Some Impressions of My Elders

by St. John G. Ervine

GEORGE MOORE

I

I was in Dublin on the day when the news of the Battle of Jutland was announced in such abrupt terms that most people imagined the British Fleet had been irretrievably defeated. The affairs of the Abbey Theatre, of which I was then in control, had been brought to a pause because of the military regulations imposed upon the city after the Easter Rising, and Mr. Moore, new from London, asked me to employ some of my leisure in making a reconciliation between Lady Gregory and Mr. Yeats on the one hand and himself on the other. I foolishly consented to see what could be done, chiefly because of the innocent wonder which I detected in Mr. Moore at the fact that any one could possibly take offence at anything he might say, however revelatory of private affairs it might be; and I spent some time in the pursuit of peace. Lady Gregory declared that she had no feeling against Mr. Moore because of what he had said about her in his trilogy, "Hail and Farewell," but that she could never forgive the insults it contained to Mr. Yeats. Mr. Yeats, endeavouring to think deeply about the Rising, declared that he had forgotten, if indeed he had ever remembered, the insults to himself in the trilogy, but that he could not pardon those offered to Lady Gregory. Moore had broken bread in her house, and then had gone away and made fun of her! Worse than that, he had belittled her work. He had said that her plays were not great plays and that her "Kiltartan" dialect was not the dialect of the people of Ireland, but a tortured, unrhythmic invention of her own!... I proposed to them that they should pool their pardons and receive him into the fold again, but my proposal was not accepted, and so I set off from Lady Gregory's lodgings in Dublin to tell Mr. Moore, staying in the Shelbourne Hotel, of the failure of my mission. On the way, I encountered newspaper boys, carrying placards on which was printed the news of the Battle of Jutland. When I got to the hotel and was shown into Mr. Moore's private sitting-room, I found assembled there, Mr. Moore, white with anger and dismay, "A. E.," "John Eglinton" (William Magee) and the late W. F. Bailey, a Land Commissioner, a Privy Councillor and a Trustee of the Abbey Theatre, who had the most extensive acquaintance of any man I have ever known. Mr. Moore was seated in the middle of the room, looking very like a portrait of himself, facing his friends, who were huddled together on a sofa in the shadow as if they were three misbehaving schoolboys receiving a severe rebuke from their master. I could not tell Mr. Moore at that moment of the result of my mission, and in the excitement of the subsequent argument I forgot to do so, but I doubt whether he was then in a mood to care whether he was forgiven or not.

II

It is several years now since that day when I heard Mr. Moore haranguing Mr. Russell and Mr. Magee and Mr. Bailey on the Battle of Jutland, but my recollection of the occasion is very vivid, partly because I have a good memory for things which interest me (and none at all for things in which I am not interested) but chiefly because it seemed to me that on that day Mr. Moore definitely became an old man. His age is not stated in the books of reference, for Mr. Moore is as reticent as an actress on this point, but he is older than Mr. Shaw, who is much older than Mr. Yeats or "A. E." It may seem singular that he, so destitute of reserve in other and more intimate matters, should be secretive on this, but I fancy that his failure to publish the number of his years is due less to vanity than to inability to believe that he is as old as they denote. Judged by the rules of arithmetic his age is—so much; but judged by his feelings, it is—much less. Facts are stubborn things, so we are told, demanding acceptance and unquestioned admission, but Mr. Moore declines to accept the fact of time: he ignores it. But on the day on which the news of the Battle of Jutland was made public, the fact of time ceased to be ignorable, and Mr. Moore, for the first moment in his life, yielded to his years. He looked old and he talked as old men talk. There was a note of panic in his voice, of frightened urgency, and he complained bitterly of those who saw importance in a mean brawl in Dublin, but remained indifferent to an event which might result in the destruction of a desirable civilization. I doubt whether anything in the world had ever until that day been serious to Mr. Moore in the sense that loss and suffering and great grief are serious. I am certain that he never understood why people were angry with him because of "Hail and Farewell." The resentment manifested against him by Lady Gregory and Mr. Yeats was to him incomprehensibly petty: the deeper resentment of other people, more grievously wounded by his revelations which they declared to be untrue, filled him with astonishment. The spectacle of life was so much of a spectacle to him that he could not conceive of it as anything else to others. He had made himself so completely, not a participant in affairs, but an observer of them, that he had lost the faculty of personal feeling. His interest in acts and motives was so intense that he could not understand any one objecting to his prying into the more entertaining of their private relationships. Equally difficult was it for him to understand that they should deeply disrelish the idea of having their affairs, intimate and even secret, used as material for a book by Mr. Moore. Any human experience, he seems to argue, particularly when narrated in his exquisite style, is of value to mankind, and it must have seemed to him that there was something, not only absurd, but also disgraceful in the objection many people had to the publication of their private concerns. Had he not paid tribute to privacy by omitting names or inventing others than the proper ones? True, everyone knew who were the persons portrayed, but was that his fault? And since every one knew already of the affairs, what possible harm could there be in his putting them into perfect and publishable prose? The objection raised by some persons that the incidents narrated by him as facts were pure inventions was frivolous! What was truth? Mr. Moore, like jesting Pilate, asked the question, but did not wait for a reply: he published as quickly as he could. The three volumes which make up "Hail and Farewell" are remarkable and have much value, but it is necessary to remember that Mr. Moore has not always been careful in them to distinguish between the historian and the novelist, between the recorder and the inventor. There are many dull passages in the trilogy, especially those in which he relates his experiences with his kinsman, Mr. Edward Martyn, a charge which Mr. Moore would not deny, but, on the contrary, proudly admit, for he insists that dullness is a prominent feature of all great books. It is only the newspapers and ephemeral books which are interesting from beginning to end, he asserts—a statement which implies that Mr. Moore has been happier in his newspapers than most people have. In this matter of privacies, Mr. Moore was, and still is, the most complete and consistent of communists. He believes in private property, but not in private feelings. One imagines him, in the days before the Battle of Jutland, asking in puzzled fashion, "What do you mean when you say you feel things? What is feeling? Why should it ever be private?" "This lady is in love with that gentleman who is not her husband! How interesting! I shall write a book about their love for each other. They may object! But why? Her husband's feelings!... Now, isn't that absurd!" And so on. Miss Susan Mitchell, in a very entertaining, but not entirely sympathetic book, entitled "George Moore," declares that he seceded from the Roman Catholic Church because be objected to the secrecy of the confessional. His sins, he considered, were so absorbingly interesting that they ought to be publicly confessed rather than confided to an undivulging priest. The flaw in Miss Mitchell's argument is her assumption that Mr. Moore had any sins to confess!...

