by George Moore
The disposal of the vase caused me a great deal of anxiety, and I foresaw that unless I hit upon some idea whereby I could safeguard it from injury for ever, my project would be deprived of half its value. As I sat thinking I heard a noise of feet suddenly on the staircase. “They are bringing down my mother’s coffin,” I said, and at that moment the door was opened and I was told that the funeral procession was waiting for me. My brother, and various relatives and friends, were waiting in the hall; black gloves were on every hand, crepe streamed from every hat, “All the paraphernalia of grief,” I muttered; “nothing is wanting.” My soul revolted against this mockery. “But why should I pity my mother? She wished to lie beside her husband. And far be it from me to criticise such a desire!”
The coffin was lifted upon the hearse. A gardener of old time came up to ask me if I wished there to be any crying. I did not at first understand what he meant; he began to explain, and I began to understand that he meant the cries with which the Western peasant follows his dead to the grave. Horrible savagery! and I ordered that there was to be no keening; but three or four women, unable to contain themselves, rushed forward and began a keen. It was difficult to try to stop them. I fancy that every one looked round to see if there were any clouds in the sky, for it was about a mile and a half to the chapel; we would have to walk three miles at least, and if it rained, we should probably catch heavy colds. We thought of the damp of the wood, and the drip from the melancholy boughs of yew and fir growing about that sepulchre on the hillside. But there was no danger of rain; Castle Island lay in the misted water, faint and grey, reminding me of what a splendid burial I might have if the law did not intervene to prevent me. And as we followed the straggling grey Irish road, with scant meagre fields on either side — fields that seemed to be on the point of drifting into marsh land — past the houses of the poor people, I tried to devise a scheme for the safeguarding of the vase. But Rameses the Second had not succeeded in securing his body against violation; it had been unswathed; I had seen his photograph in the Strand, and where he failed, how should I succeed?
Twenty priests had been engaged to sing a Mass, and whilst they chanted, my mind continued to roam, seeking the unattainable, seeking that which Rameses had been unable to find. Unexpectedly, at the very moment when the priest began to intone the Pater Noster, I thought of the deep sea as the only clean and holy receptacle for the vase containing my ashes. If it were dropped where the sea is deepest it would not reach the bottom, but would hang suspended in dark, moveless depths where only a few fishes range, in a cool, deep grave “made without hands, in a world without stain,” surrounded by a lovely revel of Bacchanals, youths and maidens, and wild creatures from the woods, man in his primitive animality. But nothing lasts for ever. In some millions of years the sea will begin to wither, and the vase containing me will sink (my hope is that it will sink down to some secure foundation of rocks to stand in the airless and waterless desert that the earth will then be).
Rameses failed, but I shall succeed. Surrounded by dancing youths and maidens, my tomb shall stand on a high rock in the solitude of the extinct sea of an extinct planet. Millions of years will pass away, and the earth, after having lain dead for a long winter, as it does now for a few weeks under frost and snow, will, with all other revolving planets, become absorbed in the sun, and the sun itself will become absorbed in greater suns, Sirius and his like. In the matters of grave moment, millions of years are but seconds; billions convey very little to our minds. At the end of, let us say, some billion years the ultimate moment towards which everything from the beginning has been moving will be reached; and from that moment the tide will begin to flow out again, the eternal dispersal of things will begin again; suns will be scattered abroad, and in tremendous sun-quakes planets will be thrown off; in loud earth-quakes these planets will throw off moons. Millions of years will pass away, the earth will become cool, and out of the primal mud life will begin again in the shape of plants, and then of fish, and then of animals. It is like madness, but is it madder than Christian doctrine? and I believe that billions of years hence, billions and billions of years hence, I shall be sitting in the same room as I sit now, writing the same lines as I am now writing: I believe that again, a few years later, my ashes will swing in the moveless and silent depths of the Pacific Ocean, and that the same figures, the same nymphs, and the same fauns will dance around me again.
