by George Moore
Destroy it! No, I answered. But if it can be shown that medieval surroundings are not altogether a healthy influence upon children, do you not think that some opportunity should be given to them for contrasting the old with the new, and that some part of the town, for instance, should be modernised?
It is possible that the reader will think that I was rather tiresome that day, but so was the train, and to while away the time there was no resource but to raise the question whether Rothenburg would have produced the same Edward as Galway. But the question did not succeed in provoking any of those psychological admissions that make him so agreeable a travelling companion. He was not in a communicative mood that afternoon, and to draw him out I was obliged to remind him that Bavaria is Protestant and Catholic, and strangely intermixed, for the two sects use the same church — service at eleven and Mass at twelve.
And you might have been brought up a Protestant, Edward, or half and half.
A grave look came into his face, and he answered that if he hadn’t been brought up a Catholic, and severely, he might have gone to pieces altogether; and I sat pondering the very interesting question whether Edward would have done better as a Protestant than as a Catholic. Every man knows himself better than any one else can know him, and Edward seemed to think that he needed a stay. Perhaps so, but there is a vein of thought — perhaps I should say of feeling — in him which Catholicism seems to me to have restrained, and which Protestantism, I like to think, would have encouraged. The effect of religion upon character was worth considering, and as there was nothing else to do in the train I set myself to think the matter out.
But it is hard to set bounds on one’s thoughts, and mine suddenly turned from Edward, and I found myself wondering if the great genius towards whom we were faring could have written The Ring in Rothenburg. Now this was a question which had to be put to Edward, and at once, and he applied himself to it, pointing out that Bayreuth was nearly as quaint and slumberous as Rothenburg, yet Wagner had written part of The Ring in Bayreuth. True that he had written parts of it all over Europe; some of it was written in Switzerland, some in Italy, some even in Dorset Square.
But if he had been born in Rothenburg and had never left it —
The noise of the train prevented me from catching his answer, and leaning back in my seat, I fell to thinking of the extraordinary joy and interest that Bayreuth had been in my life ever since Edward and I went there for the first time at the beginning of the ‘nineties, after hearing a performance of The Ring in London.
It had been the horns announcing the Rhine that re-awakened my musical conscience. The melodies of my own country I had never heard. Offenbach and Hervé stirred me to music when we went to live in London, and I carried to Paris all their little tunes in my head. Painters are often more or less musicians: one such drifted into our studio, and he introduced me to the Circle des Merlitons, where I heard Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart. Classical music ousted operette without difficulty; and as long as there were musical friends about, music was followed with as much interest as could be spared from the art of painting. But when the maladministration of my affairs called me from Paris to Ireland musical interests disappeared with my French friends; they were driven underground when agrarian outrages compelled me to consider the possibility of earning my living. The only way open to me was literature, so I went to London to learn to write, as has been told in a chapter in an earlier book.
In London literature and poverty absorbed me for several years, and I had forgotten music altogether when Edward asked me if I would go to hear The Rhinegold. I had consented, regretting my promise almost as soon as it was given, for Wagner was reputed unmelodious and difficult to all except the most erudite, and fearing that I should be bored for several hours by sounds which would mean nothing to me, I began to seek for excuses, and to ask Edward if he could not dispose of the ticket he had taken for me. He could not do this, and as my plaints did not cease, he said to me, as we walked up King’s Bench Walk:
Well, there’s no use your coming. All my pleasure will be spoilt.
