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<h2>CHAPTER XXIII</h2> <h2>THE REFORMATION OF GEORGE MOORE</h2> <h3>I</h3> Dear naughty George Moore—sad, bad, mad—has reformed. He tells us why in his book, Vale, the English edition of which I was lucky enough to read; for, the American edition is expurgated, nay, fumigated, as was the Memoirs of My Dead Life by the same Celtic Casanova. Vale completes the trilogy; Hail and Farewell, Ave and Salve being the titles of the preceding two. In the first, Moore is sufficiently vitriolic, and in Salve he serves up George Russell, the poet and painter, better known as "Æ." in a more sympathetic fashion. When Vale was announced several years ago as on the brink of completion I was moved to write: "I suppose when the final book appears it means that George Moore has put up the shutters of his soul, not to say, his shop. But I have my serious doubts." After reading Vale I still had them. Only death will end the streaming confessions of this writer. He who lives by the pen shall perish by the pen. (This latter sentence is not a quotation from the [Pg 262] sacred books of any creed, merely the conviction of a slave chained to the ink-well.) I said that Vale is expurgated for American consumption. Certainly. We are so averse to racy, forcible English in America—thanks to the mean, narrow spirit in our arts and letters—that a hearty oath scares us into the Brooklyn backyard of our timid conscience. George calls a spade a spade, and he delights on stirring up rank malodorous soil with his war-worn agricultural implement. When he returned some years ago to Dublin, there to help in the national literary and artistic movement, he found a devoted band of brethren: William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, Douglas Hyde, John M. Synge, Edward Martyn, Russell, and others. I shan't attempt even a brief mention of the neo-Celtic awakening. Yeats was the prime instigator, also the storm-centre. He literally discovered Synge, the dramatist—in reality the only strong man of the group, the only dramatist of originality—and, with his exquisite lyric gift, he, also discovered a new Ireland, a fabulous, beautiful Erin, unsuspected by Tom Moore, Samuel Lover, Carleton, Mangan, Lever, and the too busy Boucicault. As I soon found out, when there, Dublin is a vast whispering gallery. Delightful, hospitable Dublin is also a provincial town, given to gossip and backbiting. Say something about somebody in the smoking-room of the Shelbourne, [Pg 263] and a few hours later the clubs will be repeating it. Mr. Moore said things every hour in the day, and in less than six days he had sown for himself a fine crop of enemies. To "get even" he conceived the idea of writing a series of novels, with real people bearing their own names. That he hasn't been shot at, horsewhipped, or sued for libel thus far is just his usual good luck. Vale is largely a book of capricious insults. But then the facts it sets down in cruel type! When the years have removed the actors therein from the earthly scene, our grandchildren will chuckle over Moore's unconscious humour and Pepys-like chronicling of small-beer. For the social historian this trilogy will prove a mine of gossip, rich veracious gossip. It throws a calcium glare on the soul of the author, who, self-confessed, is now old, and no longer a dangerous Don Juan. In real life he was, as far as I can make out, not particularly a monster of iniquity; but, oh! in his Confessions and Memoirs what a rake was he. How the "lascivious lute" did sound. Some of the pages of the new volume (see pp. 274-278, English edition), in which he describes his tactics to avoid a kiss (kissing gives him a headache in these lonesome latter years, though he was only born in 1857), is to set you wondering over the frankness of the man. Walter Pater once called him "audacious George Moore," and audacious he is with pen and ink. [Pg 264] Otherwise, like Bernard Shaw, he is not looking for physical quarrels. He once spoke of Shaw as "the funny man in a boarding-house," though he never mentions his name in his memoirs. He doesn't like Yeats; what's more, he prints the news as often and as elaborately as possible. In the present book he doesn't exactly compare Yeats to a crane or a pelican, but he calls attention to the fact that the poet belonged to the "lower middle-class." It seems that Yeats had been thundering away at the artistic indifference of the Dublin bourgeoisie. Now, looking at Yeats the night when John Quinn gave him a dinner at Delmonico's, you could not note any resemblance to exotic birds, though he might recall a penguin. He was very solemn, very bored, very fatigued, his eyes deep sunken from fatigue. Posing as a tame parlour poet for six weeks had tired the man to his very bones. But catch him in private with his waistcoat unbuttoned—I speak figuratively—and you will enjoy a born raconteur, one who slowly distils witty poison at the tip of every anecdote, till, bursting with glee, you cry: "How these literary men do love each other! How one Irishman dotes on another!" Yeats may be an exception to the rule that a poet is as vain and as irritable as a tenor. I didn't notice the irritability, finding him taking himself seriously, as should all apostles of culture and Celtic twilight. [Pg 265] He "got even" with George Moore's virulent attacks by telling a capital story, which he confessed