by George Moore
I did not go to bed at once, but sat in the armchair thinking, calculating my chances. A cab came rattling up to the door, and one of the revellers came upstairs. He told me that everything had been arranged; I told him that I was not in the habit of allowing others to arrange my affairs for me, and went to bed.
Among my old friends I could think of some half-dozen that would suit me perfectly, but where were they? Ten years’ absence scatters friends as October scatters swallows.
The first one said, “it was about one or two in the morning?”
“Later than that, it was about seven.”
“He struck you, and not very hard, I should imagine; you hit him with a champagne bottle, and now you want to have him out.”
“I did not come here to listen to moral reflections; if you don’t like to act for me, say so.”
I telegraphed to Warwickshire to an old friend:— “Can I count on you to act for me in an affair of honour?” Two or three hours after the reply came. “Come down here and stay with me for a few days, we’ll talk it over.” English people, I said, will have nothing to do with serious duelling. I must telegraph to Marshall. “Of all importance. Come over at once and act for me in an affair of honour. Bring the Count with you; leave him at Boulogne; he knows the colonel of the —— .” The next day I received the following. “Am burying my father; as soon as he is underground will come.” Was there ever such ill-luck?... He won’t be here before the end of the week. These things demand the utmost promptitude. Three or four days afterwards Emma told me a gentleman was upstairs taking a bath. “Hollo, Marshall, how are you? Had a good crossing? The poor old gentleman went off quite suddenly, I suppose?”
“Yes; found dead in his bed. He must have known he was dying, for he lay quite straight as the dead lie, his hands by his side...wonderful presence of mind.”
“He left no money?”
“Not a penny; but I could manage it all right. Since my success at the Salon, I have been able to sell my things. I am only beginning to find out now what a success that picture was. Je t’assure, je fais l’ècole”...
“Tu crois ça...on fait l’ècole après vingt ans de travail.”
When we were excited Marshall and I always dropped into French.
“And now tell me,” he said, “about this duel.”
No sooner had I begun to tell the story than it dawned upon me that it was impossible to tell it seriously, for it was fundamentally an absurd story; and I lacked courage to tell Marshall that I only wished to go through with the duel in order to become notorious. No one will admit such a thing as that to his friend, and if I had admitted it Marshall would not have consented. I suddenly began to get interested in other things. There was Marshall’s painting to talk about. After the theatre we went home and æstheticised till three in the morning. The duel became the least important event and Marshall’s new picture the greatest. At breakfast next day the duel seemed more tiresome than ever, but the gentlemen were coming to meet Marshall. He showed his usual tact in arranging my affair of honour; a letter was drawn up in which my friend withdrew the blow of his hand, I withdrew the blow of the bottle, etc. — really now I lack energy to explain it any further.
XVII
HYPOCRITICAL READER, YOU draw your purity garments round you, you say, “How very base”; but I say unto you remember how often you have longed, if you are a soldier in Her Majesty’s army, for war, — war that would bring every form of sorrow to a million fellow-creatures, and you longed for all this to happen, because it might bring your name into the Gazette. Hypocritical reader, think not too hardly of me; hypocritical reader, think what you like of me, your hypocrisy will alter nothing; in telling you of my vices I am only telling you of your own; hypocritical reader, in showing you my soul I am showing you your own; hypocritical reader, exquisitely hypocritical reader, you are my brother, I salute you.
Day passed over day, and my novel seemed an impossible task — defeat glared at me from every corner of the room. My English was so bad, so thin, — stupid colloquialisms out of joint with French idiom. I learnt unusual words and stuck them up here and there; they did not mend the style. Self-reliance had been lost in past failures; I was weighed down on every side, but I struggled to bring the book somehow to a close. Nothing mattered to me, but this one thing. To put an end to the landlady’s cheating, and to bind myself to remain at home, I entered into an arrangement with her that she was to supply me with board and lodgings for three pounds a week, and henceforth resisting all Curzon Street temptations, I trudged home to eat a chop. I studied the servant as one might an insect under a microscope. “What an admirable book she would make, but what will the end be? if I only knew the end!”
I saw poor Miss L. nightly, on the stairs, and I never wearied of talking to her of her hopes and ambitions, of the young man she admired, and she used to ask me about my novel.
