Part 8

As I have said that George Moore might be supposed to be a lineal descendant of Zola, it seems to me that in many ways his method is almost the same as Zola's; only, they have different theories; both observe with immense persistence; but their manner of observation, after all, is only that of the man in the street; while, on the contrary, the Goncourts create with their nerves, with their sensations, with their noting of the sensations, with the complex curiosities of a delicately depraved instinct. The strange woman in _La Faustin_ is one of Goncourt's most fascinating creations: Germinie Lacerteux, his most sordidly depraved animal; and in the Preface to that novel, in 1864, they were right in saying: "_Aujourd'hui que le Roman s'élargit et grandit, qu'il commence à être la grande forme sérieuse, passionnée, vivante, de l'Étude littéraire et de enquête sociale, qu'il devient, par l'analyse et par la recherche psychologique, l'Histoire morale contemporaine._" They were the first, I believe, to invent an entirely new form, a breaking-up of the plain, straightforward narrative into chapters, which are generally disconnected, and sometimes no more than six sentences: as, for instance, in that perverse, decadent, delicately depraved study of the stages in the education of the young Parisian girl, _Chérie_ (for all its "immodesty") was an admirable thing, and a model for all such studies. Only, when I have to choose, after Balzac, the most wonderfully created woman in any novel, the vision of Emma Bovary starts before me--a woman, as I have said somewhere (with none of the passionate certainty of Charles Baudelaire) who is half vulgar and half hysterical, incapable of a fine passion; her trivial desires, her futile aspirations after second-hand pleasures and second-hand ideals, give to Flaubert all that he wants: the opportunity to create beauty out of reality.

I have always had a great admiration of Camille Lemonnier, who brought something rare, exotic and furiously animal into Flemish prose; as in his masterpiece, _Un Mâle_, where he reveals in an astonishing fashion those peasants who are so brutal, yet so subtly and rudely apprehended, in their instincts: these peasants who are the most elemental of human beings. He has none of Hardy's sinister and dejected vision of life; who often seems closer to the earth than to men and women, and who sees women and men out of the eyes of wild creatures; whose peasants have been compared with Shakespeare's. Lemonnier's women and men have in them something mysterious, dramatic, tragic: in their loves and hatreds, in their crimes and joys, they have something of the mysterious force which germinates in the furrows which they turn.

Pater, who hated every form of noise and of extravagance, who disliked whatever seemed to him either sordid or morbid, guarded himself from all these and from many other things by the wary humor that protects the sensitive. So, in his reviews of Wilde and of Moore, he is always very much on his guard as to the manner of expounding his individual opinions; saying of Wilde that his _Dorian Gray_ "may fairly claim to go with that of Edgar Poe, and with some good French work of the same kind, done--probably--in more or less conscious imitation of it." So in praising Moore's clever book, he refers to his "French intuitiveness and gaillardise;" saying that he is "a very animating guide to the things he loves, and in particular to the modern painting of France," that (here he uses his wary humor) "these chapters have, by their very conviction, their perverse conviction, a way of arousing the general reader, lost perhaps in the sleep of conventional ideas," that, to and with "the reader may now judge fairly of Moore's manner of writing; may think perhaps there is something in it of the manner of the artists he writes of."

One of the most original pictures of Degas is _L'Absinthe_, which represents Desboutins in the _café_ of the _Nouvelle Athènes_ seated beside a woman. Moore says "Desboutins always came to the _café_ alone, as did Manet, Degas, Darentz. Desboutins is thinking of his dry points; the woman is incapable of thought. If questioned about her life she would probably answer, _Je suis à la coule._" To my mind Degas gives in this picture, in a more modern way than Manet, an equal vision of reality. Desboutins, the Bohemian painter, sits there in a mood of grim dissatisfaction; he is just as living as the depraved woman who sits beside him--before the glass of absinthe that shines like an enormous and sea-green jewel--with eyes in which much of her shameful earthiness is betrayed, without malice, without pity.

