Avowals

Chapter 1

MAID. Mr Edmund Gosse.

Moore. My dear Gosse, how glad I am to see you, and how well timed your visit is, you will acknowledge when I tell you that five minutes before the door opened I left my writings — you see them all scattered over the table — and came to this fire (which, by the way, isn't wanted on a day like this) to dream of — whom do you think? — of you, of course, and that two human beings so different as ourselves should have been friends for forty years. It must be nearly as long as that.

Gosse. Differences in temperament draw men together.

Are we not formed as notes of music are For one another though dissimilar ?

A late spring fire is responsible for many dreams; but I should have preferred to hear that it had set you thinking of the art that has united us, rather than of superficial differences that failed to divide us. With you it has been as with me, not a day passing these forty years without our meditating on the mystery of our art. But

I will not delay. I merely came

Moore. You must not go. This visit is most opportune. I've been trying to write this afternoon and for many previous afternoons for the last fortnight, beginning the same thing over and over again and again and starting afresh. It was my literary perplexities, teasing difficulties, that set me dreaming of you, sitting pen in hand, your eyes fixed on a clear vision, transcribing it from time to time accurately and harmoniously, sentence rising out of sentence, paragraph out of paragraph. Have I not seen your manuscript, only a word altered here and there?

Gosse. But if I do not change on paper, I change in my mind. I sit pen in hand until the sentence is completely formed, and any quality that my prose may have it gets from the pen. If I were to dictate as you do

Moore. My dictation is the cartoon, and the quality, as you call it, and rightly comes when I begin to lick the sentences together.

Gosse. I couldn't write that way.

Moore. To me it is incredible that a man should be able to arrange his composition beforehand and execute it sentence by sentence. Your method reminds me of painting as it was done in Paris in the seventies, piece by piece, leaving off in the middle of an eye, and finishing the second half the next day. The painter's task, though difficult, was accomplished upon a drawing, but you are always, if I may so express myself, in mid-air, finding your way like the swallow. You find it, it is true, and I believe you to be without chart or compass since you say it. I believe, as the pious Christian believes, because it is incredible.

Gosse. I hold the road in my mind's eye.

Moore. But the mind's eye cannot carry the various aspects of the road and the multiple incidents of the road. But why do I say cannot? My own mind alone is known to me, and every time I begin a fresh subject it seems as if I should never succeed in unravelling it. Our minds are as different as our lives have been. You married early in life, and a gulf divides the man that marries in the beginning from the man who decides in the beginning that he will remain a bachelor. Your life has been spent in your own home among your family and in clubs. You look at this moment as if you had come from your club. You were educated, and you know literature, Greek and Roman, French, German, besides a good smattering of Scandinavian. No lives were ever so different as ours, nor temperaments. It never happened to you to rush out after dinner to see a friend, or even to desire to do such a thing. Never have I known you to pay a casual visit before to-day.

Gosse. My wife begged of me

Moore. It was not then a desire to see an old friend that compelled you from the Athenseum, that august abode of prelacy and literature. I am disappointed. I can see you coming through the portals with his Grace, noticing, as soon as you are in the air, that an acid little wind is blowing through the sunshine. You finger the lappet of his lordship's overcoat, saying: Rather thin for the season, and, having deposited his Grace in his carriage and waited till the rug was tucked about the episcopal breeches, you hailed a hansom. Did you not feel yourself to be somewhat of a hypocrite when you called out — you didn't dare to call out: 121 Ebury Street, within hearing of his Grace's coachman? You lowered your voice as a man does on his way

Gosse. I cannot allow you to indulge your imagination any longer, though it is all very amusing. I must beg you to receive without delay my wife's message. We have some distinguished visitors coming to see us on Sunday, and she will find it hard to forgive you if you do not help us to entertain them. Among them are

Moore. A Scandinavian critic and a Danish poet

Goose. I will not stay to hear you talk nonsense any longer about the nationalities of our visitors, which do not concern you at all, and I'll go so far as to say that your remarks make me regret that I broke through my usual custom of communicating by letter rather than by word of mouth. For it is, as you say, not my custom to call without an appointment, and what has happened to-day will not encourage me to repeat my experiment.

Moore. I'm sorry indeed if my reckless imagination is to deprive me of your company this afternoon, for never in my life did I need it more. Literature needs your help, as you will see if you will forgive your volatile friend his levity, which, though incurable, is harmless. I beg of you to return to your chair, for I cannot talk to you if you stand irate on the hearthrug fuming. Can I do more than apologize for having allowed my imagination to wander about the portals of the Athenaeum?

