Complete Works of George Moore

by George Moore

  I am waiting for proofs, and am free for an hour. If you like we will walk round Merrion Square, and you can tell me all about it.

  We turned to the east and walked along the north side, and it was opposite the National Gallery that he told me my second chapter must be in Victoria Street; and after a little argument, to which he listened very gently, he led me as a mother leads a child. I saw the error of my ways, and said: Goodbye; I see it all. Goodbye.

  As well as anything I can think of, this anecdote shows how we run to our good friend in time of need, and never run in vain; but now I find myself in a difficulty out of which he will not be able to help me. He is not satisfied with his portrait, and complains that I have represented him in Ave and Salve as a blameless hero of a young girl’s novel.

  Why have you found no fault with me? If you wish to create human beings you must discover their faults.

  Wherefore I am put to discovering a stain upon his character. I cannot accuse him of theft, and he never speaks of his love affairs; he may be a pure man; be that as it may, it is not for me to cast the first stone at him; lying and blackmail — of what use to make charges that no one will believe? If he will not sin, why should he object to my white flower in his button-hole? And feeling that humanity was on the whole very difficult and tiresome, I fell to thinking.... But of what I cannot tell; I only know I was awakened suddenly by a memory of a young painter in London, one who brought imagination and wit and epigram and laughter into our midst, and when he left us we rarely failed to ponder on the unmerited good fortune of his wife, for to live with him always seemed to us an unreasonable share of human happiness. But one day I made the acquaintance of this woman whom I had only known faintly during her married life, and heard from her that her husband did not speak to her at dinner, but propped a book up against a glass and read; and after dinner sat in his chair composing, and often went up to bed forgetting to bid her goodnight. If she reproached him, he assured her there was no other woman in the world he loved as much as her; but being a man of genius his mind was away among his works. But what proof have I, she said, that he is a man of genius? Of course, if I were certain, it would be different.... All the same, it is a little trying, she added. And her case is the case of every woman who marries a man of genius. A trying tribe, especially at meal-times; ideas and food being apparently irreconcilable. I have often regretted that our good friend did not leave some of his ideas on the landing with his hat and coat, for it is distressing to hear a man say that he could not tell the difference between halibut and turbot when you have just apologised to him for an unaccountable mistake on the part of your cook. This painful incident once happened in Ely Place; and I reflected, duly, that if he were indifferent to my food he might show scant courtesy to the food that his wife provided — excellent I am sure it is — but a man of ideas cannot be catered for by friend or wife. I followed him in imagination all the way up the long Rathmines Road, and saw him picking a little from his plate, and then, becoming forgetful, his eyes would rove into dark corners. (His definition of ideas are formless spiritual essences, and the room in 17 Rathgar Avenue is full of them, economic, pictorial, and poetic.) I have it at last! A blemish, and one is enough for my portrait; a little irregularity of feature will satisfy my sitter; in the eyes of the world absent-mindedness is a blemish. But if it be none in his wife’s eyes then there is no blemish, and I remembered that he chose her for her intelligence, and it is no mean one. She had abandoned papistry before he met her, and had written some beautiful phrases in her pages of the Theosophical Review; and these won his heart. A very gracious presence and personality, too distinct to seem invidious to her husband’s genius, or to deem it an injustice to herself that he should be beloved by all. But in his indifference to money we may seek and find cause for complaint. It is possible that in the eyes of women who have not succeeded in marrying men of genius he should apply his talents to increasing his income, for the common belief is that a man’s life is not his exclusive possession to dispose of as pleases his good will, but a sort of family banking account on which his wife and children may draw checks. This is not AE’s view. He has often said to me, I came into the world without money or possessions, and have done very well without either. Why shouldn’t my children do the same? His life is in his ideas as much as Christ’s, and I will avouch that his wife has never tried to come between him and his ideas. As much cannot be said for Mary, whom Christ had to reprove for trying to dissuade him from his mission, which he did on many occasions.... But again I am hoeing and raking, shovelling up merits instead of picking out the small but necessary fault. If I dig deeper perhaps my search will be rewarded. He gives his wife all the money she asks for, but she does not know what money he has in the bank. AE does not know himself, and feeling that AE was about to be born into my text, a real man rather than an ideal one, my heart rose, and I said: It is not long ago since he told me that he had given a man who had asked him for a contribution a long screed for which he could have had thirty pounds from a certain magazine. In giving his screed for nothing he acted as all the great dispensers of ideas have done, and the many will find fault with him, for though they would like to have prophets and poets they would like them domesticated, each one bringing home to a little house in the suburbs a reel of office chit-chat to unwind for his wife’s pleasure, the poet on one side of the hearth, the wife on the other, the cat between them. Jane and Minna would listen attentively, but Violet’s thoughts would stray and she would find herself very soon with Cuchulain, Caolte, and Finn, and picking up from the table her beautiful book of fairy tales, I read them until I was awakened by a knocking at my front door. The servants had gone to bed. Who could this be? AE perhaps. It was John Eglinton.

