Complete Works of George Moore

by George Moore

  As soon as we rose from the table Lady Gregory told us we should be undisturbed in the drawing-room till tea-time, and thanking her, we moved into the room. The moment had come, and feeling like a swordsman that meets for the first time a redoubtable rival, I reminded Yeats that in his last letter he had said we must decide in what language the play should be written — not whether it should be written in English or in Irish (neither of us knew Irish), but in what style.

  Yes, we must arrive at some agreement as to the style. Of what good will your dialogue be to me if it is written, let us say, in the language of Esther Waters?

  Nor would it be of any use to you if I were to write it in Irish dialect?

  Yeats was not sure on that point; a peasant Grania appealed to him, and I regretted that my words should have suggested to him so hazardous an experiment as a peasant Grania.

  We’re writing an heroic play. And a long time was spent over the question whether the Galway dialect was possible in the mouths of heroes, I contending that it would render the characters farcical, for it is not until the language has been strained through many minds that tragedy can be written in it. Balzac wrote Les Contes Drôlatiques in Old French because Old French lends itself well to droll stories. Our play had better be written in the language of the Bible. Avoiding all turns of speech, said Yeats, which immediately recall the Bible. You will not write Angus and his son Diarmuid which is in heaven, I hope. We don’t want to recall the Lord’s Prayer. And, for the same reason, you will not use any archaic words. You will avoid words that recall any particular epoch.

  I’m not sure that I understand.

  The words honour and ideal suggest the Middle Ages, and should not be used. The word glory is charged with modern idea — the glory of God and the glory that shall cover Lord Kitchener when he returns from Africa. You will not use it. The word soldier represents to us a man that wears a red tunic; an equivalent must be found, swordsman or fighting man. Hill is a better word than mountain; I can’t give you a reason, but that is my feeling, and the word ocean was not known to the early Irish, only the sea.

  We shall have to begin by writing a dictionary of the words that may not be used, and all the ideas that may not be introduced. Last week you wrote begging me not to waste time writing descriptions of Nature. Primitive man, you said, did not look at trees for the beauty of the branches and the agreeable shade they cast, but for the fruits they bore and the wood they furnished for making spear-shafts and canoes. A most ingenious theory, Yeats, and it may be that you are right: but I think it is safer to assume that primitive man thought and felt much as we do. Life in its essentials changes very little, and are we not writing about essentials, or trying to?

  Yeats said that the ancient writer wrote about things, and that the softness, the weakness, the effeminacy of modern literature could be attributed to ideas. There are no ideas in ancient literature, only things, and, in support of this theory, reference was made to the sagas, to the Iliad, to the Odyssey, and I listened to him, forgetful of the subject which we had met to discuss. It is through the dialect, he continued, that one escapes from abstract words, back to the sensation inspired directly by the thing itself.

  But, Yeats, a play cannot be written in dialect; nor do I think it can be written by turning common phrases which rise up in the mind into uncommon phrases.

  That is what one is always doing.

  If, for the sake of one’s literature, one had the courage to don a tramp’s weed — you object to the word don? And still more to weed? Well, if one had the courage to put on a tramp’s jacket and wander through the country, sleeping in hovels, eating American bacon, and lying five in a bed, one might be able to write the dialect naturally; but I don’t think that one can acquire the dialect by going out to walk with Lady Gregory. She goes into the cottage and listens to the story, takes it down while you wait outside, sitting on a bit of wall. Yeats, like an old jackdaw, and then filching her manuscript to put style upon it, just as you want to put style on me.

  Yeats laughed vaguely; his laugh is one of the most melancholy things in the world, and it seemed to me that I had come to Coole on a fruitless errand — that we should never be able to write Diarmuid and Grania in collaboration.

  XV

  A SEAT HAD been placed under a weeping ash for collaborators, and in the warmth and fragrance of the garden we spent many pleasant hours, quarrelling as to how the play should be written, Lady Gregory intervening when our talk waxed loud. She would cross the sward and pacify us, and tempt us out of argument into the work of construction with some such simple question as — And your second act — how is it to end? And when we are agreed on this point she would say:

  Let the play be written by one or the other of you, and then let the other go over it. Surely that is the best way — and the only way? Try to confine yourselves to the construction of the play while you are together.

