Chapter VIII: Act II: does he escape the lack of variety. For instance, in Act (3)

But Alphonse Daudet and music! His son, Léon, tells us much in his filial memoirs. “His ear,” says this pious and admirable biographer, “had a delicacy and correctness most exquisite. Thence came his passion for music, which was made an aid and assistance to his labors. He sits at his table in his working room. My mother is at the piano in the next room, and the music of Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, or Schubert follows, one after the other, and excites or calms the imagination of the writer. ‘Music is another planet.’ ‘I adore all music, the commonest as well as the loftiest.’ But no man could analyze and understand better the masters of harmony, no man lauded the genius of Wagner in more splendid terms or more brilliant images: ‘The conquest by Wagner and the philosophers.’”

Daudet often came home with wet eyes after a concert, and we are told that his voice was delicate and penetrating when he hummed the tunes of Provence. His intimate musical friends were Raoul Pugno, the pianist, Bizet, and Massenet. In later years Hahn, the “little Hahn,” a composer of songs, often visited him, and he dearly loved the mad music of the Hungarian gypsy orchestras. We all recall his fondness for the pastoral pipe, and Valmafour, that thrice unhappy Valmafour urged in the pursuit of a hopeless fantastic love by an avaricious sister! I have often wondered who sat for the portrait of De Potter in Sapho. It was possibly a composite of Gounod, Bizet, and Massenet, though the figure of the love-stricken composer seems to fit Gounod better than the others—Gounod at the epoch of Georgiana Weldon.

That Daudet’s ear for verbal harmonies was of the finest there can be no doubt, after reading this: “It seems that the phrase, as Châteaubriand uses it, has preserved the rhythm and movement of the sea; the rush of his crises comes from the farthest line of the horizon; their return is broad, quiet, majestic. Another example of sensitiveness to the period in writing, Gustave Flaubert, is the only one presenting, in the same degree as Châteaubriand, that verbal wealth which gives a sensuous satisfaction to one’s mind when reading.”

Of Wagner he said:—

Wagner was a phenomenon in this century just as he will be one in
the time to come, and no one is more fruitful than he in remarks of
every sort.... He was a man belonging to another age. Nevertheless,
he found a way to our nerves and our brains far more easily than
one would have thought. If imagination has representatives, he was
one of the giants. A Northern imagination, it is true, on which
all the beauties and faults of the North have left their impress.
He insists, he insists with violence and tenacity, he insists so
pitilessly! He is afraid that we haven’t understood. That language
of motives which he has imagined, and of which he makes such
magnificent use, has the fault of leaving us very often with an
impression of weariness.... Still, it was absolutely necessary
for him to invent that system of motives.... His characters
seem clothed in sound.... In Richard Wagner the imagination is
so representative and violent that it saturates his work to
overflowing with all the sounds of nature and leaves a limited
space for the episodes. The passion between Tristan and Isolde
plunges into the tumult of the ocean which overwhelms it; then it
appears on the surface, then it plunges under again. One invincible
power raises the waves and the souls by a single movement. In the
poem, water, fire, the woods, the blossoming and mystic meadow, the
holy spot become the more powerful characters. In this paganism of
to-day all nature has become divine.

Wagner’s pantheism has never been sufficiently realized. For me his dramas deal with the elemental forces, rather than with men and women. Daudet evidently recognized this fact. Wagner was a pagan. The romancer says: “Your generation is accustomed to these splendors, this torrent of heroism and life, but you cannot present to your fancy the impression which that music exercised on men of my age.... There is everything in Wagner.... Turning his face toward Gayety he wrote the Meistersinger; turning toward Pain, Love, Death, the _Mutter_ of Goethe, he wrote Tristan und Isolde. He made use of the entire human pianoforte, and the entire superhuman pianoforte. Cries, tears, the distortion of despair, the trickling of water over rocks, the sough of the wind in the trees, frightful remorse, the song of the shepherd and the trumpets of war—his tremendous imagination is always at white heat, and always ready.”

Daudet wisely refuses to discuss Wagner’s methods:—

Let his methods remain in the dark like his orchestra.... That
imagination of his, feverish and excessive, has not only renovated
music, but has also overwhelmed poetry and philosophy. Although
theories disquiet me, still I feel them trembling in Wagner behind
each one of his heroes. The gods talk of their destiny and of the
conflict of that destiny with the destiny of men; they talk of
ancient Fate in a way that is sometimes obscure, but with a rush
and a go that make one forget to question them. It is the famous
wall of the Légende des Siècles, crowded with the tubas and the
trumpets of Sachs, tumultuous and glittering in their mass.

It is quite possible that Wagner desired to have characters of
a size suited to their surroundings, and that one would feel
uncomfortable while considering ordinary men who should be
victims of the Ocean of Tristan or of the Forest of Siegfried.
What difference does it make? He succeeds in moving us with these
superterrestrial passions. In Tristan humanity plays a larger part.
These are our own wounds which are bleeding in the flesh of the
lovers, wounds that the sacred spear, which the hero brings back
with him, shall never heal.

It will be seen that these are the utterances of a man who has pondered music as well as felt it deeply. He knew Wagner, and was a welcome visitor at Wahnfried. “Daudet pleases me much,” Wagner once said. The openly expressed admiration of this cultured Frenchman must have flattered the composer greatly. Because Daudet admired Wagner, his perception of Beethoven’s greatness was not blurred. He puts the case succinctly: “It were better to say that the masterpiece by Beethoven being more concentrated and closely woven makes a total impression upon you in a much shorter time than does a drama with its necessary stops and changes of scenery and delays for explanation.” This in answer to his son Léon, who had asserted that the emotions aroused by a Beethoven symphony include “a deeper and rarer quality” than those evoked by the Ring.

