In fact I now recall that I once, regretfully, compiled my choice of the world's ten worst writers. Regretfully, I say, because I suspected that about every author in my list I was, in all likelihood, entirely wrong. For I found that, somehow, I had listed only such writers as possessed their recognized "cults" of perfervid admirers, and such writers as a respectable lapse of time had attested—perhaps—really to make some sort of mysterious appeal to a largish number of persons. One might of course, in private, assume that æsthetically these persons bemuse themselves with notions of their own superiority and refinement. Such anæsthetic notions still enable self-complacency to pull through many pages that are perused with rather less admiration of the author than of the reader,—although, for that matter, the majority of generally acknowledged and most permanent literary reputations would seem to be based upon some similar innocuous self-deceit.

Here, in any event, are the ten "established" authors endowed with "cults" whose masterpieces once appeared to me the most violently uninteresting and ill written: Jane Austen, George Borrow, Miguel de Cervantes, Henry James, Herman Melville, George Meredith, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Love Peacock, François Rabelais, and Walt Whitman.

I submitted this list without any comment save that I had made all suitable endeavors toward Melville since 1907: the antipathy was not new-born, among the bleated idiocies of his later ovine, or more robustiously arietin, admirers. And upon consideration, Peacock, I admitted, had not ever annoyed me with the relentless and deep tediousness of the others: and I for a moment inclined to strike out his name in disfavor of Marcel Proust or of James G. Huneker or of W.H. Hudson, who were at the time regarded vociferously; but refrained because that week's pother about any of these three might, after all, very well and speedily prove transient. The ten I named, though, seemed actually established in one or another sort of enduringness,—which was, to me, a fact that roused wonder not unmingled with regret. For there really must be something of enjoyment deep-hidden in the writings of these appalling persons. And, naturally, one dislikes to miss it.

§ 85

I repeat all this because to-day, upon reflection, and upon the strength of these Realistic Novels, I somewhat incline to substitute for the name of Thomas Love Peacock the name George Moore. The reputations of Mr. Moore and of Ananias, in fact, as masters of fictitious narrative, stand high above almost equally slender pediments; with no proof anywhere existent that Ananias even attempted the difficult art wherein Mr. Moore has certainly never succeeded.

I am now about to speak with all possible moderation. For I very cordially admire the talent of Mr. Moore. That is one of the reasons why I must regret its occultation in these Realistic Novels.

It is not merely that these novels adhere to the naïve and now senescent device of assuming for the author omniscience. These stories have, that is, no stable point of view: the thoughts and the emotions of each character are divulged just as these come into being; and you are thus kept skipping, with all the agility and considerably more than the penetration of the well-named genus pulex irritans, from the inside of one imagined mind to the interior of another. That convention, I know, is old, it is, in fact, decrepit; but it is also childish: prose fiction really has advanced beyond such puerilities, except of course in its more popular variants and in the prevailing balderdash of the imperishable classics of prose fiction: and this convention, for me at least, destroys everywhere the illusion which I would willingly foster, destroying it for the reason that I can imagine no existence wherein I would know, even partially, what everybody was thinking and feeling.

Nor is it merely that these thin-blooded novels are broken out with a rash of descriptory passages. I confess that, for one, the utmost I can do is to put up with the writer who formally and impersonally sets out to describe anything. When I am in my more amiable moods, then hurrying eyes glide by the solid stolid-looking paragraphs; I incuriously accept on faith the probability that the description is being competently attended to: and I, unvexed, pass on toward such portions of the book as may conceivably prove remunerative reading.... But far oftener am I the prey of logic and of peevishness, when I consider the malversation of time involved in every attempt to convey the true efficacy of a regarded vista, or of any observed object, by recording seriatim such attributes as, in life, we note simultaneously with plural senses. The discrepancy is the really considerable difference between a row of canned vegetable tins, howsoever painstakingly labeled, and a vegetable soup. And Lessing did so long ago dispose of the whole topic, among so many allied topics, that one would whole-heartedly like to see the passing of an examination upon the Laokoön made preliminary to the securing of a license to write prose.... No: here again, I must protest, the conscientious novelist will assume a conscious point of view. The utmost he will permit himself in the way of description is to note that which would be noted, naturally, from that point of view at that especial moment. And all description will thus be converted into action, in the form, not necessarily stated outright, that so-and-so observed such-and-such phenomena. For I must here point out some obvious, if disregarded, truisms: that no scene or object can display any qualities unless there is some one to notice them; that, even then, these qualities stay undisplayed unless the potential observer have the needful interest and the time, just then, to notice them; and that to present these qualities as existing impersonally—howsoever general in "writing" may be this insane practise,—is to present (here again) an existence which is inconceivable.

But, passing over these grave common imbecilities, it does seem to be somebody's duty to protest against the equally grave and common delusion that Mr. Moore, even in these Realistic Novels, is "a master of English prose." The assertion is as a rule advanced, I suspect, by ordinarily well-balanced persons who have just seen or heard Mr. Joseph Conrad described as "a master of English prose," and have not utterly recovered: the prose of Mr. Moore, in any event,—not here, but in his embellished romancing about himself,—one may very often grant to be adequate. Yet Mr. Moore's vocabulary is far from adequate, for anyone who seeks distinction in an art of which the masters are omniverbarious. Here, too, variety appears a grace unthought-of; and his employment (in these Realistic Novels) of the ready-made, time-battered phrase amounts—where his clichés do not, indeed, effuse a perturbing aspect of feeble-mindedness,—to mere wallowing in the slovenly.

I am still speaking with all possible moderation, as to a man whose writing, in his major performances, I admire. And yet I fear that what I have just said may sound overstated.... Well, I open the revised and final version of A Mummer's Wife, as it chances, at page 220; and Mr. Moore there tells me, "A word sufficed to set the whole gang recounting experiences and comparing notes." I turn to page 229, and, still avoiding dialogue, I find Mr. Moore in the rôle of narrator averring, "At the end of the act she received an ovation." Hastily I proceed to page 236, where Mr. Moore philosophises,—"As is generally the case, there was right upon both sides." Even then do I afford him another chance; I go on to the next chapter, which, upon page 245, I discover to begin, "It never rains but it pours." And thereupon I close the book: for really nobody, no matter how widely he be acclaimed a master of vigorous and delightful prose, is privileged to talk with me in just that flat and meagre tone.... If, for the rest, you have an hour to waste, not quite unedifyingly, you might compare almost any one of the earlier versions of Mr. Moore's more ambitious passages with its replacer in the Carra Edition, and marvel over his faith in the stylistic thaumaturgy wrought by interjecting the word "and." And so will it become apparent to you that the haven of the artist's dream and the unfalteringly sought ideal of "revising" is not utterly inaccessible, and can be won to by and by, through steadily adhering to this bland and magic monosyllable, and by employing it to link each sentence in the book with the sentence which precedes it and with the sentence which follows it, and so to connect all the sentences into one single and sliding and ever slipping forward sentence, and languidly to model all upon the tentative and wavering progression of a long and thin and frail and flesh-tinted angle-worm....