III

But on this day when the news of the Battle of Jutland was announced, Mr. Moore seemed, for the first time in his life, to realize that men and women do feel and suffer and bear loss; and the discovery instantly aged him. The War which had so teasingly disturbed the amenities of Ebury Street became in a moment something more than an irritating scuffle in the dark—it became an immense disaster which might make amenities forever impossible. The solidities of life were in process of dissolution. Literary style amazingly mattered less than the power of the commonest guttersnipe to kill. Mr. Bernard Shaw, in the preface to "Heartbreak House," exclaims, "Imagine exulting in the death of Beethoven because Bill Sykes dealt him his death blow!" in a rebuke administered to the people who rejoiced in the news of appalling death-rolls among Germans during the War. But on the field itself, Beethoven and Bill Sykes cease to be Beethoven and Bill Sykes and become, each, a very frightened man with a rifle and bayonet and a strong desire to live. In that dreadful encounter, Bill Sykes would not be thinking to himself, "Here comes Beethoven, a great master of music, by whom it will be an honor to be killed!" but "'Ere comes a bloody 'Un who will kill me unless I kill 'im!" The perception of what was happening in Europe, of the horrible reduction of Beethovens to the level of Sykeses, of Shakespeares to the level of Prussian drill-sergeants (for they had to come down to those levels if they were to have any hope of survival) made an old man of Mr. Moore. He threw up his hands and made submission to his years. I listened to him while he talked volubly and bitterly to "A. E." and "John Eglinton" and "Bill" Bailey, as people called him, and marvelled to find him displaying so much emotion over the naval disaster and its probable consequences. He had written a preface for his brother, Colonel Moore's life of their father, in which he had romantically stated that George Henry Moore, his father, had committed suicide because his heart was broken by the dishonourable behaviour of politicians. Colonel Moore printed the preface, but denied the statement about his father, to which, however, George still romantically clings. An English newspaper, The Observer, in its issue for Sunday, April 10, 1921, printed the preface which Mr. Moore had written for a new book to be published very soon thereafter. In this preface, he very interestingly described the way in which he was educated, and in the course of it occurred this paragraph:

He was unhappy in the strife, for he loved his father; his father was always, and still is, the intimate and abiding reality of his life, and the evening that his father started for Ireland for the last time is quick among his memories. George's father returned from the front door to bid his son good-bye, and in obedience to a sudden impulse he took a sovereign out of his pocket and put it into the boy's hand, and went away to his death resolute, for he had come to see that his death was the only way to escape from his embarrassments, without injury to his family, and I can imagine him walking about the lake shores bidding them good-bye for ever.

I suppose that if George Henry Moore were to rise from the grave and deny that he had died by his own hand, his son and heir, George, would murmur aggrievedly, "You know, father, you are spoiling a very charming story!..." He is still sufficiently insensitive not to understand that life is something more than material for the storyteller's art—he may, perhaps have relapsed from the state of understanding to which the Battle of Jutland brought him,—but for that time, at all events until the news of the Battle was amended, George Moore knew what private feelings were, even although he could not keep them to himself. "A. E.," looking woolly and worried, seemed to be completely deprived of his powers of speech by Mr. Moore's angry rhetoric. "John Eglinton," a scholarly essayist and the sanest man in Dublin, having much respect for, but no delusion about, the ancient Gaelic literature of which we hear so much and see so little, remained customarily mum. Mr. Bailey, nervously garrulous as a rule, uttered jerky, but inarticulate, sounds to which Mr. Moore paid absolutely no heed. I discreetly sat in a corner and did not make a sound. The words flowed steadily from Mr. Moore's lips—hot denunciation of the Rising, contemptuous references to Kuno Meyer, rebukes for "A. E." (discovered to have flaws) and a tremendous indictment of German culture, with a proviso in favour of German music, together with admiring references to France, to French literature and to the French Impressionists, particularly Manet. A waiter intruded into the room for some purpose and was ordered out again....

IV