by George Moore
Though much that I would like to have said is still unsaid, the exigencies of space compel me to bring this notice to a close. However, this one thing I hope I have made clear: that it is my firm opinion that if fiction is to exist at all, the right to speak as he pleases on politics, morals, and religion must be granted to the writer, and that he on his side must take cognizance of other readers than sentimental young girls, who require to be provided with harmless occupation until something fresh turns up in the matrimonial market. Therefore the great literary battle of’ our day is not to be fought for either realism or romanticism, but for freedom of speech; and until that battle be gained I, for one, will continue fearlessly to hold out a hand of welcome to all comers who dare to attack the sovereignty of the circulating library.
The first of these is “Piping Hot!” and, I think, the pungent odour of life it exhales, as well as its scorching satire on the middle-classes, will be relished by all who prefer the fortifying brutalities of truth to the soft platitudes of lies. As a satire “Piping Hot!” must be read; and as a satire it will rank with Juvenal, Voltaire, Pope, and Swift.
George Moore.
The Memoirs
Portrait of George Moore by Édouard Manet, 1879
Moore moved to Ebury Street, Belgravia, London in 1911. He remained living here until his death at the property in 1933.
Confessions of a Young Man
This memoir was published in English by Swan, Sonnenschein, Lowrey & Co. in 1888, the year in which Moore’s other publisher, Vizetelly, was prosecuted for publishing naturalistic novels, a move instigated by the National Vigilance Association (an anti-immorality society campaigning to tighten the laws against vice). It had begun as a five part series in Time magazine. Once published in book form, it sold well, running into several editions, including one in French, before the end of the 1880’s. Moore revised and annotated the memoir numerous times, certainly in 1904 and 1915-16.
Confessions of a Young Man is a book of memoirs of Moore’s fifteen years in Paris as a young man, but presented at arm’s length as the fictional autobiography of Dayne, who also travels to Paris and recounts his artistic and bohemian life there. The memoir is notable for its sketches of that life and for being the first book to bring famous artists such as the Impressionists to an English readership. As Moore stated in the preface to a later edition, “The first eulogies written in England, I might also say in almost any language, of Manet, Degas, Whistler, Monet, Pissarro, are in this book of Confessions and whoever reads will find himself unable to deny that time has vindicated them all splendidly.”
Edwin Dayne is a young man who has always favoured artistic pursuits, even as a child. He used poetry to counteract the intellectual savagery of the Roman Catholic school he attended, carrying the words of Byron and Shelley with him as a form of literary talisman. Later, he meets an artist in London and is smitten by the idea of an artist’s life, saying impulsively that he would like to be one too. The artist advises him to travel to France if he wishes to learn his craft, as France is the true school of artists. When he is eighteen years old his father dies, leaving him a substantial inheritance; thus, with the freedom of a man of independent means, his luggage and an English valet, he travels to Paris to start his life afresh. Dayne’s plan is to join the studio of Cabanel, an artist he admires greatly and to his joy, the artist accepts him. However, the world of the beaux arts is “rough, coarse and rowdy” and he soon tires of this routine.
He tries again under tutelage of Jules Lefevre and enjoys the mixed company of young men and women at the life classes he joins, now working hard at his craft — that is, until he meets again a young man named Marshall, whose brief acquaintance he had made in London. Marshall is dashing and sociable, but indolent and neglects his artistic studies; the inevitable happens and Dayne does likewise, preferring to socialise instead. However, Dayne feels that there is something that sets the two of them apart, as he cannot completely abandon his other thoughts in pursuit of pleasure; he resolves to use Marshall to learn, almost as a case study and admits this is not the only person he has done this with. He picks up and uses people, he tells the reader, in the same way as one might pick up a book, read it and discard it. The reader meets many different aspects of Parisian life, from the squalid to the high arts, visiting by proxy the bars, eateries and artistic venues that are described with a vividness that brings the scenes alive.
Dayne’s next enthusiasm – he seems to be deeply impressionable depending on whom he has encountered – is for writing plays, thanks to making the acquaintance of Duval, the dramatist. After travelling to London in the optimist hope of staging his first play – and being disappointed – he returns to Paris, just in time to visit an exhibition by the Impressionists. Dayne then goes on to recount in some detail the exhibition, describing specific paintings by Degas, Pissarro, Guillaumin, Manet and Renoir. Dayne describes how he and his friends went along to mock the Impressionists almost as a form of sport, deliberately shutting their minds to the beauty and the innovative nature of the new art form. Worse still, Dayne comes to the realisation that he will never be an artist of repute and vows to lay down his artist’s tools and never try again, but instead to become a writer. Can he really succeed at this art form, when he has failed at all the others?
