by George Moore
I appreciate your independence, and I’ll submit an article, but in England editors are not quite so Olympian to me.
The men returned to their account-books, and I left the office a little crestfallen, seeking somebody who would neither look upon my coming with suspicion, nor treat it as a joke; but finding no one until I met AE in College Green coming out of a vegetarian eating-house, lighting his pipe after his dish of lentils.
Ah, my dear Moore!
It is a great good fortune to have a friend whose eyes light up always when they see one, and whose mind stoops or lifts itself instinctively to one’s trouble, divining it, whether it be spiritual or material. Before I had time to speak he had begun to feel that Cathleen ni Houlihan was not treating me very kindly, and he allowed me to entertain him with an account of my visit to the Gaelic League, and the rebuffs that I had received from the assistant-editors of the Claidheamh Soluis.
Neither of them knew my name, neither had seen my article in the Nineteenth Century, and last night Hyde said perhaps I would be more use to them over in England. Nobody wants me here, AE, and yet I’m coming. I know I am.
But there is other work to do here, he answered, beside the Gaelic League.
None that would interest me. All I know for certain is that I am coming despite jokes and suspicion. When I told Hyde that I had disposed of the lease of my flat he said: Now, is that so? You don’t tell me you’ve left London for good? Yeats tries to treat my coming as an exquisite joke. Edward is afraid that I may trouble somebody’s religious convictions. Nobody wants me, AE. Can you tell me why I am coming to Dublin? If you can you’re a cleverer man than I am. You are that in any case. All I had hoped for was a welcome and some enthusiasm; no bonfires, torchlight processions, banners, bands, Cead mille failte’s, nothing of that kind, only a welcome. It may be that I did expect some appreciation of the sacrifice I was making, for you see I’m throwing everything into the flames. Isn’t it strange, AE? You understand, but the others don’t, so I’ll tell you something that I heard Whistler say years ago. It was in the Old Grosvenor Gallery. I have forgotten what we were talking about; one remembers the words but not what led up to them. Nothing, he said, I suppose, matters to you except your writing. And his words went to the very bottom of my soul, frightening me; and I have asked myself again and again if I were capable of sacrificing brother, sister, mother, fortune, friend, for a work of art. One is near madness when nothing really matters but one’s work, and I tell you that Whistler’s words frightened me just as Rochefoucauld’s famous epigram has frightened thousands. You know it? Something about the misfortunes of our best friends never being wholly disagreeable to us. We don’t take pleasure in hearing of the misfortunes of our friends, but there is a truth in Rochefoucauld’s words all the same; and it wasn’t until the Boer War drove me out of England that I began to think that Whistler’s words mightn’t be truer than Rochefoucauld’s.
AE took out his watch and said he must be getting back to his office.
I’m crossing tonight, I cried after him, and in the steamer’s saloon all I had not said to him rambled on and on in my head, and the summary of it all is that it might be better for me if Whistler’s words were true, for in leaving England there could be no doubt that I was leaving a literary career behind me. England had been my inspiration. A Mummer’s Wife and Esther Waters seemed conclusive proof that I could only write about England. Then, what is it, I cried, starting up from my berth, that is driving me out of England? for it is not natural to feel as determined as I feel, especially for me, who am not at all self-willed. I am being driven, and I am being pushed headlong into the unknown.
There was no motion on board, and believing that we must be by this time nearing the Welsh coast, I climbed the brassy stairs and stood watching the unwrinkled tide sweeping round the great rock. Along the foreland the shapes of the fields were visible in the moon-haze, and, while studying the beauty of the world by night, a lone star reminded me of Stella and I said:
A man is never wholly unhappy as long as he is sure of his mistress’s love.
After all, she said, some hours later, a month isn’t a long while.
It will pass too quickly, I answered, and to avoid reproaches, and in the hope of enticing her to Ireland, I told her of a garden in the midst of Dublin with apple-trees and fig-trees and an avenue of lilac-bushes as one comes down the steps from the wicket.
For the garden is lower than the street, and in the ditch (I know not how else to explain it) there are hawthorns and laburnums.
Four walks, she said, and a grass plot.
There’s a walk down the middle.
Which can be sodded over. But why should I trouble to arrange your garden for you since I shall not see you any more?
