Complete Works of George Moore

by George Moore

  How is it that you disapprove of this monastery? It seems to me that you should, on the contrary, urge me to found another at Moore Hall. You believe that masses for the dead will get your soul out of Purgatory. If you don’t, you are not a Catholic. Now, why shouldn’t we have a little plump of monasteries in Mayo? At Moore Hall we could have Benedictines; at Clogher Franciscans. Lynch is a Roman Catholic: he has got no children, what better could he do? At Tower Hill some arrangements might be come to with the Blakes to put in Trappists. You don’t know what order is in Ballinafad? The Colonel answered sullenly that he was not sure whether Llewellyn had founded a mission house or a monastery. Well, no matter. This little plump of monasteries sending up prayers for your soul, for Llewellyn’s soul, for Lynch’s soul, and for the souls of all at Tower Hill; and the prayers bringing down the archangels constantly, crooks in their hands, pulling you one after the other out of Purgatory. The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost; nectar perpetually on tap, and aureoles that never wear out. A rich prospect before you all!

  An ironical smile, deliberately introduced, pervaded the Colonel’s face, and it said as plainly as words: How very superficial you are, and vulgar, quite vulgar!

  My dear friend, I am sorry for bringing up this question again. It is the fault of Llewellyn Blake.

  Count Llewellyn Blake. He has been made Count of the Papal States, said the Colonel.

  But why laugh? In his eyes the Pope is not only a spiritual, but a temporal power. His title is more valid than any other. Don’t you think so?

  The Colonel never answers these questions, and while wondering at my own detestable character in thus plaguing him, I looked round the fields. They seemed very small and dim. And yet, I said, that gleam of light falling across the worn fields reminds us that summer is coming in. The fine days we meet in January are illusory, but the ray that lights up the dim February landscape is a herald. We believe in it, and that is the principal thing.

  A peasant stood in the roadway in front of the car, and the Colonel had to pull up.

  Long life to yer honour, cried the old man, and in his eyes I read the reverence of yore. He was a hairy and boisterous fellow, and we had to listen to his description of his house, which he said was damp enough to give a wild-duck rheumatism. I promised to help him, and we bade him godspeed. A godspeed, I said, which is probably for eternity.

  We are very late, the Colonel muttered. It was unlucky meeting him.

  Don’t say that. It is pleasant to meet literature on the road from Ballyglass to Ballinafad.

  The road looped the shoulder of a hill, and beyond a long straight bridge or viaduct we spied the gate of Ballinafad.

  But, said the Colonel, I am afraid that this gate is always kept locked. You’ll miss your train.

  If I were to miss a thousand trains, I will see Llewellyn’s monastery.

  You’ll certainly miss your train. It is two miles round — two Irish miles.

  He pulled up before a rusty gate, and bounding out of the trap, I shook it. It was locked, but there was a stile beside it.

  We can send the trap round to the other gate, which is nearer by two miles to the station, and walk up to the house.

  Yes, we can do that, he said.

  Then let us do it, for I must see Llewellyn’s mission house or monastery.

  Before Moore Hall, Ballinafad was, the Colonel answered, and he told me how the Blakes had kept their property through the Penal Laws by a special charter granted to them by Charles II. The charter he assured me was still preserved, and I asked if all this comely woodland were going to be given over to the monks. Groves in which, I said, it would be easy to imagine a rout of nymphs and satyrs. Or Thyrsis praying the goat-herd to seat himself in the shelter of that great oak, and pipe to him. Delightful woods. And whilst talking of Amaryllis, Silenus and the Zephyrs, some twenty or thirty youths passed across the glade, and having need to overtake them for inquiry we called to their shepherd, who stopped his flock. He told us that we should find Father — — ‘within,’ and on the house coming into view I said: I always hated that strange porch, so out of keeping is it with the landscape.

  The Colonel answered that the house was built by our grandfather, Maurice Blake, a soldier who had served in the Peninsula, and that the porch was probably an imperfect memory of one he had seen in Italy on his way home. No attempt, I said, has been yet made to give the house an ecclesiastical air.

