by George Moore
Only once can I accuse myself of any sudden vanity called out of the depths by the sight of a newspaper placard — once certain words excited in me a shameful sense of triumph at, shall I say, having got the better of somebody? — only once, and it did not endure longer than while walking past St Clement Danes. And I am less ashamed to speak of the joy I experienced five years after the first publication of Esther Waters. The task has to be got through, I said, throwing myself into an armchair, having left my friends at rehearsal. The hospital scenes were not liked, but the story soon picked up again, and when the end came I sat wondering how it could have happened to me to write the book that among all books I should have cared most to write, and to have written it so much better than I ever dreamed it could be written.
The joy of art is a harmless joy, and no man should begrudge me the pleasure that I got from my first reading of Esther Waters. He would not, though he were the most selfish in the world, if he knew the unhappiness and anxieties that my writings always cause me. A harmless joy, the reading of Esther Waters, truly, and it is something to think of that the book itself, though pure of all intention to do good — that is to say, to alleviate material suffering — has perhaps done more good than any novel written in my generation. It is no part of my business nor my desire to speak of the Esther Waters Home — I am more concerned with the evil I know the book to have done than with the good. It did good to others — to me it did evil, and that evil I could see all around me when I raised my eyes from my proofs. At the end of a large, handsome, low-ceilinged flat on the first floor, very different from the garret in King’s Bench Walk, hung a grey portrait by Manet; on another wall a mauve morning by Monet, willows emerging from a submerged meadow; on another an April girl sitting in an arbour, her golden hair glittering against green leaves, by Berthe Morisot. The flowered carpet and all the pretty furniture scattered over it represented evil, and the comfortable cook who came to ask me what I would like for dinner. We read in the newspapers of the evil a book may produce — the vain speculation of erotic men and women; but here is a case of a thoroughly healthy book having demoralised its author. How is such evil to be restrained? All virtuous men and women may well ask, and I hope that they may put their heads together and find out a way.
In Paris I had lived very much as I lived in Victoria Street, but it had never occurred to me that I showed any merit by accepting, without murmuring, the laborious life in the Temple that a sudden reverse of fortune had forced upon me; it was no suffering for me to live in a garret, wearing old clothes, and spending from two shillings to half a crown on my dinner, because I felt, and instinctively, that that is the natural life of a man of letters; and I can remember my surprise when my brother told me one day that my agent had said he never knew anybody so economical as George. Some time after Tom Ruttledge himself came panting up my stairs, and during the course of conversation regarding certain large sums of money which I heard of for the first time, he said: Well, you have spent very little money during the last few years. And when I spoke of the folly of other landlords, he added: There are very few who would be content to live in a cock-loft like this. And looking round my room I realised that what he said was true; I was living in a cock-loft, bitterly cold in winter and stifling in summer; the sun beating on the windows fiercely in the afternoon, obliging me to write in my shirt-sleeves. And it so happened that a few days after Tom Ruttledge’s visit a lady called by appointment — a lady whom I was so anxious to see that I did not wait to put on my coat before opening the door. My plight and the fatigue of three long flights of stairs caused her to speak her mind somewhat plainly.
A gentleman, she said, wouldn’t ask a lady to come to such a place; and he wouldn’t forget to put his coat on before opening the door to her. But you have received me dressed still more lightly.
With me it is all or nothing, she said laughing, her ill humour passing away suddenly. All the same, I realised that she was right; the Temple is too rough and too public a place for a lady, and it is an inconvenient place, too, for in the Temple it is only possible to ask a lady to dinner during forty days in the year. Only for forty days are there dinners in the hall; the sutler then will send over an excellent dinner of homely British fare to any one living in the Temple. She used to enjoy these dinners, but they did not happen often enough; and it was the necessity of providing myself with a suitable trysting place that drew me out of the poverty to which I owe so much of my literature, and despite many premonitions compelled me to sign the lease of a handsome flat. The flat sent me forth collecting pretty furniture which she never saw, for she never came to Victoria Street. I should have written better if I had remained in the Temple, within hearing and seeing of the poor folk that run in and out of Temple Lane like mice, picking up a living in the garrets, for, however poor one may be there is always somebody by one who is still poorer. Esther Waters was a bane — the book snatched me, not only out of that personal poverty which is necessary to the artist, but out of the way of all poverty.
