by George Moore
X
ONE DAY, WHILE walking home with John Eglinton from Professor Dowden’s, I mentioned that I was thinking of writing a volume of short stories about Irish life.
Like Turgenev’s Tales of a Sportsman? And the face that would be ugly if unlighted by the intelligence lit up. And you will require how many stories to make the volume?
Nine, ten, or a dozen — a year’s work.
Do you think you’ll be able to find subjects all the while?
The question kindled my vanity, and I answered: Turgenev wrote The Tales of a Sportsman in Paris, and sent them to a Russian newspaper week by week. Maupassant contributed two stories a week to the Gil Bias, but it does not follow that because Maupassant and Turgenev were always able to find new subjects I shall, and Father Tom restricting the zone of my stories. The stories I am thinking of are longer than Maupassant’s.
As soon as I had bidden him goodbye my thoughts went away in search of subjects, and before many steps were taken I remembered Dick Lennox, the fat man in A Mummer’s Wife, He used to lodge in a factory-town in Lancashire in the house of a maiden lady, and one day she opened a drawer and showed him her wedding-gown. It had never gone to church, but how she had lost her swain it was impossible to remember — Dick Lennox may never have told me — but the wedding-gown I remembered, and a new story was woven round it that same evening, and it pleased Father Tom so much that he wished to publish the English text with the Irish.
The publication of the English text seemed to me to render useless the publication of the story, and Father Tom failed to persuade me; and only Taidgh O’Donoghue’s translation appeared in the New Ireland Review — a beautiful translation, if I can judge it from Rolleston’s retranslation, full of exquisite little turns of phrase. Kuno Meyer — and who knows better? — tells me that the Irish text exhales the folk-flavour that I sought for and missed, and Hyde, who will never take sides on any subject, admits that the Irish version gives him more pleasure, for though I often meet good English, it is seldom I come across a good piece of Irish. Alms-giving and The Clerk’s Quest were published subsequently in the New Ireland Review, and both pleased Father Tom. And it was not till the fourth month that I began to feel the restrictions of the New Ireland Review. I had plenty of subjects in stock, but not one that I thought Father Tom would think suitable. Home Sickness might go into the Review, but somehow, I could not see it included in a school-book — The Exile still less, and the worst of it was that The Exile was nearly written; it had taken a fortnight to write — a longish short story, and a downright good subject for narrative, if I may say so without impertinence. And it was for no fault in the writing that Father Tom rejected it. He liked the story, and he liked Home Sickness even better than The Exile, but he made me feel that it could hardly be included in a collection of stories which he could recommend as a text-book for the Intermediate.
Yes, I answered, I quite see. Stories about things, without moral or literary tendencies — stories like Turgenev’s, of the horse that is stolen and recovered again, so the owner thinks at first, but after a little while he begins to think the horse less wonderful than the horse he lost, and the uncertainty preys upon his mind to such an extent that he ends by shooting the horse.
That is what we want — a wonderful story, and one excellently well suited to a text-book, for all children love horses; it is one of their first interests.
But my mind seemed closed for the time being to the stories suitable to a text-book, and wide open to those that would lead me away from Father Tom and the New Ireland Review. And this was a grief to me, for I knew full well that my contributions to the New Ireland Review were the link that bound me to my friend, if he will allow me to call him friend. We shall not meet again, and if we do, of what use? We are like ships; all and sundry have destinies and destinations. There is very little Nietzsche in me, but this much of him I remember, that we must pursue our courses valiantly, come what may. Father Tom and I had lain side by side in harbour for a while, but the magnetism of the ocean drew me, and I continued to write, feeling all the while that my stories were drawing me away from Catholic Ireland.
