by George Moore
But man, no more than woman, is necessary to him. Is not his self-sufficientness (if I may coin a word) admirable? Never have I known it fail him. At Dresden, it is true that he expressed regret that I was leaving him in the middle of our tour; but how shallow that regret was can be gathered from the indifference with which he accepted the news of my decision to accompany the ladies to Holland. We asked him if he would come with us, but he said that important business awaited him in Ireland; and he told me privately that he was not frightened away by the ladies, but he did not care to go to a Protestant country, for he never felt at home in one, and he did not even seem to understand when I asked him if he minded the long journey to Ireland alone.
I shall be with you in Tillyra a month later, and we shall then be able to make the necessary alterations in The Tale of a Town.
At the mention of the alterations in his play his face clouded, but he did not betray that anxiety which would have approved him a true artist. Only an amateur, I said, and went away with the ladies, our intention being to study the art of the Low Countries in Amsterdam, in Haarlem, and the Hague; to stop at every town in which there was a picture-gallery. An account of our aesthetic and sentimental tour would make a charming book; our appreciations of Ruysdael, Hals, Rembrandt and Van der Meer, and Florence’s incautious confession that no more perfect mould of body than Stella’s existed in the flesh — perhaps in some antique statues of the prime, though even that was not certain.
IX
THE SCENE YOU want me to write isn’t at all in character with the Irish people.
So you’ve said, Edward. We talked the matter out at Rothenburg, but men’s instincts are the same all over the world. If you don’t feel the scene, perhaps it would be as well if you allowed me to sketch it out for you. It is all quite clear.... Just as you like.
Edward said he didn’t mind, and I went up to my bedroom, and came down about tea-time to look for him, anxious to read the pages I had written. He consented to hear the scene, but it seemed to me that he listened to it resentfully; and when I had finished, it did not surprise me to hear that he didn’t like it at all; and then he begged of me, almost hysterically, not to press my alteration upon him, crying aloud, Leave me my play! Then, turning suddenly, he thanked me effusively for the trouble I had taken, and besought me to try to understand that he couldn’t act otherwise, assigning as a reason that I was giving the play a different colour from what he intended.
I’m sorry. But what is to be done? You admit the play requires alteration?
Yes, but I can make the alterations myself. And away he went up the slippery staircase of the old castle to his study.
For it is in the old castle that he prefers to live; the modern house, which he built some five-and-twenty years ago, remaining always outside his natural sympathies, especially its drawing-room. But one cannot have a modern house without a drawing-room, or a drawing-room without upholstered furniture, and the comfort of a stuffed armchair does not compensate Edward for its lack of design; and he prefers that his hinder parts should suffer rather than his spirit. Every drawing-room is, in the first glance, a woman’s room — the original harem thrown open to visitors — and his instinct is to get away from women, and all things which evoke intimacy with women. He was always the same, even in his hunting days, avoiding a display of horsemanship in front of a big wall, if women were about. It was in these early days, when the stables were filled with hunters, that I first went to Tillyra; and walking on the lawn, I remember trying to persuade him that the eighteenth-century house, which one of his ancestors had built alongside of the old castle, on the decline of brigandage, would be sufficient for his wants.
For you don’t intend to become a country gentleman, do you?
That he might escape from Tillyra had clearly never occurred to him, and he was startled by the idea suggested by me that he should follow his instinct. But the sea sucks back the wave, and he murmured that the old house had decayed and a new one was required.
If you spend a few hundred pounds upon the old house it will last your lifetime, my dear friend; and it is in much better taste than any house you will build. You think that modern domestic Gothic will be in keeping with the old fortress!
He must have suspected I was right, for his next argument was that the contract had been signed, and to break it would cost several hundred pounds. Better pay several hundred than several thousand, and your Gothic house will cost you twenty, and never will it please you.
For a moment it seemed as if he were going to reconsider the matter, and then he adduced a last argument in favour of the building: his mother wished it.
But, my dear friend, unless you’re going to marry, so large a house will be a burden.
Going to marry!
Well, everybody will look upon you as an engaged man.
A shadow crossed his face, and I said: I’ve touched the vital spot, and rebellion against all authority being my instinct, I incited him to rebel.
After all, your mother has no right to ask you to spend so much money, and she wouldn’t do so unless she thought you were going to marry.
I suppose she wouldn’t.
But not on that occasion, nor any other, could I induce him to throw the architect’s plans into the fire, and why blame him for his lack of courage? For it is natural to man to yield something of himself in order that there may be peace in his home. (Edward yields completely to authority once he has accepted it.) His mother’s clear and resolute mind was perhaps more sympathetic to me than to him, and turning to her, in my officiousness, I said, thinking to frighten her: Will that house be finished for fifteen thousand?
The painting and the papering aren’t included in the estimate; but a few thousands more will finish it, and I have promised to finish it for him.
