Avowals, Chapter 14

London: Privately Printed, 1 September 1919, pages 251-263, 4,274 words

Avowals is a nonlinear volume of sixteen chapters. Chapters 12 and 15 are essays in worldbuilding; the rest are essays in literary criticism. The chapters appear separately in the Aesthetics and Worlds pillars of George Moore Interactive. All are included in the GMi Kindle edition of Avowals.

CHAP. XIV.

As soon as I returned from the stage, the director of La Revue Bleue drew me aside and said: you read your lecture very well; but why didn't you read it like that to me? And while I searched for a suitable answer, the appearance of Mademoiselle Richenberg brought a light of divination into his face, and he said: you know Mademoiselle Richenberg?

Of course many friends came to tell me that I had not lost my voice, and that every word had been heard, et que ma conférence est une des plus jolie de ce temps-ci. Even la grande diseuse had a compliment for me, and in a mood of satisfaction at not having failed altogether in my enterprise (if that word does not exaggerate the importance of going to Paris to deliver a lecture on Shakespeare and Balzac) I returned home to my hotel, the excitement of addressing a French audience evaporating as I passed street after street, till on reaching the Rond Point I stopped, brought to bay: after all, what have I done but deliver a lecture? A commonplace event enough. A little later I took a different view and walked, assuring myself with much complacency that my lecture was quite different from the amorphous spoutings with which the professional lecturer seeks to entertain an audience. And with which, I added, sadly, he produces better entertainment than my elaborate composition, elaborate, yet not elaborate enough, for in a foreign language one cannot re-weave. And deep in meditation I pursued my way through the scintillating Champs Élysées, saying: it is not till the third weaving that my little patterns begin to appear; in the first two I am like everybody else, and on these words my thoughts fell suddenly into recollections of the summer I had spent in Dublin, returning to the text whenever I found myself alone, amplifying and enriching it and with good results, for my lecture contained some pretty bits; but I had not been able to pick the woof to threads again and re-weave, the labour of re-weaving in a foreign language being too great. Or was it laziness? No; I am never lazy when literature calls. Or was it that nine thousand words are too many to concentrate on in a foreign language? My English tangles very often, and the knots are hard to untie, I cried, and remembering that I had not spent more time on the French text than I had on many an English, I continued: words I have always and in abundance, and an ear for rhythm; my enduring foe is composition; and it was to composition that I succumbed rather than to language, unless it be contended that in English I should have had more courage and would have pulled the whole thing to threads and rewoven it.

How that verb to weave bores me, I murmured, and I tried to cast the lecture out of my head, and succeeded in doing so for a little while, but it was back again presently; and at the Place de la Concorde my thoughts were at flirt with the belief that it were easier to write in French about things than abstractions; and as a lecture must be largely subjective it would seem that mine should have been written in English and translated into French. But a translator's French brings my stomach up. It did that and copiously when Esther Waters was translated by a retired custom-house officer, and a third of the text, one hundred pages, eliminated by a journalist (four hundred quarter pages) so that it might be made to fit the format that Hachette insisted upon, fool that he is, treating me as he treated Tourguéneff, for experience throws light only on the waters we have passed through, none on those that lie ahead of us. How true. Good God, how true! Again I pursued my way, dreaming of the hour that had gone by till the thought of a bit of criticism that I had not been able to introduce into the text stopped me in my walk, and I stood thinking that this overlooked bit of criticism would have set forth more plainly than anything in the lecture the difference between the seventeenth and the twentieth century. So it was in a great humour of dissatisfaction that I set forth again, turning over in my mind the scene I had selected to show two great intelligences in the practice of their art, the scene between Juliet and her nurse; the nurse coming to Juliet, saying: he is dead, he is dead, he is dead! She is speaking of Tybalt, but Juliet in her great stress of mind believes Romeo the one dead, and forthwith breaks into speech too rhetorical to be accepted as an expression of true grief. No doubt the critical fraternity have found the wording of Juliet's grief lacking in that simplicity which is part of grief, but it is not to the wording of the scene that I was minded to call their attention, but to Shake­speare's shallow comprehension of it: for after setting his heroine bewailing her lover with all the eloquence he can supply her with, he sets her bewailing her kinsman immediately after, and with the same eloquence, thereby departing from true grief, which always weeps with undivided mind. But of a certainty Balzac would have felt that Juliet could have had no thought for her kinsman's death, not then at least: he would have made a point of it, showing how joy overpowers grief, leaving grief without words, mayhap, without a tear; and this natural stint of the heart would have cheered Balzac's genius to carry the scene beyond the imagination of the world's greatest poet. But thou'rt pitting sunrise against midday, the Shakespearean critic will cry, which is true, for Shakespeare was a young man when he wrote Romeo and Juliet; his inward gaze had strengthened when he rewrote Hamlet; but the waxing of Shakespeare's mind is not part of this examination but the presumption that Balzac, at the height of his genius, would have tried for something more than Shakespeare tried for.

