George Moore

by SIR MAX BEERBOHM

WHEN, where, did I first see my friend George Moore? It is odd that I do not remember my first sight of him. For I am sure there never was in heaven or on earth any one at all like him. It is conceivable that in the waters that are under the earth there may, vaguely luminous, be similar forms, and — stay, it isn’t odd, after all, this lapse of my memory. It is explained by that quality of luminous vagueness which Moore’s presence alway s had. There always was an illusory look about him the diaphanous, vaporous, wan look of an illusion conjured up for us, perhaps by means of mirrors and by a dishonourable spiritualist. There was something blurred about him: his outlines seemed to merge into the air around him. He never seemed to enter or leave a room. But her did he appear there, and in due time fade thence. It was always difficult to say at what moment he appeared: one had but become aware of his presence, which was always delightful, and later one found oneself missing him: he had gone. Thus would it be a strange feat indeed if now I remembered more than this: that somewhere in the early nineties the apparition of Moore had already been vouchsafed me.

Mentally, as well as physically, he was unique. He was always the same, and yet always new. Perhaps his novelty was in part due to his sameness. The outer and inner demeanour of almost every man is variable, changing with the circumslances he is in and the sort of people who are about him. EXcept Oscar Wilde, I never knew a man whose tone of mind and mode of expression, everywhere, and with every one, were so invariable as Moore’s. And whereas Oscar Wilde’s personality was in great measure a conscious and elaborate piece of work, and outshone other personalities by reason of the finer skill that had gone to the making of it, as well as to the richer materials from which it was made, Moore’s slighter but not less peculiar personality was an entirely natural product. That he was intensely self-conscious is proved in all his many autobiographies. On the other hand, it is clear in his writings, and was still more clear to me in personal acquaintance with him, that he never exercised any positive guidance of himself, He was content to look on at himself, sometimes rather admiringly, more often disparagingly, always with absolute detachment. While he swam he looked on from the bank, and never when he sank did he offer himself a helping hand. For well or ill, he just let himself be; and as the spectacle of himself was too interesting to be interfered with even for his own sake, of course he wouldn’t interfere with it to please Brown, Jones, and Robinson. It was for this reason that he was so dear to Wilson Steer. Tonks, and Walter Sickert, and indeed to all people w ho had the wit to enjoy in the midst of an artificial civilisation the spectacle of one absolutely natural man,

Whatever was in his mind, no matter where he was nor what his audience, he said. And when he had nothing to say, he said nothing. Which of these courses in an average drawing-room, needs the greater courage to say simply anything, or to sit saying simply nothing? I think I used to rate Moore’s silences as his finer triumph. They were so long, so unutterably blank. And yet, in some remote way , they so dominated the current chatter. It was impossible not to watch him during them, He sat rather on the edge of his chair, his knees together, his hands hanging limp on either side of him. Limply there hung over his brow a copious wisp of blond hair, which wavered as he turned the long white oval of his face from one speaker to another. He sat wide-eyed, gaping, listening — no, one would not have said “listening" but hearing: it did not seem that his ears were sending in any reports to his brain. It would be an under-statement to say that his face was as a mask which revealed nothing. His face was as a mask of gauze through which Nothing was quite clearly visible. And then, all of a sudden, there would appear—Something. There came a gleam from within the pale-blue eyes, and a sort of ripple passed up over the modelling of the flaccid cheeks; the chin suddenly receded a little further, and— Voilà Moore qui parle! Silence, la compagnie! Moore parle.