The elder Daudet finds that Wagner is saturated by nature and nature’s sounds:—

His orchestral parts cradle and swing me to and fro. His gentleness
and power cause me to pass within a few hours through the most
powerful emotions—emotions, in fact, for which no one can fail to
be grateful forever to the man who has excited them, because they
reveal our inner depths to ourselves. I love and admire Beethoven
also for the wide and peaceful landscapes which he knows how to
open up in the soul of sound. Italian music enchants me, and in
Rossini I experience that extraordinary impression of melancholy
anguish which an excess of life gives us. There is too much frenzy,
too much movement; it is as if one were trying to escape from
death. I adore Mendelssohn and his delicious pictures of nature in
the Scotch and Italian symphonies. There are certain hours toward
nightfall when the soul of Schumann torments me.... But to number
them all would be to never end. I have lived through the power of
music; I am a dweller upon its planet.

Now all this is quite satisfying when one realizes that Daudet, in his love for music, steps out of the French literary tradition. French writers, even those of this century, have never been fanatics for music, Stendhal and Baudelaire excepted—Baudelaire who discovered Wagner to France. I cannot recommend Stendhal as a musical guide. Châteaubriand, Victor Hugo, Gautier, Alfred de Vigny, de Musset, Flaubert, Dumas _fils_, Zola, the de Goncourts—the brothers secretly abominated music—this mixed company was not fond of the heavenly maid. Catulle Mendès is a Wagnerian, and in his evanescent way Paul Verlaine was affected by melody. He wrote a magnificent and subtle sonnet on Parsifal. Perhaps it was what the despiser of Kundry stood for rather than Wagner’s music that set vibrating the verbal magic of this Chopin of the Gutter. Villier de l’Isle Adam was another crazy Wagnerian, played excerpts on the piano, had his music performed at his own deathbed, and sketched in a book of his the figure of Liszt as Triboulet Bonhomet. Huysmans, of Flemish descent, has made a close study of church music and the old ecclesiastical modes in En Route and in several others of his remarkable books. The younger Parisian writers are generally music lovers.

How well Daudet understood that elusive quantity, the artistic temperament, may be seen in this bit of analysis: “Neither sculptor, nor painter represents anything which did not exist before in the world. It is somewhat different in regard to music. But, looking at things a little closer, music is the lofty manifestation of a harmony, the models for which exist in nature. Nevertheless the writer, the painter, the poet, the sculptor, and the musician, whenever their work bears them honestly along, believe honestly that they are adding to the world something which did not exist before their time. Sublime illusion!”

On this clear, critical note let us leave the always delightful writer, the once charming man. “Oh, Daudet, _c’est de la bouillabaisse_!” cries the author of Evelyn Innes. Yes, but is not _la bouillabaisse_ a fascinating dish, especially when a master _chef_ has prepared it?

GEORGE MOORE

I

EVELYN INNES

There must be a beyond. In Wagner there is none. He is too perfect.
Never since the world began did an artist realize himself so
perfectly. He achieved all he desired, therefore something is
wanting.—GEORGE MOORE.

At last a novel with some intelligent criticism of music—George Moore’s Evelyn Innes.

For years I have browsed amidst the herbage offered by writers of musical fiction, and usually have found it bitter and unprofitable. We all smile now at the inflated sentimentalities of Charles Auchester, and shudder at the mistakes of the literary person when dealing with musical themes. Jessie Fothergill’s The First Violin is very pretty, but it is badly written and reeks of Teutonic _Schwärmerei_. The characters are the conventional puppets of fiction armed with a conductor’s stick and violin bow, instead of sword, cloak, and dagger. A novel dealing with genuine musical figures has yet to be written, so George Moore’s Evelyn Innes is an attempt in the right direction. The book is full of faults, but at least it deals sanely with music, and contains several very acute criticisms of Wagner’s music, acute without being too literary or too technical.

Whenever I read a novel by George Moore I feel like dividing the English-speaking world into three parts: those who read Moore and like him—a determined and growing class; those who read him and hate him—a very much larger class; and those who never heard of him—to this class belong the admirers of Marie Corelli, Hall Caine, and Sienkiewicz. Yet for certain young men every stroke of his pen has a hieratic significance. I remember well when the Confessions of a Young Man appeared. With what eagerness was it not seized upon by a small section of the community, a section that represented the vanguard of a new movement and recognized a fellow-decadent. George Moore may be truthfully called the first of the English decadents—I mean the Verlaine crop of the early eighties, not the gifted gang that painted and sonneted under the name of the Pre-Raphaelitic Brotherhood.

It was George Moore who first brought to England’s shores the “poisonous honey of France.” In his Confessions were criticisms of acuity and several positive discoveries. He it was who introduced Arthur Rimbaud and Verlaine, Jules Laforgue and Gustave Kahn, to a public that speedily forgot them. To read these Confessions to-day is like stirring up stale musk. There is an odd comminglement of caviare and perfume in the book, and its author evidently had more to say.

He said it in A Mummer’s Wife, one of the strongest, most disagreeable books I ever read. But, while the hands were Moore’s, the voice was Zola’s. Moore has always been the victim of methods. He has dissected Tolstoy, Turgénieff, Flaubert, Balzac, and the de Goncourts to see how they do the trick; and as he possesses in a rare degree the mocking-bird voice, his various books were at first echoes of his passionate delvings in the minds of others. A Mummer’s Wife dealt with the English stage—certain phases of it. It was Zola Anglicized. Then followed the trilogy of brutal naturalistic novels, Spring Days, A Modern Lover, and Mike Fletcher, the last being the biggest. The writer exploited to the full his love for what he conceived to be the real, and there are certainly many telling passages in Mike Fletcher. To-day A Modern Lover is recognized as a very truthful study of artistic London, the London that paints and goes to picture galleries. The new man—he was very new then to the younger men—had the gift of gripping your hand with chilly, withal powerful, fingers. He forced you to look at certain surfaces and see them the way he saw them. Because nature had imposed upon him restrictions, he strove earnestly to see more clearly, and by dint of hard gazing he did see, and saw some extraordinary things.