As all will yield this point without squabble it will be no more than fair to the poet to consider if the depths of the human mind which Balzac might descend into in his narrative and make plain and convincing could be dealt with on the meagre stage; and if Shakespeare did not do well to welcome rhetoric in this issue of drama, for, as has often been said, the first obligation of the artist is to find his strength in his medium. Even so, the question has not been disposed of, for by accepting the alleged stint of his medium Shakespeare puts his actress in a quandary, his actress being part of his medium; and the quandary lies in this, that the mime cannot dismiss contradictions and discrepancies airily like the critic, saying that they are part and parcel of the man's genius. Much more than the critic the mime is part and parcel of the poet's genius; she is it and it is she, indivisibly as body and soul. She has become part and parcel of her creator — a transubstantiation that we can appreciate is this one. Her voice passing away from her becomes Juliet's, and all her body pulses with Juliet's passion; her ideas, her gestures, her gait are of Verona; and every line and word in the text that is not with her is against her. So it must be allowed that the scene between Juliet and the nurse is a pause, a seventh day in which the creator undoes his work in failing to supply the mime with true nature, giving her instead a spout of words with which she may be able to conceal his shortcomings and get for herself peradventure such a clapping of hands as will drown that voice of conscience which awakens in every woman who essays the part. But can it be that none before me has perceived this disparity, no other critic? But whether the first or last it is certain that every one of the women who has passed out of herself into Juliet did not do so without feeling this scene to drop; and none perchance so acutely as the bad mime, for she who is possessed of reason says to herself: we may not grieve equaIIy for two misfortunes, and of all no one grieves when her heart is overflowing with joy at her lover's escape from death.

And this poor mime meditates and ponders, her acting getting worse and worse (we are supposing the show to be her own, for if it were not she would have been cast out long ago), till one night, after a depressing talk with the manager, a hope quickens in her that though the tangle is beyond her powers to unravel a psychologist might help her. She has read novels, and there is one among the novelists who can weigh such trifles, whether a woman should accept a cup of tea or reject it, so the poor mime says: it will not be difficult for him to distinguish between two griefs. She goes to him, her heart swelling with hope, and we may pass a moment profitably in the contemplation of the twain sitting beside each other; the pale and drawn face of the agitated mime, and the large, impassive, shaven face of the Bostonian psychologist holding his chin, seeking for words, and in such painful congestion of phrase is he that the bad mime begins to fear lest her rash adventure will precipitate an attack of apoplexy. At last the spasms are ended, and the poor lady mime stands lost and speechless in a desert of qualifying clauses.