I open at random, the pages of _Confessions of a Young Man_ where there is a reference to the _café_ of the _Nouvelle Athènes_, Place Pigalle; where the writer confesses more of himself than on any other page of his book.

I am a student of ball rooms, bar rooms, streets and alcoves. I have read very little; but all I read I can turn to account, and all I read I remember. To read freely, extensively, has always been my ambition, and my utter inability to study has always been to me a subject of grave inquietude,--study, as contrasted with a general and haphazard gathering of ideas taken in flight. But in me, the impulse is so original to frequent the haunts of men that it is irresistible, conversation is the breath of my nostrils, I watch the movement of life, and my ideas spring from it uncalled for, as buds from branches. Contact with the world is in me the generating force; without it what invention I have is thin and sterile, and it grows thinner rapidly, until it dies away utterly, as it did in the composition of my unfortunate _Roses of Midnight._

I turn from those sentences to Casanova, whose _Memoirs_ are one of the most wonderful autobiographies in the world; who, always passionate after sensations, confesses, in his confessions, the most shameless things that have ever been written: one to whom woman was, indeed, the most important thing in the world, but to whom nothing in the world was indifferent. He was, as he professes, always in love--at least, with something. Being of origin Venetian and Spanish, he had none of the cold blooded libertinism of Valmont in _Les Liaisons Dangereuses_ of Laclos. Baudelaire, in two of his sweeping Paradoxes, said of this book: "_Ce livre, s'il brûle, ne peut brûler qu'à la manière de la glace. Tous les livres sont immoraux._" Casanova, himself, is the primitive type of the Immoralist, in certain senses of the abnormal Immoralist. His latest reincarnation is an André Gide's _L'Immoraliste_; a book perverse and unpassionate.

Now, let us return to the modern writer's Confessions. Whether Moore has read the whole of Casanova or not, there are curiously similar touches in both these writers; as, for instance, in the word "alcoves, streets, ballrooms." Instead of the modern "barrooms" use the word _cafés._ One essential difference is that Casanova had a passion for books: the more essential one is, that Casanova was born to be a vagabond and a Wanderer over almost the whole of Europe, that he had tasted all the forbidden fruits of the earth, and that he had sinned with all his body--leaving, naturally, the soul out of the question.

Every great artist has tasted the sweet poison of the Forbidden Fruit. The Serpent, the most "subtile" of all the Beasts, gave an apple he had gathered from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to Eve; she having eaten it and having given one to Adam, both saw they were naked, and, with nakedness, Sin entered into the World. Now, what was stolen from the Garden of God has, ever since, been the one temptation which it is almost impossible to resist. For instance Shakespeare stole from Marlowe, Milton stole from Shakespeare, Keats stole from Virgil, Swinburne stole from Baudelaire and Crashaw, Browning stole from Donne; as for Wagner, having stolen a motet from Vittorio which he used, almost note for note in _Parsifal_, also from Palestrina and his school, and from Berlioz and from Liszt, it is impossible to say what he did not steal. Oscar Wilde stripped, as far as he could, all the fruit he could gather from the orchards of half a dozen French novelists; besides those of Poe and of Pater. Gabrielle d'Annunzio has stolen as thoroughly as Wilde; in fact, the whole contents of certain short stories. As for George Moore, he has been guilty of as many thefts as these; only he has concealed his thefts with more stealth. Henry James said to some one of my acquaintance: "Moore has an absolute genius for picking other men's brains." That saying is as final as it is fundamental.