was invented, one that went all over Dublin and London. When George felt the call of a Protestant conversion he was in Dublin. He has told us of his difficulties, mental and temperamental. One day some question of dogma presented itself and he hurried to the Cathedral for advice. He sent in his name to the Archbishop, and that forgetful dignitary exclaimed: "Moore, Moore, oh, that man again! Well, give him another pair of blankets." In later versions, coals, candles, even shillings, were added to the apocryphal anecdote—which, by the way, set smiling the usually impassive Moore, who can see a joke every now and then. Better still is the true tale of George, who boasts much in Vale of his riding dangerous mounts; and when challenged at an English country house did get on the back of a vicious animal and ride to hounds the better part of a day. He wouldn't, quite properly, take the "dare," although when he reached his room he found his boots full of blood. So there is sporting temper in him. Any one reading his Esther Waters may note that he knows the racing stable by heart. In Vale he describes his father's stable at Castle Moore, County Mayo. Of course, this is not the time to attempt an estimate of his complete work, for who may say what fresh outbursts, what new imprudences [Pg 266] in black and white, we may expect? He has paid his respects to his fellow countrymen, and is heartily despised by all camps, political, religious, artistic. He has belittled the work of Lady Gregory, Yeats, and Edwin Martyn, and has rather patronised John M. Synge; the latter, possibly, because Synge was "discovered" by Yeats, not Moore. Yet do we enjoy the vagaries of George Moore. I only saw him once, a long time ago, to be precise in 1901, at Bayreuth. He looked more like a bird than Yeats, though his beak is not so predaceous as Yeats's; a golden-crested bird, with a chin as diffident as a poached egg, and with melancholy pale-blue eyes, and an undecided gait. He talked of the Irish language as if it were the only redemption for poor unhappy Ireland. In Vale there is not the same enthusiasm. He dwells with more delight on his early Parisian experiences—it is the best part of the book—and to my way of thinking the essential George Moore is to be found only in Paris; London is an afterthought. The Paris of Manet, Monet, Degas, Whistler, Huysmans, Zola, Verlaine, and all the "new" men of 1880—what an unexplored vein he did work for the profit and delectation of the English-speaking world. True critical yeoman's work, for to preach impressionism twenty-five years ago in London was to court a rumpus. What hard names were rained upon the yellow head of George Moore—that colour so admired [Pg 267] by Manet and so wonderfully painted by him—in the academic camp. He replied with all the vivacity of vocabulary which your true Celt usually has on tap. He even "went for" the Pre-Raphaelites, a band of overrated mediocrities—on the pictorial side, at least—though John Millais was a talent—and for years was as a solitary prophet in a city of Philistines. The world caught up with Moore, and to-day the shoe pinches on the other foot—it is George who is a belated critic of the "New Art" (most of it as stale as the Medes and Persians), and many are the wordy battles waged at the Café Royal, London, when Augustus John happens in of an evening and finds the author of Modern Painting denouncing Debussy in company with Matisse and other Post-Imitators. Manet, like Moore, is "old hat" (vieux chapeau) for modern youth. It's well to go to bed not too late in life, else some impertinent youngster may cry aloud: "What's that venerable granddaddy doing up at this time of night?" To each generation its critics. <h3>II</h3> In one of his fulminations against Christianity Nietzsche said that the first and only Christian died on the cross. George Moore thinks otherwise, at least he gives a novel version of the narrative in the synoptic Gospels. [Pg 268] The Brook Kerith is a fiction dealing with the life of Christ. It is a book that will offend the faithful, and one that will not convince the heterodox. In it George Moore sets forth his ideas concerning the Christ "myth," evoking, as does Flaubert in Salammbô, a vanished land, a vanished civilisation, and in a style that is artistically beautiful. Never has he written with such sustained power, intensity and nobility of phrasing, such finely tempered, modulated prose. It is a rhythmed prose which first peeped forth in some pages of Mr. Moore's Evelyn Innes when the theme bordered on the mystical. Yet it is of an essentially Celtic character. Mysticism and Moore do not seem bedfellows. Nevertheless, Mr. Moore has been haunted from his first elaborate novel, A Drama in Muslin, by mystic and theological questions. A pagan by temperament, his soul is the soul of an Irish Roman Catholic. He can no more escape the fascinating ideas of faith and salvation than did Huysmans. (He has taken exception to this statement in an open letter.) A realist at the beginning, he has leaned of late years heavily on the side of the spirit. But like Baudelaire, Barbey d'Aurévilly, Villiers de L'Isle Adam, Paul Verlaine, and Huysmans, Mr. Moore is one of those sons of Mother Church who give anxious pause to his former coreligionists. The Brook Kerith will prove a formidable rock of offence, and it may be said that it was on the Index before [Pg 269] it was