As soon as this amusement of my imagination had died away, and I passed out of the arcade, I said to myself: but elsewhere Shakespeare's texts are often in conflict with the human mind and its instincts, and nowhere more notably than in Falstaff's speeches; and I walked as far as the Hôtel Continental, immersed in regret that I had classed Falstaff among the vast humanities of our poetry, and it was not till I reached the Rue Castiglione that, returning to the subject of my meditation, Falstaff, I said it would be interesting to persuade the actors who have played him to relate their experiences, but acting springs out of the subconscious; actors feel, dream, aspire, but reason rarely, unless they are bad actors; we should question them in vain, none could give an account of himself in his study of the part. But is this sure? The actor, if he were caught unawares, might let drop an illuminating phrase, and I remembered with pleasure Rachel's famous: j'ai bisquée. As soon as she began to suspect and to hope that she was something more than a girl who could pick up a livelihood by reciting in the cafés, she went to an actor for advice, saying she thought she had a turn for the stage. After hearing some poems, he said: you have a nice voice, but I cannot tell what your talent may be till I've heard you in a part. He gave her Berenice to study, and in a few days she returned to astonish him with an entirely new reading, and with an acceptable one. How, asked the breathless actor, did all this come to you? And his astonishment was not lessened when she told him that she had not thought about the character at all. Nor had she even read the play, only her own part. I tried to imagine, said this woman of great genius, that it was all happening to me, et que j'ai bisquée.

Nobody had ever remarked that Berenice sulked till Rachel discovered her in one. As likely as not Racine was not aware of it, and a regret welled up in me that I had never taken Weir round to the public-house after one of his performances of Falstaff, and asked him if he thought the character lent itself to as many interpretations as Hamlet did, or some other question even more likely to lead him into talk. No better actor than Weir ever lived, yet he could do no more than to repeat the text of the play. In the slang of the theatre, he got nothing on it. As I crossed the next street and entered the arcade again I remembered the night that Tree sent one of his footmen to ask me to come to see him in his dressing-room. The invitation was opportune, for I felt I had something to say about Falstaff, and to whom could I say it more pointedly than to Tree, who had just come off the stage in his great belly? Your Falstaff, I said to him, is as good as any that have been, and none will be better, but the part has been intellectualised out of all possibility of acting. The old vice that Cervantes fell into in the second part of Don Quixote, fell into, it is true, but not so flagrantly as Shakespeare did when he set the knight musing and deciding what honour is and what honour is not at the end of the scene in Shakespeare's version, at the end of the act in yours. We go through our lives, Tree, victims of conventions and prejudices, and if I hadn't come into the theatre to-night it is possible that I should never have apprehended how entirely artificial and vain Falstaff is, and all the way hither my imagination was soothed with the entirely natural character of Sancho, who would provide you, I said, with a much better acting part. It cannot be that you don't agree with me, Tree, for in speaking Falstaff's speeches you must have often felt that they are against the character, briefly he is too heavily intellectualised to be acted. Tree did not answer; but it was plain that he brooded over what I had said and was becoming aware that the part of Falstaff contained certain irreconcilable elements, and that all he had missed in the part might be attributed to Shakespeare.

His tacit acquiescence in the criticism that Falstaff was barely an acting part encouraged me to remark that it was very odd that Tolstoy, who could not be said to be committed like our critics to praise Shakespeare in and out of season, when he is right and when he is wrong, especially when he is wrong, thought proper to remark that Falstaff is the only character in Shakespeare's plays whose words are in agreement with his acts. The very opposite is the truth to me, and you are of the same opinion, Tree, I can see you are; it could not be else, for you have lived the part. But those who have studied the texts — Tree began. You mean those who read Shakespeare twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four, as Max says, I broke in: Sir Sidney Lee, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Quiller Couch, all the other Sirs; for everybody who has studied the text of Shakespeare has been knighted. Shakespeare's reward is to be served by a vast knighthood. But Tolstoy didn't want to be knighted. It may be that Shakespeare wrote the part to prove that the mummer was the author, for his vast genius must have foreseen that — But no, there is no cryptogram in it, for Tolstoy's prime business is to put people wrong, and that being so, Falstaff, the most stagy figure in Shakespeare, was his selection as the most natural. Get thyself to Spain, Tree, and quickly. But which wilt thou play? Sancho, or the Don? Sancho is ourselves when he calls for the island, but Falstaff calls for sack only for that the audience must be made to laugh, and we believe in him neither in tipple nor in love. Of course, I should play the Don, Tree answered. But why this bitter quarrel with Falstaff? Because I too am a knight-errant, but have forfeited my knighthood perhaps by a lie. And I told him of a certain purple passage in my lecture. But you can withdraw the passage, said Tree. No, Tree, I cannot, for the lecture is in French, and I might not find any­thing as good to replace it, but I am conscience-stricken for the retaining of it.