  The ecclesiastical changes will come later on, the Colonel replied, and he expounded once more the complex question of Llewellyn’s rights under his father’s will, and he continued to expound it whilst I looked round the drawing-room in which my mother and her sisters had certainly played a selection from Norma, and in which Joe had strummed his memories of Traviata and Il Trovatore for Biddy’s and for his own amusement. The remembered pictures were still on the walls — setters creeping up to birds, probably grouse; and I began to peer into the painting like a Bond Street dealer, for the approach of a priest always sets me mumming. The door opened, and a young man of sleek speech and calves begged us to be seated; and choosing the most comfortable chair for himself, and tossing himself till he discovered its easiest corner, he told us that a large number of the last batch of missionaries sent out to West Africa had died, the climate being unhealthy, but another batch was going out shortly, and he hoped not to lose so many.

  And did those that died pray for the soul of Count Llewellyn Blake?

  He hoped that they had done so, for Count Llewellyn Blake had done a great deal for them, and I put it to him that Llewellyn’s soul was a heavy tax upon the population of Mayo, something like seventeen out of thirty-six having died. We asked him some questions regarding the possibility of converting the savages to a more rational spirituality than that which they practised in the forest.

  We meet with a great many difficulties; first and foremost the unwillingness of the men to relinquish their wives.

  I asked if any provision was being made for the abandoned wives?

  The young man admitted that they had not thought out that side of the question.

  The children, I answered, offer you a fairer field.

  Yes, we try to get hold of the children, he answered; and after some conversation with me about the climate of Africa being answerable for much of the faith of the savages in their superstitions, the young priest turned to the Colonel, and ventured to express a hope that he would come over again from Moore Hall to see them, bringing his two little boys with him. Father Zimmermann, who is at present in Switzerland, he said, will be back in Ballinafad at the end of the month.

  The whole scheme is intimately associated with Father Zimmermann, the Colonel said on our way to the stables. A very different man from the one we have seen.

  But how can he be different and continue the traffic he is engaged in? I cannot disassociate a man from his work as you do. A man is his work.

  In the stables we were met by some of Joe Blake’s hirelings, stablemen of old time who had seen the cracks go up to the Curragh, and they lamented the change; a foreign priest, they said, come to take Irishmen away to Africa, one whom Count Llewellyn had met at Ballinafad some two or three years ago, and when he ordered Jimmy Glynn to ready the dining-room for Mass, they began to have a notion of what was going to happen. The tenants, too, had got wind of the change, and were waiting at the hall door, asking how much of the land the Count was going to make over to the Swiss boyo, who was up to the height of his ankles in carpets before he took up with religion. Literature again, I whispered, and listened with glee to the tale of how the Swiss boyo and the Count had escaped through the garden, but were caught up at Lakemount, brought to bay, and how getting round them the peasants had sworn that every one of them would turn Protestant if any bloody monks were put into Ballinafad. The rain that came towards us aslant over the bog was in our faces, and with large drops running down my nose I continued: The monks and Llewellyn’s anxiety about his soul may well bring about a revival of Christianity.
You heard them say they would turn Protestant.

  I think the word Protestant was a sop for you, the Colonel answered.

  The rain splashed in our faces, making conversation difficult, and when it ceased I heard the Colonel’s voice saying from under his mackintosh: I should like to outwit Llewellyn.

  It is very difficult for me to understand you, for you are not moved by any mean sense of future pecuniary loss to yourself; your fingers do not itch to clutch. Family feeling is strong in you, stronger than in me. No one could be more shocked than you when I told you that I had heard the ecclesiastics had gotten Howth Castle, and the disappearance of Ballinafad affects you in the same way. Yet you contrive to reconcile admiration of the cause with detestation of the result. For, of course, as long as priests can persuade people that Masses for the dead will get their souls out of Purgatory they will continue to despoil their relations.

  The rain is coming on again, the Colonel interjected, and if the train isn’t late we shall miss it. At every hill I asked how far we were from the station. The train was late, and walking up the platform I grew so bitter about Catholicism that he at last said: A religion, at all events, that has made more converts than any other.

