The Facts of Fiction (28 page)

With all things one must draw a line somewhere. And the object of a line through Lawrence—if, indeed, the line is flexible enough not to exclude him altogether—must be to divide the sane from the insane. Probably it should be drawn at the point at which
Kangaroo
appears. Possibly it should be drawn to include
The Fantasia of the Unconscious
on the debit side. And the position of the line is not only a matter of prejudice but of period. We shall draw the dividing line of reason nearer to those last, mad monodies,
Nettles,
than any age before us would have drawn it.

Mr. George Moore belongs to no class in fiction. During most of his long and varied career he has generally been disowned and in the corner.

He has made two large distinct reputations as well as several smaller blurred ones. Back in the 'eighties—Mr. George Moore's seventy-eight years take him back into a world of fiction that was gaslit—he established himself with
A Mummer's Wife
as a realist of startling and defiant frankness.

Now, even his
Esther Waters,
which so notoriously shocked 1894, has been left somewhere in the rear of the race for frankness; and Mr. George Moore has very wisely not attempted to produce another book that will regain him the first place. Instead of following the French realists—who were his early models—any longer, he adopted the method of the French philosophical novelists. He was a man who, after sampling all France, preferred the manner of Anatole, even though he despised the man. So it was that at the age of sixty-nine he wrote
The Brook Kerith,
on which his reputation, as a writer of some of the most melodious and placid prose in the language, now rests.

As there is the thick, morocco-leather odour of the library about Henry James, so is there the smell of scent and turpentine, of concert hall and studio, about Mr. George Moore. In his liberal understanding of the arts he is unique among the English novelists. It is, I know, usual to say that Mr. George Moore writes in the manner of a painter, that his scenes in fiction have the shape that
a graphic artist would have given them. I am doubtful, however, whether long study of painting or music ever contributed anything to a prose writer more tangible than a capacity for taking pains.

The two disciplines of perspective and diatonics if once obeyed
may
leave some sort of orderly impression in the mind. But if they do, examples of that impression are few. And much of the talk about Mr. George Moore's painting in prose is no more than being wise after the event.

Mr. George Moore's mind, one must remember, is not one mind but a multitude. There is the little Irish Catholic boy who attended confession; and there is the Irish Catholic Apostate who mocked the confessional. There is the Irish Protestant convert; and there is the Irishman who guyed English Protestantism. There is the sparklingly independent mind that used religion as an Aunt-Sally at which to throw epigrams; and there is the mind so sensitive to beauty in any form that it was irresistibly drawn back to the mysteriously beautiful story that Protestants and Catholics rather uncomfortably share. There is the disciple of Manet; and there is the man who gave up painting for writing. There is the scholarly musician; and there is the man who has had no real connection with music. There is the author of
Parnell and His Island
who spat on his native land until his spittle became exhausted; and there is the author of
The Untilled Field,
which was adopted as a class-work by the members of the Gaelic League. There is the Parisian art student who kept a pet python, chained to a Louis XV stool and fed on guinea pigs; and there is the independent Fenian who painted his front door Nationalist colours in the most Unionist quarter of Dublin. There is the author of
Ave, Salve
and
Vale,
who published details about his friends, like an unscrupulous blackmailer who in some unaccountable way
failed to call to collect the money; and there is the author of
The Brook Kerith,
in whose drowsed ears nothing more modern than a Syrian sheepbell seems ever to have sounded. There is the humorist; and there is the author of
Esther Waters.

Of course, as the experiences and changes came to him, the mind of George Moore grew complex and compound, until no one thread of thought could be followed and extracted without one's getting tangled up in the whole skein, like a kitten playing with a ball of knitting-wool.

Susan L. Mitchell, the author of a provocatively independent study of George Moore, gives us a description of Moore's being received into the Protestant Church. Before the event, “Æ ” gave Moore the sane and salutary advice not to be an ass, and warned him that he would be called upon to “kneel and pray,” an exercise which he would find extremely awkward and doubtless extremely silly.

