music, he being of the opinion that, whereas there were many harmonists, there were few melodists. Mrs. Holmes consulted the music-master, from whom she learnt that Wilfrid’s ear was slow; He could not hear simultaneously the different parts of a fugue; and on being pressed still further, the bandmaster gave it as his opinion that Wilfrid should never look upon music as anything more than a hobby, a verdict that Mrs. Holmes received without surprise, the bandmaster’s opinion having long been her opinion. But she loved her son too dearly to utter a word of discouragement. Instead she made provision for him in her will, confiding him to the care of her younger sister, who, when Wilfrid’s mother passed away, did not forget to send her nephew a cheque for fifty pounds each half-year. And upon this money Wilfrid lived his lonely life, trying always to make both ends meet, living aloof, avoiding his relations instinctively. If one of these called, Wilfrid welcomed him, begged of him to stay to tea; and after tea he accompanied his relative, sometimes a brother, sometimes a cousin, to the station, and parted from him with such a show of courtesy and friendliness that he was surprised that Wilfrid did not return to supper, as he had promised that he would, next Sunday.
But months, sometimes years passed, without their seeing him, and again somebody would go forth and return with the truant from family life, who would again disappear, leaving them to their gentle disputations round the fire, seeking reasons for Wilfrid’s aloofness, the true reason never spoken, everybody keeping it hidden away almost from himself. To speak it, or even to allow it a plac
e in their thoughts, would be to impugn their own conduct towards Wilfrid, to set themselves above him, to make it plain to him that he was their inferior. Whosoever cannot get his living dreads his relations, dreads their eyes and words, and of all their coming to bring him back to supper, for as they pass out of the squalor of his neighbourhood into fashionable London the windows and doorways begin to reproach him, and he detects a sneer in the eyes of the servant who opens the door to him. The pictures on the walls, the carpets under his feet, the food he eats, the wine he drinks, remind him of his inferiority; and one night on returning from Hampstead Wilfrid said: Never again will they walk me round their drawing-rooms, showing off their wealth! and he lay awake, attributing motives, and asking himself why they troubled to come to see him and to pester him with invitations. The answer to his questions came: That they may better discuss me and pity me and gloat over my poverty. But I never apply to them for help. Perhaps if I did they would not be so eager to see me! In these thoughts he lay awake, passing into sleep towards morning, awakening out of sleep a happier man than when he lay down, for about him was the familiar room in which he read and wrote and played his flute.
As soon as he was out of bed his first task was the brushing of his clothes. A button to which he attached his braces hung by a single thread, but there was no need for Wilfrid to ask the landlady’s help — he could sew on a button. He could clean his boots, too, and very often did, for there were other lodgers besides him in the house in which he lived, and the landlady and her drudge could not attend upon them all. If the relations of overnight could see me now! Wilfrid said to himself as he brushed. I wish they could, for they would see that I can do many things that they cannot. If I cannot get my own living, I can at least get my own breakfast. I can light a fire, and not one of them would know how to do that. Whereupon he opened the oven (the grate was an old one, with convenient hobs), took out some dry sticks, and very soon a fire was blazing. And, still thinking of his relations, he went to the cupboard, cut his bacon, melted the butter in the pan before dropping in the eggs; and before the landlady knocked to ask if she might do his room Wilfrid had finished his breakfast and was nearly dressed. Yes, Mrs. Plowden, he answered, you can come in; I have only to tie my neck-tie and slip on my coat. And they fell to talking of the present prices of sausages, steak, and mutton chops. I think I shall treat myself to-day, Mrs. Plowden, to a little custard pudding. If you are busy with your music to-day, Mr. Holmes, I shall be glad to make your pudding for you — an offer which Wilfrid accepted, though he would have preferred to make his own pudding and cook it in his own room. But he knew that a lodger such as he was must become a friend of the landlady, and that he could do this by accepting and rendering services, by courtesy and by conversation; for Mrs. Plowden wearied of her servant’s talk, which was always, she confided to Wilfrid, about men, and was glad to come upstairs, to listen, as she put it, to a toon on the flute.