What Moore spoke of would be alw ays something quite alien to the general theme. It would be some i-de-a that had lately been simmering in his brain. He had come to the conclusion that the Eighteenth Century was a stoopid century; or he had been reading Milton, and saw now that Shelley was not a poet after all; or he saw now that women had no e-motion, but only logic. . . . Always an i-de-a, delivered hot and strong, in gulps, as front the spout of a kettle boiling over. He had (as I have typographically suggested here) a way of dividing the syllables of his words, and of giving to each syllable an equal stress. Such words as the and a and of and to he pronounced as emphatically as any other word; and the effect was that they seemed to have an emphasis beyond all others: it was as though his voice bulged when he came to them. I suppose this habit of equal stress was due to his having lived among Frenchmen and talked French during his most malleable years. His Parisianism, grafted upon an imperishable brogue, gave to his utterance a very curious charm. Aided by his face and his gesture, this charm was irresistible. I say his “gesture” advisedly; for he had but one. The finger-tips of his vague, small, inert, white hand continually approached his mouth and, rising thence, described an arc in the air — a sort of invisible suspension-bridge for the passage of his i-de-a to us. His face, too, while he talked, had but one expression — a faintly-illumined blank. Usually, when even the most phlegmatic of men is talking, you shall detect changes of expression. In Moore you never could. Usually the features of the most vivacious man’s face retain the form that Nature assigned to them. But in Moore’s face, immutable though the expression was, by some physical miracle the features were perpetually remoulding themselves. It was not merely that the chin receded and progressed, nor merely that the oval cheeks went rippling in capricious hollows and knolls: the contours of nose and brow, they too, had their vicissitudes. You think I exaggerate? Well, I myself, with Moore there before me, did sometimes doubt the evidence of my own eyes. It was possible that my eyes had been deceived. But the point then is that no face save Moore’s ever deceived t hem in just this way.

2

SOMETIMES he talked, as sometimes he also wrote in books, about ladies who had loved him. On such occasions, either because I had never met any of these ladies, or because the conventional English education instils into us a prejudice against that kind of disquisition, I used not to listen very attentively— used to revel merely in the visual aspect of this man of genius. Genius, assuredly, he had; not, I think, in his specifically creative work; but in criticism, yes. His novels, always interesting though they were, never seemed to me to have the quality of life. I saw them rather as experiments, made with admirable skill and patience and, as the years passed, on an ever-increasing scale — experiments which, though all the proper materials had been collected, and all the latest scientific formulae mastered, somehow failed of that final result for which they were made: creation of authentic life. Moore’s habit of re-writing his earlier novels was in itself the deadliest criticism they could have. When once a novel has left the writer’s hand, and been published, the characters, if they really live, are beyond his power. What they were, what they did, what, happened to them, are things as unalterable now as the character and career of the late Queen Victoria. If they do not unalterably live for the man who made them, for whom shall they live? And if they do not live, how shall belated life be breathed into the clay? Vital magic, which was just what his novels lacked, was just what his criticisms had. No one but Ruskin has written more vividly than he, more lovingly and seeingly, about the art of painting; and no one has ever written more inspiringly than he, with a more infectious enthusiasm, about those writers whom he understood and loved, or more amusingly against those whom he neither understood nor liked. Of learning he had no equipment at all; for him everything was a discovery; and it was natural that Oscar Wilde should complain, as he did once complain to me, “George Moore is always conducting his education in public.” Also, he had no sense of proportion. But this defect was in truth a quality. Whenever he discovered some new old master, that master seemed to him greater than any other: he would hear of no other. And it was just this frantic exclusiveness that made his adorations so fruitful: it was by the completeness of his surrender to one thing at a time that he possessed himself of that thing’s very essence. The finest criticism is always passive, not active. Mastery comes only by self-surrender. The critic who justly admires all kinds of things simultaneously cannot love any one of them, any more than a lady can be simultaneously in love with more than one gentleman. That kind of critic is often (if I, who am of that kind, may be allowed to say so) very admirable. But it is the Moores who matter.

When I say that Moore could revere only one master at a time, I do not mean that he was always faithless to old idols. When he had exhausted his ecstasy at some new shrine, he would rise from his knees and, if no other new shrine were visible, would wander back to some old one. Turgéneff, especially, had power to recapture and re-inflame him ever. Almost the last time I met him was in one of these recurrent intervals. We were both of us, for the week-end, guests of Mr. Hugh Hammersley and his brilliant and beautiful wife. On Saturday evening, and on Sunday, Moore was rather blank. We could not tempt him to talk. I saw that he had risen from before some shrine, and was temporarily at a loss. At dinner on Sunday I mentioned Turgeneff. It was as though I had taken him by the hand, poor waif, and led him to the place where he would be. It was as though he lept across the familiar threshold of the temple and fell prostrate at the shrine. At bed-time he was still talking of Turgéneff with unflagging charm and power. And when, next morning, rather late, I came down to breakfast, there, fresh as a lily that had bloomed in the night — there at the breakfasttable, with a fork in his right hand while his left described innumerable arcs over a plate of haddock was Moore, talking of Turgéneff to our polite host.