Having studied Germinie Lacerteux until he had mastered her, George Moore transposed her into the key of Fielding. His Esther Waters, by far simpler and healthier than the rest, is the Goncourts’ gutter-martyr, Germinie Lacerteux, done into English. But it is admirably done, and the paraphrase became known to the novel-reading world. There was a brief silence, and Celibates appeared. And there were things performed within its pages that sent shivers to your stomach. An outrageous theme was fashioned superbly. One story was a recurrence to Moore’s favorite subject, the Roman Catholic church. Whether he is a Catholic or not, I cannot say, but the church literally obsesses him. Her ritual dominates his vision, and, like a sickly woman, he loves to finger the gorgeous livery of the Lord. He continually returns to this topic. He is exercised, almost haunted, by the notion that outside of her pale salvation is impossible. “What if this be true?” cries George Moore, as he arises from his midnight bed, fearing the dark and looking for some sign of a dawn! I suppose, being a product of our times, he enjoys this acrobatic flirting and balancing on the rope of faith swung over the chasm of doubt and despair. Religion is one of his leading motives, art the other.

The new story deals with several episodes in the life of a singer. She is the daughter of a devotee of archaic music and archaic instruments. She has a voice, but her father is so absorbed in the revival of Palestrina, of Vittoria, of old English writers, of the Plain Chant, that he neglects the girl’s vocal possibilities. She plays the viola da gamba and sings at sight. Her mother was a celebrated operatic singer, of chaste life and _coloratura_ tastes. She died before the girl was developed. The dreamy father, the high-strung, ambitious girl, a dreary home at Dulwich, near London, and a rich baronet of musical tastes, crazy for notoriety in London musical life,—and you may imagine the rest.

Evelyn goes to Paris with him—and with a certain Lady Duckle as a chaperon. The scene at Marchesi’s—for of course Madame Savelli is Marchesi—is capitally done, and there is a Henry James lightness of touch and humor in the description of Lady Duckle and her dislike of Wagner’s music.

“No, my dear Owen,” she cried, “I am not a heretic, for I recognize the greatness of the music, and I could hear it with pleasure if it were confined to the orchestra; but I can find no pleasure in listening to a voice trying to accompany a hundred instruments. I heard Lohengrin last season. I was in Mrs. Ayre’s box—a charming woman—her husband is an American, but he never comes to London. I presented her at the last Drawing Room. She had a supper party afterward, and when she asked me what I’d have to eat, I said, ‘Nothing with wings!... Oh, that Swan!’”

Now, this is distinctly witty, and it is a pity that we get only a mere sketch of this chatty body.

Without explaining the processes, Evelyn becomes a great singer, a great interpreter of Wagner; and it is precisely this hiatus that deprives me of much pleasure. I dislike these persons in fiction who have become full-fledged artists at the turning of a page. Mr. Moore was treading upon dangerous ground, and he knew it; so he wisely omitted the study years. Evelyn, whose character shows little growth, conquers London, and at last goes to her father to ask his pardon. This episode is the strongest and most original in the book. Indeed, I cannot recollect anything in English fiction like it. She falls at his feet and is Brünnhilde kneeling to Wotan. As she phrases her petition for pardon she acts, consciously or unconsciously, the third act of Die Walküre: “War es so schmählich?” she mentally implores, and the simple instrument-maker is vanquished. It is very subtle, and the dual nature of the lyric artist is clearly indicated.

But such a father, such a daughter! If you were to ask me frankly if a girl could sacrifice everything for art I would as frankly reply, Yes; lots of them have. I have met a dozen myself. Moore does not believe that the moral sense can flourish in an artistic atmosphere. Perhaps he is right. Evelyn is dissatisfied with success. Her nature is too complex to find gratification in the society of Sir Owen Asher. A new man looms up. He is dark, has teeth, is a mystic, a Roscicrucian, perhaps a diabolist. He is a Celt and is composing to a Celtic legend a great music-drama; his musical forms are antique, and he wins Evelyn, after the first performance of Isolde. This scene caused all the bellboys of literature to cry “horrors!” I confess, however, that the second love is incomprehensible. It is entered into in too cold-blooded a manner. She becomes still more dissatisfied, and after a week of insomnia her early religious beliefs get the uppermost, and she goes to confession. But you feel that she has only met a third will stronger than her own. A Monsignor Mostyn, the best male portrait of the book, forces her to bend her knee to God, and she goes into conventual retreat. We get a few closing chapters—dreary ones—devoted to convent life, and then Evelyn goes forth once more into the world.

Her character is exceedingly well drawn, although I must protest against the overloading of page after page with elaborate psychologizing. Moore has deserted the brutal simplicities of his earlier manner for a Bourget-like shovelling of arid psychical details upon your wearied brain. The story becomes hazy, the main figure nebulous. At every step in the latter half of the book I detect Joris Karel Huysmans and his En Route. Evelyn Innes becomes a feminine Durtal, sick of life, afraid of God. There is too much padding in the shape of discussions about early church music—more Huysmans! Huysmans’s practice of cataloguing is very monotonous. Yet it is the best thing in the way of a literary performance that George Moore has accomplished. The style is decomposed, but it is melodious, flexible, smooth, and felicitous. One can see that he knows his Pater.