The dark theatre reminded me of the rooms at exhibitions in which bad pictures are exhibited, no light showing anywhere except on the picture itself; but the moment the horns gave out the theme of the Rhine my attention was arrested, and a few minutes after it was clear that new birth awaited me. A day or two later I heard Tristan, and it so happened that there were performances at Bayreuth that year, so Edward and I went there together, and we have gone there many times since, each visit awakening every little musical faculty in me, and developing it; and though nothing can be created, a seed can be developed prodigiously, and a taste likewise, if the soil be fertile and circumstances fortunate. They were certainly favourable to my picking up this lost interest. Edward is a true melamonaic, loving all good music, and ready to travel anywhere to hear music; then there is Dujardin, who is always talking to me about music; his friends are musicians and whenever I go to Paris I am with musicians, talking about music when not listening to it, and once again my life began to unfold in a musical atmosphere. To feel one’s life unfolding is joy. Life should never cease to unfold, and it will be time enough for Death to lower the banner when the last stitch of canvas is reached.
Now I was going to Bayreuth again, determined to understand The Ring a little better than heretofore. But was this possible? I can learn until somebody tries to teach me; all the same every man is at tether, and lying back in my seat in the train from Rothenburg, a little weary of conversation with Edward, I relinquished myself to regrets that my ear only allows me to hear the surface of the music, the motives which float up to the top, the transforming effect of a chord upon a melodic phrase. I can hear that Wagner’s melodies arise naturally one out of the other. If I could not hear that every melody in Tristan rises out of the one that preceded it, Wagner would have written in vain, so far as I was concerned. My ear is but rudimentary, an ear that will seem like no ear to those who can hear the whole orchestra together and in detail, seeing in their mind’s eye the notes that every instrument is playing. It is well to have their ears, but mere ear will not carry anybody very far; to appreciate music an intelligence is necessary; and those who are not gifted with too much ear can hear the music oftener than those who can read it. Last year in Paris Dukas told me he would not go to hear some music with me because he had read it, and having once read a piece of music there was nothing left in it for him.
So essentially human is Wagner that there is something in his art for everybody, something in his music for me, and a great deal for musicians; and besides the music, some part of which everybody except the tone-deaf can hear, there are the dramas, wonderful in conception and literary art; for him gifted with imagination there are scenes in The Ring as beautiful as any in Shakespeare; and were Dujardin pressed to state his real feeling on the subject he would affirm that nothing has been written in words as moving as the scene in which Brünnhilde tells Siegmund that Wotan is calling him to Valhalla. Not the music, Dujardin cries — it is not the music that counts, but the words. The music is beautiful, of course it is — it couldn’t be else; but so intensely aware was Wagner of the poetry that he allowed it to transpire.
One can think about Dujardin and Wagner without the time appearing long; and I had forgotten a very important matter about which there had been a great deal of correspondence, till I was suddenly reminded of it by a slackening in the speed of the train.
At the time I am writing of, Bayreuth was an uncomfortable town to live in; it has changed a good deal within the last ten years, and in the twentieth century we get better food in the restaurants than we did in the nineteenth; bathrooms have begun to appear, the fly-haunted privy is nearly extinct, and this was the important matter that the slackening of the train’s speed had reminded me of. We had written many letters, and had many interviews with the agent who apportions out the lodgings, and my last words had been to him, A clean privy! He had promised that he would see to it, but from the direction in whi
ch the coachman was driving us, it would seem that the desirable accommodation was not procurable in the town. It was Edward who noticed that our coachman was heading straight for the country, and standing up in the carriage, he began to expostulate — ineffectually, however, for Edward’s German is limited and the driver only laughed, pointing with a whip towards a hillside facing the theatre, and there we saw a villa embowered and overlooking a corn-field, a lodging so delightful that I could not but feel interested in Edward’s objection to it.
We shall be out of the way of everything, was all he shrieked.
But not out of the way of the theatre! I interjected. We shall walk through the corn-fields to it.
The theatre isn’t everything.
Everything in Bayreuth ... surely.
He spoke of his breakfast. He wouldn’t be able to get it. He must be near a restaurant, and the corn-field did not appeal to his sense of the picturesque as Rothenburg did. Despite my entreaty, he stood up again in the carriage, and began to expostulate with the driver again, who, however, only laughed and pointed with his whip, pouring forth all the while a torrent of Bavarian German which Edward could not understand.