  Yeats had left the construction pretty nearly in my hands; but he could theorise as well about construction as about style, and when Lady Gregory left us he would say that the first act of every good play is horizontal, the second perpendicular.

  And the third, I suppose, circular?

  Quite so. In the third act we must return to the theme stated in the first scene; and he described with long, thin hands the shapes the act should take. The first act begins with laying the feast for the Fianna; this is followed by a scene between Grania and the Druidess; then we have a short scene between King Cormac and his daughter. The Fianna arrive and Grania is at once captured by the beauty of Diarmuid, and she compels the Druidess (her foster-mother) to speak a spell over the wine, turning it into a drug that will make all men sleepy ... now, there we have a horizontal act. You see how it extends from right to left?

  And while I considered whether he would not have done better to say that it extended from left to right, he told me that the second act was clearly perpendicular. Did it not begin far away in the country, at the foot of Ben Bulben? And after the shearing of a sheep, which Diarmuid has performed very skilfully, Grania begins to speak of Finn, who is encamped in the neighbourhood, her object being to persuade Diarmuid to invite Finn to his dun. The reconciliation of Finn and Diarmuid is interrupted by Conan, who comes in telling that a great boar has broken loose and is harrying the country, and Diarmuid, though he knows that his destiny is to be killed by the boar, agrees to hunt the boar with Finn.

  What could be more perpendicular than that? Don’t you see what I mean? and Yeats’s hands went up and down; and then he told me that the third act, with some slight alteration, could be made even more circular than the first and second were horizontal and perpendicular.

  Agreed, agreed! I cried, and getting up, I strode about the sward, raising my voice out of its normal pitch until a sudden sight of Lady Gregory reminded me that to lose my temper would be to lose the play. You’ll allow me a free hand in the construction? But it’s the writing we are not agreed about, and if the writing is altered as you propose to alter it, the construction will be altered too. It may suit you to prepare your palette and distribute phrases like garlands of roses on the backs of chairs.... But there’s no use getting angry. I’ll try to write within the limits of the vocabulary you impose upon me, although the burden is heavier than that of a foreign language.... I’d sooner write the play in French.

  Why not write it in French? Lady Gregory will translate it.

  And that night I was awakened by a loud knocking at my door, causing me to start up in bed.

  What is it? Who is it? Yeats!

  I’m sorry to disturb you, but an idea has just occurred to me.

  And sitting on the edge of my bed he explained that the casual suggestion that I preferred to write the play in French rather than in his vocabulary was a better idea than he had thought at the time.

  How is that, Yeats? I asked, rubbing my eyes.

  Well, you see, through the Irish language we can get a peasant Grania.

  But Grania is a King’s daughter
. I don’t know what you mean, Yeats; and my French —

  Lady Gregory will translate your text into English. Taidgh O’Donoghue will translate the English text into Irish, and Lady Gregory will translate the Irish text back into English.

  And then you’ll put style upon it? And it was for that you awoke me?

  But don’t you think a peasant Grania —

  No, Yeats, I don’t, but I’ll sleep on it and tomorrow morning I may think differently. It is some satisfaction, however, to hear that you can bear my English style at four removes. And as I turned over in the hope of escaping from further literary discussion, I heard the thin, hollow laugh which Yeats uses on such occasions to disguise his disapproval of a joke if it tells ever so little against himself. I heard him moving towards the door, but he returned to my bedside, brought back by a sudden inspiration to win me over to his idea that Grania, instead of running in front of her nurse gathering primroses as I wished her to do, might wake at midnight, and finding the door of the dun on the latch, wander out into the garden and stand among the gooseberry-bushes, her naked feet taking pleasure in the sensation of the warm earth.