Mr. Moore had used to advantage his knowledge of the London musical set. Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch may have sat for a portrait of Evelyn’s father. Mr. Dolmetsch is a player on the harpsichord and spinet. But who is Evelyn Innes? That is a dangerous question. Possibly she is a composite of Melba, Calvé, Eames, and Nordica. Oddly enough, she gets a tiara, presented to her by the subscribers of the opera at New York! Of course this points to Nordica, but Nordica could never read music at sight,—you remember the one thousand piano rehearsals for Tristan,—and so that clew is misleading. Perhaps the author may enlighten the musical world some day. Lady Grimalkin is certainly intended for Lady de Grey.

Sir Owen Asher—he may be one side of George Moore himself—is well painted in the beginning, but the colors soon fade. He is a bore, with his agnosticism, his vanity, and his lack of backbone. He treated Evelyn too delicately. A lusty reproof is what the young woman most needed. Her churchly, sentimental vaporings would then have been dissipated, and she might have thrown a clock at her admirer’s head. Such things have been known to happen in the life of a prima donna. Sir Owen starts a Wagnerian Review. Could Mr. Moore have meant the Earl of Dysart? Ulick Dean is said to be drawn partially from Yeats, the mystic; but the music criticism sounds to me very like the doughty Runciman’s. There is a manager with a toothache, who is almost funny, and there is a rehearsal of Tannhäuser, in which the question of cuts is discussed. Here is a sentence that reveals the depth of Mr. Moore’s knowledge of music:—

“According to Mr. Innes, Bach was the last composer who had distinguished between A sharp and B flat. The very principle of Wagner’s music is the identification of the two notes.” Why? In the name of the Chromatic Fantasia, why?

I confess I am rather tired of convent scenes. The best I ever read in latter-day novels is in Mathilde Serao’s Fantasy. Mrs. Craigie, in The Schools for Saints, “does” a convent, and now Moore. The Roman Catholic problem, too, is overdone. Mrs. Humphry Ward, in her polemical pamphlet which she calls a novel, Helbeck of Bannisdale, indulges in numerous speculations of the sort. George Moore loves the rich trappings and the pomp of ceremonial in the church. But its iteration is an artistic mistake. Indeed, his book goes off into mid-air in the latter half. The first is fascinating. The discussion of the various schools of singing is valuable, and while at no place does he exhibit the marvellous virtuosity displayed by d’Annunzio in his exposition of Tristan and Isolde, there are many jewelled pages of descriptive writing. The book is permeated with all manners of pessimism from Omar to Schopenhauer, and life is discussed from the viewpoints of the ascetic and the epicurean.

Mr. Moore is an artist. His vision is just, and he is a better workman than he was; his sense of form is matured, although his faults of construction are easily detected. He has caught the right atmosphere; he is still master of moods, and he has attempted and nearly succeeded in spilling out the soul of a singer for our inspection,—the soul of the selfish, ambitious prima donna, for there is no denying that Evelyn, despite her tender conscience, was selfish and a fascinating creature, mastered by every passing whim, and a woman utterly incapable of developing mentally without masculine assistance. Mr. Moore, then, has given us the type of the opera singer, and I forgive him pages of solemn-gaited writing. Alas! that it should be as he writes. But it is. He says some things that go very deep, and there are many exquisite touches.

This novelist’s attitude towards Wagner’s music is well expressed in John Norton, the second of the three tales in that uncommonly strong book called Celibates. Here is another self-revelation:—

Wagner reminds me of a Turk lying amid the houris promised by the
Prophet to the Faithful—eyes incensed by kohl, lips and almond
nails incarnadine, the languor of falling hair and the languor
of scent burning in silver dishes, and all around subdued color,
embroidered stuffs, bronze lamps traced with inscrutable designs.
Never a breath of pure air, not even when the scene changes to
the terrace overlooking the dark river, ... minarets and the dome
reflected in the tide and in a sullen sky, reaching almost to
the earth, the dome and behind the dome a yellow moon—a carven
moon, without faintest aureole, a voluptuous moon, mysteriously
marked, a moon like a creole, her hand upon the circle of her
breast; and through the torrid twilight of the garden the sound of
fountains, like flutes far away, breathing to the sky the sorrow
of the water-lilies. And in the dusky foliage, in which a blue and
orange evening dies, gleams the color of fruit—dun-colored bananas,
purple and yellow grapes, the desert scent of dates, the motley
morbidity of figs, the passion of red pomegranates, shining like
stars, through a flutter of leaves, where the light makes a secret
way. And through all the color and perfume of twilight, of fruit,
of flowers, cometh the maddening murmur of fountains. At last
the silence is broken by the thud of an over-ripe fruit that has
suddenly broken from its stalk.... Now I am alive to the music, all
has ceased but it; I am conscious of nothing else. Now it has got
me; I am in its power; I am as a trembling prey held in the teeth
and claws of a wild animal. The music creeps and catches, and with
cruel claws and amorous tongue it feeds upon my flesh; my blood is
drunken, and, losing grasp upon my suborned soul, ... I tremble, I
expire.

II

SISTER TERESA

Brainstuff is not lean stuff; the brainstuff of fiction is
internal history, and to suppose it dull is the profoundest of
errors.—GEORGE MEREDITH.

What makes Moore’s case so peculiarly his own is his unlikeness to our preconceived notion of an Irishman. No man of genius resembles his countrymen; so we find Burke, Swift, George Moore, with few of the characteristics ascribed to Irishmen and wits. They were and are not jolly world lovers, rollicking sports of the sort Lever loved to paint. Tom Moore and his rose-water poetry, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and his glossy smartness, hit the popular notion of what an Irish poet, playwright, and man of letters should be.