  Are you sure you aren’t busy? If you are, don’t hesitate —

  I was sitting by the fire thinking.

  I am loath to disturb a thinking man; and he stopped half-way between the armchair and the door.

  I assure you I had come to the end of my thinking.

  On what subject?

  One that you know very well — AE. Among my portraits he is the least living, and that is a pity. He does not silhouette as Yeats does or as dear Edward. Edward’s round head and bluff shoulders and big thighs and long feet correspond with his blunt mind. And Yeats’s solemn height and hieratic appearance authorise the literary dogmas that he pronounces every season. He is the type of the literary fop, and the most complete that has ever appeared in literature. But AE! I wonder if we could get him into a phrase, John. After a while I said: He has the kindly mind of a shepherd, and ten years ago he was thin, lithe, active, shaggy, and I can see him leaning on his crook meditating.

  That is just what I don’t think he does. He talks about meditation, but his mind is much too alert. There is this resemblance, however: the shepherd knows little but the needs of his flock, and the other day, at Horace Plunkett’s, I heard that AE exhibited a surprising ignorance in an argument with some English economists. He did not know that Athenian society was founded on slavery.

  I am glad to hear it, for if he knew all the things that one learns out of books I should never get him into a literary silhouette.

  You admit, John said, inspiration in his painting, but you think it lacks quality; and in your study of him you will explain —

  Of course, a most important point. AE has come out of many previous existences and is going toward many others, and looks upon this life as an episode of no importance.

  An interesting explanation, but the real one is —

  Is what? I asked eagerly.

  He is too impatient. I told him so once, but he answered indignantly that there was no more patient man than he.

  I prefer my explanation, I answered.

  It is the more poetic, but temperament goes deeper than belief, John replied.

  Not deeper than AE’s belief in his own eternity, I said; and my answer had the effect of rolling John for a moment out of his ideas. He’ll soon be back in them
again, I said to myself. At the end of another long silence John told me that somebody had said that AE was an unhappy man.

  It never struck me that he was unhappy. He always seems among the happiest. And I began to wonder if John Eglinton looked upon me as a happy man.

  You’re happy in your work, but I don’t know if you are happy in your life.

  And you, John, I said, are happy in your thoughts.

  Yes, he answered, and my unhappiness is caused by the fact that I get so little time for enjoying them.

  It was pleasant for two old cronies to sit by the fire, wondering what they had gotten out of life; and when John bade me goodbye at the door he admonished me to be very careful what I said about AE’s home life.

  But he has asked me to tack him on to life, and now you think, since he has been tacked on, he won’t like it.