It is a pity for mankind that Moore’s eloquence was all chamber-music. When I said just now that he was always the same “everywhere” I meant that he was always the same among his diverse friends and acquaintances. In public he simply evaporated. In his “Ave" he has called himself “the only Irishman who could not make a speech;” and to this testimony I can add that he could not passably read a speech. I was a guest at that public dinner of which in “Ave” he has given an immortal account the dinner held at the Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin, to inaugurate the Irish Literary Theatre; and well do I remember the woe-begone way he murmured into his MS., making in that convivial and pugnacious company of orators no effect whatsoever. Nor was this the first time I had seen him wilt in the publicity he abhorred. In 96 Mr. Joseph Pennell sued '“The Saturday Review’ and Another" for libel. “Another” was Walter Sickert, who had written the offending criticism. The case hinged on the difference between lithographs drawn on paper and lithographs drawn directly on the stone. Whistler, who was no longer on speakingterms with Sickert, nor on speaking-terms with very many people besides Mr. and Mrs. Pennell, threw his mantle over the plaintiff. The friends of Sickert combined to throw their own modest little mantles over “Another.” Moore was always accounted a rather selfish man; but the fact that he, with his horror of public appearances, did volunteer for service in the witness-box, is proof that he could on occasion barter self for Auld Lang Sync. . . . I can see him now, penned there, more than ever wraith-like in the harsh, bleak light of the court, He kisses the book, he acknowledges that his name is George Moore, and that he is an art-critic; and dimly he conveys an impression that he prefers lithographs drawn directly on the stone. Up rises the cross-examining counsel: “Now, Mr. Moore, I want you to explain what claim you have to be regarded as an expert in this matter.” Silence reigned. Moore’s gaze wandered to the Judge, and then suddenly his tongue was loosened. ”I knew Degas,”he began; whereat down sat the cross-examining counsel with an eloquent gesture to Judge and jury; the Judge made a little gesture to the witness; the ordeal was over. But brief though that ordeal was, I hope it w ill not go unrecorded in t he Golden Book of Friendship and Self-Sacrifice.

Sickert, Steer, Tonks — these, I think, were the friends he valued most. They were more or less coaeval with him, and they were painters, It was with painters that he was happiest. To them he could talk, with the certainty that they would sympathise, about painting, and about literature without being interrupted. They, on their side, revered him as the one mere critic with whom they could talk as with one of themselves. His face, too that face transferred to canvas by so many painters since Manet — always entranced them with those problems of “planes” and “values” in which it abounded. He was alway s a sort of special treat to them. They went to him as children to a pantomime. Even more than his felicities of thought did they love those sudden infelicities which he alone could have uttered — those gaffes hailed with roars of delight that grew in volume while Moore stared around in simple wonderment. ... I have been told,” he said suddenly, one evening, “ that Mi-chael An-ge-lo carved the Da-vid from a block of marble that had been im-properly quarried. Now if any one gave me a block of marble that had been im-properly quarried, I could no more carve the Da-vid than — than I could fly!” And then “What is the joke? Tell me the joke. If there is a joke, let me share it with you. If it is a good joke,”etc., etc.

3

WE KNOW that the Irishman in England is not always what he seems. Moore, deep down in his breast, may have consciously cultivated and developed that innate quaintness which so pleased his friends. If he did so, this was his one little deviation from stark nature, and shall be forgiven him. But I don’t really think he did so. Among people who refused ever to take him seriously, and were bent merely on teasing him, he would have dropped the pretence. One of these people -their ring-leader, I might say was Edmund Gosse, who loved to entertain Aloore at his table, for sake of the lavish entertainment he found in Aloore. He had, it is true, a great admiration for Aloore’s endless patience in the craft of literature; but in social intercourse Moore was but the dearest, the least spared of all his butts. He drew Moore out, he goaded him, he danced around him, he lightly flew at him as a banderillero flies lightly at a bull, dexterously planting ornamental darts adown either flank of him. Moore never charged. He gazed mildly at his tormentor, and patiently chewed the cud. He thought “Gosse is very wit-ty. I wish I were so wit-ty as Gosse,”and was not at all deflected from his usual manner. ... “I have been reading,”he would say, “a most as-tounding book.”

