V
All that has been written here so far will seem to support the superstition that Mr. Moore is a trifler with life, that he is a man destitute of serious purposes; but I am anxious to make plain to my readers that this superstition is a superstition. His lack of reticence about his own and other people's affairs and his perverse incursions into what he imagines to be practical politics are obviously responsible for the belief that he is what is called "a typical Irishman," that is to say, a man without a sense of responsibility. My experience is that "typical Irishmen" are generally discovered to be Englishmen or Welshmen or New York East Side Jews—the late Padraic Pearse, Mr. Arthur Griffith and Mr. de Valera correspond to those descriptions—but it is undeniable that Mr. Moore, not without deliberation, has helped to maintain the legend that Irishmen are without a sense of responsibility. When, for example, during one of the many Home Rule crises, he suggested that the trouble between the two islands of Great Britain and Ireland might easily be settled by intelligent engineers, many persons were of the opinion that a man who could talk such twaddle, as they called it, in a time of much difficulty ought to be imprisoned. The proposal, when the details were disclosed, confirmed pessimists in their profound belief that the unsurmountable obstacle to the solution of Irish affairs is the Irish themselves! What Mr. Moore suggested was this: that a thick wall should be built across the North Channel between the Giant's Causeway and the Mull of Kintyre, and that another thick wall should be built across St. George's Channel between Carnsore Point and St. David's Head. These operations completed, the engineers should then pump out all the water in the Irish Sea, fill in the resultant gap with earth, and make one island out of two! He seemed not to have considered the case of Liverpool. What, some one jestingly demanded, would become of that great port when deprived of its "pool"? What also, he might have added, would become of Belfast and Dublin, deprived, the one of its Lough, and the other, of its Bay? Mr. Moore might have retorted that what Ireland lost on Belfast Lough it would more than gain on Galway Bay, but he preferred to remain silent. One could, of course, draw a conclusion, packed with thought and judgment, from Mr. Moore's playful proposal, and I do not doubt that such was his intention; but the average person is either too busy or disinclined to draw such conclusions from anything; and so, having glanced casually at the details of Mr. Moore's plan to settle the Irish Question, he turned impatiently away, convinced (a) that Mr. Moore was an incorrigible buffoon, and (b) that the government of Ireland must ever remain an unsolved problem because of the Irish people's amazing inability to conduct themselves reasonably!
But Mr. Moore has a serious purpose in life, and he pursues that serious purpose with indefatigable industry. The immediate and unmistakable fact about him is that he is an artist. There are few writers in English, not even excepting Mr. Conrad, who have so much power over words as is possessed by George Moore, and this power has been achieved, as all power is achieved, by incessant labour and the most pure devotion. He is, in the real sense, a self-made man. The artistry that is undeniably his has been wrought not only in the sweat of his brain, but in face of powerful obstacles. His position as the heir of a fairly well-to-do landowner in Ireland might have resulted in him becoming a minor poet, publishing tiny verses in tiny volumes, or a small author of fragile essays about butterflies and pierrots. He did, in fact, begin his writing career, as most reputable writers do, by composing poems, but he speedily turned to prose. He actually published verses in books entitled "Flowers of Passion"—a name which incongruously suggests Baudelaire and Ella Wheeler Wilcox—and "Pagan Poems," but, so far as I have been able to discover, no one has ever seen these books or read the poems contained in them. The first was published in 1877 and the second in 1881 and we may conclude that they have been dissolved by the chemicals of time. Miss Mitchell, in the book to which reference has already been made, states that "nobody in Ireland has ever seen any of Mr. Moore's paintings except 'A. E.' to whom he once shyly showed a head, remarking that it had some 'quality.' 'A. E.' remained silent." The poems remain under the same kindly condemnation. The favourable fortune which might have made a minor poet, and nothing but a minor poet, out of Mr. Moore was one of the powerful obstacles to his becoming a master of prose.
The other was the attempt made by his father to influence his mind. In the preface from which I have already made a brief quotation, he gives an account of his education at the Roman Catholic school of Oscott. George, it seemed, had a reticence in his childhood which he remarkably lost in maturity: he refused to confess his sins on the singular ground that he had not got any sins to confess. He had not then learned, seemingly, that he who has not got any sins to confess, can easily invent a few. The story of this episode is fully narrated in "Hail and Farewell," but in the new preface Mr. Moore summarizes it and tells how his father was summoned to Oscott by the president of the school "to inquire into his son's lack of belief in priests and their sacraments." The upshot of the business was that the boy, "not only the last boy in the class, but in the last class in the school—in a word, the dunce of the school" was removed from Oscott for private instruction at home in Mayo. "George's case is really very alarming," the president wrote to his father, and the letter contained the admission that he did not know whether George would not or could not learn.
It is exceedingly illuminating to observe how his prose style has grown through a series of very diverse books into its present condition. One of his most remarkable novels, as it is also one of his earliest, "A Mummers Wife," was clearly written under the influence of Zola, but with such individual quality that Zola might profitably have taken lessons from his pupil. The difference between Emile Zola and George Moore is that while Zola never forgot to be a doctrinaire, Moore never forgot to be an artist. "A Mummer's Wife" was unaccountably banned by the circulating libraries in England, and, such is the conservatism of these remarkable institutions, that I believe the ban is still maintained, although a generation has arisen which regards it as very restrained indeed. The style in which it is written is somewhat arid, and the reader is not carried forward by the flow of the story itself, but is forced along by its weight. A comparison between "A Mummer's Wife," or "Esther Waters," and such later books as "The Lake" or "The Brook Kerith" reveals such a difference in manner that the critic has some difficulty in believing that all four novels came from the mind of the same author. Mr. Wells is a writer with many manners, but the reader can discover a unifying characteristic, unmistakably Wellsian, in all of them. Mr. Shaw, a more consistent author than most men of his quality, has kept so closely to one level that the difference between his earliest, his best and his latest work is merely the difference of degree between growing powers, highest powers and declining powers. The style in the novels, "Love Among the Artists," "The Unsocial Socialist," "The Irrational Knot" and "Cashel Byron's Profession" is the same style, under less control, as the style of "Man and Superman," "John Bull's Other Island," "Heartbreak House" and "Back To Methuselah." But in Mr. Moore's case the style of "A Mummer's Wife" has no obvious relationship to that of "The Lake" or "The Brook Kerith." The difference between the earlier books and the later ones is the difference between the flow of a river through a canal and the flow of a river through its natural bed.