  The witless and hysterical — ladies who have been through the Divorce Courts and young men with filthy careers behind them.

  The train steamed in, and the porter cried, First class behind! Would you like to have your hat-box in the carriage with you? Yes, I answered mechanically, and jumped into the train, glad to escape from a wrangle that had become unendurable. The Colonel had said the night before last that we had better not see each other, and though the words seemed hard I could not resist their truth, for it was indeed a relief to get away from him. Catholics and Protestants don’t mix; we are never comfortable in the society of Catholics. The guard blew his whistle, the train moved up the platform, the Colonel passed out of sight, and I said: So this is the end. He thinks that I have changed. We have both changed, and the fault is neither with him nor with me. He was born a Papist, and this is the end; unendurable words if we have given all our love. And thinking how much I had lost, I sat looking out on the wet fields of Mayo. So this is the end! I cried, scaring a fellow-passenger, who looked at me askance over his newspaper. He returned to his paper, I to my thoughts, which were no longer with the Colonel but with myself. In which direction does my life lie? I asked. My mission in Ireland is over, and there is little casual visiting in Paris. I shall write less and read more, and the large book containing the thirty-six plays will never be out of my hand.

  At the prospect of becoming another Sir Sidney Lee, Paris began to recede, and I remembered that Steer and Tonks and Sickert lived in London. But even if I live in London I shall have to spend my evenings alone, unless I join a club. Bayreuth falls only every second year, and the concerts at the Queen’s Hall are often common enough. Saint-Saëns and Dvorak are often played, and a private orchestra is beyond my means. But with a piano.... A piano demands a wife, and with one who could play Schumann, Schubert, Wagner, Chopin, and Liszt, the evenings would go by happily, an excellent cigar in my mouth, my stern in a comfortable armchair. Had I married Doris I should have an hour and a half of music every evening, and if the rule were maintained for several years, we should get through the vast pile of chamber-music. I have a taste for Scarlatti; and if this admirable woman who can play all Bach were to bear me a child, he would inherit his mother’s musical ear, and it is not likely that my son would lack inventive faculty and sense of composition. And while watching the musical instinct developing in him, my heart will be filling with joy, and I shall look forward to hearing all the ridiculous and uncouth strains that have tempted and deceived me reduced to shape, but not in symphonies — my son will write operas, the words as well as the music, for I should like him to inherit as much of my literary gifts as will enable him to construct the poem on which to weave the woof, but not more.

  My thoughts were away in a jiffy in France, for the German musical idiom is worn to rags; but there is a musical atmosphere in France, and I remembered a great stone bridge with fishermen sitting on the quays, their legs hanging over the side. I had watched their floats being carried down by the current last year, had seen them lift their floats out of the current and drop them in again, and had waited, pretending to myself, that I would like to see a fish rise, but really interested in the adventure that I knew to be at my heels. An empty fly came by, and the driver asked if he might take me to Chinon. It seemed as if I heard the name, and feeling Chinon to be my adventure, I jumped into the carriage, and was driven along a road of which I remember nothing except a steep hill and at the top of it a feudal castle in ruins. Our poor little horse could hardly drag us up the hill, and the coachman turned in his seat and began to relate some history; but at that moment my eyes were taken up by a poster representing a house, or castle — I was not sure which — an extravagant painting it was. Post-Impressionism, I said, at Chinon; and dismissing the driver, I applied to an old man sitting by the side of the gate, his shaggy dog beside him, for information.

  C’est le portrait de la maison.

  Laquelle? Pardon, monsieur, mais je ne vois pas une maison ici qui ait pu vous servir de modèle.

  La maison n’est pas encore construite. Je l’ai seulement dessinée pour inspirer l’acheteur de la propriété que voici. Le clos St Georges.