GOSSE [with a little start and a cry]. Ah, I always forget that you can read — always I think of you as just a writer. But you learnt to read when you were a child: I remember you once told me so, yes. And so you’ve been reading a book? Now [beaming a quick sale-long glance to the company] tell us what that book was.

MOORE [diverting an absolutely blank gaze from host to company]. I have been reading “Don Quixote.”

GOSSE [dartingly]. In the original Spanish, no doubt ?

MOORE [blankly envisaging him]. No, in a translation. For of Spanish I know not one word. But now that I have read “Don Quixote” I am very sorry that I do not know Spanish, and that it is too late for me to learn Spanish.

GOSSE. Too late? Shame on such phrases! We’ll go to learn Spanish together, you and I, hand in hand, every evening, to one of those night-schools.

MOORE [to the company]. Ah, now Gosse is laughing at me, because Gosse is wit-ty, and if a man is us wit-ty as Gosse then he must have always somebody to laugh at.

GOSSE: Eliminate me, Moore! Or rather, regard me as the gravest and most receptive of my sex. And so you have been reading “Don Quixote” in a translation? Dear, dear! Dr. Douglas Hyde’s translation into Erse?

MOORE [his jaw dropping, and a sudden dawn of intense amusement visible in his eyes], Hyde has translated “Don Quixote” into Erse?

GOSSE. I’ve not the slightest doubt that he has. Ah [lyrically], what has he not done? What vistas of enchantment has he not opened up to the peasants who sit weeping around the waters of Shoo-naGroo, and the peasants who go dreaming on the hills of Brau-na-Thingumy? Ah, if only poor dear Cervantes could know what delight — but there! You were just going to tell us all about him. Now we want to know just how he struck you.

MOORE. The most a-mazing thing a-bout the book is —

GOSSE. That Sancho Panza is obviously mad from the outset ?

MOORE. I had not thought of that. [Thinks of it, with growing pleasure in the idea.] That is a good i-de-a, Gosse. I do not say that it is a true i-de-a. But an i-de-a is an i-de-a whether it be . . . [His voice drifts into silence, then suddenly bursts forth] Why did not Cervantes treat Dulcin-e-a sub-jective-ly? What manner of woman was she? Don Quixote speaks of her as his mistress. That is not e-nough. One wants to know, etc., etc.

The foregoing dialogue is of course apocryphal. (My memory, retentive though it is, isn’t so retentive as all that.) But it suggests, with no tinge of exaggeration that I can see in reading it, Gosse’s way with Moore, Moore’s with Gosse. . . . Only, I haven’t yet in these pages about Moore exemplified the goodness of his talk. I have merely said how good it was, and given examples of its queernesses. . . . Oh, he too was often wit-ty. His mind, slow though it was in opposition, could leap swift and far on clear ground. Once, when the painting of “still life” was being discussed, he thus routed the conversation: “I don’t care twopence about still life. Of what interest to me is it to see a picture of a bunch of grapes, a —a postage-stamp and a pair of corduroy trousers?" How perfectly delicious a generalisation! Of a certain very handsome and statuesque actress, whose performances were much admired in the ‘seventies, he said “I never could bear her. She was like most of the policemen, and all the barmaids, in London.”

