III
But on this day when the news of the Battle of Jutland was announced, Mr. Moore seemed, for the first time in his life, to realize that men and women do feel and suffer and bear loss; and the discovery instantly aged him. The War which had so teasingly disturbed the amenities of Ebury Street became in a moment something more than an irritating scuffle in the dark—it became an immense disaster which might make amenities forever impossible. The solidities of life were in process of dissolution. Literary style amazingly mattered less than the power of the commonest guttersnipe to kill. Mr. Bernard Shaw, in the preface to "Heartbreak House," exclaims, "Imagine exulting in the death of Beethoven because Bill Sykes dealt him his death blow!" in a rebuke administered to the people who rejoiced in the news of appalling death-rolls among Germans during the War. But on the field itself, Beethoven and Bill Sykes cease to be Beethoven and Bill Sykes and become, each, a very frightened man with a rifle and bayonet and a strong desire to live. In that dreadful encounter, Bill Sykes would not be thinking to himself, "Here comes Beethoven, a great master of music, by whom it will be an honor to be killed!" but "'Ere comes a bloody 'Un who will kill me unless I kill 'im!" The perception of what was happening in Europe, of the horrible reduction of Beethovens to the level of Sykeses, of Shakespeares to the level of Prussian drill-sergeants (for they had to come down to those levels if they were to have any hope of survival) made an old man of Mr. Moore. He threw up his hands and made submission to his years. I listened to him while he talked volubly and bitterly to "A. E." and "John Eglinton" and "Bill" Bailey, as people called him, and marvelled to find him displaying so much emotion over the naval disaster and its probable consequences. He had written a preface for his brother, Colonel Moore's life of their father, in which he had romantically stated that George Henry Moore, his father, had committed suicide because his heart was broken by the dishonourable behaviour of politicians. Colonel Moore printed the preface, but denied the statement about his father, to which, however, George still romantically clings. An English newspaper, The Observer, in its issue for Sunday, April 10, 1921, printed the preface which Mr. Moore had written for a new book to be published very soon thereafter. In this preface, he very interestingly described the way in which he was educated, and in the course of it occurred this paragraph:
He was unhappy in the strife, for he loved his father; his father was always, and still is, the intimate and abiding reality of his life, and the evening that his father started for Ireland for the last time is quick among his memories. George's father returned from the front door to bid his son good-bye, and in obedience to a sudden impulse he took a sovereign out of his pocket and put it into the boy's hand, and went away to his death resolute, for he had come to see that his death was the only way to escape from his embarrassments, without injury to his family, and I can imagine him walking about the lake shores bidding them good-bye for ever.
I suppose that if George Henry Moore were to rise from the grave and deny that he had died by his own hand, his son and heir, George, would murmur aggrievedly, "You know, father, you are spoiling a very charming story!..." He is still sufficiently insensitive not to understand that life is something more than material for the storyteller's art—he may, perhaps have relapsed from the state of understanding to which the Battle of Jutland brought him,—but for that time, at all events until the news of the Battle was amended, George Moore knew what private feelings were, even although he could not keep them to himself. "A. E.," looking woolly and worried, seemed to be completely deprived of his powers of speech by Mr. Moore's angry rhetoric. "John Eglinton," a scholarly essayist and the sanest man in Dublin, having much respect for, but no delusion about, the ancient Gaelic literature of which we hear so much and see so little, remained customarily mum. Mr. Bailey, nervously garrulous as a rule, uttered jerky, but inarticulate, sounds to which Mr. Moore paid absolutely no heed. I discreetly sat in a corner and did not make a sound. The words flowed steadily from Mr. Moore's lips—hot denunciation of the Rising, contemptuous references to Kuno Meyer, rebukes for "A. E." (discovered to have flaws) and a tremendous indictment of German culture, with a proviso in favour of German music, together with admiring references to France, to French literature and to the French Impressionists, particularly Manet. A waiter intruded into the room for some purpose and was ordered out again....