But you will come to paint in Ireland?
Do you think that you’d like me to?
My dear Stella, the question is can I live in Ireland without you? and I besought her for the sake of her art. The Irish mountains are as beautiful as the Welsh. Dublin is backed by blue hills, and you won’t be obliged to live in a detestable cottage as you were last year in Wales, but in a fine house. And I told her that in my search for one to live in I had come across a house in Clondalkin, or near it, that would suit her perfectly — a moated stead built in the time of Anne, and, seeing she was interested, I described how I had crossed the moat by a little bridge, and between the bridge and the front door there were about thirty yards of gravel. The left wall of the house rises sheer out of the moat; on the other side there is a pathway, and at the back a fairly large garden — close on a hundred yards, I should say — and you like gardening, Stella.
I’m afraid that so much stagnant water —
But, dear one, the water of the moat is not stagnant; it is fed at the upper end by a stream, and it trickles away by the bridge into a brook.
And the house itself? she asked.
It is two-storeyed and there are some fine rooms in it, one that I think you could paint in. My recollection is a little dim, but I remember a dining-room and a very handsome drawing-room, and I think my impression was that a thousand pounds spent upon it would give you such a house as you couldn’t get anywhere else. Of that I am sure, and the country about it is all that your art requires. I remember a row of fine chestnuts, and beyond it a far-reaching stretch of tilth to the valley of the Liffey. Promise me that you’ll come? She promised. And now, dear one, tell me of some one who will remove my furniture.
II
A DESCRIPTION OF a furniture removal would have appealed to my aesthetic sense twenty years ago, and my style of Médan thread was strong enough to capture packers and their burdens; but the net that I cast now is woven of fine silk for the capture of dreams, memories, hopes, aspirations, sorrows, with here and there a secret shame. So I will say no more than that I was out of the house one morning early, lest I should see a man seize the coal-scuttle and walk away with it, and on returning home that night I found that everything in the drawing-room and the dining-room and the spare-room and the ante-room had been taken away, only the bedroom remained intact, and I wandered round the shell that I had lived in so long, pondering on the strange fact that my life in Victoria Street was no more than a dream, and with no more reality in it, I added, than the dream that I shall dream here tonight.
Jane, this is the last time you’ll call me, for I’m going away by the mail at half past eight from Euston.
Your life is all pleasure and glory, but I shall have to look round for another place, I heard her say, as she pulled at the straps of my portmanteau, and her resentment against me increased when I put a sovereign into her hand. She cooked me excellent dinners, making life infinitely agreeable to me; a present of five pounds was certainly her due, and a sovereign was more than enough for the porter, whom I suspected of poisoning my cat — a large, grey, and affectionate animal upon whom Jane, without the aid of a doctor, had impressed the virtue of chastity so successfully that he never sought the she, but remained at ho
me, a quiet, sober animal that did not drink milk, only water, and who, when thrown up to the ceiling, refrained from turning round, content to curl himself into a ball, convinced that my hands would receive him — an animal to whom I was so much attached that I had decided to bring him with me in a basket; but a few weeks before my departure he died of a stoppage in his entrails, brought about probably by a morsel of sponge fried in grease — a detestable and cruel way of poisoning cats often practised by porters. It was pitiful to watch the poor animal go to his pan and try to relieve himself, but he never succeeded in passing anything, and after the third day refused to try any more. We had recourse to a dose of castor oil, but it did not move him and after consultation we resolved to give an enema if he would allow us. The poor animal allowed us to do our will; he seemed to know that we were trying to help him, and received my caresses and my words with kindly looks while Jane administered the enema, saying that she didn’t mind if the whole courtyard saw her do it, all she cared for was to save Jim’s life. But the enema did not help him, and after it he neither ate nor drank, but lay down stoically to die. Death did not come to him for a long while; it seemed as if he would never drop off, and at last, unable to bear the sight of his sufferings any longer, Jane held his head in a pail of water, and after a few gasps the trial of life was over. It may have been that he died of the fur that he licked away, collecting in a ball in his entrails, and that there is no cause for me to regret the sovereign given to the porter when the great van drove up to my door to take away the bedroom and kitchen furniture.