Now George Moore is far from being an Irishman in that sense—this prose poet who is at once mystical and gross. Yet he is a Celt, and lately he has developed a restless spirit, a desire to flee the Anglo-Saxon and his haunts. It is the “homing” instinct of the Celt—after forty years of age men of talent return to their tribe. And Mr. Moore is fast becoming an Irishman among Irishmen. Here is the newest incarnation of this feminine soul—perverse and feminine, he admits he is—which, waxlike, takes and retains the most subtle and powerful impressions. The readers of his early books knew him as a Shelley worshipper, then a digger among the romantic literature of 1830, finally a follower of Zola. So after Flowers of Passion (1877) we got Pagan Poems (1881), and with A Modern Lover (1883) began his prose trilogy, devoted to the young man. This was followed in 1884 by A Mummer’s Wife, Literature at Nurse (1885), A Drama in Muslin (1886), Parnell and His Island (1887), A Mere Accident (1887), Confessions of a Young Man (1888), Spring Days (1888), Mike Fletcher (1889), Impressions and Opinions (1890), Vain Fortune (1890), Modern Painting (1893), The Strike at Arlingford, a play (1893), Esther Waters (1894), Celibates (1895), Evelyn Innes (1898), The Bending of the Bough, a play (1900). He also collaborated in 1894 with Mrs. Craigie in a little comedy called Journeys End in Lovers’ Meeting, which was written for Ellen Terry, and Untilled Fields (1903).

Mr. Moore was born in 1857, the son of the late George Henry Moore, M.P., of Moore Hall, County Mayo, Ireland. He was educated at Oscott College, near Birmingham, and studied art in Paris, so his expatriation was practical and complete. He once hated his native land and hated its religion. Yet I know of few writers whose books, whose mind, are so tormented by Catholicism. He may insult the church in A Drama in Muslin—one of the most veracious documents of Irish social history in the eighties—and through the mouth of Alice Barton. But, like the moth and the flame, he ever circles about the Roman Catholic religion. It would be unfair to hold a man responsible for the utterances of his characters, nevertheless there is a peculiarly personal cadence in all that Mr. Moore writes, which makes his problem, like that of Huysmans, a fascinating one. The George Moore of Mike Fletcher and the George Moore of Sister Teresa are very different men. Mike Fletcher, for me the first virile man in English fiction since Tom Jones, may please some critics more than Evelyn Innes turned nun, for of Mike you could not say in Meredith’s words: “Men may have rounded Seraglio Point; they have not yet doubled Cape Turk.” Mike never rounded Seraglio Point; while of Evelyn, you dimly feel that she is always “fiddling harmonics on the strings of sensualism.” Yes, George Moore is returning to the tribe; he is Irish; he is almost Roman Catholic—and the man is often more interesting than his books. Not to know them all is to miss the history of artistic London during the last quarter of a century.

In the preface of the English edition of Sister Teresa Mr. Moore writes:—

I found I had completed a great pile of Ms., and one day it
occurred to me to consider the length of this Ms. To my surprise
I found I had written about 150,000 words, and had only finished
the first half of my story. I explained my difficulties to my
publisher, suggesting that I should end the chapter I was then
writing on what musicians would call ‘a full close,’ and that half
the story should be published under the title of Evelyn Innes and
half under the title of Sister Teresa. My publisher consented,
frightened at the thought of a novel of a thousand pages—300,000
words. The story has not been altered, but the text is almost
entirely new. No one, perhaps, has rewritten a book so completely.
I am aware that the alteration of a published text is deprecated
in the press, but it is difficult to understand why, for have
not Shakespeare and Balzac and Goethe and Wagner and Fitzgerald
rewritten their works? Among my contemporaries, George Meredith
and W. B. Yeats have followed the example of their illustrious
predecessors.

The latter half of the book is by no means so brilliant, or even so convincing, as the first. But then its psychology is much finer, and it was infinitely harder to handle. Evelyn was bound to taste convent life. Morbid, fatigued by Wagner singing, triumphs, social and operatic, by her two lovers, her stomach deranged by dyspepsia, her nerves worn to an irritable thread by insomnia—is it any wonder the golden-haired girl, with the freckled face, regarded convent life as a green-blooming oasis in a wilderness of lust, vanity, and artificial worldliness! You can see that her mother’s spirit grows stronger in her every day, that mother with the cold eyes and thin lips who lost her voice so early in a great career. “The portrait of our father or our mother is a sort of crystal ball, into which we look in the hope of discovering our destiny.” Evelyn was tired of love, above all of animal love which dragged her soul from God. Ulick, for that reason, was more grateful to her. He was a mystic, with the dog-cold nose of mystics, and he soothed Evelyn when Sir Owen had ruffled her with his importunities, with his materialism. But these two men soon fade after the first hundred pages of the new story; indeed, they are lightly etched in at the best. “We have only to change our ideas to change our friends. Our friends are only a more or less imperfect embodiment of our ideas,” says Mr. Moore. The feigned friendship of the two is a truly Flaubertian note. It recalls a trait of Charles Bovary. The convent of the Passionist Sisters at Wimbledon, however, is the glowing core of this remarkable tale. For nuns, for convents and monasteries, the life contemplative, this Irish novelist has always had a deep liking. There is John Norton in Celibates and there is Lily Young, who left a convent for Mike Fletcher, and then we have Agnes Lahens, whose only happiness was in a claustral life. At one time I believe that this writer would have indorsed Nietzsche’s idea of a monastery for freethinkers. Didn’t H. G. Wells suggest a retreat for a Huysmans sect? Evelyn Innes, like John Norton, dilly-dallied with her innermost convictions. It was long before she realized that faith is a gift, is a special talent, which must be cultivated to a perfect flowering. And when she left her lovers, when she left the stage, after her father died in Rome,—here the long arm of coincidence is rather unpleasantly visible,—when she had professed, taken the veil, and became Sister Teresa, her former life fell away from her like water, and she was happy, a happy bride of Christ—until the honeymoon was over; for divine nuptials have their honeymoons, their chilly repulsions, their hours and days of indifference and despair. And this brings us to M. Huysmans.