written. And yet we find in it George Moore among the prophets. Perhaps Mr. Moore has read the critical work of Professor Arthur Drews, The Christ Myth. It is a masterpiece of destruction. There are many books in which Jesus Christ figures. Ernest Renan's Life, written in his silky and sophisticated style, is no more admired by Christians than the cruder study by Strauss. After these the deluge, ending with the dream by the late Remy de Gourmont, Une Nuit au Luxembourg. And there is the brilliant and poetic study of Edgar Saltus, his Mary Magdalen. Anatole France has distilled into his The Revolt of the Angels some of his acid hatred of all religions, with blasphemous and obscene notes not missing. It may be remembered that M. France also wrote that pastel of irony The Procurator of Judea, in which Pontius Pilate is shown in his old age, rich, ennuied, sick. He has quite forgotten, when asked, about the Jewish agitator who fancied himself the son of God and was given over to the Temple authorities in Jerusalem and crucified. Rising from the tomb on the third day he became the Christ of the Christian dispensation, aided by the religious genius of one Paul, formerly known as Saul the Tent-maker of Tarsus. Now Mr. Moore does in a larger mould and in the grand manner what Anatole France accomplished in his miniature. The ironic method, a tragic irony, suffuses [Pg 270] every page of The Brook Kerith, and the story of the four Gospels is twisted into something perverse, and for Christians altogether shocking. It will be called "blasphemous," but we must remember that our national Constitution makes no allowance for so-called "blasphemers"; that the mythologies of the Greeks and Romans, Jews and Christians, Mohammedans and Mormons may be criticised, yet the criticism is not inherently "blasphemous." America is no more a Christian than a Jewish nation or a nation of freethinkers. It is free to all races and religions, and thus one man's spiritual meat may be another's emetic. Having cleared our mind of cant, let us investigate The Brook Kerith. The title is applied to a tiny community of Jewish mystics, the Essenes, who lived near this stream; perhaps the Scriptural Kedron? This brotherhood had separated from the materialistic Pharisees and Sadducees, not approving of burnt sacrifices or Temple worship; furthermore, they practised celibacy till a schism within their ranks drove the minority away from the parent body to shift for themselves. A young shepherd, Jesus of Nazareth, son of Joseph, a carpenter in Galilee, and of Miriam, his mother—they have other sons—is a member of this community. But too much meditation on the prophecies of Daniel and the meeting with a wandering prophet, John the Baptist, the precursor of the long-foretold Messiah, lead him [Pg 271] astray. Baptised in the waters of Jordan, Jesus becomes a theomaniac—he believes himself to be the son of God, appointed by the heavenly father to save mankind; especially his fellow Jews. Filled with a fanatical fire, he leads away a dozen disciples, poor, ignorant fishermen. He also attracts the curiosity of Joseph, the only son of a rich merchant of Arimathea. Two-thirds of the novel are devoted to the psychology of this youthful philosopher, who, inducted into the wisdom of the Greek sophists, is, notwithstanding, a fervent Jew, a rigid upholder of the Law and the Prophets. The dialogues between father and son rather recall Erin, hardly Syria. Joseph becomes interested in Jesus, follows him about, and the fatal day of the crucifixion he beseeches his friend Pilate to let him have the body of his Lord for a worthy interment. Pilate demurs, then accedes. Joseph, with the aid of the two holy women Mary and Martha, places the corpse of the dead divinity in a sepulchre. If Joseph hadn't been killed by the zealots of Jerusalem (heated to this murder by the High Priest) the title of the book might have been "Joseph of Arimathea." He is easily the most viable figure. Jesus is too much of the god from the machine; but he serves the author for the development of his ingenious theory. Finding the Christ still alive, Joseph carries him secretly and after dark to the house of his father, hides him and listens unmoved to the fantastic [Pg 272] tales of a resurrection. But the spies of Caiaphas are everywhere, Jesus is in danger of a second crucifixion, so Joseph takes him back to the Essenes, where he resumes his old occupation of herding sheep. Feeble in mind and body, he gradually wins back health and spiritual peace. He regrets his former arrogance and blasphemy and ascribes the aberration to the insidious temptings of the demon. It seems that in those troubled days the cities and countryside were infested by madmen, messiahs, redeemers, preaching the speedy destruction of the world. For a period Jesus called himself a son of God and threatened his fellow men with fire and the sword. Till he was five and fifty years Jesus lived with his flocks. The idyllic pictures are in Mr. Moore's most charming vein; sober, as befits the dignity of the theme. He has fashioned an undulating prose, each paragraph a page long, which flows with some of the clarity and music of a style once derided by him, the style coulant of that master of harmonies, Cardinal Newman. He is a great landscape-painter. Jesus is aging. He gives up his shepherd's crook to his successor and contemplates a retreat where he may meditate the