  Damn these models! I said, returning to my room. Models are calamitous, and it would perhaps be calamitous to be without them. Shakespeare, too, is a calamity. And, dismayed by the number of plays I should have to read, my thoughts turned to dear little John Eglinton, to the little shrivelled face and the round head with a great deal of back to it, to the reddish hair into which grey is coming, to the gaunt figure, and I fell to thinking how his trousers had wound round his legs as he had walked down the street. It seemed to me that I should never find anything more suitable to my talent as a narrator and as a psychologist than this dear little man that had just left me, dry, determined, and all of a piece, valiant in his ideas and in his life, come straight down from the hard North into the soft Catholic Dublin atmosphere, which was not, however, able to rob him of any of his individuality. The Catholic atmosphere has intensified John Eglinton — boiled him down, as it were — made him a sort of Liebig extract of himself, and I seemed to realise more than ever I had done before how like he was to himself: the well-backed head and the square shoulders, and the hesitating, puzzled look that comes into his face. I had often sought a reason for that look. Now I know the cause of it: because he gets so little time for his ideas. He does not wish to write them out any more than Steer wishes to exhibit his Chelsea figures; he rearranges them and dusts them, and sits among them conscious of familiar presences, and as the years go by he seems to us to sink deeper into his armchair, and his contempt of our literary activities strengthens; he is careful to hide the fact from us lest he should wound our feelings, but it transpired the evening I ran over to the Library to tell him of Goethe’s craving for information on all subjects, including even a little midwifery. So that he might continue a little dribble of ink in the morning, he said, for John never lacks a picturesque phrase, but that is neither here nor there; the sentiment it expresses is John Eglinton — a lack of faith in all things. Of late years he seems to have been drawn toward Buddhism, and goes out to a lonely cottage among the Dublin mountains in the hope that the esoteric lore of the East may allow him to look a little over the border. I shall never find a better model than John Eglinton. It seems to me that I understand him; and what a fine foil he would make to the soft and peaty Hyde, the softest of all our natural products, a Protestant that Protestantism has not been able to harden! A moment after I sat pondering on his yellow skull floating back from the temples, collecting hugely on the crown; his black eyebrows and a drooping black moustache; his laugh, shallow and a little vacant, a little mechanical; and his words and thoughts, casual as the stage Irishman’s. We would pick him out for a Catholic in a tram, and if there were a priest in the tram Hyde would be interested in him at once, and he would like nothing better than to visit Clare Island with a batch of ecclesiastics, a dozen or fifteen parish priests, not one of them weighing less than fifteen stone, and the bishop eighteen. It would be a pleasure to Hyde to drop the words Your Grace into as many sentences as possible; whether he would kiss the bishop’s ring may be doubted — being a Protestant, he could hardly do so — but he would fly for a pillow to put under His Grace’s throbbing head. On Clare Island the parish priest would have prepared legs of mutton and sirloins of beef, chickens and geese, and Hyde’s comment to His Grace would be: The hospitality of the Irish priest is unequalled. He will crack a bottle of champagne with any visitor. A gathering of this kind is very agreeable to the Catholic Protestant, and the Catholic bishop likes to do business with the Catholic Protestant better than with anybody else. The Catholic might stand up to him; there are one or two, perhaps, who would venture to disagree with His Grace, but the Catholic Protestant melts like peat into fine ash before His Grace’s ring. But Hyde was not always Catholic Protestant. In the old Roscommon glebe there was sufficient Protestantism in him to set him learning Irish. He has written some very beautiful poems in Irish, and it is to Hyde that we owe the jargon since become so famous, for the great discovery was his that to write beautiful English one has only to translate literally from the Irish; his prose translations of the Love Songs of Connaught are as beautiful as Synge’s, and it is a pity he was stopped by Father Tom Finlay, who said: Write in Irish or in English, but our review does not like mixed languages. And these words and his election to the Presidency of the Gaelic League made an end to Hyde as a man of letters. I took his measure at the banquet at the Shelbourne Hotel, his noisy demonstration in Irish and English convincing me that the potential scholar would be swallowed up in the demagogue, for the Gaelic League must make no enemies; and that the way to success is to stand well with everybody — members of Parliament, priests, farmers, shopkeepers — and by standing well with these people, especially with the priests, Hyde has become the archetype of the Catholic Protestant, cunning, subtle, cajoling, superficial, and affable, and these qualities have enabled him to paddle the old dug-out of the Gaelic League up from the marshes through many an old bog, lake, and river, reaching at last Portobello Bridge, where he took on board two passengers, Agnes O’Farrelly and Mary Hayden, and, having placed them in the stern, he paddled the old dug-out to the steps of the National University. He gallantly handed them up the steps, and so amazed were the three at the salaries that were offered to them that they forgot the old dug-out; and worn and broken and water-logged, it has drifted back to the original Connemara bog-hole, to sink under the brown water out of sight of the quiet evening sky, unwatched, unmourned save by dear Edward, who will weep a few tears, I am sure, when the last bubbles arise and break.