Story followed story, each coming into my mind before the story on the blotting pad was finished, and each suggested by something seen or something heard. When I was called to Castlebar to fulfil the office of High Sheriff, Father Lyons showed me the theatre he had built, and it was AE, I think, who told me that he knew a priest who lived in the great waste lying between Crossmalina and Belmullet. He once liked reading, but he now spent his evenings knitting. I can see your priest, I cried, and wrote The Playhouse in the Waste, and A Letter to Rome. A little wreath of stories was woven one evening at the Moat House out of the gossip of a maid who was prone to relate the whole countryside, and she did this so well that she seemed to be relating a village Odyssey, incident following incident with bewildering prodigality. To omit any seemed a losing. But in writing, order and sequence are necessary, and all I could make use of were the four little tales entitled Some Parishioners. It is a pity that more time was not spent on the writing of them, but the English language was still abhorrent to me; and my text was looked upon by me as a mere foundation for an Irish one, and the stories might never have been finished, or not finished at the time, for I could trust Taidgh O’Donoghue to fill up the ruts for me, if it had not been for Stella’s interest in them. Part of our bargain was that I should read them to her in the drawing-room in the Moat House after dinner, and her mind being one of those large tidy minds that can find no pleasure in broken stories or harsh or incomplete sentences, I got from her the advice I needed — to put the finishing hand to the stories before sending them to Taidgh.
Whose task, she said, will be much lightened thereby; badly constructed sentences are difficult to translate.
We stood by the bridge, looking into the moat, and hearing water faintly trickling through the summer tangle of flowering weeds, we fetched a pole and measured four or five feet of mud; below the mud was a flagged bottom, which went far to prove that Stella was right in her surmise that the moat had once been used as a breeding place for trout.
But if trout had been bred in the moat, trout could be bred in it again, and Stella was at last persuaded that the cleansing of the moat would be a pleasant summer’s work for the villagers, and that we should take great interest in the laying down of the spawn and in netting the fish when they had grown to half a pound. Trout grew to that size in a piscina, and talking of the pleasure of the netting, she trailing the net on one side of the stream and I on the other, we passed round the house into the rich garden she had planted.
I think you care more for weeds than for flowers, she said, her little hardship being my lack of interest in her garden, for a garden was part of her instinct as much as her painting; and my clearest remembrance of her is a tall figure in the evening light moving through flower-beds.
In front of us was a great sweeping corn-field covering several acres, rare in Ireland, where all the country is grass; and on the other side the Valley of the Liffey extended mile after mile, blue hills gathering the landscape up into its rest at last. Our eyes sought for Rathfarnham, four or five miles away, and we spoke of the two rivers, the Liffey and the Dodder, and of the herdsmen that followed the cattle. Ireland was new to us both, almost as new to me as it was to her, and we were interested in the country we had come to live in, she more playfully and more humanely than I, being a painter, whereas the Boer War still continued to vex me, driving me forward relentlessly, and making me a tiresome companion at times. Stella’s cordial unmoral appreciation of Ireland was a great help to me, and her fine ear for idiom drew my attention to the beauty of peasant speech in our walks through the Valley of the Liffey, her eyes measuring the landscape all the while, noting the shapely trees and the lonely farmhouses. She and Florence often spent nights together in the Sussex woods, and now, inspired by the summer-time, she began to speak to me of a night out upon the mountain; and one evening we drove to the en
d of the mountain road, and walked half a mile with our rugs and lay down under the ruins of the Hell Fire Club. Hard by is the gaunt ruin of an unfinished castle, begun with reckless extravagance — by whom? Names slip away, but the sight of the ruin against the hillside remains distinct.
And for two long summers we drove and walked through these neighbourhoods. Coming one day upon a picturesque farmhouse, and wondering who the folk might be that lived within walls as strong as a fortress, we wandered round the house, looking into the great areas. The farmer introduced us to his daughter, a pretty red-headed girl about twenty, who said they were just going to sit down to tea, and would we join them? Among other things, they spoke of a cousin from America who was coming to Ireland for a rest; he had been all through Cuba, reporting the war for the American papers. He, too, seemed typical of Ireland, and before we reached the Moat House I had begun to see him strolling about Tara, dreaming of Ireland’s past, till he fell in love with the farmer’s pretty daughter, sensual love bridging over, for a while, intellectual differences. And this story seeming to me representative of Irish life, I decided to include it in the collection, though in length it did not correspond with the others. Each story in the volume entitled The Unfilled Field had helped me to understand my own country, but it was while writing The Wild Goose that it occurred to me for the first time that, it being impossible to enjoy independence of body and soul in Ireland, the thought of every brave-hearted boy is to cry, Now, off with my coat so that I may earn five pounds to take me out of the country.