It was odd t hat whenever he dropped such crystals as these, he seemed to be as surprised by his friends’ laughter as he was after one of his gaffes. Wit-ty, he was yet no judge of wit; and he would sometimes appropriate and repeat without acknowledgement very inferior remarks made by other people. I had a personal experience of this foible. On the Sunday evening before he went to Dublin for the inauguration of Irish drama, he and I had met at the Gosses’, He had been inveighing against Kipling; and, as we walked away together along Delamere Terrace, I said that I thought Kipling fifty years hence would be remembered no more nor less than Martin Tupper was remembered now. Moore paused under a lamp-post. “That is a-mazingly good,”he exclaimed. “Fifty years hence Kipling will be remembered only as Martin Tupper is re-membered today! Oh but you really must let me say that in my speech!” Next morning he went to Dublin. I went next night. On Tuesday I was present at a luncheon which he has described in “Ave” — a luncheon given by Mr. T. P. Gill. I sat exactly opposite to Moore. Either Yeats or Mr. Gill mentioned the name of Kipling. “Oh,” said Moore, “Kipling! Fifty years hence Kipling will be remembered only as Martin Tapper is remembered today!” We all laughed our appreciation, and I especially murmured “Gapital!” Dear Moore had entirely forgotten me as maker of his remark, such as it was. He didn’t make it in his actual speech on the following Thursday. I suppose he had made a rule never to repeat himself.

It was said that in his books, too, he sometimes incorporated as his own the sayings of other people. When “Evelyn Innes” appeared, my friend Clyde Fitch, the brilliant American dramatist, an annual visitor to London, was startled at finding that the description of Evelyn’s acting of Margherite in Gounod’s Faust was already familiar to him. A year or so before, he had written in an English weekly paper, “The Musician”, a detailed appreciation of Madame Calvé’s interpretation of the part at Covent Garden Opera House. The article was one of about a thousand words. Almost all of these, with a very slight emendation here and there, had been appropriated by Moore. I asked Clyde Fitch what he was going to do about it. But Clyde was a very good-humoured fellow, and said he wasn’t going to do anything at all about it.

Perhaps it was apropos of this touching little theft in broad daylight that I said a rather good thing which, as I have not in my time said many good things, you must let me quote to you. D. S. MacColl and I and dear old W illiam Nettleship, the painter, who was one of the most fervent delighters in Moore, were talking of realism in fiction. “I’m afraid,” said Net tleship, “ Moore’s sometimes rat her heavy-handed.” “Perhaps; but he’s awfully lightfingered,” said I. . . . Now that I have made this quotation of myself, the excuse I gave for it seems not good enough. I am sure Moore wouldn’t have thought it worth borrowing.

4

OFTEN, when I met some perfect type of average English gentleman, I used to wonder in what degree he would have been more exciting, more of an individual, had he not gone to a Public School and an University. In presence of a true eccentric, conversely, I would wonder how much of him this curriculum, had he been cast into it, might have marred. For academic debate within my breast no question was more fascinating than this: How far would Moore have been less Moorish if, in those malleable years of his, he had gone (say) to Eton and Oxford, instead of to Ballyhooly and Paris? It wouldn’t really (I like to think) have made much difference. Oxford might in her own way have tinged, as Paris in hers tinged, his brogue. And he might have gone through life thinking his soul rather Oxfordish, even as he did go on thinking it rather Parisian. In his nonage, perhaps, Moore’s soul did have a veneer of Paris; but this, thin and friable, was all gone before I knew him. ... A few years ago, a friend of mine, who knew him only by sight and repute, saw him one day in Paris. By collocation of dates, I think this must have been at the time when Moore, as he told us in “Ave”, had crossed the Channel in order that he might write in French that Irish play which was to be translated into English by Lady Gregory, and thence into Erse by Mr. O’Donaghue, and thence back into English by Lady Gregory for final and magical treatment by Yeats. My friend, who would have supposed from repute that in Paris on a fine afternoon Moore would either he making love to Mme. la Comtesse de Quelquechose in the Faubourg St. Germain or be bandying heterodoxies in a conclave of poets outside some little café on the Rive Gauche, was surprised to see him in the Reading Room of the Grand Hotel, poring over “The Illustrated London News” and presently hovering impatient near the arm-chair of an old gentleman who for too long a time had been monopolising “The Graphic.”