My poor laundress used to tell me every day of her troubles, and through her I became acquainted with many other poor people, and they awakened spontaneous sympathy in me, and by doing them kindnesses I was making honey for myself without knowing it. Esther Waters and Tom Ruttledge robbed me of all my literary capital; and I had so little, only a few years of poverty. I’ve forgotten how long I lived in the Strand lodging described in My Confessions — two years, I think; I was five or six in Dane’s Inn, and seven in the Temple — about twelve lean years in all; and twelve lean years are not enough, nor was my poverty hard enough. The last I saw of literature was when my poor laundress came to see me in Victoria Street. Standing in the first position of dancing (she used to dance when she was young), she looked round the drawing-room. Five pounds was my farewell present to her! How mean we seem when we look back into our lives! When her son wrote to ask me to help her in her old age I forgot to do so, and this confession costs me as much as some of Rousseau’s cost him.... In bidding her goodbye I bade goodbye to literature. No, she didn’t inspire the subject of Esther Waters, but she was the atmosphere I required for the book, and to talk to her at breakfast before beginning to write was an excellent preparation. In Victoria Street there was nobody to help me; my cook was nearly useless (in the library), and the parlourmaid quite useless. She had no stories to tell of the poor who wouldn’t be able to live at all if it weren’t for the poor. She thought, instead, that I ought to go into society, and at the end of the week opened the door so gleefully to Edward that she seemed to say: At last somebody has called.
I turned round in my chair; Well, how are the rehearsals going on? I noticed that he was unusually red and flurried. He had come to tell me that Yeats had that morning turned up at rehearsal, and was now explaining his method of speaking verse to the actors, while the lady in the green cloak gave illustration of it on a psaltery. At such news as this a man cries Great God! and pales. For sure I paled, and besought Edward not to rack my nerves with a description of the instrument or of the lady’s execution upon it. In a fine rage I started out of my seat in the bow-window, crying: Edward, run, and be in time to catch that cab going by. He did this, and on the way to the Strand indignation boiled too fiercely to hear anything until the words quarter-tones struck my ear.
Lord save us! Quarter-tones! Why, he can’t tell a high note from a low one! And leaving to Edward the business of paying the cab, I hurried through the passage and into the theatre, seeking till I found Yeats behind some scenery in the act of explanation to the mummers, whilst the lady in the green cloak, seated on the ground, plucked the wires, muttering the line, Cover it up with a lonely tune. And all this going on while mummers were wanted on the stage, and while an experienced actress walked to and fro like a pantheress. It was to her I went cautiously as the male feline approaches the female (in a different intent, however) and persuaded her to come back to her part.
As soon as she had consented I returned to Yeats with much energetic
talk on the end of my tongue, but finding him so gentle, there was no need for it; he betook himself to a seat, after promising in rehearsal language to let things rip, and we sat down together to listen to The Countess Cathleen, rehearsed by the lady, who had put her psaltery aside and was going about with a reticule on her arm, rummaging in it from time to time for certain memoranda, which when found seemed only to deepen her difficulty. Her stage-management is all right in her notes, Yeats informed me. But she can’t transfer it from paper on to the stage, he added, without appearing in the least to wish that the stage-management of his play should be taken from her. Would you like to see her notes? At that moment the voice of the experienced actress asking the poor lady how she was to get up the stage drew attention from Yeats to the reticule, which was being searched for the notes. And the actress walked up the stage and stood there looking contemptuously at Miss Vernon, who laid herself down on the floor and began speaking through the chinks. Her dramatic intention was so obscure that perforce I had to ask her what it was, and learnt from her that she was evoking hell.
But the audience will think you are trying to catch cockroaches.
Yeats whirled forward in his cloak with the suggestion that she should stand on a chair and wave her hands.
That will never do, Yeats; and the lady interrupted, asking me how hell should be evoked, and later begged to be allowed to hand over the rehearsal of The Countess Cathleen to the experienced actress’s husband, who said he would undertake to get the play on the stage if Mr Yeats would promise not to interfere with him.
Yeats promised, but as he had promised me before not to interfere, I felt myself obliged to beg him to take himself off for a fortnight.
The temptation to deliver orations on the speaking of verse is too great to be resisted, Yeats.
One can always manage to do business with a clever man, and with a melancholy caw Yeats went away in his long cloak leaving Mr — to settle how the verses should be spoken; and, feeling that my presence was no longer required, I returned to my novel, certain that Erin would not be robbed of the wassail-bowl we were preparing for her. But there is always a hand to snatch the bowl from Erin’s lips, and at the end of the week Yeats came to tell me that Edward had gone to consult a theologian, and was no longer sure that he would be able to allow the performances of The Countess Cathleen.
You see, he’s paying for it, and believes himself to be responsible for the heresy which the friar detects in it.