Gosse. But I don't belong to that club.

Moore. Then why be angry; it is only reasonable to be angry at the truth. I shall be glad to entertain your friends to the best of my ability whatever their nationalities, if

Gosse. You make my wife's request conditional?

Moore. I beseech you not to be so prickly. I make no conditions. I'll come next Sunday to tea even though I cannot persuade you to stay to help me. Only this do I ask, that you will allow me to tell you that the subject I have been trying to write for the last fortnight arose out of one of the subtlest of your critical remarks, for me the most significant single sentence you ever wrote, or that any man wrote, a sentence that captured and held me ever since, driving me at last to the creation of the idea, an essay. Half-an-hour of your time is all I ask for, and your own thought having caused the need you can hardly refuse me half-an-hour of your time. Our art calls to you.

Gosse. You have certainly set me wondering what was the epigram, maxim, aphorism, apophthegm, or truism that has caused all the trouble with which I see the dining-room table littered.

Moore. You wrote, but when you wrote the sentence that captured my imagination I cannot tell you — it must have been in some essay or preface; a casual remark you seemed to consider it, for you did not develop the thought;

I wish you had, for had you done so you might have removed some of the errors with which literary criticism is beset; but no, you just said, as if the remark was of no particular importance, that English genius had gone into poetry. And it was this remark thrown out casually that fired my imagination. A seemingly unending perspective opened up before me.

Germany, I said, expresses herself in music; France and Italy in the plastic arts; England, as Gosse says, in poetry. Our poetical literature is the most beautiful, but outside of poetry English genius has accomplished little or nothing.

Gosse. You wouldn't go so far as to say that English genius has accomplished nothing in prose.

Moore. English genius has certainly found abundant expression in the essay. Landor, Pater, De Quincey, Lamb. You know how I have yielded to these writers, and yourself has demurred on more than one occasion to my unorthodox faith that more human souls rise out of Landor's Imaginary Conversations than out of Shakespeare's plays. Our conversation became strained as the conversation frequently became between Bishop Parker and Andrew Marvel. You remember the extraordinary inrush of character at the words : I shudder. At these the Bishop rises into our consciousness, a spiritual entity; in all Shakespeare is there anything so swift and telling? But we must keep to the subject of this discussion, that English prose narrative is the weakest part of our literature.

Gosse. With the exception of one or two masterpieces.

Moore. I cannot allow that there are any masterpieces in English prose narrative, for masterpieces are written only by first-rate minds, and I think you will agree with me that only the inferior or — shall we say? — the subaltern mind has attempted prose narrative in England.

Gosse. If we waive the smaller prose narratives of

Elizabethan times, we come upon a very remarkable narrative, Robinson Crusoe. But I see your point. Defoe sold his pen willingly to whosoever could afford to pay for the writing of political pamphlets, lampoons, scurrilous novels, literary garbage of all kinds; but you must remember that a man ceases to be a hack writer as soon as he writes a masterpiece.

Moore. I had not intended to speak of Defoe. Fielding seemed to give my essay a better start, for in Tom Jones we find the family, and in the drawing-room for the first time. Defoe was, as you say, a hack writer, and the theme of my essay is that inferior writers seized upon English prose narrative as a means of getting money; and the fact that Defoe was inspired during the first half of Robinson Crusoe does not impugn or cast a doubt on the validity of my theme. If he'd been inspired from start to finish, the matter would be different. English fiction never finishes gallantly; the writers swerve across the course or bolt out of it, or stick out their toes, turn it up, as the phrase goes. Forgive this description in racing parlance. English fiction is a hackney; French and Russian narrative shows more breeding. This can hardly be denied.

Gosse. I certainly do not deny it.

Moore. It would seem, then, that my essay must begin with Defoe; not with Defoe, but with Defoe's last word, Robinson Crusoe, the most English of all books. We are islanders, Crusoe was one. Our business is the sea. Crusoe was constantly occupied going to and fro from a wreck. We are a prosaic people, what the French would call terre & terre. Nobody was more terre d terre than Crusoe. England seems to have expressed herself in her first narrative uncommonly well. You see, my dear Gosse, that this conversation is already beginning to bear fruit. It must be fifty years since I read Robinson Crusoe, but the construction from the first part of the story is so regular that it seems to me as if I could read the book in memory. The going back and forth on a raft to get food; the finding of the fowling-pieces and cordials. How often did he mention that he had discovered a case of cordials? I used to wonder what cordials were, and why he attached so much importance to the finding of them, for I come of a family that has been sober for many generations. It seems to me that I remember his house and the building of the boat, and the current that nearly carried him out of sight of the island, for the boat could not be steered out of the current till he hoisted a sail. It was difficult for a child to comprehend how a sail that carried him more swiftly from the island than the current was doing could at the same time enable him to steer out of the current. He was almost out of sight of the island when he put up the sail, and it was with a great relief that I read that the boat answered the helm as soon as her speed exceeded the speed of the current.

