by George Moore
The correlation of the end of a story to the story itself is that of the hand to the arm; neither is complete without the other. The end of Héloïse and Abélard is very beautiful. Nature furnished it, together with a large part of the narrative, for Nature does not stint her literary activities to ends. Sometimes she undertakes the entire composition, as in Hail and Farewell; every episode and every character was a gift from Nature, even the subject itself. And I shall not be misunderstood if due attention be paid to the call that was vouchsafed to me whilst walking in the Hospital Road, and if the fact be borne in mind that from that day forward I never seemed to have doubted that I was needed in Ireland, and that the words: Highly favoured am I among authors! rose to my lips instinctively, I might say incontinently, as I opened my garden gate one morning in May, for the true significance of the words was not perceived by me whilst I worked at Nature’s bidding, taking down her many surprising inventions, thinking they were my own because they happened to come my way. For Nature is a sly puss; she sets us working, but we know nothing of her designs; and for years I believed myself to be the author of Hail and Farewell, whereas I was nothing more than the secretary, and though the reader may doubt me in the sentence I am now writing, he will believe that I am telling no more than the truth when the narrative leads him to Coole Park and he meets the hieratic Yeats and Lady Gregory out walking, seeking living speech from cottage to cottage, Yeats remaining seated under the stunted hawthorn usually found growing at the corner of the field, Lady Gregory braving the suffocating interior for the sacred cause of Idiom. And the feeling that there is something providential in the art of Hail and Farewell will be strengthened when the reader comes upon Yeats standing lost in meditation before a white congregation of swans assembled on the lake, looking himself in his old cloak like a huge umbrella left behind by some picnic-party; and raising his eyes from the book, the reader will say: This is Nature, not Art! and his thoughts reverting to the name upon the title-page, he will add: A puny author indeed, who merits a severe reprimand, if not punishment: with such a figure as Yeats he should have created something overtopping Don Quixote. He has done well, of course, for with such material he could not have done badly, but...
Whilst Yeats contemplates the lake and its water-fowl, esurient Edward devours huge loin chops, followed by stewed chicken and platesful of curried eggs, for he is suffering terrific qualms of conscience. And finding that food cannot allay thief, he founds a choir for the singing of Palestrina Masses, hoping to do something for his Church; but the only result of Palestrina is the emptying of two churches. How the emptying of the two churches came about I will suffer the reader to find out for himself, for I feel that the episode will once more strengthen the conviction in him that the book he is reading is Nature’s own book, wrought by providential hands; but when he meets AE in Salve he will discard the belief that Nature is the real author of the book and will attribute the authorship to Erin. On reflection it may seem to him that the name Erin has been turned to derision by much bad poetry in modern times, and being a student of ancient Ireland the name Banva may occur to him. Banva was Ireland’s name when the Druids flourished, and AE is the last believer in Druid mysteries. Yeats is hieratic, Edward is esurient (eating procured his death), but AE is neither hieratic nor esurient; indeed, he is apt to forget his food, so subject is he to ideas, so willing to deliver everybody of his ideas, if he have one. He has helped all and sundry through the labours of parturition, with the single exception of Lady Gregory, who delivers herself, and very easily, of her own plays and stories. Now is there a word that would represent him as hieratic represents Yeats, as esurient represents Edward? I am sure there is a word — yes, it is coming, it is coming ... I’ve got it, maieutic! The maieutic AE! A trilogy, if ever there was one, each character so far above anything one meets in fiction that the reader’s thoughts will return to Banva as the author, thinly disguised by the puerile name of George Moore, of this extraordinary work. And if any doubt regarding the authorship still remains in his mind, it will be dispelled, I think, by the labours of Plunkett and Gill in Ireland during the ten years which Hail and Farewell chronicles.