There is certainly an element of gentle self-mockery in the memoir; the description of how an inexperienced young man can become infatuated by an “older” woman and imagine a great romance unfolding is amusingly done and comes across as being drawn from real life. There are no excuses offered either, for the flitting from one art form to another, in the egotistical search for success and recognition in “Bohemian” circles. The sections diverting into literary criticism are not as entertaining and would require some knowledge of the artists explored in order to get the best from them, but the colourful descriptions of everyday life as seen through Dayne’s eyes more than make up for this. The memoir gives many useful insights for the Moore aficionado and is a worthy companion to his novels in particular.
The first edition's title page
CONTENTS
PREFACE TO A NEW EDITION OF “CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN”
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
À JACQUES BLANCHE.
Clifford’s Inn — 1904
L’âme de l’ancien Égyptien s’éveillait en moi quand mourut ma jeunesse, et j’étais inspiré de conserver mon passé, son esprit et sa forme, dans l’art.
Alors trempant le pinceau dans ma mémoire, j’ai peint ses joues pour qu’elles prissent l’exacte ressemblance de la vie, et j’ai enveloppé le mort dans les plus fins linceuls. Rhamenès le second n’a pas reçu des soins plus pieux! Que ce livre soit aussi durable que sa pyramide!
Votre nom, cher ami, je voudrais l’inscrire ici comme épitaphe, car vous êtes mon plus jeune et mon plus cher ami; et il se trouve en vous tout ce qui est gracieux et subtil dans ces mornes années qui s’égouttent dans le vase du vingtième siècle.
G.M.
PREFACE TO A NEW EDITION OF “CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN”
I
DEAR LITTLE BOOK, what shall I say about thee? Belated offspring of mine, out of print for twenty years, what shall I say in praise of thee? For twenty years I have only seen thee in French, and in this English text thou comest to me like an old love, at once a surprise and a recollection. Dear little book, I would say nothing about thee if I could help it, but a publisher pleads, and “No” is a churlish word. So for him I will say that I like thy prattle; that while travelling in a railway carriage on my way to the country of “Esther Waters,” I passed my station by, and had to hire a carriage and drive across the downs.
Like a learned Abbé I delighted in the confessions of this young man, a naïf young man, a little vicious in his naïveté, who says that his soul must have been dipped in Lethe so deeply that he came into the world without remembrance of previous existence. He can find no other explanation for the fact that the world always seems to him more new, more wonderful than it did to anyone he ever met on his faring; every wayside acquaintance seemed old to this amazing young man, and himself seemed to himself the only young thing in the world. Am I imitating the style of these early writings? A man of letters who would parody his early style is no better than the ancient light-o’-love who wears a wig and reddens her cheeks. I must turn to the book to see how far this is true. The first thing I catch sight of is some French, an astonishing dedication written in the form of an epitaph, an epitaph upon myself, for it appears that part of me was dead even when I wrote “Confessions of a Young Man.” The youngest have a past, and this epitaph dedication, printed in capital letters, informs me that I have embalmed my past, that I have wrapped the dead in the finest winding-sheet. It would seem I am a little more difficult to please to-day, for I perceived in the railway train a certain coarseness in its tissue, and here and there a tangled thread. I would have wished for more care, for un peu plus de toilette. There is something pathetic in the loving regard of the middle-aged man for the young man’s coat (I will not say winding-sheet, that is a morbidity from which the middle-aged shrink). I would set his coat collar straighter, I would sweep some specks from it. But can I do aught for this youth, does he need my supervision? He was himself, that was his genius; and I sit at gaze. My melancholy is like her’s — the ancient light-o’-love of whom I spoke just now, when she sits by the fire in the dusk, a miniature of her past self in her hand.
II
This edition has not been printed from old plates, no chicanery of that kind: it has been printed from new type, and it was brought about by Walter Pater’s evocative letter. (It wasn’t, but I like to think that it was). Off and on, his letter was sought for during many years, hunted for through all sorts of portfolios and bookcases, but never found until it appeared miraculously, just as the proof of my Pater article was being sent back to the printer, the precious letter transpired — shall I say “transpired?” — through a crack in the old bookcase.
BRASENOSE COLLEGE,
Mar. 4.
MY DEAR, AUDACIOUS MOORE, — Many thanks for the “Confessions” which I have read with great interest, and admiration for your originality — your delightful criticisms — your Aristophanic joy, or at least enjoyment, in life — your unfailing liveliness. Of course, there are many things in the book I don’t agree with. But then, in the case of so satiric a book, I suppose one is hardly expected to agree or disagree. What I cannot doubt is the literary faculty displayed. “Thou com’st in such a questionable shape!” I feel inclined to say on finishing your book; “shape” morally, I mean; not in reference to style.
You speak of my own work very pleasantly; but my enjoyment has been independent of that. And still I wonder how much you may be losing, both for yourself and for your writings, by what, in spite of its gaiety and good-nature and genuine sense of the beauty of many things, I must still call a cynical, and therefore exclusive, way of looking at the world. You call it only “realistic.” Still!