Mr. Peck, in his admirable estimate of George Moore,—in The Personal Equation,—writes that Moore is frankly a decadent, frankly a sensualist of the type of Huysmans, whom he intensely admires. “A page of Huysmans,” exclaims Moore, “is as a dose of opium, a glass of some exquisite and powerful liqueur.... Huysmans goes to my soul like a gold ornament of Byzantine workmanship. There is in his style the yearning charm of arches, a sense of ritual, the passion of the mural, of the window.” And Mr. Peck adds: “Mr. Moore’s affinity with Huysmans does not go further than a certain sensuous sympathy. He could never follow him....” But he has followed him, followed En Route; Huysmans has not only gone to his soul, but to his pen. He once wittily wrote: “Henry James went to France and read Turgénieff. W. D. Howells stayed at home and read Henry James.” This might be paraphrased thus: Joris Karel Huysmans, that unique disciple of Baudelaire, went to La Trappe and studied religion. George Moore, that most plastic-souled Irishman, stayed at home and studied Huysmans. This is the precise statement of a truth. Mr. Moore owes as much to Huysmans for his Sister Teresa. To no one does he owe Mildred Lawson. She is as much George Moore’s as L’Education Sentimentale is truly Flaubert’s. I do not know of her counterpart in fiction; like Frédéric Moreau, that unheroic hero, she is a heroine who failed from sheer lack of temperament. And her story is one of the best stories in the language.

But with Sister Teresa the case is different. She is Huysmansized. Yet Mr. Moore has only used Huysmans as a spring-board—to employ a favorite expression of the French writer—for his narration of Sister Teresa’s doings in conventual seclusion. He knew, of course, that he could never hope to rival Huysmans’s matchless, if somewhat florid and machicolated, style, and it may be confessed at once that Sister Teresa is not so intense or so sincere a book as En Route. Nowhere, despite the exquisite resignation and Mozartean sweetness of Mr. Moore’s thirty-eighth chapter, is there anything that approaches the power of the wonderful first chapter in En Route, with its thundering symphonic description of the singing of the De Profundis. Nor are Teresa’s raptures and agonies to be compared to Durtal’s in that awful first night at La Trappe, though the Irish writer follows the French one closely enough. But Moore is tenderer, more poetic, than Huysmans. He has so highly individualized, so completely transposed, his character, that to him must only praise be awarded. As Russell Jacobus writes, in The Blessedness of Egoism, the secret of Goethe’s self-culture is “the faculty of drawing from everything—experience, books, and art—just the element required at that stage of one’s growth, and the faculty of obtaining, by a clairvoyant instinct, the experience, the book, the work of art which contains that needed element.” This Mr. Moore has always done—he confesses to it, to the “echo auguries” of his young manhood. The color of his mind is ever changing. It often displays the reverberating tints of a flying-fish in full flight.

And his art has benefited by his defection from Zola. It has grown purer, more intense. As Huysmans says himself in La Bas, “We must, in short, follow the great highway so deeply dug out by Zola, but it is also necessary to trace a parallel path in the air, another road by which we may reach the Beyond and the Afterward, to achieve thus, in one word, a spiritualistic naturalism.” Huysmans believes Dostoïevsky comes nearest to this achievement—as Havelock Ellis remarks—Dostoïevsky, who was once described by Mr. Moore as a Gaboriau with psychological sauce. But at that time he had not read The Idiot, The Gambler, or L’Adolescence. I find traces of the Russian novelists and their flawless art throughout Sister Teresa, just as the externals of the book—of Evelyn Innes also—recall Flaubert in L’Education Sentimentale. There are many half-cadences, chapters closing on unresolved harmonies, many ellipses, and all bathed in a penetrating yet hazy atmosphere. Yet his style is clear and rhythmic. Mr. Moore tells of subtle things in a simple manner—the reverse of Henry James’s method. The character drawing is no longer so contrapuntal as in Evelyn Innes. But the convent sisters are delightful—the Prioress, Mother Hilda, and Sister Mary Saint John. It would not be George Moore, however, to miss a tiny suggestion of the morbid—though I confess he has treated the episode discreetly. But here again has Huysmans anticipated him, and also anticipated him in Durtal’s revolt against the faith, with his almost uncontrollable desire to utter blasphemies in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. With a master hand—but always the hand of a master miniaturist—does Mr. Moore paint cloistered life, its futile gossiping, little failings, heroic sacrifices, and humming air of sanctity. There are pages in the book that I could almost swear were written by a nun—so real, so intimate, so saturated, are they with the religious atmosphere. And the garden, that nuns’ garden! Whosoever has walked in the sequestered garden of a convent can never quite lose the faint sense of sweetness, goodness, spirituality, and a certain soft communion with nature which modulate into the very speech and rhythm of the sisters. All this atmosphere Mr. Moore, whose receptivity is most feminine, brings into his perfumed pages. After the fleshly passion, the unrest, of Evelyn Innes, this book has a consoling music of its own.

