Complete Works of George Moore

by George Moore

  So it was there that my great-grandfather had wished to be buried, but he was buried at Ashbrook in a Catholic chapel. By mistake, the Colonel says in his letter. By mistake! I cried. Any breach of faith were better than that he should be laid with his Protestant forebears. The Irish Spaniard, Catholic, back, belly, and sides, would not have hesitated to ignore her husband’s instructions. She must have come from London, for George the historian, an Agnostic like his master Gibbon, would have buried his father as the will directed, if he had not been overcome by his mother, who, of course, would like to conceal the fact that she had married a man of such certain Protestantism that at the last he had chosen to be buried in a Protestant cemetery. I should like to know who was at this funeral, and if the historian came over from London to attend it or remained gadding about Holland House, or courting Louisa Browne, whom he afterwards married in spite of the fact that it was her uncle or her brother who secured the conviction of John Moore, the historian’s brother. That marriage would have added another grief to the old merchant’s many griefs.

  A portrait of Louisa hangs in the dining-room, and she appears in it as a voluptuous young woman wrapped in gauze, and by her hangs the portrait of her uncle, Lord Altamont, a copy of the portrait by Reynolds in Westport House. Both are indifferent works, but there is a good picture in the dining-room at Moore Hall, a portrait of my grandfather painted in 1836, certainly not earlier, and therefore not a Raeburn. Nor is it a Catterson Smith, who was painting at that time in Dublin, for his thick, heavy touch is nowhere visible in grandfather’s portrait. The drawing is sure, almost unconscious, revealing an old man with white hair growing scantily about a high forehead, and though no books are in the background, we divine a library and a life sheltered from every misfortune. Who could have painted the portrait? Wilkie, perhaps. He was painting about that time. But there are few life-size portraits by Wilkie, and in none that I have seen is the drawing so thoughtful, nor does he show much interest in character except in this portrait. He seems to have said in it all that my grandfather tells us about himself in his preface to the French Revolution. A very remarkable portrait, no doubt, and for a long time I sat struggling with an idea that would not come into a phrase: that the picture and the preface might be compared to the music and words, opera and libretto, something like that. But it would not come, and I got up and took the preface out of the drawer.

  PREFACE TO MY HISTORICAL MEMOIRS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, TO BE PUBLISHED AFTER MY DEATH.

  August 20, 1837.

  I, this day, complete my sixty-fourth year. I have for some time been engaged in a history of the French Revolution. I early in life began collecting books on this subject, and they now fill up an entire side of my very pretty library in this beautiful place. They are most of them bad in style, and worse in spirit and sentiment. There are few of them which I could endure reading were it not for the task I have laid down for myself. This task has the effect of giving interest to the most wretched productions. Any book which offers me a choice of a new fact, or the solution of any difficulty attached to old facts, interests me, and I find amusement in examining it. Amusement and the banishment of what the French call ennui are my principal objects. Beautiful as this place is, and much as I love it, I confess I have not always been able to exclude ennui from its precincts. There are hours in which I have not been able to keep it away; general vague reading, without any specific object, afforded me no protection against it, but since I have sat down to my task I scarcely have known what it is. I have a rough copy carried on nearly to the present time. To every written page I have left a blank one, in which I put down any new facts or reflections or news. I wish to go on for some time longer in this manner. But my age, as mentioned at the head of this preface, admonishes me there is no time to be lost if I wish the public ever to have an insight into my history. My rough copy with alternate blank pages it is impossible for any one to make anything of, and it is not till after my death I wish my history to appear, not in the form in which my rough copy exhibits it.