After a week had elapsed, “Æ.” met Mr. Moore and asked him about the initiation. “Well,” said Moore, “what you said nearly burst up the whole thing. When the clergyman came I did not wish to appear to be taken in too easily and I worked up a few remaining scruples, fenced for a while and finally announced my scruples as conquered, and myself ready to be received into the fold. Then the clergyman said, ‘ Let us have a prayer,' and I remembered your words and saw your face looking at me, and I burst out laughing. When I saw the horrified look in the clergyman's face I realised it was all up unless I could convince him that it was hysteria; and I clasped my hands together and said, ‘ Oh, you don't realise how strange all this appears to me to be. I feel like a little child that has lost its way
on a long road and at last sees its father,' and I, folding my hands anew, began ‘ Our Father.' I took the wind out of his sails that way, for he had to join in, but he got in two little prayers on his own account afterwards and very nice little prayers they were too.”

It may be objected that such behaviour was not so much that of a man who was a Protestant and a humorist, as that of a man who was a Catholic and a clown. At least, it is typical of the confusion of character that is George Moore's.

But our chief concern must be with the two books
Esther Waters
and
The Brook Kerith
—two books that might more easily have been written by different men than by the same man—on which his reputation rests. Now is not the moment to deal either with him or with his other works, such as
Evelyn Innes,
in which he spilt his musical and æsthetic knowledge about like a clumsy workman carrying a whitewash pail, or with
Aphrodite in Aulis
in which he wrote of love as a woman thinks of it.

That unfortunate girl, Esther Waters, like Tess, seems to have had Fate slamming doors in her face all through life.
Esther Waters
lacks entirely those moments of exalted emotion which transformed Tess's sordid affair into epic tragedy. But against that loss there is the gain of that observant, and sometimes peeping, naturalism that Balzac practised. In short
Tess
moves, and
Esther Waters
depresses.

George Moore's novels were always getting swamped by those things in which his mind was interested at the moment. In
Evelyn Innes
it was musical criticism; in
Esther Waters
in was wet-nursing; in
The Brook Kerith
it was theology.
Evelyn Innes
died to the sound of music;
Esther Waters
and
The Brook Kerith
survived because the
mechanics of motherhood and the Bible were more nearly their subjects.

Esther Waters
is a novel of magnificent intention. Its subject is the love of a mother for her child. Unfortunately, the fulfilment of the intention is marred by the wretchedness of the writing. It is of that kind of half naturalism that is about as much like life as it is known to-day as the faded photographs, full of big hats and bell-sleeves, that fill old albums.

“I'm your father,” said William.

“No, you ain't. I ain't got no father.”

“How do you know, Jackie? ”

“Father died before I was born; mother told me.”

“But mother may have been mistaken.”

“If my father hadn't died before I was born he'd've been to see us before this. Come, mother, come to tea. Mrs. Lewis 'as got hot cakes, and they'll be burnt if we stand talking.”

“Yes, dear, but what the gentleman says is quite true; he is your father.”

Jackie made no answer, and Esther said: “I told you your father was dead, but I was mistaken.”

“Won't you come and walk with me? ” said William.

“No, thank you; I like to walk with mother.”

And it is not only the quality of the writing that is poor. Mr. George Moore's mind never, as Hardy's does in
Tess,
gives the impression of rising an inch above the scenes he describes; it simply drifts about in the slums on flat feet like a charity-worker. And the proportion of things in the mind occasionally seems to be wrong; in the first half of the book, for instance, the parturient is considerably larger than the whole. Esther Waters herself, the loyal, loving,
illiterate savage, is one of the noble figures of fiction; far finer, in fact, than the novel in which she lives.

Any coldness that we may feel towards Esther may be due to the fact that Jackie was not the only child of sin she bore, and that from her time onwards, fiction has been considerably overcrowded with women to whom the wages of sin has been publicity.
Esther Waters,
in fact, despite the lavish praise that has been paid to it, proves that it was as something larger than an outspoken Gissing that Mr. George Moore was to make a name.

