by George Moore
“By the tideless dolorous inland sea,
In a land of sand, of ruin, and gold.”
And, better example still,
“Dieu que le son du cor est triste au fond des bois,”
that impeccable, that only line of real poetry Alfred de Vigny ever wrote. Being a great poet Shakespeare consciously or unconsciously observed more faithfully than any other poet these principles of art; and, as is characteristic of the present day, nowhere do we find these principles so grossly violated as in the representation of his plays. I had painful proof of this some few nights after my arrival in London. I had never seen Shakespeare acted, and I went to the Lyceum and there I saw that exquisite love-song — for Romeo and Juliet is no more than a love song in dialogue — tricked out in silks and carpets and illuminated building, a vulgar bawd suited to the gross passion of an ignorant public. I hated all that with the hatred of a passionate heart, and I longed for a simple stage, a few simple indications, and the simple recitation of that story of the sacrifice of the two white souls for the reconciliation of two great families. My hatred did not reach to the age of the man who played the boy-lover, but to the offensiveness with which he thrust his individuality upon me, longing to realise the poet’s divine imagination: and the woman, too, I wished with my whole soul away, subtle and strange though she was, and I yearned for her part to be played by a youth as in old time: a youth cunningly disguised, would be a symbol; and my mind would be free to imagine the divine Juliet of the poet, whereas I could but dream of the bright eyes and delicate mien and motion of the woman who had thrust herself between me and it.
But not with symbol and subtle suggestion has the villa to do, but with such stolid, intellectual fare as corresponds to its material wants. The villa has not time to think, the villa is the working bee. The tavern is the drone. It has no boys to put to school, no neighbours to study, and is therefore a little more refined, or, should I say? depraved, in its taste. The villa in one form or other has always existed, and always will exist so long as our present social system holds together. It is the basis of life, and more important than the tavern. Agreed: but that does not say that the tavern was not an excellent corrective influence to the villa, and that its disappearance has not had a vulgarising effect on artistic work of all kinds, and the club has been proved impotent to replace it, the club being no more than the correlative of the villa. Let the reader trace villa through each modern feature. I will pass on at once to the circulating library, at once the symbol and glory of villaism.
The subject is not unfamiliar to me; I come to it like the son to his father, like the bird to its nest. (Singularly inappropriate comparison, but I am in such excellent humour to-day; humour is everything. It is said that the tiger will sometimes play with the lamb! Let us play.) We have the villa well in our mind. The father who goes to the city in the morning, the grown-up girls waiting to be married, the big drawing-room where they play waltz music, and talk of dancing parties. But waltzes will not entirely suffice, nor even tennis; the girls must read. Mother cannot keep a censor (it is as much as she can do to keep a cook, housemaid and page-boy), besides the expense would be enormous, even if nothing but shilling and two-shilling novels were purchased. Out of such circumstances the circulating library was hatched.
The villa made known its want, and art fell on its knees. Pressure was put on the publishers, and books were published at 31s. 6d.; the dirty outside public was got rid of, and the villa paid its yearly subscription, and had nice large handsome books that none but the élite could obtain, and with them a sense of being put on a footing of equality with my Lady This and Lady That, and certainty that nothing would come into the hands of dear Kate and Mary and Maggie that they might not read, and all for two guineas a year. English fiction became pure, and the garlic and assafœtida with which Byron, Fielding and Ben Jonson so liberally seasoned their works, and in spite of which, as critics say, they were geniuses, have disappeared from our literature. English fiction became pure, dirty stories were to be heard no more, were no longer procurable. But at this point human nature intervened; poor human nature! when you pinch it in one place it bulges out in another, after the fashion of a lady’s figure. Human nature has from the earliest time shown a liking for dirty stories; dirty stories have formed a substantial part of every literature (I employ the words “dirty stories” in the circulating library sense); therefore a taste for dirty stories may be said to be inherent in the human animal. Call it a disease if you will — an incurable disease — which, if it is driven inwards, will break out in an unexpected quarter in a new form and with redoubled virulence. This is exactly what has happened. Actuated by the most laudable motives, Mudie cut off our rations of dirty stories, and for forty years we were apparently the most moral people on the face of the earth. It was confidently asserted that an English woman of sixty would not read what would bring the blush of shame to the cheeks of a maiden of any other nation. But humiliation and sorrow were awaiting Mudie. True it is that we still continued to subscribe to his library, true it is that we still continued to go to church, true it is that we turned our faces away when Mdlle. de Maupin or the Assommoir was spoken of; to all appearance we were as good and chaste as even Mudie might wish us; and no doubt he looked back upon his forty years of effort with pride; no doubt he beat his manly breast and said, “I have scorched the evil one out of the villa; the head of the serpent is crushed for evermore;” but lo, suddenly, with all the horror of an earthquake, the slumbrous law courts awoke, and the burning cinders of fornication and the blinding and suffocating smoke of adultery were poured upon and hung over the land. Through the mighty columns of our newspapers the terrible lava rolled unceasing, and in the black stream the villa, with all its beautiful illusions, tumbled and disappeared.