THE END
Hail and Farewell
CONTENTS
ART WITHOUT THE ARTIST
AVE OVERTURE
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
SALVE
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
VALE
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
ART WITHOUT THE ARTIST
AT THE END of the ‘forties Ruskin preached: Let us abandon ourselves unreservedly to Nature, and his teaching gave birth to Pre-Raphaelitism, unless indeed the truth is that the painters Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt stood up one evening in a studio in Newman Street, all three crying together: If we purify ourselves in ignorance and put our trust in Nature, we shall rediscover the innocency of the painters of the fifteenth century. So did Robert Ross relate to me the story of the movement, and perceiving that he was intimately acquainted with it, I often tried to persuade him to write it: but he could not be persuaded, for to do so, he said, would deprive him of the pleasure of talking it, and I was disappointed, for no more perfect beginning of a story was ever invented than the three — a Robespierre, a Danton, a Marat, standing up together proclaiming their faith in Nature. A little too dramatic and self-conscious they were for an aesthetic Revolution, some may think, but for many no more than a few moments of reflection are needed to remember that the natural would be for the painters to discover the truth themselves and find their Apostle afterwards in Ruskin.
But however our feelings go, whether in the direction of Ruskin or the painters, we must not forget that Ruskin was a craftsman, a master of the lead pencil, whose drawings bear comparison with the best of their kind, if we except Turner’s. His architectural drawings must have been admired by Whistler in secret, and there are drawings in which his pencil followed a range of hills revealing the beauty of every fold and the swerve of every outline. An exquisite draughtsman! and the question now comes whether these drawings were done in the ‘forties. If Robert Ross were alive he could tell me; but assuming that some were accomplished about that time and were accompanied by literary comment (which is not unlikely, his pen and pencil being as dependent one upon the other as the musical notes of a song are upon the words they enhance and illustrate), we find ourselves unable to consider Ruskin as a mere propagandist, and are obliged to admit that his handicraft counted for a little in the declaration that was destined to give to England an art entirely her own.
Hitherto England had derived her inspiration from abroad, but the Pre-Raphaelite movement was English as a Surrey hedgerow. But before the hedgerow there were scattered bushes, and before the Pre-Raphaelite movement there were quakings and stirrings. Mulready is reported to have said: Yes, but what you tell me is no more than what I have been trying to do all my l
ife! words that tell plainly how unable Mulready was by temperament to appreciate the love of beauty that inspired the brotherhood and directed their choice to beautiful things with a view to making them seem even more beautiful than they were by a beautiful handicraft, of which I should speak at length if the subject of this paper was the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood or Pre-Raphaelitism. As it is neither one nor the other I shall say no more than that the desire of Man to discover the source of things led critics even to the beginning of the century, to William Dyce, and to hang a pretty, romantic movement round the neck of one of the most prosaic of all painters, dry and punctilious.
So things are misrepresented in this world even by the best intentioned! But truth is stronger than good intentions, and of late years Dyce’s name as a possible claimant has been dropped and the Newman Street episode accepted as the authorised version.
A small thing Pre-Raphaelitism may be, no more than a daisy in the great flower garden of the world’s art; but a daisy that is your own is perhaps better than a sunflower that is somebody else’s, and it is with reluctance I remark that Rossetti was an Italian — born in England, nurtured in England, it is true — and that Millais came from the Channel Islands and was perhaps of French stock. But Holman Hunt’s English blood has never been called into question, happily; so we are in possession of an artistic movement more or less exclusively our own, and one that lasted more than twenty years. The dates are approximately from 1850 to 1870. Millais was painting the three Miss Armstrongs in Cromwell Place in the ‘seventies, and drooping, the movement lingered on still a few years, till in the ‘eighties a great painter, James M’Neill Whistler, felt himself called upon to pronounce what may be described as a funeral oration over it. None was necessary, for the Pre-Raphaelite movement was dead and beyond hope of resurrection before a goodly assembly of ladies and gentlemen was called to the Dudley Gallery to hear the artist exalted, placed above Nature, and his business declared to be to take hints from Nature, to interpret and to amplify, to use Nature as a musician uses the piano. All the same, James M’Neill (I drop the Whistler, the name being an absurd one and a disparagement to his painting) could not do else than concede a part of every picture to Nature, an admission that will be regarded as a weakness by many who have followed after him. In his Ten o’Clock he admits that Nature can on occasions create a picture:
‘The sun blares, the wind blows from the east, the sky is bereft of cloud, and without, all is of iron. The windows of the Crystal Palace are seen from all points of London. The holiday-maker rejoices in the glorious day, and the painter turns aside to shut his eyes.
