Her character is exceedingly well drawn, although I must protest against the overloading of page after page with elaborate psychologizing. Moore has deserted the brutal simplicities of his earlier manner for a Bourget-like shovelling of arid psychical details upon your wearied brain. The story becomes hazy, the main figure nebulous. At every step in the latter half of the book I detect Joris Karel Huysmans and his En Route. Evelyn Innes becomes a feminine Durtal, sick of life, afraid of God. There is too much padding in the shape of discussions about early church music—more Huysmans! Huysmans’s practice of cataloguing is very monotonous. Yet it is the best thing in the way of a literary performance that George Moore has accomplished. The style is decomposed, but it is melodious, flexible, smooth, and felicitous. One can see that he knows his Pater.
Mr. Moore had used to advantage his knowledge of the London musical set. Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch may have sat for a portrait of Evelyn’s father. Mr. Dolmetsch is a player on the harpsichord and spinet. But who is Evelyn Innes? That is a dangerous question. Possibly she is a composite of Melba, Calvé, Eames, and Nordica. Oddly enough, she gets a tiara, presented to her by the subscribers of the opera at New York! Of course this points to Nordica, but Nordica could never read music at sight,—you remember the one thousand piano rehearsals for Tristan,—and so that clew is misleading. Perhaps the author may enlighten the musical world some day. Lady Grimalkin is certainly intended for Lady de Grey.
Sir Owen Asher—he may be one side of George Moore himself—is well painted in the beginning, but the colors soon fade. He is a bore, with his agnosticism, his vanity, and his lack of backbone. He treated Evelyn too delicately. A lusty reproof is what the young woman most needed. Her churchly, sentimental vaporings would then have been dissipated, and she might have thrown a clock at her admirer’s head. Such things have been known to happen in the life of a prima donna. Sir Owen starts a Wagnerian Review. Could Mr. Moore have meant the Earl of Dysart? Ulick Dean is said to be drawn partially from Yeats, the mystic; but the music criticism sounds to me very like the doughty Runciman’s. There is a manager with a toothache, who is almost funny, and there is a rehearsal of Tannhäuser, in which the question of cuts is discussed. Here is a sentence that reveals the depth of Mr. Moore’s knowledge of music:—
“According to Mr. Innes, Bach was the last composer who had distinguished between A sharp and B flat. The very principle of Wagner’s music is the identification of the two notes.” Why? In the name of the Chromatic Fantasia, why?
I confess I am rather tired of convent scenes. The best I ever read in latter-day novels is in Mathilde Serao’s Fantasy. Mrs. Craigie, in The Schools for Saints, “does” a convent, and now Moore. The Roman Catholic problem, too, is overdone. Mrs. Humphry Ward, in her polemical pamphlet which she calls a novel, Helbeck of Bannisdale, indulges in numerous speculations of the sort. George Moore loves the rich trappings and the pomp of ceremonial in the church. But its iteration is an artistic mistake. Indeed, his book goes off into mid-air in the latter half. The first is fascinating. The discussion of the various schools of singing is valuable, and while at no place does he exhibit the marvellous virtuosity displayed by d’Annunzio in his exposition of Tristan and Isolde, there are many jewelled pages of descriptive writing. The book is permeated with all manners of pessimism from Omar to Schopenhauer, and life is discussed from the viewpoints of the ascetic and the epicurean.
Mr. Moore is an artist. His vision is just, and he is a better workman than he was; his sense of form is matured, although his faults of construction are easily detected. He has caught the right atmosphere; he is still master of moods, and he has attempted and nearly succeeded in spilling out the soul of a singer for our inspection,—the soul of the selfish, ambitious prima donna, for there is no denying that Evelyn, despite her tender conscience, was selfish and a fascinating creature, mastered by every passing whim, and a woman utterly incapable of developing mentally without masculine assistance. Mr. Moore, then, has given us the type of the opera singer, and I forgive him pages of solemn-gaited writing. Alas! that it should be as he writes. But it is. He says some things that go very deep, and there are many exquisite touches.
This novelist’s attitude towards Wagner’s music is well expressed in John Norton, the second of the three tales in that uncommonly strong book called Celibates. Here is another self-revelation:—
Wagner reminds me of a Turk lying amid the houris promised by the Prophet to the Faithful—eyes incensed by kohl, lips and almond nails incarnadine, the languor of falling hair and the languor of scent burning in silver dishes, and all around subdued color, embroidered stuffs, bronze lamps traced with inscrutable designs. Never a breath of pure air, not even when the scene changes to the terrace overlooking the dark river, ... minarets and the dome reflected in the tide and in a sullen sky, reaching almost to the earth, the dome and behind the dome a yellow moon—a carven moon, without faintest aureole, a voluptuous moon, mysteriously marked, a moon like a creole, her hand upon the circle of her breast; and through the torrid twilight of the garden the sound of fountains, like flutes far away, breathing to the sky the sorrow of the water-lilies. And in the dusky foliage, in which a blue and orange evening dies, gleams the color of fruit—dun-colored bananas, purple and yellow grapes, the desert scent of dates, the motley morbidity of figs, the passion of red pomegranates, shining like stars, through a flutter of leaves, where the light makes a secret way. And through all the color and perfume of twilight, of fruit, of flowers, cometh the maddening murmur of fountains. At last the silence is broken by the thud of an over-ripe fruit that has suddenly broken from its stalk.... Now I am alive to the music, all has ceased but it; I am conscious of nothing else. Now it has got me; I am in its power; I am as a trembling prey held in the teeth and claws of a wild animal. The music creeps and catches, and with cruel claws and amorous tongue it feeds upon my flesh; my blood is drunken, and, losing grasp upon my suborned soul, ... I tremble, I expire.
II
Sister Teresa
Brainstuff is not lean stuff; the brainstuff of fiction is internal history, and to suppose it dull is the profoundest of errors.—George Meredith.