What makes Moore’s case so peculiarly his own is his unlikeness to our preconceived notion of an Irishman. No man of genius resembles his countrymen; so we find Burke, Swift, George Moore, with few of the characteristics ascribed to Irishmen and wits. They were and are not jolly world lovers, rollicking sports of the sort Lever loved to paint. Tom Moore and his rose-water poetry, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and his glossy smartness, hit the popular notion of what an Irish poet, playwright, and man of letters should be.
Now George Moore is far from being an Irishman in that sense—this prose poet who is at once mystical and gross. Yet he is a Celt, and lately he has developed a restless spirit, a desire to flee the Anglo-Saxon and his haunts. It is the “homing” instinct of the Celt—after forty years of age men of talent return to their tribe. And Mr. Moore is fast becoming an Irishman among Irishmen. Here is the newest incarnation of this feminine soul—perverse and feminine, he admits he is—which, waxlike, takes and retains the most subtle and powerful impressions. The readers of his early books knew him as a Shelley worshipper, then a digger among the romantic literature of 1830, finally a follower of Zola. So after Flowers of Passion (1877) we got Pagan Poems (1881), and with A Modern Lover (1883) began his prose trilogy, devoted to the young man. This was followed in 1884 by A Mummer’s Wife, Literature at Nurse (1885), A Drama in Muslin (1886), Parnell and His Island (1887), A Mere Accident (1887), Confessions of a Young Man (1888), Spring Days (1888), Mike Fletcher (1889), Impressions and Opinions (1890), Vain Fortune (1890), Modern Painting (1893), The Strike at Arlingford, a play (1893), Esther Waters (1894), Celibates (1895), Evelyn Innes (1898), The Bending of the Bough, a play (1900). He also collaborated in 1894 with Mrs. Craigie in a little comedy called Journeys End in Lovers’ Meeting, which was written for Ellen Terry, and Untilled Fields (1903).
Mr. Moore was born in 1857, the son of the late George Henry Moore, M.P., of Moore Hall, County Mayo, Ireland. He was educated at Oscott College, near Birmingham, and studied art in Paris, so his expatriation was practical and complete. He once hated his native land and hated its religion. Yet I know of few writers whose books, whose mind, are so tormented by Catholicism. He may insult the church in A Drama in Muslin—one of the most veracious documents of Irish social history in the eighties—and through the mouth of Alice Barton. But, like the moth and the flame, he ever circles about the Roman Catholic religion. It would be unfair to hold a man responsible for the utterances of his characters, nevertheless there is a peculiarly personal cadence in all that Mr. Moore writes, which makes his problem, like that of Huysmans, a fascinating one. The George Moore of Mike Fletcher and the George Moore of Sister Teresa are very different men. Mike Fletcher, for me the first virile man in English fiction since Tom Jones, may please some critics more than Evelyn Innes turned nun, for of Mike you could not say in Meredith’s words: “Men may have rounded Seraglio Point; they have not yet doubled Cape Turk.” Mike never rounded Seraglio Point; while of Evelyn, you dimly feel that she is always “fiddling harmonics on the strings of sensualism.” Yes, George Moore is returning to the tribe; he is Irish; he is almost Roman Catholic—and the man is often more interesting than his books. Not to know them all is to miss the history of artistic London during the last quarter of a century.
In the preface of the English edition of Sister Teresa Mr. Moore writes:—
I found I had completed a great pile of Ms., and one day it occurred to me to consider the length of this Ms. To my surprise I found I had written about 150,000 words, and had only finished the first half of my story. I explained my difficulties to my publisher, suggesting that I should end the chapter I was then writing on what musicians would call ‘a full close,’ and that half the story should be published under the title of Evelyn Innes and half under the title of Sister Teresa. My publisher consented, frightened at the thought of a novel of a thousand pages—300,000 words. The story has not been altered, but the text is almost entirely new. No one, perhaps, has rewritten a book so completely. I am aware that the alteration of a published text is deprecated in the press, but it is difficult to understand why, for have not Shakespeare and Balzac and Goethe and Wagner and Fitzgerald rewritten their works? Among my contemporaries, George Meredith and W. B. Yeats have followed the example of their illustrious predecessors.