  I have several times published, but never with any success, so that I am tired of publication in my lifetime. Besides, as I foresee my history will be pretty voluminous, I do not like the trouble of superintending the proofs. As I am a man of fortune, I leave by my will five hundred pounds to defray the expenses of publication. As the publication is in this manner ordered and appointed by me in my testamentary deposition, no one who survives me will be answerable for anything it contains. I foresee many things I say will give offence, but my objects are truth and my country. As amusement was my great object in undertaking this task, it may be said I have already gained my end in never knowing ennui since I began it. But having written a history of the French Revolution, impregnated with all the feelings and sentiments of an Englishman, and written in a style, I hope, purely and thoroughly English, I am ambitious it should be read after me. I have had no celebrity in my life. But a prospect of this posthumous fame pleases me at this moment. I may say with Erasmus: Illud certe praesagio, de meis lucubrationibus, qualescumque sunt, candidius, judicaturam posteritatem, though I cannot add with him: Tametsi nec de meo seculo queri possum. Having missed the applause, and even notice, of my age, I ought, perhaps, to be indifferent about the opinions of those that follow; their applause, should I ever gain it, will not reach me when the grave has closed over me. This is true; but we are so made that while we are living we think with pleasure that we shall not be forgotten after our deaths. The nature of this feeling is beautifully expressed by Fielding in a passage which Gibbon has transcribed in the account of his own life. What adds to my wish that my history should be read after my death is that I am convinced no account of the great event of the French Revolution in all its parts will be fair and impartial coming from a Frenchman, none certainly will do justice to my country. I am anxious to have the merits of the Duke of Wellington duly appreciated as having done more in war than any captain that ever existed. He entered on the contest with more disadvantages on his side, as will be explained in the history. He had greater difficulties to encounter, and arrived at more glorious results. Though not a Frenchman, I am perfectly acquainted with the French language, and there are few Frenchmen better informed with respect to the history, literature, and what are called the statistics of France than I am, so that I conceive myself perfectly well qualified, as much as any Frenchman, for the task I have undertaken. In this improved copy which I am now transcribing, I break the history into chapters, with a view to the grouping of the facts of which it consists. It is this which I call grouping that distinguishes the task of the historian from that of the annotist, and there is no point of greater importance in a history than the manner in which this grouping is executed. The deficiencies of some celebrated historians in this particular may be noticed....

  How abruptly it breaks off! Some pages must have been mislaid! and I sought among the litter in the drawer, and finding none, returned to my armchair full of regret that grandfather had not written a biography instead of a history, for such sincerity, such simplicity, such humility, are qualities that are rarely met with except in masterpieces. Some writers, it is true, have adopted humility as a literary artifice, but grandfather is not aware that he is humble; his prose dreams and unfolds like clouds going by. In speaking of Moore Hall I might have said that it stood on a pleasant green hill, with woods following the winding lake, and attributed the melancholy of the people to their mountains, but my grandfather merely says, In this beautiful place, and the reader’s imagination is free to remember the place that has seemed to him the most beautiful. Grandfather is able to accept his own failure without attributing it to circumstances, writing that if his history should gain the applause of those that come after him, it would not matter to him, the grave having closed over him. But we are so made that while we live we think with pleasure that we shall not be forgotten after our death. This feeling, he adds modestly, has been beautifully transcribed in Gibbon’s account of his own life. For this modest
y and for many other reasons I love my grandfather, and like to think of his life flowing on uneventfully for three or four more years in the pretty library, and then his ashes being carried to Kiltoome, where the applause of the world can never reach him.... But by what right do I publish his preface without his history, perhaps perturbing his rest, for we are not sure that the dead cannot hear us. The Colonel, who has inherited his grandfather’s taste for history, should edit the French Revolution. He began reading it, and finding it entertaining, he gave me the preface, remarking that our grandfather had managed to escape notice even in his own house, which was indeed the case. Our mother used to say that when his wife opened the door of his library to consult him, or to make pretence of consulting him regarding the management of his property, he would answer, My dear Louisa, all that you do is right, and on these words the old man would drop back into his meditations.