How shall I stop him? he cried, turning to me, who can speak no single word of German. After mentioning this fact, I reminded him that the people in the villa were waiting for us, and for us to go away to the town without advising them might prevent them from letting their lodgings. I said this, knowing Edward’s weak spot — his moral conscience. He fell to my arrow, answering quietly that he would willingly pay for the lodging on the hillside if I would only go with him to the town in search of another. To this I consented, unwillingly I admit, but I consented. My unwillingness, however, to live in the town, where all the decent lodgings had long ago been taken, became more marked when we were shown into a large drawing-room and two bedrooms, the cleanest we had ever seen in Bayreuth.
We shall want a room in which to write The Tale of a Town.
The mention of his play did not seem to soften Edward, and the landlord, an elderly man, who had relinquished me because I knew no German at all, attached himself to Edward — literally attached himself, taking him by the lappet of his coat; and I remember how the old man drew him along with him to the end of a passage, I following them, compelled by curiosity. We came to a door, which the old man threw open with a flourish, exhibiting to our enchanted gaze a brand-new water-closet, all varnish and cleanliness, and the pride of the old man, who entered into a long explanation, the general drift only of which pierced Edward’s understanding. He says he has redecorated the privy for us at the special request of Mr Schulz Curtis. But if we pay him for his lodging!
No mere payment will recompense him. Remember he asked you if you liked the wallpaper. He may have spent hours choosing it.
But, blind to all the allurements of the checkered paper, Edward insisted on telling the landlord that he wished to live near a restaurant where he could get his breakfast. The German again caught him by the lappet of his coat, and there was a pretty German girl who knew a little English, the old man’s daughter, smiling in the doorway, about whom I had already begun to think. But it was impossible to dissuade Edward, and we drove with our luggage here and there and everywhere, seeking a couple of rooms. It would be inopportune to describe every filthy suite of apartments that we visited; but it is not well, in a book of this kind, to omit any vivid memory, and among my memories none is more vivid than that of an iron railing dividing a sort of shallow area from the street in which some workmen were drinking beer, and of the kitchen beyond it. Uncouth women, round in the back as washtubs, walked about with frying-pans in their hands, great udders floating under blue blouses; and we followed a trail of inferior German cookery up a black slimy staircase to the first landing, where a bald-headed waiter, with large drops of sweat upon his brow, opened a door, exhibiting for our inspection two low-ceilinged rooms with high beds in the corners.
Ask him if we can have clean sheets. We have no others, the waiter answered.
As I moved towards the doorway, I heard Edward saying that the rooms would do us very well, and when I explained to him their disadvantages, he answered that he would be able to get his breakfast. To get his breakfast! The phrase seemed so Irish, so Catholic, that for a moment it was impossible to suppress my anger at Edward’s unseemly indifference to my sense of cleanliness and comfort, and the women in the kitchen, the waiter, and the sheets horrified me, even to the extent of compelling me to tell him that I would sooner go back to England, giving up The Ring, Parsifal —
I would sooner sleep anywhere, Edward; in the streets! Let us get away. Perhaps we shall find —
No, you’ll object to all.
But why, Edward, should you stay here? You can have breakfast at our lodging.
I shan’t be able to get an omelette. Can’t you understand that people have habits?
Habits! I said.
And then he admitted — it seemed to me somewhat unwillingly, no doubt because he was talking to a heretic — that the villa under the lindens was two miles from the chapel, and that he liked to go to Mass in the morning.
I see; it is the magician and his house that tempts you.
If you talk like that you’ll make me regret I came abroad with you.
But, unable to restrain myself, I added:
The desire to have a magician always at one’s elbow is extraordinary.
I know the value of such talk as that, he growled, as we drove back to the villa, and he seemed so much put about that he gained my sympathy, almost to the extent of persuading me that I, and not he, was the inconsiderate one; and I began to defend myself.