With sincere wishes for the future success of your most entertaining pen. — Very sincerely yours,
WALTER PATER.
Remember, reader, that this letter was written by the last great English writer, by the author of “Imaginary Portraits,” the most beautiful of all prose books. I should like to break off and tell of my delight in reading “Imaginary Portraits,” but I have told my delight elsewhere; go, seek out what I have said in the pages of the Pall Mall Magazine for August 1904, for here I am obliged to tell you of myself. I give you Pater’s letter, for I wish you to read this book with reverence; never forget that Pater’s admiration has made this book a sacred book. Never forget that.
My special pleasure in these early pages was to find that I thought about Pater twenty years ago as I think about him now, and shall certainly think of him till time everlasting, world without end. I have been accused of changing my likes and dislikes — no one has changed less than I, and this book is proof of my fidelity to my first ideas; the ideas I have followed all my life are in this book — dear crescent moon rising in the south-east above the trees at the end of the village green. It was in that ugly but well-beloved village on the south coast I discovered my love of Protestant England. It was on the downs that the instinct of Protestantism lit up in me.
But when Zola asked me why I preferred Protestantism to Roman Catholicism I could not answer him.
He had promised to write a preface for the French translation of the “Mummer’s Wife”; the translation had to be revised, months and months passed away, and forgetting all about the “Mummer’s Wife,” I expressed my opinion about Zola, which had been changing, a little too fearlessly, and in view of my revolt he was obliged to break his promise to write a Preface, and this must have been a great blow, for he was a man of method, to whom any change of plan was disagreeable and unnerving. He sent a letter, asking me to come to Medan, he would talk to me about the “Confessions.” Well do I remember going there with dear Alexis in the May-time, the young corn six inches high in the fields, and my delight in the lush luxuriance of the l’Oise. That dear morning is remembered, and the poor master who reproved me a little sententiously, is dead. He was sorrowful in that dreadful room of his, fixed up with stained glass and morbid antiquities. He lay on a sofa lecturing me till breakfast. Then I thought reproof was over, but after a walk in the garden we went upstairs and he began again, saying he was not angry. “It is the law of nature,” he said, “for children to devour their parents. I do not complain.” I think he was aware he was playing a part; his sofa was his stage; and he lay there theatrical as Leo XI. or Beerbohm Tree, saying that the Roman Church was an artistic church, that its rich externality and ceremonial were pagan. But I think he knew even then, at the back of his mind, that I was right; that is why he pressed me to give reasons for my preference. Zola came to hate Catholicism as much as I, and his hatred was for the same reason as mine; we both learnt that any religion which robs a man of the right of free-will and private judgment degrades the soul, renders it lethargic and timid, takes the edge off the intellect. Zola lived to write “that the Catholic countries are dead, and the clergy are the worms in the corpses.” The observation is “quelconque”; I should prefer the more interesting allegation that since the Reformation no born Catholic has written a book of literary value! He would have had to concede that some converts have written well; the convert still retains a little of his ancient freedom, some of the intellectual virility he acquired elsewhere, but the born Catholic is still-born. But however we may disapprove of Catholicism, we can still admire the convert. Cardinal Manning was aware of the advantages of a Protestant bringing up, and he often said that he was glad he had been born a Protestant. His Eminence was, therefore, of opinion that the Catholic faith should be reserved, and exclusively, for converts, and in this he showed his practical sense, for it is easy to imagine a country prosperous in which all the inhabitants should be brought up Protestants or agnostics, and in which conversions to Rome are only permitted after a certain age or in clearly defined circumstances. There would be something beyond mere practical wisdom in such law-giving, an exquisite sense of the pathos of human life and its requirements; scapulars, indulgences and sacraments are needed by the weak and the ageing, sacraments especially. “They make you believe but they stupefy you;” these words are Pascal’s, the great light of the Catholic Church.
III
My Protestant sympathies go back very far, further back than these Confessions; I find them in a French sonnet, crude and diffuse in versification, of the kind which finds favour with the very young, a sonnet which I should not publish did it not remind me of two things especially dear
to me, my love of France and Protestantism.
Je t’apporte mon drame, o poète sublime,
Ainsi qu’un écolier au maître sa leçon:
Ce livre avec fierté porte comme écusson
Le sceau qu’en nos esprits ta jeune gloire imprime.
Accepte, tu verras la foi mêlée au crime,
Se souiller dans le sang sacré de la raison,
Quand surgit, rédempteur du vieux peuple saxon,
Luther à Wittemberg comme Christ à Solime.
Jamais de la cité le mal entier ne fuit,
Hélas! et son autel y fume dans la nuit;
Mais notre âge a ceci de pareil à l’aurore.
