by George Moore
Haven’t you read anything but The Apologia?
No, and there is no reason why I should.
How would you like to be judged by one book?
I have shown my friends the passages I have been quoting, and they think he wrote better when he was a Protestant.
I see your article on Newman from end to end. That Newman was a great writer until he became a Catholic is a pretty paradox which will suit your style. You will be able to discover passages in his Protestant sermons better written, no doubt, than the passages you select from The Apologia. The Colonel lit his candle, and I could hear him laughing good-humouredly as he went upstairs to bed.
It is dangerous to name a quality, I said to him next morning at breakfast, whereby we may recognise a great writer, for as soon as we have done so somebody names somebody whom we must confess deficient in the quality mentioned. The perils of definition are numerous, but most people will agree with me that all great writers have possessed an extraordinary gift of creating images, and if that be so, Newman cannot be called a writer. We search vainly in the barren, sandy tract of The Apologia for one, finding only dead phrases, very often used so incorrectly that it is difficult to tell what he is driving at; driving at is just the kind of worn-out phrase he would use without a scruple.
You are judging Newman by The Apologia.
I admit I haven’t read any other book. But dear Edward once invited me to look into — I have forgotten the title, but I remember the sentence that caught my eye — Heresy stalks the land, and you will agree with me that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the average reporter would be ashamed to write the words ... unless he were in a very great hurry.
Newman wrote The Apologia in a great hurry.
However great your hurry, you couldn’t, nor could any of the friends who came here on Saturday night, write as badly, and unless we hold that to be always thin and colourless is a style —
You’ve a good case against him, but I’m afraid you’ll spoil it by overstatement.
My concern is neither to overstate nor to understate, but to follow my own mind, faithfully, tracing its every turn. An idea has been running in my head that books lose and gain qualities in the course of time, and I have worried over it a good deal, for what seemed to be a paradox I felt to be a truth. Our fathers were not so foolish as they appear to us to be in their admiration of Lara, The Corsair, The Bride of Abydos, The Giaour; they breathed into the clay and vivified it, and when weary of romance they wandered into theology, and were lured by a mirage, seeing groves of palm-trees, flowers, and a bubbling rill, where in truth there was nothing but rocks and sand and a puddle. And while Byron and Newman turn to dust Shakespeare is becoming eternal.
There are degrees, then, in immortality?
Of course. The longer the immortality the more perfect it becomes, Time putting a patina upon the bronze and the marble and wood, and I think upon texts; you never will persuade me that the text that we read is the text read in 1623.
The Colonel raised his sad eyes from The Apologia into which they had been plunged.
I’ll admit that we never seem to get any further in metaphysics than Bishop Berkeley. I see, he said a few minutes later, that Newman has written a preface for this new and insufficiently revised edition. Have you read it?
No, but I shall be glad to listen if you’ll read it to me after breakfast.
As soon as he had finished his eggs and bacon, the Colonel fixed his glasses a little higher on his nose, and it was not long before we began to feel that our tasks were hard, one as hard as the other, and when the last sentence was pronounced, the Colonel, despite his reluctance to decry anything Catholic, was forced to admit a lack of focus in the composition.
He wanders from one subject to another, never finishing.
Excellent criticism! What you say is in agreement with Stevenson, who told an interviewer that if a man can group his ideas he is a good writer, though the words in which he expresses himself be tasteless, and as you say, Newman, before he has finished with his third section, returns to his first; from the fifth he returns to the fourth, and in the sixth section we find some points that should have been included in the second.
The Colonel did not answer; and feeling that I owed something to my guest, I said:
The last time you were here you mentioned that you hoped to be able to get one of the gateways from Newbrook.
The Colonel brightened up at once, and told me that he was only just in time, for the stones were about to be utilised by the peasants for the building of pigsties and cottages. But he had followed them in his gig through the country, and had brought them all to Moore Hall, and was now only waiting for me to decide whether I would like the gateway built in a half-circle or in a straight line. The saw-mill he hoped to get into working order very soon.
It will be of great use for cutting up the timber that we shall get out of the stone park.
Isn’t it in working order?
With emphasis and interest the Colonel began to relate the accident the saw-mill had met with on the way from Ballinrobe; as it was entering the farmyard one of the horses had shied, bringing the boiler right up against a stone pillar, starting some of the rivets. A dark cloud came into his face, and I learnt from him that he had very foolishly given heed to the smith at Ballinrobe, a braggart who had sworn he could rivet a boiler with any man in Ireland; but when it came to the point he could do nothing. The Castlebar smith, a very clever man, had not succeeded any better, but there was a smith at Cong —
A real Cuchulain.
The story, I admit, is assuming all the proportions of an epic, the Colonel replied joyously, and I allowed him to tell me the whole of it, listening to it with half my brain, while with the other half I considered the height of the Colonel’s skull and its narrowness across the temples.