Yeats and dear Edward and AE are outside and beyond anything that has ever appeared before in print; there is no standard by which we can judge them; but in the case of Plunkett and Gill there is a standard, and a literary standard. The reader has read or has heard of Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet, two clerks whom a fortune beguiles from their offices and an evil spirit urges to experiment in all directions, one of which is horticulture, and their efforts produce a melon that has all the qualities a melon should have except one — the monstrous fruit is uneatable. France has laughed at the joke for forty years, appreciating the point of it: the wrecking of a theory by a simple fact overlooked by the theorists; and Plunkett and Gill reproduced the originals almost line for line, with this difference, that they exceeded the originals, which is not surprising if the theory advanced in this paper be true, that Nature’s inventions exceed the artist’s. Whosoever doubts this I would invite to compare Flaubert’s invention of the melon with some of the disasters that followed Plunkett’s and Gill’s philanthropic career in Ireland. Some of these disasters the reader will discover in the book, succinctly related, but the crowning disaster is the one that I hope will engage his attention. Inspired by a very noble desire for the advancement of Banva, it occurred to them that the breed of Irish asses might be improved; and having sent to the library for all the books on the subject, the twain spent six days reading, with a view to avoiding the mistakes that had been made hitherto in the breeding of asses. On the seventh day several hundred pounds were sent to Alexandria for the purchase of sires — but no, I will not deflower the joke by reporting what happened to the unfortunate asses on the voyage. A broad smile will illumine the face of the reader and the smile will wax broader till he bursts into laughter, and when he comes to the impotent jackass that brays at Foxrock, he will cry aloud: Bravo! and clap his hands. But I would not give a false impression of Banva’s book. The reader will find many touching incidents in it. Tchekov should have written the story of the snow lion; he would have, had not Banva been busy dictating it to me.
So far my task of introducing Hail and Farewell to the reader has been an easy one. All the merits of the book belong to Banva, and the demerits, alas! to me. In this new edition I have not, needless to say, meddled with Banva’s inventions and with the characters that she brought into the book. For me to lay hands upon these would be as unseemly as if I were to undertake to rearrange, to emendate, to revise the work of some great author — more unseemly, perhaps, for Banva is a spiritual entity; the Irish themselves are always willing to strike a blow for Banva. So my editing was limited to re-knitting and mending the literary texture, which seemed to me in many places loose and casual. I have done my best with it, and even now, despite all my stitching and unstitching, as Yeats would say, I have not woven a garment worthy of Banva.
G.M.
AVE OVERTURE
IN 1894 EDWARD Martyn and I were living in the Temple, I in a garret in King’s Bench Walk, he in a garret in Pump Court. At the time I was very poor and had to work for my living; all the hours of the day were spent writing some chapter of Esther Waters or of Modern Painting; and after dinner I often returned to my work. But towards midnight a wish to go out to speak to somebody would come upon me: Edward returned about that time from his club, and I used to go to Pump Court, sure of finding him seated in his high, canonical chair, sheltered by a screen, reading his book, his glass of grog beside him, his long clay pipe in his hand; and we used to talk literature and drama until two or three in the morning.
I wish I knew enough Irish to write my plays in Irish, he said one night, speaking out of himself suddenly.
You’d like to write your plays in Irish! I exclaimed. I thought nobody did anything in Irish except bring turf from the bog and say prayers.
Edward did not answer, and when I pressed him he said:
You’ve always lived in France and England, and have forgotten Ireland.
You’re wrong: I remember the boatmen speaking to each other in Irish on Lough Carra! And Father James Browne preaching in Irish in Carnacun! But I’ve never heard of anybody wanting to write in it ... and plays, too!
Everything is different now; a new literature is springing up.
In Irish? I said; and my brain fluttered with ideas regarding the relation of the poem to the language in which it is born.
A new language to enwomb new thoughts, I cried out to Edward.
On the subject of nationality in art one can talk a long while, and it was past one o’clock when I groped my way down the rough-timbered staircase, lit by dusty lanterns, and wandered from Pump Court into the cloister, loitering by the wig-maker’s shop in the dim corner, so like what London must have been once, some hundreds of years after the Templars.
On my way back to King’s Bench Walk I passed their church! And, standing before the carven porch, I thought what a happy accident it was that Edward Martyn and myself had drifted into the Temple, the last vestige of old London — combining, as some one has said, the silence of the cloister with the licence of the brothel — Edward attracted by the church of the Templars, I by the fleeting mistress, so it pleased me to think.
One is making for the southern gate, hoping that the aged porter will pull the string and let her pass out without molesting her with observations, and, when the door closed behind her, there seemed to be nothing in the Temple but silence and moonlight: a round moon sailing westward let fall a cold ray along the muddy foreshore and along the river, revealing some barges moored in mid-stream.