It would have been impossible to eat anything that came out of that kitchen. The magician must have a very strong hold upon you to —
Edward is so good-humoured that one cannot resist the temptation to tease and to twit him, though one knows that one will regret doing so afterwards; and, sorry already, seeing how seriously he felt this unexpected dislocation in his habits, I began to think how I might be kind, and, rightly or wrongly, mentioned his play, asking him when he would like to consider it with me. Without answering my question, he went into his room and began to rummage in his trunk, coming back, however, with the manuscript, which he handed to me.
Now, Edward, there is the second act —
You don’t want to alter that, do you? I thought it the best act —
He did not seem to appreciate my criticism or to pick up my suggestions. He was not very forthcoming, and we went to bed early that evening. He’ll be in a more literary humour tomorrow morning, I said, before going to sleep, and looked forward to a long séance de collaboration after breakfast. But Edward would accept no breakfast in the house, only a cup of tea and a thin slice of bread and butter. He refused to ask the landlord’s daughter, who attended upon us, if she could make an omelette, for some reason which it is impossible for me even to guess at. It would not be like him to go without breakfast, so that he might make me feel I had seriously inconvenienced him, and it seemed difficult to understand why he should refuse to breakfast in the house. The people were willing to cook him anything he wanted. Was he such a slave to habits that he had to breakfast in a restaurant? No, for when he was at home he had to breakfast in his own house. He would say that was different. So I was forced to fall back on the theory that he was annoyed because he would have to walk two miles to chapel to hear Mass. But when he was in Galway he did not go to Mass every morning. So why did he wish to go to Mass every day in Bayreuth? Why would he refuse to discuss the question any further, saying that it didn’t matter, that it was all right, and, after sipping his tea, steal away for the greater part of the day, leaving me alone with The Tale of a Town? A séance de collaboration would have passed the morning nicely for me, and I muttered: He has taken his soul out, or his soul has taken him out. Would that his soul would betake itself to literature! He has gone away without saying a word about The Tale of a Town.
It did not strike
me until late in the afternoon that he had gone away to avoid criticism of his play; but on reflection it hardly seemed necessary that I should accept literary sensitiveness as a reason for absence. Yeats had told him, and I had told him, and Lady Gregory had told him, that the play could not be acted by the Irish Literary Theatre in its present form. It would have to be altered, and at Aix-la-Chapelle, at Boppart, and at Mainz, and in the long train journey from Mainz to Nuremberg, he had seemed willing to accept some of my criticism as just. Et alors? Had he begun to examine my criticism, picking it to pieces, arriving gradually at the conclusion that it was all wrong, and that his play was all right? Or was it that he had persuaded himself that it were better to retain his own mistakes than to accept my suggestions, even if they were improvements? A view of art for which a great deal may be said when the artist has arrived at maturity of thought and expression, but a very dangerous one when the artist is but a beginner.
And Edward is a beginner, and he isn’t progressing, I said, and may remain a beginner. For he came into the world a sketch, une ébauche by a great master, and was left unfinished, whether by design or accident it is impossible to say. A delightful study he is! And in the embowered villa I sat, looking into his mind, interested in its unmapped spaces (Australia used to interest me in much the same manner when I was a child) until the young girl came upstairs to tell me it was time to go to the theatre. One knows a single word — Spielhaus. My eyes went to the clock, the hands pointed to four, and from four to five is the hottest hour of a summer’s day. By four the sun, blazing forth from a cloudless sky, has sucked all the cool of the night away, and heated unendurably every brick and tile and stone it can strike with a ray. Even in the shady villa under the lindens one could not think of the tall gables in the town, the fierce sun beating on them, or of the cobble-stones in the streets, without congratulating oneself that Edward’s inclinations had been resisted. Those low-ceilinged rooms above the kitchen would stifle on such a day, and I was able to look back on my courage with admiration. It had given me a splendid view of a corn-field with reapers working in it, the sun shining on their backs — that one straightening himself to wipe the sweat from his brow with a ragged sleeve.