  You’ve a nice sense of folk, though you are an indifferent collector, I muttered from my pillow; and, as I lay between sleeping and waking, I heard, some time later in the night, a dialogue going on between two men — a young man seemed to me to be telling an old man that a two-headed chicken was hatched in Cairbre’s barn last night, and I heard the old man asking the young man if he had seen the chicken, and the young man answering that it had been burnt before he arrived, but it had been seen by many. Even so, I began, but my thoughts were no longer under my command and I saw and heard no more till the dawn divided the window-curtains and the rooks began to fly overhead.

  The next morning was spent in thinking of Yeats’s talent, and wondering what it would come to eventually. If he would only — But there is always an only, and at breakfast there seemed very little chance of our ever coming to an agreement as to how the play should be written, for Lady Gregory said that Yeats had asked to have his breakfast sent upstairs to him, as he was very busy experimenting in rhyme. She spoke of Dryden, whose plays were always written in rhyme; we listened reverentially, and when we rose from table she asked me to come into the garden with her. It was on our way to the seat under the weeping ash that she intimated to me that the best way to put an end to these verbal disputes between myself and my collaborator would be to do what I had myself suggested yesterday — to write a French version of the play.

  Which I will translate, she said.

  But, Lady Gregory, wouldn’t it be better for you to use your influence with Yeats, to persuade him to concede something?

  He has made all the concessions he can possibly make.

  I don’t know if you are aware of our difficulties?

  It would be no use my taking sides on a question of style, even if I were capable of doing so, she said gently. One has to accept Yeats as he is, or not at all. We are both friends of his, and he has told me that it is really his friendship for you which has enabled him —

  To suggest that I should try to write the play in French! I cried.

  But I will translate it with all deference to your style.

  To my French style! Good heavens! And then it is be translated into Irish and back into English. Now I know what poor Edward suffered when I altered his play. Edward yielded for the sake of Ireland — But as I was about to tell Lady Gregory that I declined to descend into the kitchen, to don the cap and apron, to turn the spit while the chef des sauces prepared his gravies and stirred his saucepans, the adventure of writing a play in French, to be translated three times back and forwards before a last and immortal relish was to be poured upon it, began to appeal to me. Literary adventures have always been my quest, and here was one; and seeing in it a way of escape from the English language, which I had come to hate for political reasons, and from the English country and the English people, I said:

  It is impossible to write this play in French in Galway. A French atmosphere is necessary; I will go to France and send it to you, act by act. And overjoyed when the news was brought to his bedroom, Yeats came down at once and began to speak about the value of dialect, and a peasant Grania. If I did not like that, at all events a Grania —

  Who would be racy of the soil, I said.

  A cloud came into Yeats’s face, but we parted the best of friends, and it was in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of a hotel sitting-room that I wrote the first scene of our second act in French — if not in French, in a language comprehensible to a Frenchman.

  Une caverne. Grania est couchée sur une peau d’ours; se réveillant en sursaut

  Grania

  J’ai entendu un bruit. Quelqu’un passe dans la nuit des rochers. Diarmuid!

  Diarmuid

  Je t’ai fait peur.

  Grania

  Non. Mais qu’est-ce que tu m’apportes? Quels sont ces fruits d’or?

  Diarmuid

  Je t’apporte des pommes, j’ai trouvé un pommier dans ces landes, très loin dans une vallée désolée. Cela doit être le pommier dont le berger nous a parlé. Regarde le fruit! Comme ces pommes sont belles! Cela doit être le pommier des admirable vertus. Le berger l’a dit.

  (Il donne la branche à Grania)

  Grania

  Ces pommes sont vraiment belles, elles sont comme de l’or. (Elle fait glisser une pomme dans sa robe.) Les solitudes de ces landes nous ont sauvegardés de toute poursuite. N’est-ce pas, Diarmuid? Ici nous sommes sauvegardés. C’est la solitude qui nous sauvegarde, et ce pommier sacré dont le berger nous a parlé. Mais les pommes si belles doivent être le signe d’un grand malheur ou peut-être bien, Diarmuid, d’une grand joie. Diarmuid! j’entends des pas. Écoute! Cherche tes armes!