The unfortunate Stevenson who tried to write books of adventures merely wrote a succession of accidents, but in Robinson Crusoe every incident is necessary; and every one is shapen perfectly, and fits into its place; at the right moment we are told that Crusoe's powder and shot began to run short, so, instead of shooting the goats, he trapped them; the wild goats became tame and gave him milk, and from the milk he may have made butter and cheese; I've forgotten. But he certainly made himself a suit of clothes out of goat skins, and what is wonderful in this adventure story is the moral idea: man alone with Nature. Defoe may have gotten the desert island from Juan Fernandez, but he got the unforgettable incident, the footprint on the sand, out of his own mind, and the subsequent discovery that cannibals had been on the island and indulged in a cannibal feast. In considering the beauty of the subject that chance dropped in front of Defoe (true that it dropped in front of many besides Defoe), it may occur to us that for full justice to be done to it a man who was at once a poet, a philosopher, and a great descriptive writer was needed, but on consideration doubts will soon begin to arise if this be so, and we begin to think that perhaps the story gains by an unaffected absence of the grand style. The first part of the story could not be improved, but the end is a sad spectacle for us men of letters — the uninspired trying to continue the work of the inspired.

Gosse. It is quite true that very few people continue the book after Crusoe leaves the island, and your description of the uninspired trying to continue the work of the inspired must be accepted, I think, as a just criticism and judgment of the book's end; and I suppose I must allow that if a man fails to hold the mean in his narrative, and all the way, from end to end, he cannot be looked upon as a genius of the first rank.

Moore. The man of talent may be inspired, but the moment of inspiration gone by, he writes like a dolt.

Gosse. Not so a man of genius; he always writes well ; he never gives the show away. But my apologies for a colloquialism seemingly necessary for the occasion. I see you look upon the end of Robinson Crusoe as a complete failure.

Moore. An end that nobody reads cannot be looked upon as else than a failure, and the true end seems so plain that I am puzzled. After the evangelisation of Friday I've forgotten if Crusoe taught Friday his catechism and his prayers; if he didn't, the oversight is incomprehensible; but if we begin by supposing that he did not miss this very English point, Crusoe would be moved to consider his own life in relation to Friday.

Gosse. He did not miss the evangelisation.

Moore. I am sincerely glad to hear it. After Friday had been instructed in the doctrine of the Atonement, the thought would cross Crusoe's mind that his life and the savage's would shape out into an admirable romance; but he would be deterred from writing the book for a long time, thinking that no one would ever read it, not even Friday.

Gosse. Pens and ink and paper are not available on a desert island.

Moore. There was a wreck.

Gosse. The wreck had gone to pieces long ago. True, he might have saved a good deal of writing material from the first wreck. But the dislike to pass out of this life without leaving some record of our passage through it is one entirely alien to the character of Robinson Crusoe. You would make him into an artist. Defoe was particularly careful to avoid this mistake, for he explains, as you would have seen if you had read the end of the book, that Robinson Crusoe does not write his story till he has exhausted all the occupations he can devise. It is not till he has tied up the last fruit tree that he sits down to write his story.

Moore. A time-worn literary trick that betrays the hack writer. Let us avail ourselves, if needs must be, of it on the island; and, accepting Defoe's own subterfuge, I say that the taming and instruction of Friday being completed there remains little daily work for Crusoe. Friday does the work, and, finding the afternoons a little languid, Crusoe begins to dream, and before long his dreams are of another ship come to rescue his manuscript. Another ship, he says, will come sooner or later, and he'd just as lief be read after his death as before. Crusoe should die before Friday, for some admirable pages might be written on the grief of the man Friday, intermingled with fears lest his kindred should return and eat him, Friday, not Crusoe; and Friday, true to his evangelisation, would bury Crusoe with all the prayers he could remember.

Gosse. But who would write this? You cannot have two pair of eyes on the island.