Everything except my personal luggage was going to Ireland by a small coasting steamer, which would not arrive for three weeks, and my hope was that the house in Upper Ely Place would then be ready to receive my furniture; but next morning only one workman could be discovered in my new house, and he lazily sweeping. The builder was rung up on the telephone; he promised many things. Three weeks passed away; the furniture arrived, but the vans had to go away again; communications were received from the firm who removed my furniture, demanding the return of the vans, and it was not until a fortnight later that my Aubusson carpet was unrolled in the drawing-room one afternoon in AE’s presence, the purple architecture and the bunches of roses shocking him so much that I think he was on the point of asking me to burn my carpet. It affected him so much that it was with difficulty I persuaded him to withdraw his eyes from it and look at the pictures. I would conceal the fact if I dared, but a desire of truth compels me to record that when he first saw Manet’s portrait it seemed to him commonplace, even uncouth.
I asked him if the beautiful grey of the background were not in harmony with the exquisite grey of the dress, and if the paint were not spilt upon the canvas like cream, and if the suffused colour in a tea-rose were more beautiful?
Oh, Moore!
Well, if you will not admire the beauty of Manet’s paint, admire its morality. How winningly it whispers, Be not ashamed of anything but to be ashamed! And I chose this mauve wallpaper, for upon it this grey portrait will be triumphant. The other Manet is but a sketch, and the casual critic only sees that she is cock-eyed; the whiteness of her shoulders escapes him, and the pink of her breasts blossoms. Manet’s pink — almost a white! I remember a peony.... I’ll turn the picture a little more to the light. Now, AE, I beseech you to look upon it. No, it doesn’t please you. Well, look at my Monet instead; a flooded meadow and willows evanescent in the mist. Compared with Monet, Constable’s vision is a journeyman’s, and he is by no means seen at his worst in that little picture. But look again at the willows and tell me if the Impressionists did not bring a delicacy of vision into art undreamt-of before. In their pictures the world is young again. Look at this charming girl by Berthe Morisot and tell me, was a girl ever so young before? — an April girl, hyacinth-coloured dress and daffodil hair.
AE liked better Berthe Morisot’s picture of her little daughter coming to see the maid who is sewing under a dovecot.
She has caught the mystery of the child’s wondering eyes. We call it mystery, he added, but it is merely stupidity. People often say things that are not in the least like them, therefore criticism will reprove me for recording words that AE may have uttered, but which are admittedly not like him.
Ah, here’s my Conder! You can’t but like this picture of Brighton — the blue sea breaking into foam so cheerfully; a happy lady looks from her balcony at other happy ladies walking in the sunshine. The optimism of painting! AE sighed. You don’t like it? Here is a Mark Fisher; women singing under trees. The Land of Wine and Song, he calls it, and if you look through the trees you will see an estuary and a town in long perspective dying in the distance. Like my Mark Fisher, AE. Why do you hesitate?
I do like it, but —
But what?
It is a landscape in some small world, a third the size of our world.
I know what is the matter with you, AE; you’re longing for Watts. You try to disguise it, but you are sighing for Time Treading on the Big Toe of Eternity, or Death Bridging Chaos, or The Triumph of Purgatory over Heaven.
Admit —
No, AE, I’ll admit nothing, except that he painted a heron rather well, and then dropped into sixteenth-century treacle. Impressionism is a new melodic invention invisible to you at present. One of these days you’ll see it. But there’s no use talking about painting. Come into the garden. I’m expecting a lady; she will join us there, and if you’ll take her out among the hills she’ll show you how to draw a round brush from one side of the canvas to the other without letting it turn round in the middle, leaving a delicious ridge of paint with a lot of little waggles —
But little waggles, my dear Moore, are not —
AE, we’ve talked enough about painting for one afternoon. Come into the garden.
AE took out his watch; it was nearly three, he must be getting back to his office; but would I tell the lady that he’d be glad to go out painting with her any Sunday morning?