When my troubles lay too heavily upon me, I let her go up to her garret without a word, and remained at the window wondering if I should ever escape from Cecil Street, if I should ever be a light in that London, long, low, misshapen, that dark monumented stream flowing through the lean bridges. What if I were a light in this umber-coloured mass? Happiness abides only in the natural affections — in a home and a sweet wife. Would she whom I saw to-night marry me? How sweet she was in her simple naturalness, the joys she has known have been slight and pure, not violent and complex as mine. Ah, she is not for me, I am not fit for her, I am too sullied for her lips. Were I to win her could I be dutiful, true?...
XVIII
“YOUNG MEN, YOUNG men whom I love, dear ones who have rejoiced with me, not the least of our pleasures is the virtuous woman; after excesses there is reaction, all things are good in nature, and they are foolish young men who think that sin alone should be sought for. The feast is over for me, I have eaten and drunk; I yield my place, do you eat and drink as I have; do you be young as I was. I have written it! The word is not worth erasure, if it is not true to-day it will be in two years hence; farewell! I yield my place, do you be young as I was, do you love youth as I did; remember you are the most interesting beings under heaven, for you all sacrifices will be made, you will be fêted and adored upon the condition of remaining young men. The feast is over for me, I yield my place, but I will not make this leavetaking more sorrowful than it is already by afflicting you with advice and instruction how to obtain what I have obtained. I have spoken bitterly against education, I will not strive to educate you, you will educate yourselves. Dear ones, dear ones, the world is your pleasure, you can use it at your will. Dear ones, I see you all about me still, I yield my place; but one more glass I will drink with you; and while drinking I would say my last word — were it possible I would be remembered by you as a young man: but I know too well that the young never realise that the old were not born old. Farewell.”
I shivered; the cold air of morning blew in my face, I closed the window, and sitting at the table, haggard and overworn, I continued my novel.
THE END
Memoirs of My Dead Life
CONTENTS
APOLOGIA PRO SCRIPTIS MEIS
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
APOLOGIA PRO SCRIPTIS MEIS
[THE APOLOGIA WHICH follows needs, perhaps, a word of explanation, not to clear up Mr. Moore’s text — that is as delightful, as irrelevantly definite, as paradoxically clear as anything this present wearer of the Ermine of English Literature has ever written — but to explain why it was written and why it is published. When the present publisher, who is hereinafter, in the words of Schopenhauer, “flattened against the wall of the Wisdom of the East,” first read and signified his pride in being able to publi
sh these “Memoirs,” the passages now consigned to “the late Lord — — ‘s library” were not in the manuscript. On the arrival of the final copy they were discovered, and thereby hangs an amusing tale, consisting of a series of letters which, in so far as they were written with a certain caustic, humorous Irish pen, have taken their high place among the “Curiosities of Literature.” The upshot of the matter was that the publisher, entangled in the “weeds” brought over by his Mayflower ancestors, found himself as against the author in the position of Mr. Coote as against Shakespeare; that is, the matter was so beautifully written that he had not the heart to decline it, and yet in parts so — what shall we say? — so full of the “Wisdom of the East” that he did not dare to publish it in the West. Whereupon he adopted the policy of Mr. Henry Clay, which is, no doubt, always a mistake. And the author, bearing in mind the make-up of that race of Man called publishers, gave way on condition that this APOLOGIA should appear without change. Here it is, without so much as the alteration of an Ibsen comma, and if the Mayflower “weeds” mere instrumental in calling it forth, then it is, after all, well that they grew. — THE PUBLISHER.]
Last month the post brought me two interesting letters, and the reader will understand how interesting they were to me when I tell him that one was from Mr. Sears, of the firm of Appleton, who not knowing me personally had written to Messrs. Heinemann to tell them that the firm he represented could not publish the “Memoirs” unless two stories were omitted; “The Lovers of Orelay,” and “In the Luxembourg Gardens,” — Messrs. Heinemann had forwarded the letter to me; my interest in the other letter was less direct, but the reader will understand that it was not less interesting when I tell that it came from the secretary of a certain charitable institution who had been reading the book in question, and now wrote to consult me on many points of life and conduct. He had been compelled to do so, for the reading of the “Memoirs” had disturbed his mind. The reader will agree with me that disturbed is probably the right word to use. To say that the book had undermined his convictions or altered his outlook on life would be an exaggeration. “Outlook on life” and “standard of conduct” are phrases from his own vocabulary, and they depict him.