Moore. Crusoe must not meet with sudden death, rather an accident among the cliffs that would allow him to continue his memoirs from time to time. I would have the last page of the manuscript relate Crusoe's anxiety for Friday, who he foresees will die of grief, and Friday's last act, the placing of the manuscript in the cave hard by the grave which would be necessary for the completion of the story, for it is the manuscript that explains to the captain of the next ship that visits the island the presence of the skeleton by the grave. The discovery of and the reading of the manuscript would have given Defoe an opportunity to evolve a new soul — the captain's. How the poor savage must have grieved for his saviour and master! Like a dog, the captain mutters as he turns the last page.

Gosse. I can see that a good deal is to be said in favour of entrusting you with the task of providing new ends to old masterpieces.

Moore. If we begin to put jokes on each other we shall never arrive at the end of our task, which is a long one, a review of the history of prose narrative in England.

Gosse. Your end strikes me as admirable, but it would require a greater writer than Defoe to execute it, and I'm glad you were not by to suggest it.

Moore. Why?

Gosse. I'm afraid the new wine would have burst the old bottles — with that end in view he might not have succeeded in writing the story.

Moore. You must not think that I'm providing a definite plan for the completion of the story. I'm only throwing out hints. But there can be no doubt that Defoe would have done better had he kept Crusoe on the island. And it would be amusing to write the end on the lines I have suggested, doing for Defoe what

Wagner did for Gluck and what Liszt did for many writers. Why should the arrangements of masterpieces be limited to music? Why should we not rearrange literary masterpieces?

Gosse. The rearrangement would not prove acceptable.

Moore. It would, if the rearrangement were better than the original.

Gosse. Don Quixote is another masterpiece that ends unsatisfactorily.

Moore. I'm glad you mentioned Don Quixote. Defoe called him to your mind, for he, too, was a literary hack, writing many comedies, autos and poems, unworthy trash, till he stumbled upon a subject which he wrote as well as it could be written till he came to the end of his inspiration. The coming to the end of one's inspiration is always pathetic, and for Cervantes the loss was doubly cruel, for it came suddenly and went suddenly, like a wind. A fine wind it was while it lasted; a finer never blew peradventure, not excepting the wind that carried the plays along — Hamlet and Lear. Cervantes sailed out of harbour in a grand gale. Who lives that does not sometimes think of the Castilian gentleman, exalted by a long reading of the literature of knight errantry, discovering armour in a garret and repairing the helmet with brown paper on wire?

Gosse. Admirable, thrice admirable is the description of the knight himself. Nor do I think that it is going too far to say that never in literature has so perfect a correspondence been found between the spirit and the flesh. And all you who have sought for this correspondence will accept the knight of the rueful countenance as the unparalleled example in which the flesh or lack of flesh proclaims the soul.

Moore. Tourgueneff descried a fitting envelope for the spirit of Bazaroff, but Tourgueneff's conception is small compared with the world-wide figure of the knight riding forth by himself in the first instance, and then returning in search of an esquire. As we watch the twain riding side by side through the highlands, we seem to be looking upon some great sculpture of Egypt and Assyria. Never was the world so wide before nor gestures so eternal.

Gosse. And we seem to be listening to Shakespeare himself, who was a contemporary; and this sets me thinking that perhaps the special quality of their humour was not the insular possession of England, but belonged to the great century that produced these two men.

They could not have known each other, and yet

But I must not allow our conversation to drift into Shakespearean controversy. You said that never was the world so wide before nor gestures so eternal.

Moore. As in the first adventures when the knight charged the flock and afterwards the windmill. And is it not thrilling to remember that they were on their way to the inn in which Don Quixote was enrolled by the innkeeper into the order of knighthood; and indeed I cannot keep myself from mentioning the vigil undertaken at the instigation of the innkeeper, or of telling you that it was the innkeeper who sent the knight home in search of an esquire. The Don returns with Sancho mounted on an ass! Was ever before an imagination so epical? And how splendid the blanketing of Sancho in the inn and the account of the evil-smelling slut stealing by mistake into the knight's bed, and he lying between sleeping and waking, dreaming of Dulcinea, instead of into the bed of the lusty waggoner who had been looking forward to her all that day for many weary miles. After reading these pages I lay immersed in genius, like a mediaeval saint in God, the host still melting on his tongue; and I continued in ecstasy till the twain reached an almost savage landscape, admirably described.

The time must have been late in the afternoon, for there still lingers in my mind a memory of peaks brilliant against the sun setting, and my ear still holds like a shell Don Quixote's voice telling Sancho that he wishes to strip himself naked and stand upon his head, and Sancho begging the knight to refrain, saying that the sight of his master's naked rump in the air will bring up his stomach.

