by George Moore
Steer’s pictures are the best he has done, Tonks said, as soon as we had left our friend’s doorstep, and he asked me if I liked the wooded hillside better than the ruins.
I can’t talk of pictures just now, Tonks. The war has put pictures clean out of my head, and I don’t mind telling you that Steer’s indifference to everything except his values has disgusted me. I don’t know if you noticed it, I hardly looked at anything. Were you interested?
Well, Moore, I can always admire Steer’s pictures, but it is difficult to detach oneself from the war to admire them sufficiently. I’m sure we shall admire his work more at some other time; so far I am with you.
Only as far as that? Can’t you see that the war has changed me utterly?
I can see that you take it very much to heart.
I don’t mean that, Tonks; it seems to me to have changed me outwardly. I can’t believe that I present the same appearance. After all, it is the mind that makes the man. Tell me, hasn’t the war put a new look on my face?
When you mention it, you change; there’s no doubt about it, you seem a different person. I’ll say that.
Do tell me. And Tonks tried to describe the scowl that overspreads my face.
I’ll do a drawing of it, and then you’ll see. You glare at us across the dinner-table. Steer and I were talking about it only yesterday, and Steer said: Moore looks like that when he remembers we are Englishmen. Now, isn’t it so?
I shouldn’t like to say it wasn’t, though it seems silly to admit it. You don’t approve of the war, do you, Tonks?
I think it is a very unfortunate affair.
Those concentration camps!
At the words the kind melancholy of the surgeon appeared in Tonks’s face. He was a surgeon before he was a painter, and, seeing that he was genuinely afflicted, I told him the Ebury Street episode, and my fears lest my life had been changed, and radically, and that there was no place now in it for admiration of pictures or of literature.
But what will you do, my dear Moore? Tonks asked, his voice tight with sympathy.
I don’t know; anything may happen to me, for I don’t think as I used to. When it is assumed that justice must give way to expediency, concentration camps are established and women and children kept prisoners so that they may die of typhoid and enteric.
No, Moore, it isn’t as bad as that. They couldn’t be left on the veldt; we had to do something with the women and children.
Tonks, I’m ashamed of you! After having burnt down their houses you had to keep them, and as it would be an advantage to you to destroy the Boer race, you keep them in concentration camps where they drop off like flies.
Now, my dear Moore, I’m not going to quarrel with you. I’m quite ready to admit —
When I think of it I feel as if I were going mad, and that I must do something. This evening when I jumped up from my chair and walked about the room I could hardly keep myself from breaking Steer’s Chelsea china; those shepherds and shepherdesses were too cynical. Men and women in roses and ribbons twanging guitars! Why —
Of course, I can see what you mean, but I can’t help laughing when you say you were tempted to break Steer’s Chelsea figures.
It is easy, Tonks, to see an absurdity; very little intelligence is required for that; much more is required to see the abomination of — At that moment we were joined by Sickert. He had stopped behind to exchange a few words with Steer.
You really shouldn’t, Sickert, Tonks said. The last time you detained him on the doorstep he was laid up with influenza.
An attack of influenza! And thousands of women and children kept prisoners in concentration camps — children without milk to drink; water, perhaps, from springs fouled with the staling of mules!
But if we had Steer laid up, what would happen to the models? Sickert asked. One is coming at ten tomorrow. Who would support the models? Would you? And the New English Art Club without a work by Steer! Six feet by four; a fine Old English prospect with a romantic castle in the foreground. An august site. As soon as the war is over, one of those sites will be bought for the Pretoria Art Gallery, and the tax-payer will be charged an extra halfpenny in the pound for improving the intellectual status of the Kaffirs, which will be indefinitely raised.
