Fantasy in Three Keys

The Life of George Moore, by Joseph Hone (Macmillan, $3,00), is the authorized biography of the late great leprechaun of Ebury Street. Mr. Hone inherited his exacting task from Mr. Charles Morgan, who relinquished it for reasons set forth in his Epitaph on George Moore. In carrying it out the biographer had the solicitous and open-handed help of virtually all those in England, Ireland, France, and America who had known Moore best and longest, and the immense store of documents placed at his disposal included the subject’s intimate correspondence from the age of nine. The result is a portrait of brilliantly satisfying thoroughness, richness, and balance. Among recent lives it stands out for its systematic chronological treatment, its profusion of enlightening documents, and its steady reliance on the ascertainable facts alone — its refusal of all the pert and delusive tricks of ‘interpretation practised by the fashionable psychographers. Among official lives it must be all but unique in candor and humor, and quite unique in its eventual triumphant extrication of dignity, even of a tranquil beauty, from a long-established personal legend in which by far the most noticeable components were perversity, fatuity, and an overwhelmingly shame less egotism.

George Moore was one of the most fantastic human creatures the Lord ever let live, and the friendly biographer could scarcely be less squeamish in presentation if he were the most impish of enemies. He shows us a Moore who, oftener than not, behaved as if he had set out to immortalize himself as the Emperor, the Colossus, of Asses. Bored at finding a distinguished physician’s drawing-room all solicitude for the physician’s wife, who was seriously ill, Moore said brusquely to his host: ‘Please convey my sympathy once for all to Lady Stoker.’ Being told of the death of an old friend, but misunderstanding the name, he launched into an eloquent and intimate character sketch of the deceased; then, brought up short by the disclosure that it was Boss, not Gosse, who had died, he snapped: ' Well, I can’t go over all that again.’ When, in his sixties, he set out to master Galilee in a fortnight in the interest of The Brook Kerith, he wanted to lighten the journey by reading Sterne, with whom he had been often compared; and, borrowing a Sterne from Gosse and finding it ’full of blank pages, and little dots,’he insisted thereafter that Gosse had maliciously palmed off on him an expurgated edition. Arranging (for publication) one of the Conversations in Ebury Street, he seriously proposed that his interlocutor, Gosse, should begin with a graceful apology for interrupting Moore’s work. Of a new legal adviser on the occasion of his first call Moore demanded whether he did not think Esther Waters ‘better than anything Dickens ever wrote.’ And he argued with passionate truculence that the Moores of Moore Hall were really Irish Protestant gentlemen in spite of appearances, inasmuch as his great-grandfather had embraced Romanism only that he might the more easily make money.

There were, however, persons without illusions who respected and were even fond of this incredible being, and the least tribute that can be paid Mr. Hone is to point out that in the end his painstaking chapters fully account for the respect and make the fondness actually comprehensible. George Moore ignoring at eighty the poison which mounts in his arteries, throwing every consideration to the winds except the idée fixe of getting a few more sentences of his inimitably mannered writing exactly as he wanted them before the darkness closed in, is a figure not easily forgotten; and it is also an implicit. revelation of what the man’s most discerning intimates had felt to be central and supreme in him in the earlier decades, even when it was the most overlaid by absurdity and confused by irrelevance.

The volume is enriched by portraits, an amusingly artless account of Moore’s last years by his Ebury Street housekeeper, and a conspectus of his literary achievement by Mr. Desmond Shawe-Taylor. Tire main text would have been the gainer by an efficient proofreading, and the index by a careful rechecking.

Pearl S. Buck, in Fighting Angel (Reynal and Hitchcock, $2.50), erects her memorial to a man also driven to fantastic and inhuman lengths by his obsessions. The man, her missionary father, was capable by turns of a saint’s amazing simplicity and of startlingly canny, humorous, and efficient strokes of guile. His great lifelong objectives were to accomplish in his own way the translation of portions of the Scriptures from the original tongues into Chinese and, also in his own way, the extension throughout northern China of a sort of skeleton church organization which he believed would do the most for the future of Christianity. Nothing could exceed the candor with which he accepted his fellow missionaries as the chief obstacles to both undertakings. His ostensible co-workers were ' persons designed by the devil to thwart the will of God, or what he, Andrew, wanted to do.’ Of his children and his merely human spouse (whose story was told in a companion volume, The Exile) he was conscious only at rare and increasing intervals, and then but half-absently. His attitude about money is illustrated in his reply to a landlady who wanted to know what guarantee she had for a year’s rent: ‘The same guarantee, Madam, which I have — that the Lord provides for His own,’ he told her with his ‘furiously tranquil’ look. This ‘Portrait of a Soul’ is rather an elongated character sketch than the biography it is called. Mrs. Buck intends, I think, that her father shall appear simultaneously as a touching character and the most exasperating of mortals, a monster and an angel. The elegiac mood slightly overreaches itself on the last page in two closing sentences of presumably unintended blank verse.

In Lancer at Large (Viking, $2.75) Francis YeatsBrown, he of The Lives of a Bengal Lancet, revisits India after fifteen years and reports what he sees in a long loop of travel from Cape Comorin to the Khyber Pass and from Calcutta on one coast to Bombay on the other. To the British reader the chief interest of the book probably arises from its vivid glimpses of an India rapidly preparing to think and to shift for itself in a hundred areas of education, science, sanitation, industry, medicine, and social reform, as it has immemoriallv done in religion and philosophy. To Americans the chief thread of interest is the author’s successful quest of a guru (spiritual teacher) and his exposition of the theory and practice of Yoga, which is the control of the body in the interest of spiritual efficiency.

Yoga involves a drastic reëducation in posture and breathing; to relearn breathing alone takes five years, and they must he spent at a particular spot in the Himalayas. The proficient can, among other things, swallow water and pass it at will through the whole intestinal tract. Eventually the practice of meditation may culminate in samadhi, which is a suspended animation of the body for hours or days while the untrammeled spirit visits the Region of Bliss. (One preliminary is three years’ surgery on the tongue, which must be long enough to reach back and stop the oral outlets of the nose.) There is nothing, we are told, to prevent the truly enlightened from living a century and a half or even two centuries. But it is perfectly clear that there is no compromise between these practices and the characteristic assumptions, demands, and rewards of ordinary Occidental living. A man cannot have this enlightenment, without making a steady job of self-culture. His own psychophysical adjustment must be his exclusive lifelong concern. The author does not say so, but the whole business is curiously suggestive of putting in one’s first couple of centuries making oneself fit to live. It does not transpire that the eventual goal is anything but the fitness, which does not even seem to be carried over into successive reincarnations.

WILSON FOLLETT