A refined head, I said to myself, and it seemed to me that I had seen, at some time or other, the same pinched skull in certain portraits of ecclesiastics by Bellini and the School of Bellini: but not the Colonel’s vague, inconclusive eyes, I added. Italy has always retained a great deal of her ancient paganism; but Catholicism absorbed Spain and Ireland. It is into Spanish painting that we must look for the Colonel, and we find most of him in Velasquez, a somewhat icy painter who, however, relished and stated with great skill the Colonel’s high-pitched nose, the drawing of the small nostrils, the hard, grizzled moustache. He painted the true Catholic in all his portraits of Philip, never failing to catch the faded, empty look that is so essentially a part of the Catholic face. Our ideas mould a likeness quickly if Nature supplies certain proportions, and the Colonel — when he fattens out a little, which he sometimes does, and when his mind is away — reminds me of the dead King. Of course, there are dissimilarities. Kingship creates formalities, and the Spanish Court must have robbed Philip of all sense of humour, or buried it very deeply in his breast, for it is recorded that he was so pleased on one occasion with the splendid fight that a bull put up against the picadors, that he did not deem any swordsman in Spain worthy of the honour of killing him; the bull had earned his death from the highest hand in the land, and arming himself with an arquebuse or caliver, he walked across the arena and shot the bull with his own kingly hand. He must have walked towards the bull with a kingly stride — a sloven stride and a kingly act would be incompatible — he must have walked as if to music; but the Colonel has little or no ear for music, and his walk is, for this reason or another, the very opposite to Philip’s. He slouches from side to side, a curious gait, the reader will say, for a soldier of thirty years, but very like himself, and therefore one likes to see it, and to see him preparing for it, hustling himself into his old yellow overcoat in the passage. He never carries a stick or umbrella; he slouches along, his hands dangling ugly out of the ends of the cuffs. To what business he is going I often wonder as I stand at the window watching him, remembering all the while how he had lain back in his armchair after breakfast, reading a book, his subconsciousness su
ggesting to him many different errands, and at last detaching him from his book or his manuscript, for the Colonel has always meditated a literary career for himself as soon as he was free from the army.
There are people of today, tomorrow, and yesterday; and the Colonel is much more of yesterday than of today. If he does not defend the Inquisition directly, he does so indirectly — all religions have persecuted, for it is the nature of man to persecute, and he is unable to understand that Protestantism and Rationalism together redeemed the world from the disgrace of the Middle Ages. His ideas clank like chains about him, but not to the ordinary ear, for the Colonel is reserved by nature; only a fine ear can hear the clanks. Balzac would never have thought of the Colonel for a modern story, but would have placed him — I have sufficient confidence in Balzac’s genius to believe that he would have placed him in a Spanish setting; for the Colonel’s mind is so archaic that his clothes distress even me. I am not good at clothes, but I am sure it is because his natural garment, the doublet, is forbidden him that he dresses himself in dim grey hues or in pepper-and-salt. He has never been seen in checks or fancy waistcoats, or in a bright-coloured tie. He goes, however, willingly into breeches; at Moore Hall he is never out of breeches; breeches remind him of his racing and hunting days, besides being convenient. So far can his country gear be explained, but why he sometimes comes up to Dublin in breeches, presenting, as I have said, an incongruous spectacle of sport in my drawing-room on a background of impressionist pictures, I am unable to offer any opinion.
XVI
A TELEGRAM, SIR.
Will you please to get the Colonel’s room ready, and tell him, when he arrives, that I shall not be free for a couple of hours? I’m busy with The Lake. And about half past four I went down to the dining-room and found him in an armchair surrounded by books: Imaginary Portraits, Evelyn Innes, Wild Wales, and a book of Irish Folk Tales, and he was reading Strauss’s Life of Jesus.
He makes some very good points, he said, and I encouraged him to continue in his appreciation of Strauss’s skill as a dialectician; but on pressing him to say that the book was influencing him, he said that his mind had been made up long ago.
Then you are merely reading languidly, without taking sides; a cricket-match seen from the windows of a railway train — that’s about all. To read without drawing conclusions is fatal. We have known men and women in our youth who could neither read nor write, but who were clever at their trades, far cleverer than those who have come after them. Mahomet could neither read nor write. Forcible education is one of the follies of the century, I continued. We are agreed in that, for how can you educate forcibly? Education demands a certain acquiescence.
Tea was brought in, and the Colonel said he had come up for a meeting of the Coisde Gnotha, and must go back on Saturday.
On Saturday!
I must get back to look after the men.
Your sawyers? I suppose Paddy Walshe wants some rafters for his barn?
No, there’s the garden. Kavanagh is a splendid vegetable grower, but he doesn’t understand the fruit-trees. I have to look after them myself. The meeting begins at eight. Would you mind if we were to dine at seven or a little before?
It was irritating to be asked to change the hour of dinner for the sake of so futile a thing as a meeting of the Coisde Gnotha, and though I replied, Of course, I could not refrain from adding: In fifty years’ time no one will speak Irish unless you procure a parrot and teach her. Parrots live a long while; an Irish-speaking Polly in a hundred years’ time! what do you think, Maurice? And about that time Christianity will be extinct.