Rossetti said: "There ought to be always, double of oneself, the self-critic, who should be one always with the poet." The legend of the Doppelgänger haunted him; the result of which is _How They Met Themselves_, where two lovers wandering in a wood come on their doubles, apparitions who, casting their perilous eyes on them sidewise, vanish. It is mysterious and menacing. Pater uses the same symbol: three knights as they hear the night-hawk, are confronted by their own images, but with blood, all three of them, fresh upon the brow, or in the mouth. "It were well to draw the sword, be one's enemy carnal or spiritual; even devils, as all men know, taking flight at its white glitter through the air. Out flashed the brave youths' swords, still with mimic counter-motion, upon nothing--upon the empty darkness before them." These revenants are ghost-like and flame-like: they are the symbols of good and evil; the symbols of the haunting of one uneasy conscience. Balzac, Blake, Hawthorne, saw them in visions; the moderns, such as Maupassant and Moore, must always ignore them.

The novel and the prose play are the two great imaginative forms which prose has invented for itself. Prose is the language of what we call real life, and it is only in prose that an illusion of external reality can be given. And, in any case, the prose play, the novel, come into being as exceptions and are invented by men who can not write plays in verse. Only in the novel and the prose play does prose become free to create, free to develop to the utmost limits of its vitality. Perhaps the highest merit of prose consists in this, that it allows us to think in words. But art, in verse, being strictly and supremely on art, begins by transforming. Indeed, there is no form of art which is not an attempt to capture life, to create life over again.

The rhythm of poetry is musical; the rhythm of prose is physiological. For this reason Ibsen's prose is like that of a diagram in Euclid; it is the rhythm of logic, and it produces in us the purely mental exaltation of a problem solved. Swinburne, writing on Wilkie Collins's _Armadale_, declares that the heroine who dies of her own will by her own crime, had an American or a Frenchman introduced her, no acclamation would have been too vehement to express their gratitude! "But neither Feuillet nor Hawthorne could have composed and constructed such a story; the ingenuity spent on it may possibly be perverse, but is certainly superb." As I have never read one line of Feuillet I am no judge of his merit as a novelist. Hawthorne had a magical imagination, a passion for "handling sin" purely; he was haunted by what is obscure and abnormal in that illusive region which exists on the confines of evil and good; his opinion of woman was that she "was plucked out of a mystery, and had its roots still clinging to her." Sin and the Soul, those are the problems he has always before him; Sin, as our punishment; the Soul, in its essence, mist-like and intangible. He uses his belief in witchcraft with admirable effect, the dim mystery which clings about haunted houses, the fantastic gambols of the soul itself, under what seems like the devil's own promptings.

In the whole of Moore's prose there is no such magic, no such mystery, no such diabolism; he is not so lacking in imagination as in style. He has always been, with impressive inaccuracy, described as the English Zola; at the outset of his career he gained a certain notoriety not unlike Zola's; his novels are not based on theories, as some of Zola's are. Moore always knew how to make a cunning plot, to make some of his compositions masterly, and how to construct his characters--which, to a certain extent, are living people, really existent, as their surroundings. As I say further on: "Compare with any of Zola's novels the amazingly clever novel of Moore, _A Mummer's Wife_, which goes with several other novels which are--well--_manqués_, in spite of their ability, their independence, their unquestionable merits of various kinds." The style always drags more than the action. Vivid, sensual, not sensuous, often perverse, never passionate; written with a curious sense of wickedness, of immorality, of vice; extraordinary at times in some of the scenes he evokes in one or several chapters; always with the French element; his prose exotic, morbid, cruel, as cruel as this catsuit of the passions, has in it a certain scorn and contempt of mediocrities, which can be delivered with the force of a sledge-hammer that strikes an anvil and shoots forth sparks.

II

George Moore has been described, with impressive inaccuracy, as the English Zola. At what was practically the outset of his career he gained a certain notoriety; which did him good, by calling public attention to an unknown name; it did him harm, by attaching to that name a certain stigma. In a certainly remote year, but a year we all of us remember, there were strange signs in the literary Zodiac. There had been a distinctly new growth in the short story, and along with the short story ("poisonous honey stolen from France") came a new license in dealing imaginatively with life, almost permitting the Englishman to contend with the writers of other nations on their own ground; permitting him, that is to say, to represent life as it really is. Foreign influences, certainly, had begun to have more and more effect upon the making of such literature as is produced in England nowadays; we had a certain acceptance of Ibsen, a popular personal welcome of Zola, and literary homage paid to Verlaine. What do these facts really mean? It is certain that they mean something.