It was sad to lose him, and while walking to the wicket it seemed to me clear that he was the one who could restore to me my confidence in life; and when he left me, a certain mental sweetness seemed to have gone out of the air, and, thinking of him, I began to wonder if he were aware of his own sweetness. It is as spontaneous and instinctive in him as.... A breath of scent from the lilac-bushes seemed to finish my sentence for me, and it carried my mind into a little story I had heard from Hughes. He and AE were students together in the Art School in Dublin, and in a few weeks masters and students were alike amazed at AE’s talent for drawing and composition; he sketched the naked model from sight with an ease that was unknown to them, and, turning from the model, he designed a great assembly of Gods about the shores of the lake renowned in Celtic tradition. Compared with him we seemed at that time no more than miserable scratchers and soilers of paper. Hughes’s very words! Yet, in spite of an extraordinary fluency of expression, abundant inspiration, and the belief of the whole school that a great artist was in him, AE laid aside his brushes, determined not to pick them up again until he had mastered the besetting temptation that art presented at that moment. He feared it as a sort of self-indulgence which, if yielded to, would stint his life; art with him is a means rather than an end; it should be sought, for by its help we can live more purely, more intensely, but we must never forget that to live as fully as possible is, after all, our main concern; and he had known this truth ever since he had defied God on the road to Armagh.
But his life did not take its definite direction until an Indian missionary arrived in Dublin. It seemed odd that I should have personal knowledge of this very Brahmin. Chance had thrown me in his way; I had met him in West Kensington, and had fled before him; but AE had gone to him instinctively as to a destiny; and a few months later the Upanishads and the Vedas were born again in verse and in prose — the metrical version better than the prose; in the twenties our thoughts run into verse, and AE’s flowed into rhyme and metre as easily as into line and colour. But, deriving the same plea
sure from the writing of verse as he did from painting, he was again assailed by scruples of conscience, and to free himself from the suspicion that he might be still living in time rather than in eternity, he charged his disciples to decide whether he should contribute essays or poems. It is to their wise decision that we owe the two inspired volumes The Earth Breath and Homeward.
As the reader follows my tracing of AE’s soul at a very difficult point in his life, he must be careful to avoid any inference that AE endeavoured to escape from the sensual will because he believed it to be the business of every one to tear it out of his life; an intellect suckled on the lore of the East does not fall into the error of the parish priest, who accepts chastity as a virtue in itself, thinking that if he foregoes the pleasure of Bridget’s he is free to devote himself to that of his own belly; and I smiled, for in my imagination I could see a Yogi raising his oriental eyes in contempt at the strange jargon of metaphysics that a burly priest from Connaught, out of breath from the steep ascent, pours over his bowl of rice.
My thoughts melted away and I dreamed a long while, or a moment, I know not which, on the pure wisdom of the East and our own grossness.
But of course, I said, waking up suddenly, we have all to yield something to gain a great deal. Were it otherwise, Society would come to pieces like a rotten sponge. The right of property holds good in all Society; but in the West ethics invade the personal life in a manner unknown to the East, so much so that the Oriental stands agape at our folly, knowing well that every man brings different instincts and ideas into the world with him. The East says to the West, You prate incessantly about monogamy, and the fruit of all your labour is a house divided against itself, for man is polygamous if he is anything, and if our deeds go down one set of lines and our ideas go down another, our lives are wasted, and in the end —
A sudden thought darting across my mind left my sentence unfinished, and I asked myself what manner of man I was. The question had often been asked before, had always remained unanswered; but that day, sitting under my apple-tree, it seemed to me that I had suddenly come upon the secret lair in which the soul hides itself. An extraordinarily clear and inflexible moral sense rose up and confronted me, and, looking down my past life, I was astonished to see how dependent my deeds had always been upon my ideas. I had never been able to do anything that I thought wrong, and my conscience had inspired my books. A Modern Lover is half forgotten, but it seems to me that even in those early days I was interested in the relation of thought and deed. The Mummer’s Wife declines, for she is without sufficient personal conscience to detach herself from the conventions in which she has been brought up. Alice Barton in Muslin is a preparatory study, a prevision of Esther Waters; both represent the personal conscience striving against the communal, and, feeling that I had learnt to know myself at last, I rose from the seat, and looked round, thinking that in AE as in myself thought and action are at one. Alike, I said, in essentials, though to the casual observer regions apart.... But everybody in Dublin thinks that he is like AE as everybody in the world thinks he is like Hamlet.