That the spending of so much money should cost her no scruple whatever surprised me, and to explain her to myself I remembered that she belonged to a time when property was secured to its owner by laws. The Land Acts, which were then coming into operation, could not change her point of view. Edward must build a large and substantial house of family importance, and when this house was finished he could not do otherwise than marry. She would ask all the young ladies of her acquaintance to come to see them, and among the many Edward might find one to his liking. This hope often transpired in her talks about Edward, and she continued to cherish it during the building of the house, in spite of her suspicions that Edward’s celibacy was something more than the whim of a young man who thinks that a woman might rob him of his ideals. She could not admit to herself any more than you can, reader, or myself, that we come into the world made as it were to order, contrived so that we shall run down certain lines of conduct. We are not determinists, except in casual moments of no importance, and we like to attribute at least our misfortunes to circumstance, never looking beyond the years of childhood, just as if the greater part of man’s making was not done before he came into the world. Edward was a bachelor before he left his mother’s womb. But how was his mother to know such a thing — or to sympathise with such an idea? All the instruction we get from the beginning of our lives is to the effect that man is free, and our every action seems so voluntary that we cannot understand that our lives are determined for us. Another illusion is that nothing is permanent in us, that all is subject to change. Edward’s mother shared this illusion, but for a much shorter time than many another woman would have done, partly because her intelligence allowed her to perceive much, and to understand much that would have escaped an inferior woman, and partly because Edward never tried to hide his real self, wearing always his aversion on his sleeve. So it could not have been later than two years after the building of the house that the first thought crossed her mind, that, though she had ruled Edward in every detail of his daily life since he was a little boy, she might still fail to reach the end which she regarded as the legitimate end of life — a wife for her son, and grandchildren for herself.
He has built a modern house
, but before it is quite finished he has decided to live in the old tower, she said to me, and the furniture which had been made for his sitting-room filled her, I could see, with dread. A less intelligent woman would have drawn no conclusions from the fact that a table taken from a design by Albert Dürer, and six oaken stools with terrifying edges, were to be the furniture of the turret chamber, reached by cold, moist, winding stairs, and that his bedroom, too, was to be among the ancient walls. Look at his bed, she said, as narrow as a monk’s; and the walls whitewashed like a cell, and nothing upon them but a crucifix. He speaks of his aversion from upholstery, and he can’t abide a cushion.
She has begun to understand that there are certain natures which cannot be changed, I said to myself. She understands in her subconscious nature already, soon she will understand with her intellect, that he, who lies in that bed by choice, will never leave it for a bridal chamber.
Life affords no more arresting drama than the fatality of temperament which irrevocably separates two people bound together by the closest natural ties, and the poignancy is heightened when each is sensitive to the duty which each bears the other, when each is anxious to perform his or her part of the contract; and the drama is still further heightened when both become aware that they must go through life together without any hope that they will ever understand each other better. This drama is curious and interesting to the looker-on, who is able to appreciate the qualities of the mother and the son; the son’s imaginative temperament always in excess of, and overruling, his reason, and his mother’s clear, practical intelligence, always unable to understand that her son must live the life that his nature ordained him to live. Again and again, in the course of our long friendship, he has said: If you had been brought up as severely as I was.... A sudden scruple of conscience, or shyness of soul, stays the end of the phrase on his large loose mouth. But by brooding on his words I understand them to mean that his mother imposed obedience upon him by appealing to his fear of God, and aggravating this fear by a severe training in religious dogma. It is easy to do this; a little child’s mind is so sensitive and so unprotected by reason that a stern mother is one of the great perils of birth. If the boy is a natural boy with healthy love of sex in his body, the wife or mistress will redeem him from his mother, but if there be no such love in him he stands in great danger; for from woman’s influence the son of man may not escape; and it would seem that whoever avoids the wife falls into the arms of the mistress, and he who avoids the wife and the mistress becomes his mother’s bond-slave.
Edward was in his tower, and, wandering about the park, I thought how he had gone back to his original self since his mother death. The schoolboy was a Republican, but the Church is not friendly to free-thought, and the prestige of his mother’s authority had prevented him from taking any active part in Nationalist politics during her lifetime. The wild heather, I said, is breaking out again; and I stopped in my walk, so that I might think how wonderful all this was — the craving for independence, of a somewhat timid nature always held back, never being able to cast out of the mouth the bit that had been placed in it. These weak, ambiguous natures lend themselves so much more to literature, and, indeed, to friendship, than the stronger, who follow their own instincts, thinking always with their own brains. They get what they want, the others get nothing; but the weak men are the more interesting: they excite our sentiments, our pity, and without pity man may not live.
Then, a little weary of thinking of Edward, my thoughts turned to Yeats. He had come over to Tillyra from Coole a few days before, and had read us The Shadowy Waters, a poem that he had been working on for more than seven years, using it as a receptacle or storehouse for all the fancies that had crossed his mind during that time, and these were so numerous that the pirate-ship ranging the Shadowy Waters came to us laden to the gunnel with Fomorians, beaked and unbeaked, spirits of Good and Evil of various repute, and, so far as we could understand the poem, these accompanied a metaphysical pirate of ancient Ireland cruising in the unknown waters of the North Sea in search of some ultimate kingdom. We admitted to Yeats, Edward and I, that no audience would be able to discover the story of the play, and we confessed ourselves among the baffled that would sit bewildered and go out raging against the poet. Our criticism did not appear to surprise Yeats; he seemed to realise that he had knotted and entangled his skein till no remedy short of breaking some of the threads would avail, and he eagerly accepted my proposal to go over to Coole to talk out the poem with him, and to redeem it, if possible from the Fomorians. He would regret their picturesque appearance; but could I get rid of them, without losing the poetical passages? He would not like the words poetical passages — I should have written beautiful verses.