Every race gets the religion it deserves, I said, and only as policemen, pugilists, and priests have they succeeded, with here and there a successful lawyer. The theory of the germ cell floated into my mind: It may be that Nature did not intend them to advance beyond the stage of the herdsmen — the finest in the world! I cried, rising from the composition of The Wild Goose. They were that in the beginning, when the greater part of Ireland was forest and marsh, with great pasture lands through which long herds of cattle wandered from dawn to evening, watched over by barbarous men in kilts with terrible dogs; and since those days we have lost the civilisation that obtained in the monasteries. We have declined in everything except our cattle, and our herdsmen, the finest in the world, divining the steak in the bullock with the same certainty as the Greek divined the statue in the block of marble.
My discovery produced in me a kind of rapture, and I sat looking at my Monet for a long while, thinking that perhaps, after all, it is unnecessary for a race to produce pictures or literature or sculpture or music, for to do one thing extremely well justifies the existence of a race, and the beef-steaks that Ireland produces justify Ireland — in a way, for though the Irish have produced the finest steaks, they have never invented a sauce for the steak; and I fell to thinking that if some meditative herdsman, while leaning over a gate, had been inspired to compose a sauce whereby the steak might be eaten with relish, the Irish race would be able to hold up its head in the world. One finds excuses always for one’s country’s shortcomings, and it pleased me to think that if none had imagined Sauce Béarnaise it was because his attention was always needed to keep the cattle from straying. There were wolves in Ireland always lurking round the herd, ready to separate a heifer or a calf from the protection of the bulls. But to find an excuse for the monks dwelling in commodious monasteries is more difficult. The talk of the monks must have been frequently about the pleasures of the table, yet none was inspired to go to the Prior with the sacred word Béarnaise upon his lips. That word would have secured an immortality as secure as Chateaubriand, who is read no more, but is eaten every day. The intellect perishes, but the belly is always with us. Or may we acquit the race of lack of imagination, and lay the blame upon the Irish language, which is, perhaps, too harsh and bitter for such a buttery word as Béarnaise? And could a language in which there is no butter be capable of inventing a succulent sauce? It may be that the Irish language was intended for the sale of bullocks — a language that has never been to school, as John Eglinton once said. If it had only fled to the kitchen one might forgive it for having played truant — the Irish language, a language that has never been spoken in a drawing-room, only in rude towers, and very like those towers are the blocks of rough sound that a Gaelic speaker hurls at his audience when he speaks. Whereas one can hardly imagine any other language but French being spoken along the beautiful winding roads of France, lined with poplar-trees, and about the hillsides dotted with red-tiled roofs, and behind the pierced green shutters, which enchant us when we see them as the train moves on towards Paris from Amiens. The French language is implicit in the balconies, lanterns, perrons, that we see as the train nears Paris, and still more implicit in the high-pitched roofs of the chateau of Fontainebleau when allâmes and allâtes came naturally into conversation. In a trice we leave the Court of Louis XV for a fête at Melun, and there, though the past tenses are no longer in use, the language still sparkles; it foams and goes to the head, a lovely language, very like champagne. True that the English language has never been much in the kitchen nor in the vineyard, but it has been spoken in the dales and along the downs, and there is a finer breeze in it than there is in French, and a bite in it like Elizabethan ale — all the same, a declining language; thee and thou have been lost beyond hope of restoration, and many words that I remember in common use are now nearly archaic; a language wearied with child-bearing, and I pondered the endless poetry of England, and admitted English literature to be the most beautiful, Boer War or no Boer War. Whereas the Irish language, notwithstanding its declensions and its grammatical use of thee and thou, has failed. As Bergin said once to me, We did nothing with it when we had it. By this, did he mean that the Irish race was never destined to rise above the herdsman? And if he did, his instinctive judgment is important; it shows that we know ourselves. We see, I cried, the rump-steak in the animal as clearly as the Greek saw the statue in the marble, and the epigram pleased me so much that I felt I must go out at once to collogue with somebody.