The latter half of the book is by no means so brilliant, or even so convincing, as the first. But then its psychology is much finer, and it was infinitely harder to handle. Evelyn was bound to taste convent life. Morbid, fatigued by Wagner singing, triumphs, social and operatic, by her two lovers, her stomach deranged by dyspepsia, her nerves worn to an irritable thread by insomnia—is it any wonder the golden-haired girl, with the freckled face, regarded convent life as a green-blooming oasis in a wilderness of lust, vanity, and artificial worldliness! You can see that her mother’s spirit grows stronger in her every day, that mother with the cold eyes and thin lips who lost her voice so early in a great career. “The portrait of our father or our mother is a sort of crystal ball, into which we look in the hope of discovering our destiny.” Evelyn was tired of love, above all of animal love which dragged her soul from God. Ulick, for that reason, was more grateful to her. He was a mystic, with the dog-cold nose of mystics, and he soothed Evelyn when Sir Owen had ruffled her with his importunities, with his materialism. But these two men soon fade after the first hundred pages of the new story; indeed, they are lightly etched in at the best. “We have only to change our ideas to change our friends. Our friends are only a more or less imperfect embodiment of our ideas,” says Mr. Moore. The feigned friendship of the two is a truly Flaubertian note. It recalls a trait of Charles Bovary. The convent of the Passionist Sisters at Wimbledon, however, is the glowing core of this remarkable tale. For nuns, for convents and monasteries, the life contemplative, this Irish novelist has always had a deep liking. There is John Norton in Celibates and there is Lily Young, who left a convent for Mike Fletcher, and then we have Agnes Lahens, whose only happiness was in a claustral life. At one time I believe that this writer would have indorsed Nietzsche’s idea of a monastery for freethinkers. Didn’t H. G. Wells suggest a retreat for a Huysmans sect? Evelyn Innes, like John Norton, dilly-dallied with her innermost convictions. It was long before she realized that faith is a gift, is a special talent, which must be cultivated to a perfect flowering. And when she left her lovers, when she left the stage, after her father died in Rome,—here the long arm of coincidence is rather unpleasantly visible,—when she had professed, taken the veil, and became Sister Teresa, her former life fell away from her like water, and she was happy, a happy bride of Christ—until the honeymoon was over; for divine nuptials have their honeymoons, their chilly repulsions, their hours and days of indifference and despair. And this brings us to M. Huysmans.
Mr. Peck, in his admirable estimate of George Moore,—in The Personal Equation,—writes that Moore is frankly a decadent, frankly a sensualist of the type of Huysmans, whom he intensely admires. “A page of Huysmans,” exclaims Moore, “is as a dose of opium, a glass of some exquisite and powerful liqueur.... Huysmans goes to my soul like a gold ornament of Byzantine workmanship. There is in his style the yearning charm of arches, a sense of ritual, the passion of the mural, of the window.” And Mr. Peck adds: “Mr. Moore’s affinity with Huysmans does not go further than a certain sensuous sympathy. He could never follow him....” But he has followed him, followed En Route; Huysmans has not only gone to his soul, but to his pen. He once wittily wrote: “Henry James went to France and read Turgénieff. W. D. Howells stayed at home and read Henry James.” This might be paraphrased thus: Joris Karel Huysmans, that unique disciple of Baudelaire, went to La Trappe and studied religion. George Moore, that most plastic-souled Irishman, stayed at home and studied Huysmans. This is the precise statement of a truth. Mr. Moore owes as much to Huysmans for his Sister Teresa. To no one does he owe Mildred Lawson. She is as much George Moore’s as L’Education Sentimentale is truly Flaubert’s. I do not know of her counterpart in fiction; like Frédéric Moreau, that unheroic hero, she is a heroine who failed from sheer lack of temperament. And her story is one of the best stories in the language.
