Complete Works of George Moore

by George Moore

  And that man Gustave Kahn, who takes the French language as a violin, and lets the bow of his emotion run at wild will upon it, producing strange acute strains, unpremeditated harmonies comparable to nothing that I know of but some Hungarian rhapsody; verses of seventeen syllables interwoven with verses of eight, and even nine, masculine rhymes, seeking strange union with feminine rhymes in the middle of the line — a music sweet, subtil, and epicene; the half-note, the inflexion, but not the full tone — as “se fondre, o souvenir, des lys âcres délices.”

  Se penchant vers les dahlias,

  Des paons cabrent des rosaces lunaires

  L’assou pissement des branches vénère

  Son pâle visage aux mourants dahlias.

  Elle écoute au loin les brèves musiques

  Nuit claire aux ramures d’accords,

  Et la lassitude a bercé son corps

  Au rhythme odorant des pures musiques.

  Les paons ont dressé la rampe occellée

  Pour la descente de ses yeux vers le tapis

  De choses et de sens

  Qui va vers l’horizon, parure vermiculée

  De son corps alangui

  En l’âme se tapit

  Le flou désir molli de récits et d’encens.

  I laughed at these verbal eccentricities, but they were not without their effect, and that a demoralising one; for in me they aggravated the fever of the unknown, and whetted my appetite for the strange, abnormal and unhealthy in art. Hence all pallidities of thought and desire were eagerly welcomed, and Verlaine became my poet. Never shall I forget the first enchantment of “Les Fétes Galantes.” Here all is twilight.

  The royal magnificences of the sunset have passed, the solemn beatitude of the night is at hand but not yet here; the ways are veiled with shadow, and lit with dresses, white, that the hour has touched with blue, yellow, green, mauve, and undecided purple; the voices? strange contraltos; the forms? not those of men or women, but mystic, hybrid creatures, with hands nervous and pale, and eyes charged with eager and fitful light...”un soir équivoque d’automne”...”les belles pendent rêveuses à nos bras”...and they whisper “les mots spéciaux et tout bas.”

  Gautier sang to his antique lyre praise of the flesh and contempt of the soul; Baudelaire on a mediæval organ chaunted his unbelief in goodness and truth and his hatred of life. But Verlaine advances one step further: hate is to him as commonplace as love, unfaith as vulgar as faith. The world is merely a doll to be attired to-day in a modern ball dress, to-morrow in aureoles and stars. The Virgin is a pretty thing, worth a poem, but it would be quite too silly to talk about belief or unbelief; Christ in wood or plaster we have heard too much of, but Christ in painted glass amid crosiers and Latin terminations, is an amusing subject for poetry. And strangely enough, a withdrawing from all commerce with virtue and vice is, it would seem, a licentiousness more curiously subtle and penetrating than any other; and the licentiousness of the verse is equal to that of the emotion; every natural instinct of the language is violated, and the simple music native in French metre is replaced by falsetto notes sharp and intense. The charm is that of an odour of iris exhaled by some ideal tissues, or of a missal in a gold case, a precious relic of the pomp and ritual of an archbishop of Persepolis.

  Parsifal a vaincu les filles, leur gentil

  Babil et la luxure amusante et sa pente

  Vers la chair de garçon vierge que cela tente

  D’aimer des seins légers et ce gentil babil.

  Il a vaincu la femme belle aucœur subtil

  Etalant ces bras frais et sa gorge excitante;

  Il a vaincu l’enfer, il rentre dans sa tente

  Avec un lourd trophée à son bras puéril.

  Avec la lance qui perça le flanc suprême

  Il a guéri le roi, le voici roi lui-même.

  Et prêtre du très-saint trésor essentiel;

  En robe d’or il adore, gloire et symbole,

  Le vase pur où resplendit le sang réel,

  Et, o ces voix d’enfants chantant dans la coupole.

  In English there is no sonnet so beautiful, its beauty cannot be worn away, it is as inexhaustible as a Greek marble. The hiatus in the last line was at first a little trying, but I have learned to love it. Not in Baudelaire nor even in Poe is there more beautiful poetry to be found. Poe, unread and ill-understood in America and England, here, thou art an integral part of our artistic life.

  The Island o’ Fay, Silence, Eleonore, were the familiar spirits of an apartment beautiful with Manets and tapestry; Swinburne and Rossetti were the English poets I read there; and in a golden bondage, I, a unit in the generation they have enslaved, clanked my fetters and trailed my golden chain, a set of stories in many various metres, to be called “Roses of Midnight.” One of the characteristics of the volume was that daylight was banished from its pages. In the sensual lamplight of yellow boudoirs, or the wild moonlight of centenarian forests, my fantastic loves lived out their lives, died with the dawn which was supposed to be an awakening to consciousness of reality.

  FOOTNOTES:

  Surely the phrase is ill considered, hurried “my convalescence” would express the author’s meaning better.