In Paris he might have seemed to belong more or less to London; but not so in London. Wherever a true individuality may be found, there recognisable is not its home. Sometimes I used to see Moore dining in the Café Royal, on the ground-floor — a haunt of which you could say that it was neither French nor English; neutral territory (like that Heading Room overseas); no-man’s-land. Here seemed to be, not indeed a home for him, but a fairly congruous background. He himself, I think, knew that the other scenes of London looked rather odd in relation to him. “If you did not know me — if you just saw me in the street,” he said once to Sickert, “what should you guess me to be?” The question demanded thought. “Should you not,” he pursued, with a touch of impatience, “guess me to be an English count ry-gentleman, who had come up to London to see his lawyer?” And then “ What is the joke? Tell me the joke. If there is a joke,” etc., etc. . . . No, assuredly, no passer-by would have attributed Moore to our simple English countryside. He could ride a horse well, I was told, and was quite a good shot, “but hang it!” Sir William Eden once said to me, “he always comes down to breakfast in pumps.”And this reminds me that it was in shooting over the coverts at Windlestone that he met with an accident of which the sequel (as related by him to Sickert and myself) illustrated most exquisitely his indifference to the codes of behaviour that govern us timid creatures of convention. A young man who was staying in the house, and was one of the shooting party, fired off his gun at some wrong moment, and in some wrong direction; and the result was that a spent shot, glancing off a tree, badly grazed the surface of one of Moore’s eyes. The sufferer was hurried back to the house, and surgically treated, and had to lie for some days in his darkened bedside. On the second day, the guilty youth came to the bedside, to express his contrition. “And what,” we asked Moore, as he described the scene to us in London, “what did you say?” “I said ‘Oh, go a-way. I do not want ever to see you. You are an id-i-ot. For heaven’s sake, go a-way,’ and I turned on my pillow.” How much better, after all, because how much more sincere, this was than the prescribed “My dear fellow, it’s nothing! Don’t say’ another word! Sort o’ thing might happen to any one!” Such phrases as these would not have implied any true forgiveness; whereas Moore, having uttered his mind, was free to bear no ill-will. The tone in which he spoke to us of the young man was perfectly good-humoured. It might, of course, have been less so if the accident had been more serious. Luckily, no lasting damage had been done. “In fact,” said Moore, unconsciously taking for a moment the famous posture of the Widow Wadman, “the eye is rather a pret-ti-er colour.”

The thought that passed through the mind of Julia Hazeltine, when she found the Maestro Jimson hiding under the table in the deserted houseboat — “Surely this is very strange behaviour. He cannot be a man of the world!” —was precisely the thought raised by Moore in the minds of all worldly persons who met him for the first, or indeed the hundred-and-first, time. Yet neither would the unworldly have dreamed of claiming him for themselves. He shocked them. He was as one dangling to them the lures of levity and life. Of Edward Martyn, sitting stout in his tower at Tillyra, alone, cultivating his soul among his tomes of theology, Moore gave us in “Ave a wonderful study—a study whose ridicule could not have been one tithe so good had it not been based on sympathy and affection. And Martyn, I believe, reciprocated fully these feelings. He liked to learn from Moore about modern painting, in return for what he taught him about old music. But certain it is that he was also afraid of Moore, afraid of his influence; and once, I am told, he gav e to his fear deathless expression in a simple phrase, pensively uttered while he knocked the ashes from his pipe: ”Well, he’s a bint of a bhankholiday fellow, ye know, Moore is.”

A marvellous phrase, that; an absolutely perfect rendering of the emotion behind it; but as a full judgement, of course, it cannot be accepted, nor have been intended. A man must be judged by what is fine in him, not by w hat is trivial; for the fine qualities must have deep roots within him, whereas triv ial ones may thrive from the very surface. The bhank-hofiday side of Moore, if there it was, can count for nothing as against the fine things inside him — his matchless honesty of mind; his very real modesty about his own work; his utter freedom from jealousy; his loving reverence of all that in all arts was nobly done; and, above all, that inexhaustible patience of his, and courage, whereby be made the very most of the gifts he had, and earned for himself a gift which Nature had not bestowed on him: the specific gift of writing. No young man — nay, no young woman — ever wrote worse than young Moore wrote. It must have seemed to every one that here was a writer who, however interesting he in himself might be, never would learn to express himself tolerably. Half-acrown, we know, may be the foundation of a vast fortune. But what can be done without a penny? Some of the good writers have begun with a scant gift for writing. But which of them with no gift at all? Moore is the one instance I ever heard of. Somehow, in the course of long years, he learned to express himself beautifully. I call that great.