But with Sister Teresa the case is different. She is Huysmansized. Yet Mr. Moore has only used Huysmans as a spring-board—to employ a favorite expression of the French writer—for his narration of Sister Teresa’s doings in conventual seclusion. He knew, of course, that he could never hope to rival Huysmans’s matchless, if somewhat florid and machicolated, style, and it may be confessed at once that Sister Teresa is not so intense or so sincere a book as En Route. Nowhere, despite the exquisite resignation and Mozartean sweetness of Mr. Moore’s thirty-eighth chapter, is there anything that approaches the power of the wonderful first chapter in En Route, with its thundering symphonic description of the singing of the De Profundis. Nor are Teresa’s raptures and agonies to be compared to Durtal’s in that awful first night at La Trappe, though the Irish writer follows the French one closely enough. But Moore is tenderer, more poetic, than Huysmans. He has so highly individualized, so completely transposed, his character, that to him must only praise be awarded. As Russell Jacobus writes, in The Blessedness of Egoism, the secret of Goethe’s self-culture is “the faculty of drawing from everything—experience, books, and art—just the element required at that stage of one’s growth, and the faculty of obtaining, by a clairvoyant instinct, the experience, the book, the work of art which contains that needed element.” This Mr. Moore has always done—he confesses to it, to the “echo auguries” of his young manhood. The color of his mind is ever changing. It often displays the reverberating tints of a flying-fish in full flight.
And his art has benefited by his defection from Zola. It has grown purer, more intense. As Huysmans says himself in La Bas, “We must, in short, follow the great highway so deeply dug out by Zola, but it is also necessary to trace a parallel path in the air, another road by which we may reach the Beyond and the Afterward, to achieve thus, in one word, a spiritualistic naturalism.” Huysmans believes Dostoïevsky comes nearest to this achievement—as Havelock Ellis remarks—Dostoïevsky, who was once described by Mr. Moore as a Gaboriau with psychological sauce. But at that time he had not read The Idiot, The Gambler, or L’Adolescence. I find traces of the Russian novelists and their flawless art throughout Sister Teresa, just as the externals of the book—of Evelyn Innes also—recall Flaubert in L’Education Sentimentale. There are many half-cadences, chapters closing on unresolved harmonies, many ellipses, and all bathed in a penetrating yet hazy atmosphere. Yet his style is clear and rhythmic. Mr. Moore tells of subtle things in a simple manner—the reverse of Henry James’s method. The character drawing is no longer so contrapuntal as in Evelyn Innes. But the convent sisters are delightful—the Prioress, Mother Hilda, and Sister Mary Saint John. It would not be George Moore, however, to miss a tiny suggestion of the morbid—though I confess he has treated the episode discreetly. But here again has Huysmans anticipated him, and also anticipated him in Durtal’s revolt against the faith, with his almost uncontrollable desire to utter blasphemies in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. With a master hand—but always the hand of a master miniaturist—does Mr. Moore paint cloistered life, its futile gossiping, little failings, heroic sacrifices, and humming air of sanctity. There are pages in the book that I could almost swear were written by a nun—so real, so intimate, so saturated, are they with the religious atmosphere. And the garden, that nuns’ garden! Whosoever has walked in the sequestered garden of a convent can never quite lose the faint sense of sweetness, goodness, spirituality, and a certain soft communion with nature which modulate into the very speech and rhythm of the sisters. All this atmosphere Mr. Moore, whose receptivity is most feminine, brings into his perfumed pages. After the fleshly passion, the unrest, of Evelyn Innes, this book has a consoling music of its own.
It was after the convent doors closed that the real struggles of the singer began. Some of them have considerable vraisemblance, some of them are very trivial. The letters sent to Monsignor Mostyn, for example, are not credible; nor are Teresa’s revolt and subsequent spiritual rebirth made quite clear. Perhaps Mr. Moore is not yet so strong a believer as Huysmans. His words do not carry the intense conviction of the Fleming-Frenchman, who from his retreat in a Benedictine monastery has given the world a vivid and edifying account of St. Lydwine de Schiedam, that blessed Dutch saint he speaks of in En Route, first attacked at the time of the plague in Holland. “Two boils formed, one under her arm, the other above the heart. ‘Two boils, it is well,’ she said to the Lord, ‘but three would be better in honor of the Holy Trinity,’ and immediately a third pustule broke out on her face.” This extraordinary mystic considered herself as an expiatory victim for all the sins of the earth. Her sufferings were finally rewarded. Like John Bunyan, she died a “comfortable and triumphant death.” A writer of Huysmans’s magnificent artistry, who can thus transform himself into an humble hagiographer, must indeed have forsworn his ways and become impregnated by faith.