  One’s first memory is generally of one’s mother, but my grandmother was the first human being that came into my consciousness, a crumpled lady of sixty-five, who introduced me to gingerbread nuts, which, however, she did not allow me to eat. And this incident may have impressed her upon my mind; but now I come to think of it my second memory is of her. She fell one day as she was coming downstairs, and I remember William Mullowney and Joseph Applely carrying her to her room, and from that day onward she lived in two rooms in the charge of nurses, carried out on fine days in a sort of sedan chair. And not only my first and second memories, but my third is of her. I remember my father sitting at a small table writing letters by the bed on which his mother lay. He never spoke of her afterwards. And to me it seems strange not to speak of those we love, but that was my father’s way. He never spoke of his mother or his brother Augustus, whom he loved next to his mother, and when I asked him about what books my grandfather had written, he answered, Some histories, leaving me in doubt if he had ever read one of them. But he must have looked into the huge manuscript, for five hundred pounds were left for its publication, and he should have edited it. But my father did not appreciate the old gentleman who wrote histories in the room overlooking the lake; he liked his mother, and all the charming letters that he wrote from school were sent to her, and it was to her, and not to his father, that he sent his Latin and English verses, for between sixteen and seventeen he seems to have had literary ambitions. But as soon as he went to Cambridge he became interested in horses, hounds, and a lady whom he met at Bath. All this the Colonel will write excellently well in his life of our father, for he seems to understand our father’s character, though he hardly knew him, and shows a surprising appreciation of the antagonism which arose between mother and son as soon as the son had left school. Our father had inherited his character from her (perhaps that is why he loved her), an obstinate, impetuous character, and he had also inherited from her a taste for letter-writing which followed him through life to the very end, and the letters that mother and son exchanged about the debts the son incurred at Cambridge and about the lady that he wished to marry are very violent, and every quarrel was followed by a violent reconciliation. A time of great storm and stress rolled on until he felt that another quarrel with his mother would be more than he could bear, so he went away to Russia, journeying through the Caucasus, getting to Asia Minor, how, I know not, meditating on the nothingness of things and on suicide as a respite from the torture of existence. His diary breaks off suddenly, to be taken up again two years after; all we know of these two years is that they were spent in the company of a man and his wife ... no doubt the lady he met at Bath, who married soon after my father’s flight, and travelled with her husband in the East.

  The gentlemen of 1830 all had Byronic adventures, I said, and fell to thinking of the illegitimate daughter that was born to him. My mother told my sister that she had seen the lady; my father had pointed her out, saying, She is my daughter. She married and died childless, an old woman, not very long ago, and it seems a pity, and rather harsh, that we should never have met, for it is quite probable that I might have liked her better than my legitimate relation. There can be no doubt that we should have been great friends, and I pondered the charm of an illegitimate relation, especially a sister, and my father whom I did not recognise in the avowal he is reported to have made to his wife. A reticent man he was, especially reticent about the dead, loquacious only about his journey to the East.... It was probably the part of his life that was most real to him.

  After dinner Joseph Applely always brought up tea to the summer room, and my father drank a large cup sitting by a round rosewood table, on which stood a Moderator lamp; and that he did not eat bread and butter or cake with his tea never ceased altogether to surprise me. After tea my mother read a novel in an armchair, and as soon as my toys ceased to interest me I clambered on my father’s knee and begged him to tell me stories about the desert and the oases where the caravan had rested on its journey from Palestine to Egypt. My father had been obliged to go to Egypt to get permission to measure the Dead Sea and to survey the coasts, and I listened round-eyed to the tale of how the guides, discovering that the Christian dogs were chalking out the way along the passages inside the Pyramid, threatened to extinguish the torches. His voyage down the Nile was a great delight to me, and between the age of six and seven I was quite familiar with the Blue Nile and the White Nile, and had many times mourned the death of a monkey. The poor little fellow tumbled out of the tree, and putting his hand to his side looked up so plaintively that my father declared that for nothing in the world would he shoot another monkey. The story that I liked best was the bringing of the boat from Joppa on the backs of mules to the Dead Sea, and not satisfied with knowing the story myself, I wished everybody else to hear it, and very often embarrassed my father by insisting that he should tell his visitors that the mules could only totter a few hundred yards, so heavy was the boat, and then had to be changed, and that he had let down eighteen hundred feet of line without touching bottom, the water being so dense that the lead would not sink any farther. And I took care that he should not skip the account of the storm that had arisen and the great fright of the Arabs at the waves; or the explanation that on any other sea except the Dead Sea the boat would certainly have been wrecked. But the best story of all was of a man whom he met walking about some world-renowned ruins with a hammer in his hand. Standing before a statue he would say, You’ve had that nose on your face for many thousand years, in one second you’ll have it no longer. Whack! and away went the nose. No sooner had he finished the tale than he had perforce to tell the story of the merchant who used to go out at nightfall to seek European travellers, and if he saw one who looked as if he had money to spend, he would approach him and whisper in his ear that he if came up a by-street with him he would show him a real Khorassan blade. The celebrated smithies of Damascus had been removed to Khorassan, and the Khorassan blades were being imitated for the European market, and one day the merchant related that he was no longer put to the expense of having new ones made. He had agents in Paris and London, and whenever these imitation swords came into the market they were purchased for small sums and sent out again to be sold after nightfall for large prices. If you can let me have one of these blades, my father answered, I should like to take it home. No, said the crafty Persian, I have none left, but I have a real Khorassan blade which I should very much like to sell you.