The tide is out, I said, and I wondered at the spots and gleams of light, amid the shrubs in the garden, till I began to wonder at my own wonderment, for, after all, this was not the first time the moon had sailed over Lambeth. Even so the spectacle of the moonlit gardens and the river excited me to the point of making me forget my bed; and, watching the white torch of Jupiter and the red ember of Mars, I began to think of the soul which Edward Martyn had told me I had lost in Paris and in London, and if it were true that whoever casts off tradition is like a tree transplanted into uncongenial soil. Turgenev was of that opinion: Russia can do without any one of us, but none of us can do without Russia — one of his sentimental homilies grown wearisome from constant repetition, true, perhaps, of Russia, but utterly untrue of Ireland. Far more true would it be to say that an Irishman must fly from Ireland if he would be himself. Englishmen, Scotchmen, Jews, do well in Ireland — Irishmen never; even the patriot has to leave Ireland to get a hearing. We must leave Ireland; and I did well to listen in Montmartre. All the same, a remembrance of Edward Martyn’s conversation could not be stifled. Had I not myself written, only half conscious of the truth, that art must be parochial in the beginning to become cosmopolitan in the end? And isn’t a great deal of the savour of a poem owing to the language in which it is written? If Dante had continued his comedy in Latin! He wrote two cantos in Latin! Or was it two stanzas?
So Ireland is awaking at last out of the great sleep of Catholicism! And I walked about the King’s Bench Walk, thinking what a wonderful thing it would be to write a book in a new language or in an old language revived and sharpened to literary usage for the first time. We men of letters are always sad when we hear of a mode of literary expression not available to us, or a subject we cannot treat. After discussing the Humbert case for some time, Dujardin and a friend fell to talking of what a wonderful subject it would have been for Balzac, and I listened to them in sad silence. Moore is sad, Dujardin said. He is always sad when he hears a subject which he may never hope to write.
The Humbert case being involved in such a mass of French jurisprudence that — And they laughed at me.
But in the Temple, in Edward’s rooms, I had heard that a new literature was springing up in my own parish, and forthwith began to doubt if the liberty my father’s death had given me was an unmixed blessing. The talent I brought into the world might have produced rarer fruit if it had been cultivated less sedulously. Ballinrobe or the Nouvelle Athènes — which?
The bitterness of my meditation was relieved, somewhat, on remembering that those who had remained in Ireland had written nothing of any worth — miserable stuff, no narrative of any seriousness, only broad farce. Lever and Lover and a rudiment, a peasant whose works I had once looked into, and whose name it was impossible to remember. Strange that Ireland should have produced so little literature, for there is a pathos in Ireland, in its people, in its landscape, and in its ruins. And that night I roamed in imagination from castle to castle, following them from hillside to hillside, along the edges of the lake, going up a staircase built between the thickness of the walls, and on to the ramparts, remembering that Castle Carra must have been a great place some four or five hundred years ago. Only the centre of the castle remains; the headland is covered with ruins, overgrown with thorn and hazel; but great men must have gone forth from Castle Carra; and Castle Island and Castle Hag were defended with battle-axe and sword, and these were wielded as tremendously, from island to island, and along the shores of my lake, as ever they were under the walls of Troy. But of what use are such deeds if there be no chroniclers to relate them? Heroes are dependent upon chroniclers, and Ireland never produced any, only a few rather foolish bards, no one who could rank with Froissart; and I thought of my friend up in Pump Court writing by a window, deep set in a castle wall, a history of his times. That was just the sort of thing he might do, and do very well, for he is painstaking. An heroic tale of robbers issuing from the keep of Castle Carra and returning with cattle and a beautiful woman would be more than he could accomplish. I had heard of Grania for the first time that night, and she might be written about; but not by me, for only what my eye has seen, and my heart has felt, interests me. A book about the turbulent life of Castle Carra would be merely inventions, cela ne serait que du chiqué; I should be following in the tracks of other marchands de camelote, Scott and Stevenson, and their like. But modern Ireland! What of it as a subject for artistic treatment?