The visit of Zola, for instance--how impossible that would have been a little while ago! A little while ago we were opening the prison doors for the publishers who had ventured to bring out translations of _Nana_ and _La Terre_; now we open the doors of the Guildhall for the author of _Nana_ and _La Terre_; and the same pens, with the same jubilance, chronicle both incidents. To the spectator of the comedy of life all this is merely amusing; but to the actor in the tragic comedy of letters it means a whole new _repertoire._ Not so very many years ago George Moore was the only novelist in England who insisted on the novelist's right to be true to life, even when life is unpleasant and immoral; and he was attacked on all sides.

The visit of Paul Verlaine, too--unofficial, unadvertised, as it was--seemed to be significant of much. In the first place, it showed, as in the case of Zola, a readiness on the part of some not unimportant section of the public to overlook either personal or literary scandal connected with a man of letters who has done really remarkable work. But the interest of Verlaine's visit was much more purely literary than that of Zola; his reception was in no sense a concession to success, but entirely a tribute to the genius of a poet.

I find that William Watson published only one tiny volume of verse, the barren burlesque of _The Eloping Angels_, which should never have been printed, and a book of prose, _Excursions in Criticism_, the criticism and the style being alike as immature and unbalanced as his verse is generally mature and accomplished; while Mr. Le Gallienne has forsaken the domesticity of the muse, to officiate, in _The Religion of a Literary Man_, as the Canon Farrar of the younger generation. The most really poetic of the younger poets, W. B. Yeats, who has yet to be "discovered" by the average critic and the average reader, has this year published a new volume of verse, _The Countess Kathleen_, as well as a book of prose stories, _The Celtic Twilight_, and, in conjunction with Edwin J. Ellis, a laborious study in the mysticism of William Blake. Yeats' work, alone among recent work in verse, has the imaginative quality of vision; it has the true Celtic charm and mystery; and while such admirable verse as Watson's, such glowing verse as Thompson's, are both superior, on purely technical grounds, to Yeats', neither has the spontaneous outflow of the somewhat untrained singing-voice of the younger poet.

Another writer of verse who has not yet been estimated at his proper value, John Davidson, has also published a new book of poems, _Fleet Street Eclogues_, and a book of prose, _A Random Itinerary._ It is difficult to do justice to Davidson, for he never does justice to himself. His verse is always vivid and striking; at its best it has a delightful quality of fantastic humor and quaint extravagance; but it is singularly uneven, and never, in my opinion, at its best in purely modern subjects. The _Random Itinerary_ is a whole series of happy accidents; but there are gaps in the series. Davidson strikes one as a man who might do almost anything; why, then, does he not do it?

Now, these paradoxical digressions have brought me back to the question of Zola and Moore, and of the realistic novel. Moore's were based on no theories; Zola's on certain theories, really a view of humanity which he adopted as a formula: "Nature seen through a temperament;" a definition supposed to be his definition of all art; which it most certainly is not. Yet nothing, certainly, could be more exact and expressive as a definition of the art of Huysmans.

Zola has made up his mind that he will say everything without omitting a single item; so that his vision is the vision of the mediocre man; and his way of finding out in a slang dictionary that a filthy idea can be expressed by an ingeniously filthy phrase in _Argot_, is by no means desirable. Every one knows two sentences in that supreme masterpiece, _Madame Bovary_, how that detail, brought in without the slightest emphasis of the husband turning his back at the very instant when his wife dies, is a detail of immense psychological value; it indicates to us, at the very beginning of the book, just the character of the man about whom we are to read so much. Zola would have taken at least two pages to say that, and, after all, he would not have said it.