  Khorassan or imitation I know not, but many swords, scimitars, and daggers were brought back, and Arab bridles looking like instruments of torture; and these were kept in a great press in my nursery, which I was forbidden to open. But a child cannot be gainsaid on his birthday, and my dearest wish was gratified when I was dressed as a Turk, and rode about the estate flourishing a Khorassan blade above the head of my pony. The success of the ride encouraged me to pursue my inquiries into Eastern costumes and customs, and my father’s diaries were examined — not the text, that was too difficult for a child, but the camels with which the text was embellished. His eyes were keen, and with a lead pencil, hard and sharp
enough to have won all Ruskin’s admiration, he followed the long, shaggy, birdlike necks, the tufted and callous hides, and the mobile lips of these bored ruminants, the nonconformists of the four-footed world. The Arab horse never seems to have once tempted his pencil; and it is difficult to find a reason, for he must have had some wonderful horses. He used to tell me of a journey from Jerusalem to Jeddo in a single day; the horse was very tired at the end of it, but he pricked up his ears and began to trot as soon as he caught sight of the town.

  The only portrait of a horse that he ever attempted was a large water-colour of Anonymous — a very painstaking piece of work, of which he was a little ashamed, I think, preferring to turn the conversation from the drawing to the race itself. The horse was going very well when he turned a shoe. I wanted him to say that the horse would have won had it not been for the accident, but I could not get him to say that, and remember going to Joseph Applely, a taciturn, clandestine little man whom there is no necessity to describe here, for he is described in Esther Waters under the name of John Randal, to find out the truth — whether Anonymous would have won the Liverpool if he had not turned a shoe. He had done some riding himself, and was disposed to be critical, and he thought — well, it is difficult to remember exactly his criticism of my father’s riding, for he had a habit of dropping his voice and muttering to himself in his shirt-collar, mumbling and turning suddenly to his press, that wonderful press in which all things could be found. It was out of that press that Esther Waters came, out of the stable-yard and out of my own heart.

  Oscott College had demonstrated, to the satisfaction of my unhappy parent, that it was impossible to teach me to write a clean, intelligible letter, and in despair he allowed me to apply myself to the study of life. At Moore Hall there was no life except the life of the stable-yard, and to it I went with the same appetite with which I went to the life of the studio afterwards; if I had remained at Moore Hall I certainly should have ridden many steeplechases, and perhaps succeeded in doing what my father had failed to do. A pretty indulgence it would be for me now, sitting here, surrounded by Impressionist pictures, to look back upon the day at Liverpool when the flag fell and we raced for the bit of hard ground, numbers of us coming down at the first fence, myself, however, escaping a fall, and then away off into the country ... three miles, over how many fences? And then the jump into the racecourse and the three-quarters of a mile over hurdles. A pretty memory all that long way would have been for a man who has written a line of books, and I should certainly have had some such memory to play with if my father could have restrained himself from asking the electors of Mayo to send him to Parliament to ride for Repeal of the Union. They answered that they would; the horses were sold, and my dream of doing on Slievecarn what my father had hoped to do on Anonymous died in South Kensington, where we had taken a small house at the corner of Alfred Place, opposite South Kensington Station, a pleasant suburb then, thinly populated.