  Une vraie petite aventure, I said to myself and followed the old man round the enclosure, amused by the pomp with which he vaunted the excellence of his grapes and the courtesy with which he invited my admiration of the pears and peaches ripening on the southern wall. I had seen fine peaches and pears at home, but never flowers like silk gathered into a rosette. And seeing that I was genuinely ignorant, he told me the tree in question was a grenadier, and trying to remember what a grenadier was in English, I stood admiring the roofs of Chinon under the hill.

  C’est là où naquit notre grand Rabelais.

  Finir mes jours en face de la ville de Rabelais; quelle joie pour un Irlandais!

  Mais, monsieur, vous êtes encore jeune; cinquante et quelques années; and he looked at me interrogatively and regretfully, for the old man was seventy et quelques années.

  Ici, je voudrais vivre et mourir, I answered mechanically.

  Rien ne vous empêche, monsieur, d’acheter ma vigne ... et pas cher. Voyez-vous il y a des avantages; and he led me down into a pit which he had digged in the centre of the enclosure, and pointed out to me a great many stones and broken arches.

  Il y a de quoi bâtir une jolie maison; and I learnt from him that these stones had once formed part of the castle, that it was here that Henry of Anjou (Henry II of England) had died on the altar steps, and that the house I had in mind, with the old carvings he had stacked by the hut in which he and his dog lived let into the walk, would not cost me more than a thousand pounds to build. He asked me if I would like to see his pictures, for when he was not spraying his vines he was painting scenes from the life of Joan of Arc in distemper, and spraying vines had become hard work; he was seventy-five, and wished to finish his paintings before he died.

  Achetez donc ma vigne, monsieur; finissez vos jours en face de la ville où naquit notre grand Rabelais.

  Why not?

  And now with the advent of my new idea — that a musician was the legitimate end of my life — the Clos St Georges began to acquire a new and potent significance. She and the boy and the vineyard will be the pear and the peach, the apricot, the nectarine, the bottle of wine from my own vineyard. My life will have to end somewhere. Why not in the Clos St Georges? Because Hail and Farewell must be written, a voice answered from within. Before the vineyard could be purchased and the house built Hail and Farewell must be finished. Ave was in the publisher’s hands; a good deal of Salve was written; there was a sketch, chapter for chapter, down to the very end. And between Mullingar and Dublin I realised, more acutely than I had ever done before, that Hail and Farewell could not be abandoned for a vineyard. I ha
ve been led to write it, by whom I know not, but I have been led by the hand like a little child. And it was borne in upon me at the same time that a sacrifice was demanded of me, by whom I knew not, nor for what purpose, but I felt I must leave my native land and my friends for the sake of the book; a work of liberation I divined it to be — liberation from ritual and priests, a book of precept and example, a turning-point in Ireland’s destiny, and yet I prayed that I might be spared the pain of the writing it and permitted instead to acquire the Clos St Georges, a wife, and a son. But no man escapes his fate. Something was propelling me out of Ireland, whither I was not yet sure. I must yield to instinct, I said to AE. He was deeply moved.

  You are going away from us to spend your evenings with Steer and Tonks, but where shall I spend mine?

  It may grieve you to lose me, dear AE, and it grieves me to lose you.... I shall never find anybody like you again. AE is only found once in a lifetime.

  You’ll not forget me? he said, grasping my hand.

  The next night we met at Bailey’s, the Land Commissioner, who lives in Earlsfort Terrace. I had gained his friendship in the last year of my sojourn in Ireland, and found his alert and witty mind so pleasant that I had begun to think it a pity I had let him go by unknown for so many years. Bailey knows a good picture and buys one occasionally, he reads books and has practised literature, and will probably practise it again; some day he will write his memoirs. And, better still, he practises life, going away every year for long travel, to return to Ireland, his mind enriched. He has not influenced me in my life as AE, or John Eglinton, or Yeats, and to speak of him here is a little outside of my subject, but if I closed this book without mention of him it would seem that I had forgotten the many hours we passed together. Besides, his dinner-party is fixed in my mind. He assembled all my friends: AE, Ernest Longworth, Philip Hanson, John Healy, John Eglinton, the graceful and witty Dena Tyrrell, and Susan Mitchell, who sang songs about the friends I was leaving behind me.