Gosse. You will allow me to interrupt you for a moment. The credit of introducing landscape into fiction has always been granted to Rousseau. But your mention of the rugged landscape in Cervantes puts it into my mind that the honour of introducing landscape background into fiction really belongs to Cervantes. I remember the landscape you allude to; it is brushed in with the energy of Salvator Rosa.

Moore. It is, indeed, and many others. But I would remind you that yourself deprecated the introduction of Shakespearean controversy into our talk, and you did well, and I did ill when I spoke of Egyptian and Assyrian sculpture, for the landscapes through which the knight and his escort follow their adventures are superterrestrial. We have left our miserable little planet for a larger one, Jupiter maybe, and the book drops from our hands in amazement when the Don throws his heels into the air. Cervantes' last inspiration, no, the last is Sancho turning in the saddle, and catching sight of the knight's shanks above his shirt, he drops into reverie, falls to considering his relation, for he is on his way back to recount the knight's last exploits to Dulcinea.

The book should have ended here, for God himself could not have invented adventures more wonderful than those that have been. I have forgotten if the meeting with the gang of convicts, and the subsequent misunderstanding, and the severe beating he receives as soon as he freed them from their chains, comes just before or just after Sancho's departure. For the sake of a clear division between the inspired and the uninspired Cervantes, I would have it come before. But it may come in the next division of the story, Nature being the real author and Cervantes no more than her mouthpiece. Nature is good at detail, but lacks rhythm; she lingers and spoils the harvest with an aftermath. It may come in the next division, yet I do not see how it can, for we are introduced to new characters, and stories are told that no one remembers— Moorish maidens who became Christians and such like. A faint memory lingers in me of a curate. Do you remember?

Gosse. My unfortunate memory, oh, my unfortunate memory.

Moore. There is no reason for being disheartened, not this time, for it may be doubted if even Mr Fitzmaurice Kelly could give any lucid account of these stories, though he refused to collaborate with me in an edition that would exclude all extraneous matter and follow closely the fortunes of the knight and his esquire. He was right, for his closer study of the book than mine had revealed to him, let us hope, the truth that the original inspiration was too wonderful to be continued by Gods or men; and henceforth Cervantes, the hack writer, turns the handle of his hurdy gurdy, setting Don Quixote and his esquire dancing to the old tune — Don Quixote starting out on some new adventure, Sancho holding up his hands.

Gosse. It has often been said that a finer and nobler nature begins to appear in the knight in the second part; and I do not think that this is true to nature, for if we contain any grain of good it ripens as we live.

Moore. The change in the knight, if there be any change, does not help us to any new appreciation of him, and I say this though I know in saying it I am at variance with Tourgueneff, who drew the attention of the Moscow students to the death of Don Quixote trampled to death by a herd of swine, and to the last words of the chivalrous knight. I will not ask you what they are; I, too, have forgotten them, and only remember that: though all things pass away, even beauty, chivalry and truth, goodness remains. A stupid paraphrase, doubtless, but a beautiful idea it is, truly, that he who had followed goodness all his life long should find his death at last under cloven hooves. But the herd of swine is introduced into the story casually — a casual thought introduced into a casually composed sequel in which Sancho becomes a pour of proverbial wisdom while the knight rides wrapped in his meditations, like Falstaff, for Shakespeare, too, intellectualised his knight, thereby puzzling the mummers who try to portray him. But, as you just said, we must not allow Shakespearean controversy to beguile us from our search of a first-rate mind expressing itself in English prose narrative.

Gosse. As that is our quest, it seems to me that I cannot do better than to ask you to put a precise meaning on the words: a first-rate mind. Kant's mind was first-rate, but it was not the sort of mind that instigated works of art, and it has often occurred to me that something more than mere mind is necessary to produce the pictures — shall we say? — of Manet and Degas? Yet a mind is visible in their works.

Moore. I wonder if we can differentiate between the mind and the instincts of the mind? If we can, I should prefer to say that instincts of the mind are discernible in the works of the great masters. But I'm always apprehensive of metaphysical quicksands and mists, and before putting down the helm I will remark that the artist's instinct is the sail that carries the boat along, and his reason the rudder that keeps the boat's head to the wind; without a rudder the sail loses the wind. The simile seems to hold good. An instinct will carry the artist some distance, but if we have not reason he will drift like the rudderless boat, making no progress at all.