An awful and terrifying proof of the futility of human effort, that there is neither bad work nor good work to do, nothing but to await the coming of the Nirvana.
I have written much against the circulating library, and I have read a feeble defence or two; but I have not seen the argument that might be legitimately put forward in its favour. It seems to me this: the circulating library is conservatism, art is always conservative; the circulating library lifts the writer out of the precariousness and noise of the wild street of popular fancy into a quiet place where passion is more restrained and there is more reflection. The young and unknown writer is placed at once in a place of comparative security, and he is not forced to employ vile and degrading methods of attracting attention; the known writer, having a certain market for his work, is enabled to think more of it and less of the immediate acclamation of the crowd; but all these possible advantages are destroyed and rendered nil by the veracious censorship exercised by the librarian.
There is one thing in England that is free, that is spontaneous, that reminds me of the blitheness and nationalness of the Continent; — but there is nothing French about it, it is wholly and essentially English, and in its communal enjoyment and its spontaneity it is a survival of Elizabethan England — I mean the music-hall; the French music-hall seems to me silly, effete, sophisticated, and lacking, not in the popularity, but in the vulgarity of an English hall — I will not say the Pavilion, which is too cosmopolitan, dreary French comics are heard there — for preference let us say the Royal. I shall not easily forget my first evening there, when I saw for the time a living house — the dissolute paragraphists, the elegant mashers (mark the imaginativeness of the slang), the stolid, good-humoured costers, the cheerful lights o’ love, the extraordinary comics. What delightful unison of enjoyment, what unanimity of soul, what communality of wit; all knew each other, all enjoyed each other’s presence; in a word, there was life. Then there were no cascades of real water, nor London docks, nor offensively rich furniture, with hotel lifts down which some one will certainly be thrown, but one scene representing a street; a man comes on — not, mind you, in a real smock-frock, but in something that suggests one — and sings of how he came up to London
, and was “cleaned out” by thieves. Simple, you will say; yes, but better than a fricassée of Faust, garnished with hags, imps, and blue flame; better, far better than a drawing-room set at the St James’s, with an exhibition of passion by Mrs and Mr Kendal; better, a million times better than the cheap popularity of Wilson Barrett — an elderly man posturing in a low-necked dress to some poor trull in the gallery; nor is there in the hall any affectation of language, nor that worn-out rhetoric which reminds you of a broken-winded barrel-organ playing a che la morte, bad enough in prose, but when set up in blank verse awful and shocking in its more than natural deformity — but bright quips and cranks fresh from the back-yard of the slum where the linen is drying, or the “pub” where the unfortunate wife has just received a black eye that will last her a week. That inimitable artist, Bessie Bellwood, whose native wit is so curiously accentuated that it is sublimated, that it is no longer repellent vulgarity but art, choice and rare — see, here she comes with “What cheer, Rea! Rea’s on the job.” The sketch is slight, but is welcome and refreshing after the eternal drawing-room and Mrs Kendal’s cumbrous domesticity; it is curious, quaint, perverted, and are not these the aions and the attributes of art? Now see that perfect comedian, Arthur Roberts, superior to Irving because he is working with living material; how trim and saucy he is! and how he evokes the soul, the brandy-and-soda soul, of the young men, delightful and elegant in black and white, who are so vociferously cheering him, “Will you stand me a cab-fare, ducky, I am feeling so awfully queer?” The soul, the spirit, the entity of Piccadilly Circus is in the words, and the scene the comedian’s eyes — each look is full of suggestion; it is irritating, it is magnetic, it is symbolic, it is art.