The Colonel laughed good-humouredly, he hustled himself into his old yellow overcoat, and went away leaving me disconcerted, irritated against him, and still more against myself, for it was impossible not to feel that I was abominably unsympathetic to other people’s ideas. But am I? Only when phantoms are cherished because they are phantoms. We are all liable to mistake the phantom for reality. I followed the Irish language for a while, but as soon as I discovered my mistake I retraced my steps. Not so the Colonel. He knows at the bottom of his heart that the Irish language cannot be revived, that it would take two hundred years to revive it, and that even if it were revived nothing would come of it unless Ireland dropped Catholicism.
The lamp burned brightly on the table, and, rising from the armchair to light a cigar, I caught sight of my face and wondered at my anger against my brother, a sort of incoherent, interior rumbling, expressing itself in single words and fragments of sentences. An evil self seemed to be stirring within me; or was it that part of our nature which lurks in a distant corner of our being and sometimes breaks its chain and overpowers the normal self which we are pleased to regard as our true self? Every one has experienced the sensation of spiritual forces at war within himself, but does any one ever suspect that the abnormal self which has come up to the surface and is influencing him may be influencing him for his good; at all events, for some purpose other than the generally received one — the desire to lead poor human nature into temptation? The Christian idea of horns and hooves and tail has been rammed into us so thoroughly that we seldom cease to be Christians; but I must have nearly ceased to be one in the evening I am describing, for I seemed to be aware all the while that there was good purpose behind my anger at my brother’s untidy mind. I was not certain what adjective to apply to it — untidy, unfinished, or prejudiced.
He reads Strauss’s Life of Jesus, admitting that no proofs, however conclusive, would persuade him that the son of Mary and Joseph was anything else but the Son of God. Christ never said that he was, and I suppose he knew. Even St Paul never spoke of him as God. How precisely I can see that brother of mine, I cried, surprised myself at the clearness with which I remembered the long, pear-shaped head with some fine lines in it; but too narrow at the temples, I muttered, and the eyes are vague and lacking in the light of any great spiritual conviction, and they tell the truth, for has he not admitted to me that substantially the host does not change, and the rest is merely whatever philosophical idea you like to attach to it? Worse still, he has said that the Decrees the Pope issues affecting excommunication do not interest him in the least, and this proves him to be a heretic, a Modernist. He always eats meat on Friday; of course he may have obtained a dispensation to eat the chicken as well as the egg, but I am not at all sure that he acquiesces in priestly rule enough to apply for a dispensation; and I began to wonder how long it was since his last confession. When the Bishop questioned the parish priest on the subject, the Colonel was very angry, and said it was hitting below the belt. He did not go to Mass when he came to see me in Dublin until I reproached him for neglect of his duties, and then he never failed afterwards to step away to Westland Row, his white hair blowing over the collar of the old yellow overcoat — never failed while I was in the house, but when I left it he remained in bed, so I have been told. He may have been ill, but I don’t believe it. There has always been a vein of humbug in the depths of his deeply affectionate nature; when he was a little child of four or five he was caught with his fingers in a jam-pot, but instead of saying, I took the jam because I liked it, he fled to his mother and flung himself into her arms, begging of her not to believe the nurse, crying, I am your own innocent yam (lamb).
The Colonel’s key in the lock interrupted my thoughts, and there he was before me, overflowing with anecdote, his hilarity as unpleasing as it was surprising; high spirits sit ill upon the constitutionally sad, and the humorous sententious are very trying at times. His chatter about the doings of the League seemed endless, and I felt that I could not abide that family attitude into which he at once fell: the hand held in front of the fire, the elbow resting on the knee. The Colonel had fattened in the face since his last visit. Everybody should cultivate a kindly patience, imitating AE, who, while going his way, can watch others going theirs without seeming invidious or disdainful. But AE was born with a beautiful mind, and can pass a criticism on a copy of bad verses, and send the poet hom
e unwounded in his self-respect. He will never change. He knows himself to be immortal, and is content to overlook or claim my periodical aggressiveness, as part of my character. But not being as wise as AE, I would alter myself if I could. How often have I tried! In vain, in vain! We are what we are, for better or worse, and there are no stepping stones ... except in bad verses. Enough of myself and back to the Colonel.
He was telling me how one orator’s loquacity had driven his supporters out of the room, and when the amendment was put there was nobody to support it. The incident amused me for a moment, and then a sudden sense of the triviality of the proceedings boiled up in my mind.
Of course, I said, the amendment you speak of was invaluable, and its loss a great blow to the movement. But tell me, do you propose to spend the rest of your life coming up from Mayo to listen to these fellows chattering about the best means of reviving a language which the few who can speak it are ashamed to speak, or have fallen out of the habit of speaking, like Alec McDonnell and his wife?
I have never denied that the difficulties are very great.
But of what use would the language be to anybody if it could be revived? Prayers, I have often said, are equally valuable in whatever language they may be said.
The Colonel smiled a little contemptuously, and his smile irritated me still further.
As I have said a thousand times, unless Ireland ceases to be Catholic —
That question has been gone into.
Gone into; but you’ve never been able to explain why there is so little Catholic literature. It must be clear to everybody that dogma draws a circle round the mind; within this circle you may think, but outside of it your thoughts may not stray. An acorn planted in a pot —