Looking up at the ivied embrasure of the tower where Edward was undergoing the degradation of fancying himself a lover so that he might write the big scene between Jasper and Millicent at the end of the third act, I said: He will not come out of that tower until dinner-time, so I may as well ride over to Coole and try what can be done. But the job Yeats has set me is a difficult one.
Away I went on my bicycle, up and down along the switch-back road, trying to arrive at some definite idea regarding Fomorians, and thinking, as I rode up the long drive, that perhaps Yeats might not be at home, and that to return to Tillyra without meeting the Fomorians would be like riding home from hunting after a blank day.
The servant told me that he had gone for one of his constitutionals, and would be found about the lake. The fabled woods of Coole are thick hazel coverts, with tall trees here and there, but the paths are easy to follow, and turning out of one of these into the open, I came upon a tall black figure standing at the edge of the lake, wearing a cloak which fell in straight folds to his knees, looking like a great umbrella forgotten by some picnic-party.
I’ve come to relieve you of Fomorians, and when they’ve been flung into the waters we must find some simple and suggestive anecdote. Now, Yeats, I’m listening.
As he proceeded to unfold his dreams to me I perceived that we were inside a prison-house with all the doors locked and windows barred.
The chimney is stopped, I said, but a brick seems loose in that corner. Perhaps by scraping —
And we scraped a little while; but very soon a poetical passage turned the edge of my chisel like a lump of granite, and Yeats said:
I can’t sacrifice that.
Well, let us try the left-hand corner.
And after scraping for some time we met another poetical passage.
Well, let us try one of the tiles under the bed; we might scrape our way into some drain which will lead us out.
But after searching for a loose tile for an hour, and finding none, all proving more firmly cemented than any reader would think for, the task of getting Yeats out of the prison-house which he had so ingeniously built about himself, began to grow wearisome, and my thoughts wandered from the Fomorians to the autumn landscape, full of wonderful silence and colour, and I begged Yeats to admire with me the still lake filled with broad shadow of the hill, and the ghostly moon high up in the pale evening, looking down upon a drift of rose-coloured clouds. A reed growing some yards from the shore threw its slender shadow to our feet, and it seemed to me that we could do nothing better than watch the landscape fixed in the lake as in a mirror.
But Yeat’s mind was whirling with Fomorians, and he strove to engage my attention with a new scheme of reconstruction. He had already proposed, and I had rejected so many that this last one was undistinguishable in my brain from those which had preceded it, and his febrile and somewhat hysterical imagination, excited as if by a drug, set him talking, and so volubly, that I could not help thinking of the old gentleman that Yeats had frightened when he was staying last at Tillyra. The old gentleman had come down in the morning, pale and tired, after a sleepless night, complaining that he had been dreaming of Neptune and surging waves.
Last night, said Yeats, looking up gloomily from his breakfast, I felt a great deal of aridne
ss in my nature, and need of moisture, and was making most tremendous invocations with water, and am not surprised that they should have affected the adjoining room.
The old gentleman leaned back in his chair, terror-stricken, and taking Edward aside after breakfast he said to him: A Finnish sorcerer; he has Finnish blood in him; some Finnish ancestor about a thousand years ago. And with the old gentleman’s words in my head, I scrutinised my friend’s hands and face, thinking them strangely dark for Ireland. But there are Celts with hair of Oriental blackness, and skins dyed with Oriental yellow. All the same, the old gentleman’s reading of Yeats’s prehistoric ancestry seemed to me like an intuition. His black hair and yellow skin were perhaps accidents, or they might be atavisms. It was not the recurrence of any Finnish strain of a thousand years ago that tempted me to believe in a strain of Oriental blood; it was his subtle, metaphysical mind, so unlike anything I had ever met in a European, but which I had once met in an Oriental years ago in West Kensington, in a back drawing-room, lecturing to groups of women — an Indian of slender body and refined face, a being whose ancestry were weaving metaphysical arguments when painted savages prowled in the forests of Britain and Ireland. He seemed to be speaking out of a long metaphysical ancestry; unpremeditated speech flowed like silk from a spool, leading me through the labyrinth of the subconscious, higher and higher, seemingly towards some daylight finer than had ever appeared in the valleys out of which I was clambering hurriedly, lest I should lose the thread that led me. On and on we went, until at last it seemed to me that I stood among the clouds; clouds filled the valleys beneath me, and about me were wide spaces, and no horizon anywhere, only space, and in the midst of this space light breaking through the clouds above me, waxing every moment to an intenser day; and every moment the Indian’s voice seemed to lead me higher, and every moment it seemed that I could follow it no longer. The homely earth that I knew had faded, and I waited expectant among the peaks, until at last, taken with a sudden fear that if I lingered any longer I might never see again a cottage at the end of an embowered lane, I started to my feet and fled.