And noiselessly, like a ghost, modern Ireland glided into my thoughts, ruinous as ancient Ireland, more so, for she is clothed not only with the ruins of the thirteenth century, but with the ruins of every succeeding century. In Ireland we have ruins of several centuries standing side by side, from the fifth to the eighteenth. By the ruins of Castle Carra stand the ruins of a modern house, to which the chieftains of Castle Carra retired when brigandage declined; and the life that was lived there is evinced by the great stone fox standing in the middle of the courtyard — was evinced, for within the last few years the fox and the two hounds of gigantic stature on either side of the gateway have been overthrown.
When I was a small child I used to go with my mother and governess to Castle Carra for goat’s milk, and we picnicked in the great banqueting-hall overgrown with ivy. If ever the novel I am dreaming is written, Ruin and Weed shall be its title — ruined castles in a weedy country. In Ireland men and women die without realising any of the qualities they bring into the world, and I remembered those I had known long ago, dimly, and in fragments, as one remembers pictures — the colour of a young woman’s hair, an old woman’s stoop, a man’s bulk; and then a group of peasants trooped past me — Mulhair recognised by his stubbly chin, Pat Plunket by his voice, Carabine by his eyes — and these were followed by recollection of an old servant, Appleby, his unstarched collar and the frock-coat too large for him which he wore always, and his covert dislike of the other servants in the house, especially the old housemaids.
All these people have gone to their rest; they are all happily forgotten, no one ever thinks of them; but to me they are clearer than they were in life, because the present changes so quickly that we are not aware of our life at the moment of living it. But the past never changes; it is like a long picture-gallery. Many of the pictures are covered with grey cloths, as is usual in picture-galleries; but we
can uncover any picture we wish to see, and not infrequently a cloth will fall as if by magic, revealing a forgotten one, and it is often as clear in outline and as fresh in paint as a Van der Meer.
That night in the Temple I met a memory as tender in colour and outline as the Van der Meer in the National Gallery. It was at the end of a long summer’s day, five-and-twenty years ago, that I first saw her among some ruins in the Dublin mountains, and in her reappearance she seemed so startlingly like Ireland that I felt she formed part of the book I was dreaming, and that nothing of the circumstances in which I found her could be changed or altered. My thoughts fastened on to her, carrying me out of the Temple, back to Ireland, to the time when the ravages of the Land League had recalled me from the Nouvelle Athènes — a magnificent young Montmartrian, with a blonde beard à la Capoul, trousers hanging wide over the foot, and a hat so small that my sister had once mistaken it for her riding-hat. And still in my Montmartrian clothes I had come back from the West with a story in my head, which could only be written in some poetical spot, probably in one of the old houses among the Dublin mountains. And I had set out to look for one on a hot day in July, when the trees in Merrion Square seemed like painted trees, so still were they in the grey silence; the sparrows had ceased to twitter; the carmen spat without speaking, too weary to solicit my fare; and the horses continued to doze on the bridles. Even the red brick, I said, seems to weary in the heat. Too hot a day for walking, but I must walk if I’m to sleep tonight.
My way led through Stephen’s Green, and the long decay of Dublin that began with the Union engaged my thoughts, and I fared sighing for the old-time mansions that had been turned into colleges and presbyteries. There were lodging-houses in Harcourt Street, and beyond Harcourt Street the town dwindled, first into small shops, then into shabby-genteel villas; at Terenure, I was among cottages, and within sight of purple hills, and when the Dodder was crossed, at the end of the village street, a great wall began, high as a prison wall; it might well have been mistaken for one, but the trees told it was a park wall, and the great ornamental gateway was a pleasant object. It came into sight suddenly — a great pointed edifice finely designed, and after admiring it I wandered on, crossing an old grey bridge. The Dodder again, I said. And the beautiful green country unfolded, a little melancholy for lack of light and shade, for lack, I added, of a ray to gild the fields. A beautiful country falling into ruin. The beauty of neglect — yet there is none in thrift. My eyes followed the long herds wandering knee-deep in succulent herbage, and I remembered that every other country I had seen was spoilt more or less by human beings, but this country was nearly empty, only an occasional herdsman to remind me of myself in this drift of ruined suburb, with a wistful line of mountains enclosing it, and one road curving among the hills, and everywhere high walls — parks, in the centre of which stand stately eighteenth-century mansions. How the eighteenth century sought privacy! I said, and walked on dreaming of the lives that were lived in these sequestered domains.