‘How little this is understood, and how dutifully the casual in Nature is accepted as sublime, may be gathered from the unlimited admiration daily produced by a very foolish sunset.
‘The dignity of the snow-capped mountain is lost in distinctness, but the joy of the tourist is to recognise the traveller on the top. The desire to see, for the sake of seeing, is, with the mass, alone the one to be gratified, hence the delight in detail.
‘And when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairyland is before us — then the wayfarer hastens home; the working man and the cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleasure, cease to understand, as they have ceased to see, and Nature, who, for once, has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master — her son in that he loves her, her master in that he knows her.’
When the beautifully proportioned brown, square book drops upon my lap, my mind reverts to the Nocturnes, and I have not long to wait before a pale grey-green waste of waters rises up in my thoughts, with shadowy shores, receding lights, and on the horizon dimmer lights, and half submerged in the swelling tide a trailing seaweed of lovely design. A mingling of night and day is on the waters, and the artist hears the song that Nature sings, this time in tune, and returns home to report it in paint and afterwards in words so beautiful that we do not forget the warehouses like palaces in the night, nor the artist who declares himself Nature’s son and master — her son in that he loves her, her master in that he knows her. A beautiful prose this is, beautiful as the artist’s paint. Can I say more? And it is with regret that I pick a hole in it; but my argument compels. James M’Neill’s point is that Nature is rarely an artist. But may we not say the same of Man? Indeed, James M’Neill says it on the first page of his book. Are not then Man and Nature equal, both of them being seldom artists? James M’Neill would have found no way out of the dilemma, and if he had sought to do so I should have asked him to come to the Royal Academy with me. Nature sings in tune many times in the course of a single year, and sings in vain, there being no artist about who understands her; and taking Nature’s adventures into painting as being on the whole equal to those of Man, we will turn to Nature’s novels.
A novel is the story of a man’s life, and I think we shall find that Nature provides ends for lives more strangely significant than any invented by story-tellers. The end of Beau Brummel at Nice seems to me one of Nature’s triumphs; in it she has surpassed anything that I remember for the moment in Tolstoy, or Turgenev, or Tchekov, or Balzac. We all have a hearsay knowledge of Beau Brummel. We have heard, or think we have heard, that he came to London with a fifty-pound note in his pocket, no more, and a talent for dressing himself so remarkable that he soon began to set the fashion in clothes and was much sought after by tailors. His wit was ready and he reigned in London for twenty years, till one evening he said, addressing the Regent: George, ring the bell! The Regent rang the bell, and the servant was told to send round for Mr Brummel’s carriage. Everybody wondered, and everybody understood that the knell of his popularity had been rung. The friends who had endured the Beau’s authority, accepting rebuffs, sarcasms, and insolences of every kind complacently, foresaw their release from tyranny in the incident, and soon after, if not immediately after, the Beau found himself without a friend in London. And for some years, I know not for how many, he lived in Nice with an ever-fading brain, without friends or money, his only entertainment being the donning of his gala clothes of other days and listening to his servant announcing the high-sounding titles of his former friends, till the cracking of the sconces restored him to sanity and the sadness thereof.
For another great conqueror, Napoleon, Nature invented an end that equals in beauty the one she devised for Beau Brummel: she placed him on the rock of St Helena to watch and listen to the Atlantic, a wonderful end. And Tolstoy’s end is very wonderful if we connect it with the strange morality that he preached from the Steppes, a veritable Jeremiah, telling that a wife who left her husband would meet a violent end; however kind and good her lover may have been, she would not escape her fate. We are asked to believe in Anna Karenina’s suicide, and we do whilst the book is in our hands; but we do not follow the great writer in The Kreutzer Sonata, for the morality preached in that book is that unless we marry a woman who is physically disagreeable to us, we shall plunge of a certainty a stiletto through the exquisite jersey that tempted us in the beginning. Mad indeed is the moralist who would reform our natures; and Nature, having watched the preacher all the while, decreed an end the significance of which cannot escape even the most casual reader: a flight from his wife and home in his eighty-second year, and his death in the waiting-room of a wayside railway station in the early hours of a March morning.