  VII

  A LAST HOUR of vivid blue and gold glare; but now the twilight sheds softly upon the darting jays, and only the little oval frames catch the fleeting beams. I go to the miniatures. Amid the parliamentary faces, all strictly garrotted with many-folded handkerchiefs, there is a metal frame enchased with rubies and a few emeralds. And this chef d’œuvre of antique workmanship surrounds a sharp, shrewdish, modern face, withal pretty. Fair she is and thin.

  She is a woman of thirty — no, — she is the woman of thirty. Balzac has written some admirable pages on this subject; my memory of them is vague and uncertain, although durable, as all memories of him must be. But that marvellous story, or rather study, has been blunted in my knowledge of this tiny face with the fine masses of hair drawn up from the neck and arranged elaborately on the crown. There is no fear of plagiary; he cannot have said all; he cannot have said what I want to say.

  Looking at this face so mundane, so intellectually mundane, I see why a young man of refined mind — a bachelor who spends at least a pound a day on his pleasures, and in whose library are found some few volumes of modern poetry — seeks his ideal in a woman of thirty.

  It is clear that, by the very essence of her being, the young girl may evoke no ideal but that of home; and home is in his eyes the antithesis of freedom, desire, aspiration. He longs for mystery, deep and endless, and he is tempted with a foolish little illusion — white dresses, water-colour drawings and popular music. He dreams of Pleasure, and he is offered Duty; for do not think that that sylph-like waist does not suggest to him a yard of apron string, cries of children, and that most odious word, “Papa.” A young man of refined mind can look through the glass of the years.

  He has sat in the stalls, opera-glass in hand; he has met women of thirty at balls, and has sat with them beneath shadowy curtains; he knows that the world is full of beautiful women, all waiting to be loved and amused, the circles of his immediate years are filled with feminine faces, they cluster like flowers on this side and that, and they fade into garden-like spaces of colour. How many may love him? The loveliest may one day smile upon his knee! and shall he renounce all for that little creature who has just finished singing and is handing round cups of tea? Every bachelor contemplating marriage says, “I shall have to give up all for one, one.”

  The young girl is often pretty but her prettiness is vague and uncertain, it inspires a sort of pitying admiration, but it suggests nothing; the very essence of the young girl’s being is that she should have nothing to suggest, therefore the beauty of the young face fails to touch the imagination. No past lies hidden in those translucent eyes, no story of hate, disappointment, or sin. Nor is there in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases in a thousand any doubt that the hand, that spends at least a pound a day in restaurants and
cabs, will succeed in gathering the muslin flower if he so wills it, and by doing so he will delight every one. Where, then, is the struggle? where, then, is the triumph? Therefore, I say that if a young man’s heart is not set on children, and tiresome dinner-parties, the young girl presents to him no possible ideal. But the woman of thirty presents from the outset all that is necessary to ensnare the heart of a young man. I see her sitting in her beautiful drawing-room, all designed by, and all belonging to her. Her chair is placed beneath an evergreen plant, and the long leaves lean out as if to touch her neck. The great white and red roses of the Aubusson carpet are spread enigmatically about her feline feet; a grand piano leans its melodious mouth to her; and there she sits when her visitors have left her, playing Beethoven’s sonatas in the dreamy firelight. The spring-tide shows but a bloom of unvarying freshness; August has languished and loved in the strength of the sun. She is stately, she is tall. What sins, what disappointments, what aspirations lie in those grey eyes, mysteriously still, and mysteriously revealed. These a young man longs to know of, they are his life. He imagines himself sitting by her, when the others have gone, holding her hand, calling on her name; sometimes she moves away and plays the moonlight sonata. Letting her hands droop upon the keys she talks sadly, maybe affectionately; she speaks of the tedium of life, of its disenchantments. He knows well what she means, he has suffered as she has; but could he tell her, could she understand, that in his love reality would dissolve into a dream, all limitations would open into boundless infinity.

  The husband he rarely sees. Sometimes a latch-key is heard about half-past six. The man is thick, strong, common, his jaws are heavy, his eyes are expressionless, there is about him the loud swagger of the caserne, and he suggests the inevitable question, Why did she marry him? — a question that every young man of refined mind asks a thousand times by day and ten thousand times by night, asks till he is five-and-thirty, and sees that his generation has passed into middle age.

  Why did she marry him? Not the sea, nor the sky, nor the great mysterious midnight, when he opens his casement and gazes into starry space will give him answer; no Œdipus will ever come to unravel this riddle; this sphinx will never throw herself from the rock into the clangour of the sea-gulls and waves; she will never divulge her secret; and if she is the woman and not a woman of thirty, she has forgotten.

  The young man shakes hands with the husband; he strives not to look embarrassed, and he talks of indifferent things — of how well he (the husband) is looking, of his amusements, his projects; and then he (the young man of refined mind) tastes of that keen and highly-seasoned delight — happiness in crime. He knows not the details of her home life, the husband is merely a dark cloud that fills one side of the picture, sometimes obliterating the sunlight; a shadowy shape that in certain moments solidifies and assumes the likeness of a rock-sculptured, imminent monster, but the shadow and the shape and the threat are magnetic, and in a sense of danger the fascination is sealed.