It was after the convent doors closed that the real struggles of the singer began. Some of them have considerable vraisemblance, some of them are very trivial. The letters sent to Monsignor Mostyn, for example, are not credible; nor are Teresa’s revolt and subsequent spiritual rebirth made quite clear. Perhaps Mr. Moore is not yet so strong a believer as Huysmans. His words do not carry the intense conviction of the Fleming-Frenchman, who from his retreat in a Benedictine monastery has given the world a vivid and edifying account of St. Lydwine de Schiedam, that blessed Dutch saint he speaks of in En Route, first attacked at the time of the plague in Holland. “Two boils formed, one under her arm, the other above the heart. ‘Two boils, it is well,’ she said to the Lord, ‘but three would be better in honor of the Holy Trinity,’ and immediately a third pustule broke out on her face.” This extraordinary mystic considered herself as an expiatory victim for all the sins of the earth. Her sufferings were finally rewarded. Like John Bunyan, she died a “comfortable and triumphant death.” A writer of Huysmans’s magnificent artistry, who can thus transform himself into an humble hagiographer, must indeed have forsworn his ways and become impregnated by faith.

Mr. Moore does not succeed in arousing any such poignant and unpleasant impressions. Notwithstanding his array of mystical learning, his familiarity with the writings of Rüysbroeck, John of the Cross, Saint Teresa, Catharine Emmerich, Saint Angela, and the rest, one cannot escape the conviction that it is not all deeply felt. Count S. C. de Soissons writes: “He who praises the lasciviousness of Alcibiades does not enjoy the pleasure that he had; neither do they experience the mystic ecstasies of the anchorites of the Thebaid who try to parody their saintly lives.” Even the striking account of the Carmelite’s profession in Sister Teresa is paralleled in En Route. There is not so much music talk as in Evelyn Innes, for she leaves its world of vain and empty sonorities. This much I found in an early chapter. “In Handel there are beautiful proportions; it is beautiful like eighteenth-century architecture, but here I can discover neither proportion nor design.” Moore referred to a Brahms score, which is manifestly absurd. Whatever else there may be in Brahms, we are sure to discover proportion, design. Again, “She remembered that César Franck’s music affected her in much the same way.” Shrugging her shoulders, she said, “When I listen I always hear something beautiful, only I don’t listen.” I fear Mr. Moore has succumbed again to the blandishing voice of Ulick Dean Runciman!

And how does it all end, the psychic adventures of this Wagner singer turned nun, this woman who “discovered two instincts in herself—an inveterate sensuality and a sincere aspiration for a spiritual life”? She loses her voice, like her mother, and after relinquishing all idea of escaping from the convent—not a well-developed motive—she settles down to teaching voice and piano. Sir Owen Asher no longer troubles her; Ulick Dean has evaporated, or perhaps crumbled to dust, like an unheeding Brann if he had touched the early shores of real life. No one from the outside world visits her but Louise, Mlle. Helbrun, the Brangaene of her Tristan and Isolde days. To the evanescent bell booming of their distant past goes the conversation of the friends. It is not so depressingly real, not so moving, as the last words of Frédéric Moreau and Deslauriers in the coda to L’Education Sentimentale,—that most perfect of fictions,—but is melancholy enough. “Our fate is more like ourselves than we are aware,” and in the last analysis Evelyn’s fate suits her. As a singer she talked too much like a music critic; as Sister Teresa, too much like a sophist in a nun’s habit. She was from the start a female theologian. Her conscience was more to her than her lovers. She was never quite in earnest, always a little inhuman, and I for one can contemplate with equanimity her immurement until her final “packing up” for death and its dusty hypnotism. After reading the story I was tempted to repeat Renan’s remarks on Amiel,—quoted by Ernest Newman in his Wagner,—“He speaks of sin, of salvation, of redemption, and conversion, as if these things were realities.” I wonder if Mr. Moore did not feel that way sometimes!

But the book is full of brainstuff. It is also a book with a soul. In it George Moore’s art is come to a spiritual and consummate blossoming. After reading such a passage of sustained music as the following I am almost inclined to make an expiatory pilgrimage to the drab city on the Liffey, to make of Dublin a critic’s Canossa; and in the heated, mean streets, and in sable habiliments of sorrow, beat my breast without Mr. Moore’s abode, crying aloud, “Peccavi.” But would I be forgiven for all that I have said about the noble, morbid, disquieting, and fascinating art of George Moore, the Irish Huysmans? Here is a passage executed with incomparable bravura. Ulick Dean speaks:—

To keep her soul he said she must fly from the city, where men
lose their souls in the rituals of materialism. He must go with
her to the pure country, to the woods and to the places where the
invisible ones whom the Druids knew ceaselessly ascend and descend
from earth to heaven, and from heaven to earth, in flame-colored
spirals. He told her he knew of a house by a lake shore, and there
they might live in communion with nature, and in the fading lights,
and in the quiet hollows of the woods she would learn more of God
than she could in the convent. In that house they would live; and
their child, if the gods gave them one, would unfold among the
influences of music and love and song traditions.

It was writing of a similar order in Mildred Lawson that evoked from Harry Thurston Peck the declaration: “George Moore is the greatest literary artist who has struck the chords of English since the death of Thackeray.” George Moore always had the voice. He has now both voice and vision.

V

ANARCHS OF ART

A SONNET BY CAMPANELLA

The people is a beast of muddy brain
That knows not its own strength, and therefore stands
Loaded with wood and stone; the powerless hands
Of a mere child guide it with bit and rein;
One kick would be enough to break the chain.
But the beast fears, and what the child demands
It does; nor its own terror understands,
Confused and stupefied by bugbears vain.
Most wonderful! With its own hand it ties
And gags itself—gives itself death and war
For pence doled out by kings from its own store.
Its own are all things between earth and heaven;
But this it knows not; and if one arise
To tell this truth, it kills him unforgiven.
—_Translated by_ JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.