“Your outlook on life is so different from mine that I can hardly imagine you being built of the same stuff as myself. Yet I venture to put my difficulty before you. It is, of course, no question of mental grasp or capacity or artistic endowment. I am, so far as these are concerned, merely the man in the street, the averagely endowed and the ordinarily educated. I call myself a Puritan and a Christian. I run continually against walls of convention, of morals, of taste, which may be all wrong, but which I should feel it wrong to climb over. You range over fields where my make-up forbids me to wander.
“Such frankness as yours is repulsive, forbidding, demoniac! You speak of woman as being the noblest subject of contemplation for man, but interpreted by your book and your experiences this seems in the last analysis to lead you right into sensuality, and what I should call illicit connections. Look at your story of Doris! I do want to know what you feel about that story in relation to right and wrong. Do you consider that all that Orelay adventure was put right, atoned, explained by the fact that Doris, by her mind and body, helped you to cultivate your artistic sense? Was Goethe right in looking upon all women merely as subjects for experiment, as a means of training his aesthetic sensibilities? Does it not justify the seduction of any girl by any man? And does not that take us straight back to the dissolution of Society? The degradation of woman (and of man) seems to be inextricably involved. Can you regard imperturbedly a thought of your own sister or wife passing through Doris’ Orelay experience?”
The address of the charitable institution and his name are printed on the notepaper, and I experience an odd feeling of surprise whenever this printed matter catches my eye, or when I think of it; not so much a sense of surprise as a sense of incongruity, and while trying to think how I might fling myself into some mental attitude which he would understand I could not help feeling that we were very far apart, nearly as far apart as the bird in the air and the fish in the sea. “And he seems to feel toward me as I feel toward him, for does he not say in his letter that it is difficult for him to imagine me built of the same stuff as himself?” On looking into his letter again I imagined my correspondent as a young man in doubt as to which road he shall take, the free road of his instincts up the mountainside with nothing but the sky line in front of him or the puddled track along which the shepherd drives the meek sheep; and I went to my writing table asking myself if my correspondent’s spiritual welfare was my real object, for I might be writing to him in order to exercise myself in a private debate before committing the article to paper, or if I was writing for his views to make use of them. One asks oneself these questions but receives no answer. He would supply me with a point of view opposed to my own, this would be an advantage; so feeling rather like a spy within the enemy’s lines on the eve of the battle I began my letter. “My Dear Sir: Let me assure you that we are ‘built of the same stuff.’ Were it not so you would have put my book aside. I even suspect we are of the same kin; were it otherwise you would not have written to me and put your difficulties so plainly before me.” Laying the pen aside I meditated quite a long while if I should tell him that I imagined him as a young man standing at the branching of the roads, deciding eventually that it would not be wise for me to let him see that reading between the lines I had guessed his difficulty to be a personal one. “We must proceed cautiously,” I said, “there may be a woman in the background.... The literary compliments he pays me and the interest that my book has excited are accidental, circumstantial. Life comes before literature, for certain he stands at the branching of the roads, and the best way I can serve him is by drawing his attention to the fallacy, which till now he has accepted as a truth, that there is one immutable standard of conduct for all men and all women.” But the difficulty of writing a sufficient letter on a subject so large and so intricate puzzled me and I sat smiling, for an odd thought had dropped suddenly into my mind. My correspondent was a Bible reader, no doubt, and it would be amusing to refer him to the chapter in Genesis where God is angry with our first parents because they had eaten of the tree of good and evil. “This passage” I said to myself, “has never been properly understood. Why was God angry? For no other reason except that they had set up a moral standard and could be happy no longer, even in Paradise. According to this chapter the moral standard is the origin of all our woe. God himself summoned our first parents before him, and in what plight did they appear? We know how ridiculous the diminutive fig leaf makes a statue seem in our museums; think of the poor man and woman attired in fig leaves just plucked from the trees! I experienced a thrill of satisfaction that I should have been the first to understand a text that men have been studying for thousands of years, turning each word over and over, worrying over it, all in vain, yet through no fault of the scribe who certainly underlined his intention. Could he have done it better than by exhibiting our first parents covering themselves with fig leaves, and telling how after getting a severe talking to from the Almighty they escaped from Paradise pursued by an angel? The story can have no other meaning, and that I am the first to expound it is due to no superiority of intelligence, but because my mind is free. But I must not appear to my correspondent as an exegetist. Turning to his letter again I read:
“I am sorely puzzled. Is your life all of a piece? Are your ‘Memoirs’ a pose? I can’t think the latter, for you seem sincere and frank to the verge of brutality (or over). But what is your standard of conduct? Is there a right and a wrong? Is everything open to any man? Can you refer me now to any other book of yours in which you view life steadily and view it whole from our standpoint? Forgive my intrusion. You see I don’t set myself as a judge, but you sweep away apparently all my standards. And you take your reader so quietly and closely into your confidence that you tempt a response. I see your many admirable points, but your center of li
ving is not mine, and I do want to know as a matter of enormous human interest what your subsumptions are. I cannot analyze or express myself with literary point as you do, but you may see what I aim at. It is a bigger question to me than the value or force of your book. It goes right to the core of the big things, and I approach you as one man of limited outlook to another of wider range.”