There was a moment’s hesitation between anger and laughter, but no one is angry when Sickert is by. He has kept in middle age a great deal of his youth, and during dinner I had noticed that not a streak of grey showed in the thick rippling shock of yellow-brown hair. The golden moustache has been shaved away, and the long mouth and closely set lips give him a distinct clerical look. There was always something of the cleric and the actor in him, I thought, as I overlooked his new appearance, drawing conclusions from the special bowler-hat of French shape that he wore. He had just come over from Dieppe and his trousers were French corduroy, amazingly peg-top, and the wide braid on the coat recalled 1860. He was, at this time, addicted to 1860, living in a hotel in the Tottenham Court Road in which all the steads were four-posted and all the beds feather, and he was full of contempt for Steer’s collection of Chelsea china, and in favour of wax fruit and rep curtains, and advocated heavy mahogany sideboards.
He was as Pro-Boer as myself, with less indignation and more wit, and Tonks and I yielded that night, as we always do, to the charm of his whimsical imagination, and we laughed when he said:
Our latest casualties are the capture of four hundred Piccadilly dandies who had been foolish enough to go out to fight the veterans of the veldt. They were stripped of their clothes, patted on their backs, and sent home to camp in silk fleshings and embroidered braces.... Hope Bros., Regent Street.
Sickert’s wide, shaven lip laughed, and he looked so like himself in his overcoat and his French bowler-hat that we walked for some yards delighting in his personality — Tonks a little hurt, but pleased all the same, myself treasuring up each contemptuous word for further use, and considering at which of my friends’ houses the repetition of Sickert’s wit would give most offence.
Tonks bade us goodnight in the King’s Road. Sickert came on with me; his way took him through Victoria Street, and we stopped outside my doorway drawn into tense communion by our detestation of the war.
I’m so glad to have met you after this long while, he said, for I wanted to know if you held the same opinion of Mr Gladstone. Do you remember how we used to laugh at him? Now we see what a great man he was.
England is, at present, the ugliest country. Oh, I have changed towards England. I try to forget that I once thought differently, for when I remember myself (my former self) I hate myself as much as I hate England.
Doesn’t the lack of humour in the newspapers surprise you? This morning I read in the Pall Mall that we are an Imperial people, and being an Imperial people we must think Imperially, and presumably do everything else Imperially. Splendid, isn’t it? Everything, the apple trees included, must be Imperial. We won’t eat apples except Imperial apples, and the trees are conjured to bear no others, but the apple trees go on flowering and bearing the same fruit as before, and Sickert burst into joyous laughter in which I joined.
We bade each other good night, and I went up to my bed looking forward to the morning paper. Which may bring us some further news of the Piccadilly dandies, I muttered into my pillow.
In old times my servant would find me in my drawing-room looking at a picture that I had bought a few days before at Christie’s, or at one that had been some time in my possession, uncertain whether I liked it as much as last year; but, as I told Tonks, art and literature had ceased to interest me, and now she found me every morning in the dining-room reading the paper. The morning after Steer’s dinner-party she came upon me in a very exultant mood. Another win for the Boers, I told her, and took the paper back to bed with me, thinking how I should go down and humiliate my tobacconist. The day before he had said: Buller has trapped the Boers; we shall see a change within the next few days. He was right. A very nice change, too, and I went out to ask him if he had a
ny new cigars that would suit me. I did not like his cigars, and told him so after a ten minutes’ discussion as to the reason for our defeat at Spion Kop. From the tobacconist’s I went to the Stores in the hope of waylaying a friend or two there. A lady that I knew very well always shopped there in the morning, and it would be only a kindness to advise her to take her money out of South African mines.
Parents take pleasure in putting a horrible powder called Gregory into a spoon, and covering it with jam, and telling the unfortunate child that he must swallow it; and that afternoon I called on all my friends, taking a grim pleasure in watching their faces while I assured them that the recall of our troops would be the wisest thing we could do.