Every other scene described in this book has been traced faithfully from memory; even the dialogues may be considered as practically authentic, but all memory of Yeats bringing news to me of Edward’s vacillations seemed to have floated from my mind until Yeats pitted his memory against mine. My belief was that it was in Ireland that Edward had consulted the theologian, but Yeats is certain that it was in London. He gave me a full account of it in Victoria Street, and was careful to put geasa upon me, as himself would word it, which in English means that he was careful to demand a promise from me not to reproach Edward with his backsliding until the company had left Euston. The only interest in the point is that I who remember everything should have forgotten it. There can be no doubt that Yeats’s version is the true one; it appears that I was very angry with Edward, and did write him a letter which flurried him and brought him to Yeats with large sweat upon his forehead. Of this I am sure, that if I were angry with Edward, it was not because he feared to bring an heretical play to Dublin — a man has a right to his conscience — if I were angry, it was because he should have neglected to find out what he really thought of The Countess Cathleen before it went into rehearsal. It seemed that, after giving up many of my days to the casting of his play, and to the casting of The Countess Cathleen, it was not fair for him to cry off, and at the last moment. He had seen The Countess Cathleen rehearsed day after day, and to consult a friar about a play was not worthy of a man of letters. But he was not a man of letters, only an amateur, and he would remain one, notwithstanding The Heather Field — Symons had said it. What annoyed me perhaps even more than the sudden interjection of the friar into our business, were Edward’s still further vacillations, for after consultation with the friar he was not yet certain as to what he was going to do. Such a state of mind, I must have declared to Yeats, is horrifying and incomprehensible to me. Edward’s hesitation must have enraged me against him. It is difficult for me to understand how I could have forgotten the incident.... It seems to me that I do remember it now. But how faint my memory of it is compared with my memory of the departure of the mummers from Euston! Yeats and the lady in green had started some days before — Yeats to work up the Press, and the lady to discover the necessary properties that would be required in Dublin for both plays. Noggins were wanted for The Countess Cathleen, and noggins could not be procured in London. Yeats and the lady in green were our agents in advance, Edward with universal approbation casting himself for the part of baggage-man. He was splendid in it, with a lady’s bag on his arm, running up and down the station at Euston, shepherding his flock, shouting that all the luggage was now in the van, and crying: The boy, who is to look after him? I will be back with the tickets in a moment. Away he fled and at the ticket-office he was impassive, monumental muttering fiercely to impatient bystanders that he must count his money, that he had no intention of leaving till he was sure he had been given the right change.
Now, are you not coming with us? he cried to me, and would have pulled me into the train if I had not disengaged myself, saying:
No, no; I will not travel without clothes. Loose me. The very words do I remember, and the telegram two days after: The sceptre of intelligence has passed from London to Dublin. Again and again I read Edward’s telegram. If it be true, if art be winging her way westward? And a vision rose up before me of argosies floating up the Liffey, laden with merchandise from all the ports of Phoenicia, and poets singing in all the bowers of Merrion Square; and all in a new language that the poets had learned, the English language having been discovered by them, as it had been discovered by me, to be a declining language, a language that was losing its verbs.
The inflaming telegram arrived in the afternoon, and it was possible to start that evening; but it seemed to me that the returning native should see Ireland arising from the sea, and thinking how beautiful the crests would show against the sunset, I remembered a legend telling how the earliest inhabitants of Ireland had the power of making the island seem small as a pig’s back to her enemies, and a country of endless delight to her friends.
And while I sat wondering whether Ireland would accept me as a friend or as an enemy, the train steamed through the Midlands; and my anger against Edward, who preferred his soul to his art, was forgotten; it evaporated gently like the sun haze at the edges of the wood yonder. A quiet, muffled day continued its dreams of spring and summer time; but my thoughts were too deeply set in memories of glens where fairy bells are heard, to heed the simple facts of Nature — the hedgerows breaking into flower, the corn now a foot high in the fields, birds rising out of it, birds flying from wood to wood in the dim sunny air, flying as if they, that had been flying all their lives, still found pleasure in taking the air. I was too deeply set in my adventure to notice the red towns that flashed past, nor did I sentimentalise over the lot of those who lived in those ugly parallel streets — human warrens I should call them. I could think of nothing else but the sweetness of Étaine’s legs as she washed them in the woodlands; of Angus coming perhaps to meet her, his doves flying round him; of Grania and Diarmuid sleeping under cromlechs, or meeting the hermit in the forest who had just taken three fish out of the stream, of the horns of Finn heard in the distance, and the baying of his hounds.
The sudden sight of shaw, spinney, and sagging stead would at other times have carried my thoughts back into medieval England, perhaps into some play of Shakespeare’s interwoven with kings and barons; now the legends of my own country — the renascent Ireland — absorbed me, and so completely, that I did not notice
the passing of Stafford and Crewe. It was not until the train flashed through Chester that I awoke from my reveries sufficiently to admire the line of faint yellow hills, caught sight of suddenly, soon passing out of view. Before my wonderment ceased we were by a wide expanse of water, some vast river or estuary of the sea, with my line of yellow hills far away — cape, promontory, or embaying land, I knew not which, until a fellow-passenger told me that we were travelling along the Dee, and at low tide the boats, now proudly floating, would be lying on the empty sand. A beautiful view it was at high tide, the languid water lapping the rocks within a few feet of the railway; and a beautiful view it doubtless was at low tide — miles and miles of sand, a streak of water flashing half-way between me and the distant shore.
