But at this point I desist from tapping at the typewriter keys; and I re-read what I have just said in—upon the whole—depreciation of Mr. Moore. And every word of it seems to me quite true. Yet it lacks that fine frank ring of amateurishness without which literary dicta are as nothing; and I appear somehow to have lapsed into the professional accent of the luckless being who makes a business of reviewing books. Now, this accent I can only describe as that of one speaking from an eminence, which it is not at all necessary to have attained. It is the accent which implies that you may by and by, should other more important interests permit, take a Saturday afternoon off, and write a literary masterpiece of the same genre in which the discussed writer has, you benignantly allow, done his poor best during the last year or so. It is the accent with which the eunuch advocates birth control, strongly every month in The Dial, and weekly in The New York Times Book Review.[10] It is, in fine, an unlovable accent.
So I lament this accent, even in the moment that I protest it voices here—rather sniffishly, if you will,—the truth. I have endeavored to speak, I repeat, with all possible moderation. But that accent very certainly has crept in,—perhaps because I am here dealing with "realism," perhaps because of some occult underlying envy of these books' handsome physical appearance. It may be I am thinking the Biography ought to be issued thus, instead of George Moore's novels. I am sure I do not know....
In any event, I reflect that Balzac, also, does not always, nor indeed as a rule, ascribe to his auctorial heroes the gift of writing especially well; that the samples which Balzac, also, presents from the novels of an imaginary author do not pretend to be fine literature; and that Mr. Moore, in preparing this Carra Edition, had thus the shield of weighty precedent....
§ 86
The going, even so, is immeasurably better when we come, as now, to the consistently important books, to The Confessions of a Young Man, Avowals, Memoirs of My Dead Life, Conversations in Ebury Street, and to the Hail and Farewell trilogy. For here Mr. Moore is candidly, and without any vain pretence of ascribing real weightiness to anything else, expressing his own nervous reactions to painting and books and to the best examples of human thought and anatomy, and here he has turned most potently to ensnaring us with "nets woven of curious stuffs,—of a singer's corset-lace, a forgotten dream, a strand of honey-colored hair, a phrase from Walter Pater, moonlight on a pillow in Orelay, a scrap from the Catechism translated by Verlaine, hopes, and aspirations, and, here and there, a faint and not too secret shame."
Now, it is in these books, to my finding, that Mr. Moore has made perhaps his only but his ineffably interesting addition to creative literature; and has caused to move like a corporeal, breathing being of flesh and blood his one great character, George Moore. How lavishly that character repays attention by the parodist was shown but yesterday when, in Heavens—that most trenchant of volumes from which I have just quoted,—Mr. Louis Untermeyer wrote what is, actually, the very best and loveliest appreciation of George Moore yet given us by anybody outside the pages of Mr. Moore. Then, too, there is the Beerbohm parody, not anything like so good, of course, but still containing its really superb sentence,—"There are moments when one does not think of girls, are there not, dear reader?" This is the sentence which George Moore has not ever, quite, dictated to his secretary: but for some years now he has fluttered close to its perfection....
Yes, certainly, the character does lend itself to caricature. Yet I shall not here speak of the rôle's component oddities, nor prattle any word about the Nouvelle Athènes or the Celtic Renaissance. Nobody dare attempt in one chapter to sum up George Moore after seeing a fine artist give over a lifetime to the task. So I can but refer you to the Carra Edition, as to a longish book which is devoted entirely to this topic, with the rider that I have found nowhere volumes more engaging than are the best of these.
One's human taste for the irrelevant provokes, of course, some natural speculation as to how little of this perverse, painstaking, fleering and inconsequential personality is based upon truth? What parsimonies in veracity, how much of self-denial, in short, has Mr. Moore at odd times woven into his scandal-mongering about George Moore? I grant that, from the reader's selfish standpoint, it does not matter; and that our general pleasure in the performance ought not to be dashed by anybody's lugging in the refrain of Edgar Allan Poe's most famous poem. For Casanova also, you will recall, indulged in the same sort of romancing; and secured his most admirable effects through mixing in some revelatory fiction with etymologically pure truth. Nor did Cellini write under affidavit.... Then too, to me, the George Moore of the Carra Edition suggests—with, to be sure, a difference,—that Thackeray who is really the main character of Thackeray's Collected Works, the Thackeray who is always interrupting his puppets, to edify you with the unaffected confidences of the author, as a shrewd and tolerant and tender-hearted man of the great world who, as we now know, existed nowhere outside these books. Just so, one tacitly assumes, Mr. Moore has given us George Moore as he, not wholly spurred by either moral or æsthetic criteria, would like to be: and, for one, I find—upon the whole, and if it a bit matters,—both his aspiration and his artistry to be commendable. In that unending literary shadow-show wherein "all passes except Shakespeare and the Bible," George Moore should stay for a long while one of the great characters of English fiction: and in creating him, Mr. Moore has rendered everybody a considerable service at the price of condemning himself to eternal oblivion.
For these egotists who write perpetually about themselves are under no bond, and under no temptation whatever, to write the truth. So do we come to the reservation which I said just now I thought not unimportant: it is that in pretending to commemorate himself the self-respecting artist, who is also an egoist, substitutes an edited and a considerably embellished effigy. He immortalizes, in fine, somebody else.
And it is indeed to-day a fairly open secret that Mr. Moore in very little resembles the George Moore of the confessional romances. All persons who have known Mr. Moore in the flesh seem here unanimous: and in particular do those who have known in the flesh this historian of his own so many fleshly loves acclaim in him a beguiling tendency to rival the eremite St. Anthony in continence and imagination. "Some men kiss and do not tell,"—thus Lady Gregory has phrased it, with perfection:—"George Moore does not kiss; but he tells." Yet the point is that he "tells" very charmingly; and that therefore, beyond any possible doubt, posterity will rejoicingly accept George Moore, and, with admirable good sense, forget all about Mr. Moore.