Not art, but a sign, a presentiment of an art, that may grow from the present seeds, that may rise into some stately and unpremeditated efflorescence, as the rhapsodist rose to Sophocles, as the miracle play rose through Peele and Nash to Marlowe, hence to the wondrous summer of Shakespeare, to die later on in the mist and yellow and brown of the autumn of Crowes and Davenants. I have seen music-hall sketches, comic interludes that in their unexpectedness and naïve naturalness remind me of the comic passages in Marlowe’s Faustus, I waited (I admit in vain) for some beautiful phantom to appear, and to hear an enthusiastic worshipper cry out in his agony: —
“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Her lips suck forth my soul; see where it flies!
Come, Helen, come; give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.”
And then the astonishing change of key: —
“I will be Paris, and for love of thee,
Instead of Troy shall Wurtemberg be sacked,” etc.
The hall is at least a protest against the wearisome stories concerning wills, misers in old castles, lost heirs, and the woeful solutions of such things — she who has been kept in the castle cellar for twenty years restored to the delights of hair-pins and a mauve dress, the ingenue to the protecting arm, etc. The music-hall is a protest against Mrs Kendal’s marital tendernesses and the abortive platitudes of Messrs Pettit and Sims; the music-hall is a protest against Sardou and the immense drawing-room sets, rich hangings, velvet sofas, etc., so different from the movement of the English comedy with its constant change of scene. The music-hall is a protest against the villa, the circulating library, the club, and for this the “‘all” is inexpressibly dear to me.
But in the interests of those illiterate institutions called theatres it is not permissible for several characters to narrate events in which there is a sequel, by means of dialogue, in a music-hall. If this vexatious restriction were removed it is possible, if it is not certain, that while some halls remained faithful to comic songs and jugglers others would gradually learn to cater for more intellectual and subtle audiences, and that out of obscurity and disorder new dramatic forms, coloured and permeated by the thought and feeling of to-day, might be definitely evolved. It is our only chance of again possessing a dramatic literature.
XII
IT IS SAID that young men of genius come to London with great poems and dramas in their pockets and find every door closed against them. Chatterton’s death perpetuated this legend. But when I, George Moore, came to London in search of literary adventure, I found a ready welcome. Possibly I should not have been accorded any welcome had I been anything but an ordinary person. Let this be waived. I was as covered with “fads” as a distinguished foreigner with stars. Naturalism I wore round my neck, Romanticism was pinned over the heart, Symbolism I carried like a toy revolver in my waistcoat pocket, to be used on an emergency. I do not judge whether I was charlatan or genius, I merely state that I found all — actors, managers, editors, publishers, docile and ready to listen to me. The world may be wicked, cruel, and stupid, but it is patient; on this point I will not be gainsaid, it is patient; I know what I am talking about; I maintain that the world is patient. If it were not, what would have happened? I should have been murdered by the editors of (I will suppress names), torn in pieces by the sub-editors, and devoured by the office boys. There was no wild theory which I did not assail them with, there was no strange plan for the instant extermination of the Philistine, which I did not press upon them, and (here I must whisper), with a fair amount of success, not complete success I am glad to say — that would have meant for the editors a change from their arm-chairs to the benches of the Union and the plank beds of Holloway. The actress, when she returned home from the theatre, suggested I had an enemy, a vindictive enemy, who dogged my steps; but her stage experience led her astray. I had no enemy except myself; or to put it scientifically, no enemy except the logical consequences of my past life and education, and these caused me a great and real inconvenience. French wit was in my brain, French sentiment was in my heart; of the English soul I knew nothing, and I could not remember old sympathies, it was like seeking forgotten words, and if I were writing a short story, I had to return in thought to Montmartre or the Champs Elysées for my characters. That I should have forgotten so much in ten years seems incredible, and it will be deemed impossible by many, but that is because few are aware of how little they know of the details of life, even of their own, and are incapable of appreciating the influence of their past upon their present. The visible world is visible only to a few, the moral world is a closed book to nearly all. I was full of France, and France had to be got rid of, or pushed out of sight before I could understand England; I was like a snake striving to slough its skin.