  The young man of refined mind is in a ball-room! He leans against the woodwork in a distant doorway; hardly knowing what to do with himself, he strives to interest himself in the conversation of a group of men twice his age. I will not say he is shunned; but neither the matrons nor the young girls make any advances towards him. The young girls so sweet — in the oneness of their fresh hair, flowers, dresses, and glances — are being introduced, are getting up to dance, and the hostess is looking round for partners. She sees the young man in the doorway, but she hesitates and goes to some one else, and if you asked her why, she could not tell you why she avoided him. Presently the woman of thirty enters. She is in white satin and diamonds. She looks for him — a circular glance. Calm with possession she passes to a seat, extending her hand here and there. She dances the eighth, twelfth, and fifteenth waltz with him.

  Will he induce her to visit his rooms? Will they be like Marshall’s — strange debauches of colour and Turkish lamps — or mine, an old cabinet, a faded pastel which embalms the memory of a pastoral century, my taste; or will it be a library, — two leather library chairs, a large escritoire, etc.? Be this as it may, whether the apartments be the ruthless extravagance of artistic impulse, or the subdued taste of the student, she, the woman of thirty, shall be there by night and day: her statue is there, and even when she is sleeping safe in her husband’s arms, with fevered brow, he, the young man of refined mind, alone and lonely shall kneel and adore her.

  And should she not visit his rooms? If the complex and various accidents of existence should have ruled out her life virtuously; if the many inflections of sentiment have decided against this last consummation, then she will wax to the complete, the unfathomable temptress — the Lilith of old — she will never set him free, and in the end will be found about his heart “one single golden hair.” She shall haunt his wife’s face and words (should he seek to rid himself of her by marriage), a bitter sweet, a half-welcome enchantment; she shall consume and destroy the strength and spirit of his life, leaving it desolation, a barren landscape, burnt and faintly scented with the sea. Fame and wealth shall slip like sand from him. She may be set aside for the cadence of a rhyme, for the flowing line of a limb, but when the passion of art has raged itself out, she shall return to blight the peace of the worker.

  A terrible malady is she, a malady the ancients knew of and called nympholepsy — a beautiful name evocative and symbolic of its ideal aspect, “the breasts of the nymphs in the brake.” And the disease is not extinct in these modern days, nor will it ever be so long as men shall yearn for the unattainable; and the prosy bachelors who trail their ill-fated lives from their chambers to their clubs know their malady, and they call it — the woman of thirty.

  VIII

  A JAPANESE DRESSING-GOWN, the ideality of whose tissue delights me, some fresh honey and milk set by this couch hung with royal fringes; and having partaken of this odorous refreshment, I call to Jack, my great python crawling about after a two months’ fast. I tie up a guinea-pig to the tabouret, pure Louis XV., the little beast struggles and squeaks, the snake, his black, bead-like eyes are fixed, how superb are the oscillations...now he strikes; and with what exquisite gourmandise he lubricates and swallows.

  Marshall is at the organ in the hall, he is playing a Gregorian chant, that beautiful hymn, the “Vexilla Regis,” by Saint Fortunatus, the great poet of the Middle Ages. And, having turned over the leaves of “Les Fêtes Galantes,” I sit down to write.

  My original intention was to write some thirty or forty stories varying from thirty to three hundred lines in length. The nature of these stories is easy to imagine: there was the youth who wandered by night into a witches’ sabbath, and was disputed for by the witches, young and old. There was the light o’ love who went into the desert to tempt the holy man; but he died as he yielded; his arms stiffened by some miracle, and she was unable to free herself; she died of starvation, as her bondage loosened in decay. I had increased my difficulties by adopting as part of my task the introduction of all sorts of elaborate, and in many cases extravagantly composed metres, and I had begun to feel that I was working in sand, I could make no progress, the house I was raising crumbled and fell away on every side. These stories had one merit: they were all, so far as I can remember, perfectly constructed. For the art of telling a story clearly and dramatically, selon les procédés de M. Scribe, I had thoroughly learnt from old M. Duval, the author of a hundred and sixty plays, written in collaboration with more than a hundred of the best writers of his day, including the master himself, Gautier. I frequently met M. Duval at breakfast at a neighbouring café, and our conversation turned on l’exposition de la pièce, préparer la situation, nous aurons des larmes, etc. One day, as I sat waiting for him, I took up the Voltaire. It contained an article by M. Zola. Naturalisme, la vérité, la science, were repeated some half-a-dozen times. Hardly able to believe my eyes, I read that you should write, with as little imagination as possible, that plot in a novel or in a play was illiterate and puerile, and that
the art of M. Scribe was an art of strings and wires, etc. I rose up from breakfast, ordered my coffee, and stirred the sugar, a little dizzy, like one who has received a violent blow on the head.