Love of cruelty is inveterate in the human being, and remembering this, remorse would sometimes overtake me in the street, and a passionate resolution surge up not to offend again, and it often happened to me to go to another house to approve myself; but some chance phrase would set me talking again; my tongue could not be checked, not even when the lady, to distract my attention from De Wet, asked my opinion of some picture or knick-knack. She did not succeed any better when she strove to engage my attention by an allusion to a book. Not only books and pictures had lost interest for me, but human characteristics; opinions were what I demanded, and from everybody. I remember coming from the North of England in company with a prosaic middle-aged man who had brought into the carriage with him for his relaxation three newspapers — the Builder, the Athenaeum, and Vanity Fair — and in the long journey from Darlington to London I watched him taking up these papers, one after the other, and reading them with the same attention. At any other time I should have been eager to make the acquaintance of one who could find something to interest him in these papers and should have been much disappointed if I did not succeed in becoming intimate with him by the end of the journey. But, strange as it will seem to the reader, who by this time has begun to know me, I am forced to admit that I was only anxious to hear his opinion of the war, and my curiosity becoming at last intolerable, I interrupted his architectural, social, or literary meditation with the statement that the Daily Telegraph contained some very grave news. Two eyes looked at me over spectacles, and on the phrase, Well, the war was bound to come sooner or later, we began to argue, and it was not until we reached Finsbury Park — he got out there — that I remembered I had forgotten to ask him if he were a constant reader of the three newspapers that he rolled up and put away carefully into a black bag.
The incident is one among hundreds of similar incidents, all pointing to the same fact that nothing but the war interested me as a subject of conversation or of thought. Every day the obsession became more terrible, and the surrender of my sanity more imminent. I shall try to tell the story as it happened, but I fear that some of it will escape my pen; yet it is all before me clear as my reflection in the glass: that evening, for instance, when I walked with a friend through Berkeley Square and fell out with my friend’s appearance, so English did it seem to me, for he wore his clothes arrogantly; yet it was not his clothes so much as his sheeplike face that angered me. We were dining at the same house that night, and on looking round the dinner-table I saw the same sheep in everybody, in the women as much as in the men. Next day in Piccadilly I caught sight of it in every passer-by; every man and woman seemed to wear it, and everybody’s bearing and appearance suggested to me a repugnant, sensual cosmopolitanism; a heartless lust for gold was read by me in their faces — for the goldfields of Pretoria which they haven’t gotten yet, and never will get, I hope.
In the dusk, England seemed to rise up before me in person, a shameful and vulgar materialism from which I turned with horror, and this passionate revolt against England was aggravated by memories of my former love of England, and, do what I would, I could not forget that I had always met in England a warm heart, a beautiful imagination, firmness and quiet purpose. But I just had to forget that I ever thought well of England, or to discover that I had been mistaken in England. To bring the point as clearly as I may before the reader, I will ask him to think of a man who has lived happily and successfully with a woman for many years, and suddenly discovers her to be a criminal or guilty of some infidelity towards him; to be, at all events, one whose conduct and capacities are not those with which he had credited her. As his suspicions multiply, the beauties which he once read in her face and figure fade, and her deportment becomes aggressive, till she can no longer cross the room without exciting angry comment in his mind. A little later he finds that he cannot abide in the house, so offensive is it to him; the disposition of the furniture reminds him of her; and one day the country through which they used to walk together turns so distasteful that he longs to take the train and quit it for ever. How the change has been accomplished he does not know, and wonders. The hills and the woods compose the landscape as they did before, but the poetry has gone out of them; no gleam of sunlight plays along the hillsides for him, and no longer does the blue hill rise up far away like a land out of which dreams come and whither they go. The world exists only in our ideas of it, and as my idea of England changed England died, so far as I was concerned; an empty materialism was all I could see around me; and with this idea in my mind my eyes soon saw London as a great sprawl of brick on either side of a muddy river without a statue that one could look upon with admiration.