Handicapped as I was with dangerous ideas, and an impossible style, defeat was inevitable. My English was rotten with French idiom; it was like an ill-built wall overpowered by huge masses of ivy; the weak foundations had given way beneath the weight of the parasite; and the ideas I sought to give expression to were green, sour, and immature as apples in August.
Therefore before long the leading journal that had printed two poems and some seven or eight critical articles, ceased to send me books for review, and I fell back upon obscure society papers. Fortunately it was not incumbent on me to live by my pen; so I talked, and watched, and waited till I grew akin to those around me, and my thoughts blended with, and took root in my environment. I wrote a play or two, I translated a French opera, which had a run of six nights, I dramatized a novel, I wrote short stories, and I read a good deal of contemporary fiction.
The first book that came under my hand was “A Portrait of a Lady,” by Henry James. Each scene is developed with complete foresight and certainty of touch. What Mr James wants to do he does. I will admit that an artist may be great and limited; by one word he may light up an abyss of soul; but there must be this one magical and unique word. Shakespeare gives us the word, Balzac, sometimes, after pages of vain striving, gives us the word, Tourgueneff gives it with miraculous certainty; but Henry James, no; a hu
ndred times he flutters about it; his whole book is one long flutter near to the one magical and unique word, but the word is not spoken; and for want of the word his characters are never resolved out of the haze of nebulae. You are on a bowing acquaintance with them; they pass you in the street, they stop and speak to you, you know how they are dressed, you watch the colour of their eyes. When I think of “A Portrait of a Lady,” with its marvellous crowd of well-dressed people, it comes back to me precisely as an accurate memory of a fashionable soirée — the staircase with its ascending figures, the hostess smiling, the host at a little distance with his back turned; some one calls him. He turns; I can see his white kid gloves, the air is sugar sweet with the odour of the gardenias, there is brilliant light here, there is shadow in the further rooms, the women’s feet pass to and fro beneath the stiff skirts, I call for my hat and coat, I light a cigar, I stroll up Piccadilly...a very pleasant evening, I have seen a good many people I knew, I have observed an attitude, and an earnestness of manner that proved that a heart was beating.
Mr James might say, “If I have done this, I have done a great deal,” and I would answer, “No doubt you are a man of great talent, great cultivation and not at all of the common herd; I place you in the very front rank, not only of novelists but of men of letters.”
I have read nothing of Henry James’s that did suggest the manner of a scholar; but why should a scholar limit himself to empty and endless sentimentalities? I will not taunt him with any of the old taunts — why does he not write complicated stories? Why does he not complete his stories? Let all this be waived. I will ask him only why he always avoids decisive action? Why does a woman never say “I will”? Why does a woman never leave the house with her lover? Why does a man never kill a man? Why does a man never kill himself? Why is nothing ever accomplished? In real life murder, adultery, and suicide are of common occurrence; but Mr James’s people live in a calm, sad, and very polite twilight of volition. Suicide or adultery has happened before the story begins, suicide or adultery happens some years hence, when the characters have left the stage, but in front of the reader nothing happens. The suppression or maintenance of story in a novel is a matter of personal taste; some prefer character-drawing to adventures, some adventures to character-drawing; that you cannot have both at once I take to be a self-evident proposition; so when Mr Lang says, “I like adventures,” I say, “Oh, do you?” as I might to a man who says “I like sherry,” and no doubt when I say I like character-drawing, Mr Lang says, “Oh, do you?” as he might to a man who says, “I like port.” But Mr James and I are agreed on essentials, we prefer character-drawing to adventures. One, two, or even three determining actions are not antagonistic to character-drawing, the practice of Balzac, and Flaubert, and Thackeray prove that. Is Mr James of the same mind as the poet Verlaine —