He made that name with
The Brook Kerith.
The subject was one that had to face unnatural competition, and was bound to meet its readers with as heavy a handicap as any story ever carried. The Christian story has been a trap in which faithful and heretics have fallen in hideous confusion. But somehow the perfection of the Gospel version has had a fatal fascination for the courageous of all creeds. If the Gospel version has been done less well already, that is, if it had exercised a less powerful appeal, there would have been fewer competitors. As it is, the sheer hopelessness of the task has released some silly catch in men's minds and set them off. It is bad enough in the public Christian mind when the writer fails clumsily and reverently. But the embarrassment is proportionately greater when a writer, who succeeds exquisitely, suggests that the Gospel version is not so much a masterpiece as a mistake.

The Brook Kerith
is really not so astonishing a thing in Mr. Moore's life as it might at first seem. It was written at a moment when a kind of Catholic mushroom left over from childhood broke the adult, sceptical soil. Like Rénan's
Life of Jesus
it is the work of a man to whom the Christian story is a thing of beautiful associations. Mr. Moore was never more nearly Catholic than he was in
writing this story of the crucified Saviour who was taken down from the cross and nursed back to health and obscurity. True, from the orthodox point of view Mr. Moore has got the story all wrong. But the important fact remains that he had got it at all.

The deep reverence of the narrative is far more impressive to the unreligious mind than the quick genuflexion of a busy priest. Mr. George Moore's journey to gather local colour for the book was far more in the nature of a pilgrimage, even though it was a pagan pilgrimage, than a pleasure-trip.

Susan Mitchell describes
The Brook Kerith
as “an epilogue to a beautiful story written by a man tired of the theme, yet who cannot invent anything more beautiful than the story he wrecks.” That was written by a Protestant. Mr. Moore had been a Catholic; and Catholics do not regard the Bible—possibly because theirs is a poor one—with the respect shown by Protestants. I do not understand how a man could be called tired of it who was drawn back to a story of his nursery days as dramatically as if a stockbroker had suddenly got down on all fours on the floor and asked his mother to tell him the story of Red Riding Hood. And the fact that Mr. Moore changed the tale as fundamentally as though Red Riding Hood had eaten the wolf, was not because he was tired of it, so much as because he was George Moore.

The Brook Kerith
is one of those beautifully written books that defy quotation. To exhibit it in portions would be as silly as picking a bunch of flowers and pretending that they adequately represent Kew Gardens.

The prose is as moderated as though Mr. George Moore were a conductor continually damping down the ardour of his orchestra. It is a work that can be read for the slow beauty of its language, and can be searched for the purple
passage without revealing anything like one. It is the work of an old man only in the number of things, the tricks, artifices and devices of writing, for which he no longer cares. If a passage in the whole work can be found for isolated reproduction it is probably this:

The sunny woods were threaded with little paths, and Joseph cast curious eyes upon them all. The first led him into bracken so deep that he did not venture farther, and the second took him to the verge of a dark hollow so dismal that he came running back to ask if there were crocodiles in the water he had discovered. He did not give his preceptor time to answer the difficult question, but laid his hand upon his arm, and whispered that he was to look between the two rocks, for a jackal was there, slinking away—turning his pointed muzzle to us now and then. To see he isn't followed, Azariah added: and the observation endeared him so to Joseph that the boy walked for a moment pensively in the path they were following. It turned into the forest, and they had not gone very far before they were aware of a strange silence, if silence it could be called, for when they listened the silence was full of sound, innumerable little sounds, some of which they recognised; but it was not the hum of insects or the chirp of a bird or the snapping of a rotten twig that filled Joseph with awe, but something that he could neither see, nor hear, nor smell, nor touch. The life of the trees—is that it? he asked himself. A remote mysterious life breathing about him and he regretted that he was without a sense to apprehend this life.