  XI

  THE SINKING OF the old dug-out will rob Edward of an evening’s occupation, and the question comes, to what great national or civic end he will devote his Thursdays. On Monday evening he presides at the Piper’s Club, on Tuesday he goes to the theatre, on Wednesday he attends a meeting of Sinn Fein, on Thursday he dozes through the proceedings of the Coisde Gnotha, on Friday there is choir practice in the cathedral, on Saturday he speaks severely to his disobedient choristers, tries new voices in his rooms in Lincoln Place, and plans new programmes with Vincent O’Brien, his choirmaster, chosen by him because he believes in O’Brien’s talent and in his desire to give the music in accordance with tradition and Edward’s own taste. On Sunday he is ever watchful in the cathedral, sitting with his hand to his ear, noting the time and the efficiency of the singers.

  I had to give way on one point, he said to me, but I think I told you already that the Archbishop stipulated that if a great composer of Church music should arise, the cathedral should not be debarred from giving his music. I don’t think it will happen very often, so there was no use in opposing His Grace on this particular point. We have now eight hundred a year —

  Eight hundred a year out of ten thousand!

  You see, he said, the Archbishop has added ten thousand to mine, and that invested at four per cent will bring in eight hundred.

  So you succeeded in persuading the Archbishop to give you ten thousand as well as to grant you the Headship! My admiration for Edward as a business man swelled.

  It was a hard fight, he said, and very often the negotiations were nearly broken off; but I stuck to my guns, for of course it wasn’t likely that I was going to
give ten thousand without getting what I was bargaining for.

  The sum of money seemed to strike a chord in my memory, and I was moved to ask him what had led him to fix on this sum, but refrained lest I should appear too inquisitive. Something must have happened, I said, to fix this sum in his mind. It has never been less, it has never been more, and in the beginning he didn’t know how much money was necessary to found the choir. Would he have given the twenty thousand if —

  It suddenly dropped upon me that he had told me in Bayreuth, in the great yawning street between the little bridge and the railway-station, that he had come out of a great conscientious crisis, and had had to go to Bishop Healy and lay the whole matter before him. What sin can he have committed? I said to myself, and, quelling my curiosity as best I could, I tried to induce him to confide in me, and after some persuasion he confessed that his mother, fearing the Land Acts, had prevailed upon him to redistribute his grass-farms. He had told the tenants that he would reinstate them; whereas he had given them other farms equally good, but they had found fault with the lands he had put them into, and his bailiff had been fired at on the highroad to Gort. He had received coffins and crossbones; it was not, however, fear of his life or his money that had brought about the great mental breakdown, but his conscience. If he had acted wrongly, he must make reparation before his sin would be forgiven him.... And while I pictured him as a prey to remorse, of pallid and rueful countenance, he told me that the one thing that stood to him was his appetite. For after a night of agony he often descended his Gothic stairs forgetful of everything but the sirloin on the side-table. He is always original, I said, and has discovered an unexpected connection between conscience and appetite. But notwithstanding his appetite, he had had to leave Tillyra for Cork. He had always liked the sea and its influences, and in six weeks had returned much improved in health, but still unable to smoke his churchwarden, only an occasional cigar, and that a mild one.