I must at outset confess that I find these novels are quaint reading now. They seem faded, and somewhat pathetically droll, and they a bit too aptly illustrate their writer's petted word suranné, the while that young George Moore toils conscientiously at a ruthless exposition of the race-track, or a depiction of the evils of drink, or is daringly describing the temptations of stage life. Yes; it really is rather quaint as long as George Moore is playing up to his then current Vizetellean advertisements, and turning out "studies of degradation mercilessly done," or is endeavoring to convince the unwary that "you are in a moral dissecting room, watching the demonstration of a brilliant psychological surgeon." But the first moment he spies a chance to let his characters, at some breathing-spell between their disasters and their fornications, fall into talk about academic or æsthetic matters which interest George Moore, then the style quickens and fancy gallops. And the puppets discourse for pages upon pages the heresies and petulancies and "studied disrespects" of George Moore, and all advances briskly, undrugged by any narcotizing "drops of story." By and by, to be sure, the ghost of Germinie Lacerteux or of Bel-Ami (though the Carra Edition tactfully omits Mike Fletcher) arises to coerce the apostle of candor—the whole-hearted devotee of candor, even then,—with its gibbers about realism. But in a while the young puppet-master is again playing truant from his art's imagined responsibilities, and is contentedly expounding the notions of George Moore.
So one must not take these realistic novels over-seriously. That sort of realism—the realism of "the human document" and the selected "corner of creation," here to re-echo that far time's old-fangled catchwords,—was, as they said, the "trend" of that era. And even to-day, with the innate conservatism of youth, still do the immature laboriously transcribe the insignificant, in their exposures of the inadequacy of American standards and the loneliness of the budding artist in one or another parish of Philistia. These "trends" we, willy-nilly, must put up with....
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Of course, there is not, and never has been, in any important sense, any trend in literature. One says, in any important sense, because of the so amply attested fact that the only books which ultimately count, for their permitted season, are adequate expressions, not of any ideas just then in the air (to employ that delightfully two-edged phrase), but of the individual being who wrote that particular book. And personality seems a remarkably haphazard affair. You are born, for one inexplicable reason or another, as such and such a person, as a person endowed with private and especial faults and hallucinations. And if your book is ultimately to count, however transiently, you will in your book have managed to expose that person, very much as Mr. Moore came in the end to do, without talking or thinking any nonsense about "trends." You will have contrived, in fine, your own particular "method": and in contriving it you will do well to remember that, just as I pointed out at the beginning, there must always be, to the last digit, precisely as many "methods" as there are novelists.
Meanwhile, to be sure, the popular styles in books for the intelligentsia must always be varying, somewhat as every season the styles a little alter in disbeliefs and neckwear, and give room to some other method of irritating the conventional. And all really competent manufacturers of reading-matter, whether as publishers or authors, must always stay upon the alert to cater to the latest hebetude of serious-minded persons sufficiently cultured to assume that whatever they cannot quite understand or read with reasonable pleasure is probably high art. But the philosopher recalls that, somewhat to emend the proverb, every vogue has its day; and that, also, all literary modes must pass, pass very often with a hullabaloo, but always with rapidity.
It seems, in fact, only yesterday that both the books and the decolleté "sport shirt" of Blasco Ibáñez were the height of fashion, and The Young Visiters was a perdurable production. And now, in really literary circles, they tell me, the sublimities of M. Maeterlinck are no longer spoken of in lowered tones, but rather with raised eyebrows; Stevenson has become just a working model for writers upon the art of selling the short story; and even Mr. Kipling has passed into the götterdämmerung of being praised by Mrs. Gerould.[9] Thus suddenly their fame is made a vain and doubtful good, and the shining gloss of all their glories is vaded, in the bright prime of such impeccant prosateurs as Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad and Marcel Proust: and it is salutary to reflect that Sir Rabindranath Tagore and O. Henry, they also, were once upon a time immortal for several months....
Well, and just so, in the departed youth of this George Moore, in the perverse Victorian 'eighties and 'nineties,—when, as Mr. Moore now puts it, "we were all cowed by the spell of realism, external realism,"—did many persons regard Zola and Flaubert and Maupassant and Huysmans with a seriousness which the considerate dare not wager that posterity will emulate, when it comes to appraising us and our own literary idols.
—All of which seems rather Mooreishly digressive. It would be perhaps a neater adhesion to the point succinctly to note here that, with the addition of some peculiarly delightful prefaces, the books which Vizetelly & Co. used to advertise as Mr. George Moore's Realistic Novels—listing them, one finds, with an invidious separateness from those of the firm's publications which, The Sheffield Independent was wont to guarantee, "may be safely left lying about where the ladies of the family can pick them up and read them,"—have, in preparing these books for this Carra Edition, been rewritten throughout, alike with a view of stylistic improvement and of, as it is rather handsomely phrased, "returning from the conventions of Vanity Fair and The Small House at Allington to those that inspired the writing of Shakespeare's plays and the Bible." Mr. Moore, at last at ease in the exclusive company of one thousand subscribers only, can now speak freely without bothering about such finicking contemporaneous notions of delicacy and indelicacy as, we now learn, had until the printing of this Carra Edition somewhat hampered him. And for the rest, even in their most tedious passages of brilliant psychology, Mr. George Moore's Realistic Novels really do remain interesting, as relics.
Yet there perhaps I underrate these novels, which may be taken as interesting from quite other points of view. Mr. Moore is, for example, so convincingly the great prose artist everywhere in manner and gesture that we are rather generally apt to overlook his frequent omission to be anything of the sort in his writing....
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