But it was eleven o’clock, and no one is available at that hour but dear Edward; a few hundred yards are as nothing to one with a passion for literary conversation; and away I went down Ely Place, across Merrion Row, through Merrion Street, and as soon as the corner of Clare Street was turned, I began to look out for the light above the tobacconist’s shop. The light was there! My heart was as faint as a lover’s, and the serenade which I used to beguile him down from his books rose to my lips. He will only answer to this one, or to a motive from The Ring. And it is necessary to whistle very loudly, for the trams make a great deal of noise, and Edward sometimes dozes on the sofa.
On the other side is a public-house, and the serenading of Edward draws comments from the topers as they go away wiping their mouths. One has to choose a quiet moment between the trams; and when the serenade has been whistled twice, the light of Edward’s candle appears, coming very slowly down the stairs, and there he is in the doorway, if anything larger than life, in the voluminous grey trousers, and over his shoulders a buff jacket which he wears in the evening. Two short flights of stairs, and we are in his room. It never changes — the same litter from day to day, from year to year, the same old and broken mahogany furniture, the same musty wallpaper, dusty manuscripts lying about in heaps, and many dusty books. If one likes a man one likes his habits, and never do I go into Edward’s room without admiring the old prints that he tacks on the wall, or looking through the books on the great round table, or admiring the little sofa between the round table and the Japanese screen, which Edward bought for a few shillings down on the quays — a torn, dusty, ragged screen, but serviceable enough; it keeps out the draught; and Edward is especially susceptible to draughts, the very slightest will give him a cold. Between the folds of the screen we find a small harmonium of about three octaves, and on it a score of Palestrina. As well might one try to play the Mass upon a flute, and one can only think that it serves to give the keynote to a choir-boy. On the table is a candlestick made
out of white tin, designed probably by Edward himself, for it holds four candles. He prefers candles for reading, but he snuffs them when I enter and lights the gas, offers me a cigar, refills his churchwarden, and closes his book.
What book are you reading, Edward?
I am reading Ruskin’s Modern Painters, but it is very long and rather prosy, and the fifth volume is inexpressibly tedious. It doesn’t seem to me that I shall ever get through it.
But if it doesn’t interest you why do you read it?
Oh, I don’t like to leave a book.
You prefer reading a tiresome book to my conversation.
But you live so far away.
How far, Edward? Five hundred yards.
And after dinner I like to get home to my pipe. You see, I’m at business all day; I’ve business relations with a great number of people. Our lives aren’t the same; and I assure you that in the evening a quiet hour is a luxury to me.
But how can you find business to do all day? There is Mass in the morning and the Angelus at twelve?
I know what all that kind of talk is worth. And Edward puffed sullenly at his churchwarden while I assured him that I was thinking of his play.
All this public business, I said, leaves very little time for your work.
In the afternoon between four and seven I get a couple of hours. Yesterday I had a run; I got off thirty lines, but today I’m stuck again, and shall have to invent something to get one of the characters off the stage naturally. You see, I’m still in the pencil stage. In about two years I shall be in ink, and then I’ll give you the play to read.
As my help would not be needed for the next two years, it seemed to me that I might speak of The Wild Goose, and Edward listened, giving his whole mind to the story.
But why, he asked, should Ned Carmody object to his wife suckling her baby?
He fears that it might spoil her figure.