The reader will not suspect me of vanity for indulging in these quotations; he will see readily that my desire is to let the young man paint his own portrait, and I hope he will catch glimpses as I seem to do of an earnest spirit, a sort of protestant Father Gogarty, hesitating on the brink of his lake. “There is a lake in every man’s heart” — but I must not quote my own writings. If I misinterpret him ... the reader will be able to judge, having the letter before him. But if my view of him is right, my task is a more subtle one than merely to point out that he will seek in vain for a moral standard whether he seeks it in the book of Nature or in the book of God. I should not move him by pointing out that in the Old Testament we are told an eye for an eye is our due, and in the New the rede is to turn the left cheek after receiving a blow on the right. Nor would he be moved by referring him to the history of mankind, to the Boer War, for instance, or the massacres which occur daily in Russia; everybody knows more or less the history of mankind, and to know it at all is to know that every virtue has at some time or other been a vice. But man cannot live by negation alone, and to persuade my correspondent over to our side it might be well to tell him that if there be no moral standard he will nevertheless find a moral idea if he looks for it in Nature. I reflected how I would tell him that he must not be disappointed because the idea changes and adapts itself to circumstance, and sometimes leaves us for long intervals; if he would make progress he must learn to understand that the moral world only becomes beautiful when we relinquish our ridiculous standards of what is right and wrong, just as the firmament became a thousand times more wonderful and beautiful when Galileo discovered that the earth moved. Had Kant lived before the astronomer he would have been a great metaphysician, but he would not have written the celebrated passage “Two things fill the soul with undying and ever-increasing admiration, the night with its heaven of stars above us and in our hearts the moral law.” The only fault I find with this passage is that I read the word “law” where I expected to read the word “idea,” for the word “law” seems to imply a Standard, and Kant knew there is none. Is the fault with the translator or with Kant, who did not pick his words carefully? The metaphysician spent ten years thinking out the “Critique of Pure Reason” and only six months writing it; no doubt his text might be emendated with advantage. If there was a moral standard the world within us would be as insignificant as the firmament was when the earth was the center of the universe and all the stars were little candles and Jehovah sat above them, a God who changed his mind and repented, a whimsical, fanciful God who ordered the waters to rise so that his creatures might be overwhelmed in the flood, all except one family (I need not repeat here the story of Noah’s Ark and the doctrine of the Atonement) if there was one fixed standard of right and wrong, applicable to everybody, black, white, yellow, and red men alike, an eternal standard that circumstance could not change. Those who believe in spite of every proof to the contrary that there is a moral standard cannot appreciate the beautiful analogy which Kant drew, the moral idea within the heart and the night with its heaven of stars above us. “It is strange,” I reflected, “how men can go on worrying themselves about Rome and Canterbury four hundred years after the discovery that the earth moved, and involuntarily a comparison rose up in my mind of a squabble between two departments in an office after the firm has gone bankrupt.... But how to get all these vagrant thoughts into a sheet of paper? St. Paul himself could not proselytize within such limitations, and apparently what I wrote was not sufficient to lead my correspondent out of the narrow lanes of conventions and prejudices into the open field of inquiry. Turning to his letter, I read it again, misjudging him, perhaps ... but the reader shall form his own estimate.