Compare with any of Zola's novels the amazingly clever novel of Moore, _A Mummer's Wife_, which goes with several other novels which are--well--_manqués_, in spite of their ability, their independence, their unquestionable merits of various kinds. _A Mummers Wife_ is admirably put together, admirably planned and shaped; the whole composition of the book is masterly. The style may drag, but not the action; the construction of a sentence may be uncertain, but not the construction of a character. The actor and his wife are really living people; we see them in their surroundings, and we see every detail of those surroundings. Here, of course, he would never have made Zola's stupid mistake; but can one imagine for a moment--I certainly can not--the writer of this novel writing, creating, (if I may dare use the word) two such sentences of Flaubert, which I quote in their original? "_Huit jours après, comme elle étendait du linge dans sa cour, elle fut prise d'un crachement de sang, et le lendemain, tandis que Charles avait le dos tourné pour fermer le rideau de la fenêtre, elle dit: 'Ah! Mon Dieu!' poussa un soupir et s'évanouit. Ella était morte._"

George Moore's _Modern Painting_ is full of injustices, brutality and ignorances; but it is full also of the most generous justice, the most discriminating sympathy, and the genuine knowledge of the painter. It is hastily thought out, hastily written; but here, in these vivid, direct, unscrupulously logical pages, you will find some of the secrets of the art of painting, let out, so to speak, by an intelligence all sensation, which has soaked them up without knowing it. Yet, having begun by trying to paint, and having failed in painting, and so set himself to the arduous task of being a prose-writer, he is often, in spite of his painter's accuracy as to "values" and "technique" and so on, unreliable.

For, being neither creative as a novelist nor as a critic, he has nothing, as a matter of course, of two among many essential qualities: vision and divination. Take, for instance, a few pages anywhere in _L'Art Romanesque_ of Baudelaire, or from his prose on Delacroix, on Constantine Guys, on Wagner, on Daumier, on Whistler, on Flaubert, and on Balzac--where he is always supreme and consummate, "fiery and final"--and place these beside any chosen pages of Moore's prose on either Balzac or on Whistler, and you will see all the difference in the world: as I have said above, between the creative and the uncreative criticism.

Had Walter Pater devoted himself exclusively to art criticism, there is no doubt that, in a sense, he would have been a great art critic. There are essays scattered throughout his work, as in the Botticelli where he first introduces Botticelli to the modern world, as in the Leonardo da Vinci--in which the simplest words take color from each other by the cunning accident of their placing in the sentences, the subtle spiritual fire kindling from word to word creates a masterpiece, a miracle in which all is inspiration, all is certainty, all is evocation, and which, in the famous page on _La Gioconda_, rises to the height of actually lyrical prose--in which the essential principles of the art of painting are divined and interpreted with extraordinary subtlety. In the same sense all that Whistler has written about painting deserves to be taken seriously, and read with understanding. Written in French, and signed by Baudelaire, his truths, and paradoxes reflecting truths, would have been realized for what they are. He fought for himself, and spared no form of stupidity: for, in Whistler, apart from his malice, his poisonous angers, taste was carried to the point of genius, and became creative.

George Moore's literary career has been singularly interesting; his character as a writer is very curious. A man who respects his art, who is devoted to literature, who has a French eye for form, he seems condemned to produce work which is always spotted with imperfection. All his life he has been seeking a style, and he has not yet found one. At times he drops into style as if by accident, and then he drops style as if by design. He has a passionate delight in the beauty of good prose; he has an ear for the magic of phrases; his words catch at times a troubled expressive charm; yet he has never attained ease in writing, and he is capable of astounding incorrectness--the incorrectness of a man who knows better, who is not careless and yet who can not help himself. Yet the author of _A Mummer's Wife_, of _The Confessions of a Young Man_, of _Impressions and Opinions_, has more narrowly escaped being a great writer than even he himself, perhaps, is aware.

FRANCIS THOMPSON

I