  Diarmuid

  Non, Grania, tu n’entends rien. Nous sommes loin de toute poursuite. (On écoute et alors Diarmuid reprend le bouclier qu’il a jeté par terre; avançant d’un pas.) Oui, Grania, quelqu’un passe dans la nuit des rochers.... Qui êtes-vous? D’où venez-vous? Pourquoi venez-vous ici?

  Entrent deux Jeunes Hommes.

  1er Jeune Homme

  Nous venons de Finn.

  Diarmuid

  Et vous venez pour me tuer?

  1er Jeune Homme

  Oui.

  Grania

  Vous êtes donc venus ici en assassins! Pourquoi cherchez-vous à tuer deux amants? Quel mal vous avons-nous donc fait? Nous sommes ici dans les landes inconnues, et si nous ne sommes pas morts c’est parce que la Nature nous a sauvegardés. La Nature aime les amants et les protège. Qu’avons-nous donc fait pour que vous veniez aussi loin nous tuer?

  2ème Jeune Homme

  Nous avons voulu faire partie du Fianna, et nous avons passé par toutes les épreuves de la prouesse que l’on nous a demandée.

  1er Jeune Homme

  Nous avons fait des armes avec les guerriers de Finn.

  2ème Jeune Homme

  La lance lourde et la lance légère, nous avons couru et sauté avec eux.

  1er Jeune Homme

  Nous sommes sortis acclamés de toutes les épreuves.

  Diarmuid

  Et vous êtes venus chercher la dernière épreuve. Finn vous a demandé ma tête?

  1er Jeune Homme

  Avant d’être admis au Fianna il faut que nous apportions la tête de Diarmuid à Finn.

  Grania

  Et ne savez-vous pas que tout le Fianna est l’ami de Diarmuid excepté Finn?

  Diarmuid

  Ils veulent ma tête? Eh bien! qu’ils la prennent s’ils le peuvent.

  Grania

  Qui de vous attaquera Diarmuid le premier?

  1er Jeune Homme

  Nous l’attaquerons tous les deux à la fois.

  2ème Jeune Homme

  Nous ne venons pas ici faire des prouesses d’armes.

  Diarmuid

  Ils ont raison, Grania, ils ne viennent pas ici faire des prouesses d’armes, ils viennent comme des b�
�tes cherchant leur proie; cela leur est égal comment.

  (Ils commencent l’attaque; l’un est plus impétueux que l’autre, et il se met en avant. Diarmuid se recule dans un étroit passage entre les rochers. Soudain il blesse son adversaire qui tombe. Diarmuid passe par-dessus son corps et s’engage avec l’autre. Bien vite il le jette par terre et il commence à lui lier les mains, mais l’autre se lève et s’avance l’épée à la main gauche. Diarmuid donne son poignard à Grania; laissant à la charge de Grania l’adversaire qui est par terre, il attaque l’autre et dans quelques ripostes fait sauter l’épée de sa main. Pendant ce combat Grania est restée assise, le poignard en main. Aussitôt, l’homme ayant voulu se relever, elle le poignarde, et avance nonchalamment vers Diarmuid.)

  Diarmuid

  Ne le quitte pas.

  Grania

  Il est mort.

  Diarmuid

  Tu l’as tué?

  Grania

  Oui, je l’ai tué. Et maintenant tue celui-ci; ce sont des lâches qui n’auraient osé t’attaquer un contre un.

  Diarmuid

  Je ne peux pas tuer un homme qui est sans armes. Regarde-le! Son regard me trouble, pourtant c’est Finn qui l’a envoyé. Laisse-le partir.

  Grania

  Les malfaiteurs restent les malfaiteurs. Il retournerait à Finn et il lui dirait que nous sommes ici. (S’adressant à l’homme.) Tu ne dis rien, tourne-toi pour que le coup soit plus sûr. Mets-toi contre le rocher. (L’homme obeit.)

  Diarmuid

  Dans la bataille je n’ai jamais frappé que mon adversaire et je n’ai jamais frappé quand il n’était pas sur ses gardes. Et quand il tombait, souvent je lui donnais la main; et j’ai souvent déchiré une écharpe pour étancher le sang de ses blessures. (Il coupe un lambeau de son vêtement et l’attache autour du bras du jeune homme.)