thrilling events of his youth. Then Paul of Tarsus intervenes. He is vigorously painted. A refugee from Jerusalem, with Timothy lost somewhere in Galilee, he invades the Essenian monastery. Eloquent [Pg 273] pages follow. Paul relates his adventures under the banner of Jesus Christ. A disputatious man, full of the Lord, yet not making it any easier for his disciples. You catch a glimpse of Pauline Christianity, differing from the tender message of Jesus; that Jesus of whom Havelock Ellis wrote: "Jesus found no successor. Over the stage of those gracious and radiant scenes swiftly fell a fireproof curtain, wrought of systematic theology and formal metaphysics, which even the divine flames of that wonderful personality were unable to melt." If this be the case then Paul was, if not the founder, the foster-father of the new creed. A seer of epileptic visions—Edgar Saltus has said of the "sacred disease" that all founders of religions have been epileptics—Paul, with the intractable temperament of a stubborn Pharisee, was softened by some Greek blood, yet as Renan wrote of Amiel: "He speaks of sin, of salvation, of redemption and conversion, and other theological bric-a-brac, as if these things were realities." For Paul and those who followed him they were and are realities; from them is spun the web of our modern civilisation. The dismay of Paul on learning from the lips of Jesus that he it was who, crucified, came back to life may be fancy. The sturdy Apostle, who recalled the reproachful words of Jesus issuing from the blinding light on the road to Damascus: "Paul, Paul, why persecutest thou me?" naturally enough denounced [Pg 274] Jesus as a madman, but accepted his services as a guide to Cæsarea, where, in company with Timothy, he hoped to embark for Rome, there to spread the glad tidings, there to preach the Gospel of Christ and Him crucified. On the way he cautiously extracts from Jesus, whose memory of his cruel tormentors is halting, parts of his story. He believes him a half-crazy fanatic, deluded with the notion that he is the original Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus gently expounds his theories, though George Moore pulls the wires. A pantheism that ends in Nirvana, Néant, Nada, Nothing! Despairing of ever forcing the world to see the light, he is become a Quietist, almost a Buddhist. He might have quoted the mystic Joachim Flora—of the Third Kingdom—who said that the true ascetic counts nothing his own save only his harp. ("Qui vere monachus est nihil reputat esse suum nisi citharam.") When a man's cross becomes too heavy a burden to carry then let him cast it away. Jesus cast his cross away—his spiritual ambition—believing that too great love of God leads to propagation of the belief, then to hatred and persecution of them that won't believe. The Jews, says Jesus, are an intolerant, stiff-necked people; they love God, yet they hate men. Horrified at all this, Paul parts company with the Son of Man, secretly relieved to hear that he is not going, as he had contemplated, [Pg 275] to give himself up to Hanan, the High Priest in Jerusalem, to denounce the falseness of the heretical sect named after him. Paul, without crediting the story, saw in Jesus a dangerous rival. The last we hear of the divine shepherd is a rumour that he may join a roving band of East Indians and go to the source of all beliefs, to Asia, impure, mysterious Asia; the mother of mystic cults. Paul too disappears, and on the little coda: "The rest of his story is unknown." We are fain to believe that the "rest of his story" is very well known in the wide world. The book is another milestone along Mr. Moore's road to Damascus. If, as Charles Baudelaire has said, "Superstition is the reservoir of all truths," then, we have lost our spiritual bearings in the dark forest of modern rationalism. To be sure, we have a Yankee Pope Joan, a Messiah in petticoats who has uttered the illuminating phrase, "My first and for ever message is one and eternal," which is no more a parody of Holy Writ than The Brook Kerith, a book which while it must have given its author pains to write—so full of Talmudic and Oriental lore and the lore of the apocryphal gospels is it—must have been also a joy to him as a literary artist. The poignant irony of Paul's disbelief in the real Jesus is understandable, though it is bound to raise a chorus of protestations. But Mr. Moore never worried over abuse. He has, Celt that he is, followed his vision. In [Pg 276] every man's heart there is a lake, he says, and the lake in his heart is a sombre one, a very pool of incertitudes. One feels like quoting to him—though it would be unnecessary, as he knows well the quotation—what <ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: Barbey d'Aurevilly" id="tnote10b">Barbey d'Aurévilly</ins> once wrote to Baudelaire, and years later of Joris-Karel Huysmans, that he would either blow out his brains or prostrate himself at the foot of the cross. Mr. Moore has in the past made his genuflections. But they were before the Jesus of his native religion; the poetic though not profound image he has created in his new book will never seem the godlike man of whom Browning said in Saul: "Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee. See the Christ stand!" <hr style="width: 65%;" /> [Pg 277] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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