Have not all great composers been anarchs—from Bach to Strauss? At first blush the hard-plodding Johann Sebastian of the Well-tempered Clavichord seems a doubtful figure to drape with the black flag of revolt. He grew a forest of children, he worked early and late, and he played the organ in church of Sundays; but he was a musical revolutionist nevertheless. His music proves it. And he quarrelled with his surroundings like any good social democrat. He even went out for a drink during a prosy sermon, and came near being discharged for returning late. If Lombroso were cognizant of this suspicious fact, he might build a terrifying structure of theories, with all sorts of inferential subcellars. However, it is Bach’s music that still remains revolutionary. Mozart and Gluck depended too much on aristocratic patronage to play the rôle of Solitaries. But many tales are related of their refusal to lick the boots of the rich, to curve the spine of the suppliant. Both were by nature gentle men, and both occasionally arose to the situation and snubbed their patrons outrageously. Handel! A fighter, a born revolutionist, a hater of rulers. John Runciman—himself an anarchistic critic—calls Handel the most magnificent man that ever lived. He was certainly the most virile among musicians.

I recall the story of Beethoven refusing to uncover in the presence of royalty, though his companion, Goethe, doffed his hat. Theoretically I admire Beethoven’s independence, yet there is no denying that the great poet was the politer of the two, and doubtless a pleasanter man to consort with. The mythic William Tell and his contempt for Gessler’s hat were translated into action by the composer.

Handel, despite the fact that he could not boast Beethoven’s peasant ancestry, had a contempt for rank and its entailed snobberies, that was remarkable. And his music is like a blow from a muscular fist. Haydn need not be considered. He was henpecked, and for the same reason as was Socrates. The Croatian composer’s wife told some strange stories of that merry little blade, her chamber-music husband. As I do not class Mendelssohn among the great composers, he need not be discussed. His music was Bach watered for general consumption. Schubert was an anarch all his short life. He is said to have loved an Esterhazy girl, and being snubbed he turned sour-souled. He drank “far more than was good for him,” and he placed on paper the loveliest melodies the world has ever heard. Beethoven was the supreme anarch of art, and put into daily practice the radicalism of his music.

Because of its opportunities for soul expansion, music has ever attracted the strong free sons of earth. The most profound truths, the most blasphemous things, the most terrible ideas, may be incorporated within the walls of a symphony, and the police be none the wiser. Suppose that some Russian professional supervisor of artistic anarchy really knew what arrant doctrines Tschaïkowsky preached! It is its freedom from the meddlesome hand of the censor that makes of music a playground for great brave souls. Richard Wagner in Siegfried, and under the long nose of royalty, preaches anarchy, puts into tone, words, gestures, lath, plaster, paint, and canvas an allegory of humanity liberated from the convention of authority, from what Bernard Shaw would call the Old Man of the Mountain, the Government.

I need only adduce the names of Schumann, another revolutionist like Chopin in the psychic sphere; Liszt, bitten by the Socialistic theories of Saint-Simon, a rank hater of conventions in art, though in life a silken courtier; Brahms, a social democrat and freethinker; and Tschaïkowsky, who buried more bombs in his work than ever Chopin with his cannon among roses or Bakounine with his terrible prose of a nihilist. Years ago I read and doubted Mr. Ashton-Ellis’s interesting “1849,” with its fallacious denial of Wagner’s revolutionary behavior. Wagner may not have shouldered a musket during the Dresden uprising, but he was, with Michael Bakounine, its prime inspirer. His very ringing of the church bells during the row is a symbol of his attitude. And then he ran away, luckily enough for the world of music, while his companions, Roeckel and Bakounine, were captured and imprisoned. Wagner might be called the Joseph Proudhon of composers—his music is anarchy itself, coldly deliberate like the sad and logical music we find in the great Frenchman’s Philosophy of Misery (a subtitle, by the way).

And what a huge regiment of painters, poets, sculptors, prosateurs, journalists, and musicians might not be included under the roof of the House Beautiful! Verhaeren of Belgium, whose powerful bass hurls imprecations at the present order; Georges Eckhoud, Maurice Maeterlinck; Constantin Meunier, whose eloquent bronzes are a protest against the misery of the proletarians; Octave Mirbeau, Richepin, William Blake, William Morris, Swinburne, Maurice Barrès, the late Stéphane Mallarmé, Walt Whitman, Ibsen, Strindberg; Félicien Rops, the sinister author of love and death; Edvard Munch, whose men and women with staring eyes and fuliginous faces seem to discern across the frame of his pictures febrile visions of terror; and the great Scandinavian sculptors, Vigeland and Sinding; and Zola, Odilon Redon, Huysmans, Heine, Baudelaire, Poe, Richard Strauss, Shaw,—is not the art of these men, and many more left unnamed, direct personal expression of anarchic revolt?

Przybyszewski asserts that physicians do not busy themselves with history; if they did, they would know that decadence has always existed; that it is not decadence at all, but merely a phase of development as important as normality: Normality is stupidity, decadence is genius! Is there, he asks, a more notable case of the abnormal than the prophet of Protestantism, Martin Luther?

They are all children of Satan, he cries, those great ones who for the sake of the idea sacrifice the peace of thousands, as Alexander and Napoleon; or those who spoil the dreams of youth, Socrates and Schopenhauer; or those who venture into the depths and love sin because only sin has depth, Poe and Rops; and those who love pain for the sake of pain and ascend the Golgotha of mankind, Chopin and Schumann. Satan was the first philosopher, the first anarchist; and pain is at the bottom of all art, and with Satan, the father of illusions! It is wise to stop here, else might we become entangled in a Miltonic genealogy of the angels. I give the foregoing list to show how easy it is to twist a theory to one’s own point of view. The decadence theory is silly; and equally absurd is Przybyszewski’s idea that the normal is the stupid. This Pole seems anything but normal or stupid. He now writes plays in the Strindberg style; formerly he lectured on Chopin, and played the F sharp minor polonaise—he was possessed by the key of F sharp minor, and saw “soul-states” whenever a composer wrote in that tonality! _Audition colorée_, this?