9.
A Theme With Variations
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The literary artist plays, I had said, at the game of perpetuating, not merely (as did the painter of Queen Radegonde) his personal notions, but also his own personality....
To me that seemed a secondary consideration. Yet that was, I took it, the main tenet of the Economists and of the creed which John Charteris had elsewhere expounded. Kings and prime ministers and admirals and czars and popes and bank-presidents all shrivelled with the passing of time, as I had said earlier, into some uncarnate quality, uncertainly remembered. But writers here and there did attain to a sort of terrestrial immortality as rounded, actual human beings. The lyric poet bequeaths to us like a legacy his personal emotion, the familiar essayist makes the gossamer of his whims and fancies perdurable as diamonds. The great egotists, in particular, such as Pepys, Casanova, Montaigne, Cellini, Rousseau, are generally conceded each to have immortalized himself and all his traits, especially his frailties: for each lounges into our libraries unreticently, proclaiming, in the words of Montaigne, "I expose myself entire"; and each too has, by lending to every peccadillo permanency, kept letters healthily lewd, with the lustiness of eternal youth....
Well! that, with just one reservation, which I thought not unimportant, seemed true enough. For the great egotists do achieve very charming and tolerably permanent results, in a fashion that I could best appraise, I believed, by pausing here to consider the triumphant outcome, in our own era, of the literary endeavors of Mr. George Moore.
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No reasonably conceited author, I said,—if for the moment one might imagine any of the tribe to merit the adverb,—would aspire to be perpetuated in a form more worthy than, in the Carra Edition, had lately been bestowed upon the Collected Works of George Moore. It was true that I spoke with, of the promised twenty volumes, only fourteen at hand: but these I had found in every nicety of book-making to be wholly admirable. Paper and binding and printing were of the sort describable as luxurious. The frontispieces most handsomely presented George Moore in every imaginable phase of moustache and mental abstraction. In fine, it was the sort of Collected Edition which any victim of the ennervating habit of writing books could not but view a little wistfully. And, though for a while I had thought to lay finger upon one marked, consolatory defect,—that the lack of running-heads to the pages creates some difficulty in locating at once the especial subdivision of the volume for which you happen to be looking,—yet reflection had made against such petty fault-finding, by revealing that, after all, it was as remunerative to read in one place as another, in this longish book which is devoted, after all, entirely to one topic.
For Mr. Moore, of course, had nowhere written except incidentally about anything except George Moore. To some this might appear a dubious axiom, in view of the circumstance that of these fourteen volumes no less than eight consisted of the earlier Realistic Novels,—as we used to hear them called, only yesterday, with a certain lowering of the voice,—wherein there is no explicit word as to George Moore. Yet, when seen in the entirety of the Carra Edition, I thought,—as I still think,—and when appraised as component parts of the one longish book which every sincere literary artist perforce composes, and of which his various publications are each a chapter, then these novels fall into their proper niche. George Moore in youth was exposed to, among other perils, the corrupting influence of "realism"; and here are some of the results, directly valuable to letters, in chief, as the record of a phase through which passed, long ago, George Moore. These books, to-day, rank somewhat with the extracts which Balzac gives you from the writings of his auctorial protagonists,—of Lucien de Rubempré, of Lousteau, of Canalis,—and which Balzac very sensibly presents not as literature per se, but as useful lights upon their partly taken from life and partly imagined author. So here, in depicting George Moore, does the compiler of the Carra Edition appear to illumine his subject with copious extracts from the novels of his hero, who, again, is partly taken from life.
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