And then I grew interested in my case, and went for long walks with a view to discovering how much I had been deceived, taking a certain bitter pleasure in noticing that Westminster Abbey was not comparable to Notre Dame (nobody ever thought it was, but that was a matter that did not concern me); Westminster was merely an echo of French genius, the church that a Norman King had built in a provincial city; and, going up Parliament Street, I shook my head over my past life, for there had been a time when the Horse Guards had seemed no mean structure. The National Gallery was compared to the Madeleine and to the Bourse; St Martin’s Church roused me to special anger, and I went down the Strand wondering how any one who had seen the beautiful French churches could admire it. I walked past St Clement Danes, thinking it at best a poor thing. The Temple Church was built by Normans, and it pleased me to remember that there were no avenues in London, no great boulevards. There are parks in London, but they have not been laid out. Hyde Park is no more than a great enclosure, and St James’s Park, which used to awaken such delicate sympathies in my heart as I stood on the bridge, seemed to me in 1900 a rather foolish counterfeit, shamming some French model, I said. The detestable race has produced nothing original; not one sculptor, nor a great painter, except, perhaps, John Millais. He came from one of the Channel Islands. A Frenchman! If English painting can be repudiated, English literature cannot: Shakespeare, Shelley, and Wordsworth — above all Shelley, whose poetry I loved more than anything else in the world. Was he free from the taint of England?
The question occupied my thoughts one evening all the way home, and after dinner I took down a volume and read, or looked through, the last act of Prometheus. I cast my eyes over The Sensitive Plant; it might have been beautiful once, but all the beauty seemed to have faded out of it, and I could discover none in the Ode to the West Wind. Nor did any of the hymns interest me, not even the Hymn of Pan, the most beautiful lyric in the world. My indifference to English poetry extended to the language itself; English seemed to me to lack consistency that evening — a woolly language without a verbal system or agreement between the adjectives and nouns. So did I rave until, wearied of finding fault with everything English, my thoughts melted away into memories of the French poets.
XIII
IT WOULD BE better to get away from London and waste no more time joining people in their walks, to try to persuade them that London was an ugly city, or to wring some admission from them that the Boer War was shameful, and that England was on her knees, out-fought, vanquished by a few thousand Boers, about as many able-bodied men as one would find in the Province of Connaught.
It was in such empty conflict of opinion that I had b
een engaged yesterevening all the way along the King’s Road, having button-holed a little journalist as he came out of Sloane Square railway-station. He seemed to be laughing at me when we parted, somewhere in the Grosvenor Road, and I had returned home full of the conviction that I must get away from opinions. My condition would welcome a pastoral country, and a vision of a shepherd following his flock rose before my eyes. The essential was a country unpolluted by opinions, and hoping to find this in Sussex, I got into the train at Victoria one afternoon, rapt in a memory of some South Saxon folk that lived in an Italian house under the downs.
They had come into my life when I was a boy, and had been always the single part of me that had never changed; ideas had come and gone, but they had remained, and it was pleasant to ponder on this friendship as I returned to them and to seek out the secret reason of my love of these people — the very last that anybody would expect to find me among. So it was clear that there was nothing superficial in our affection; it was at the roots of our nature, and I could only think that I had not wearied of these South Saxons because they were so like themselves, exemplars of a long history, a great tradition; and as the train passed through Hayward’s Heath I could see them coming over with Hengist and Horsa. Ever since they had been on their land, cultivating it, till it had taken on their likeness, or else they had taken on the likeness of the land. Which had happened I did not know, nor did it matter much. Hundreds of —— had come and gone, but the type remained, affirming itself in habits and customs.
It is my love of what is permanent that has drawn me to them again and again, I said, and I thought of that sweet returning, when, coming back from France after a pursuit of painting through the Latin Quarter and Montmartre, I had met Golville in Regent Street; and without reproaching me for my long desertion, he had asked me when it would be convenient for me to come down to Sussex to see them. All my love of them had sprung up on the instant, and we had gone away together that very afternoon. My visit, intended to last for two or three days, had lasted two or three years ... perhaps more.