As I pursued my way along the echoing arcades it seemed to me that this conversation about Falstaff was the last I had with Tree; and I might have meditated upon my dead friend till I was well past the Hôtel Meurice, if it had not been that thoughts of something else that I had failed to include in my lecture pursued me to the door of the Hôtel Brighton, causing me to halt as I ascended the stairs, causing my hands to drop from my cravat and to leave it dangling, while I considered how it was that I had omitted to quote some passages from Madame Bovary even more ridiculous than the one in which the moon looked like a great silver candelabra at the bottom of the river, and afterwards like a serpent with silver scales.

Christianity, I said, on entering my room, is not a stranger belief than the cult of the inevitable word. This strange religion arose suddenly in a small country house near Rouen, and spread quickly from thence over the entire world till the cow-boys of Texas rode after the inflamed heifer, shouting: she ran in her intrepid naked­ ness — referring not to the heifer, but to some fisher girl who ran along the Boulogne sands in her pelt — in what book I have forgotten. But how did this belief in the inevitable word arise? Like all beliefs and diseases, mysteriously.

In the fifties was the Word and the Word was with Flaubert, I said, and began to trace the origin of Flaubert's reputation to a reaction against Byron's Laras and Corsairs, his going to Greece to die for an idea, to Chateaubriand's tomb, the one he built by the side of the sounding sea to pirates and brigands who had become so much more intolerable in literature than in reality that everybody welcomed the idea that a writer had arisen who did not try to dine in a baronial hall among retainers, but was satisfied with a chop at home, and did not keep for pets, pythons, eagles, wolves or jaguars, who preferred cats, and spent his time at the window in his dressing-gown watching the Seine flowing by, thinking all the time of the inevitable Word, which he never found till late in the evening.

It was easy for the grocer to understand that it took a long time to find the inevitable Word; for himself had sought it in vain, and he appreciated Monsieur Flaubert, who wrote with difficulty just like everybody else, and when it became known for certain that Madame Bovary was written in a dressing-gown, the reaction against romanticism carried the book along with it. A better explanation than this I cannot find for the extraordinary belief that has possessed France for over fifty years, and if this explanation prove inacceptable, we shall have to hold by the somewhat depressing belief, for which, indeed, much can be said, that the masterpiece is but our mood, and that as soon as the mood passes — all moods except the Bible, Shakespeare and Sterne pass in a hundred years­ — the inspired and the uninspired are as like as twins.

As I took off my boots I remembered Baudelaire, who was the only one who dared to write coldly about this book, and if he knew, others must have known, for he was not as clever a man as Gautier or Sainte-Beuve. Many others must have known too that Madame Bovary was not as well written a book as Eugénie Grandet. But for the reason that I have given, or at least hinted at, they held their tongues; they too were duped by the mood of the moment, and it may be that Gautier felt it were better to teach by example than by exhortation. Nor were they the first to acquiesce in the universal folly which is man.  Constantine acquiesced in Christianity, and Henry IV. in Catholicism. But we must not suppose they were duped, nor were Gautier and Sainte-Beuve, nor was Gerard de Nerval. Baudelaire, we know, was not. But what is all this to me, since I was duped, and to the top of my bent? Year after year I believed Madame Bovary and L' Education Sentimentale to be great works. Good God! I cried, and stopped on the third button — that article published in Cosmopolis will one day be brought up against me, and I know not how it is to be destroyed, unless I come back to Paris with another lecture in which I shall expose the stiff, paralysed narrative, the short sentence trussed like a fowl, with the inevitable adjective, in the middle of everyone. To repent is a great temptation, and it is hard to apprehend how one was duped; for even in the years of Cosmopolis it must have been clear that the writing of patter represents the highest point of literary skill; and so slight was Flaubert's literary skill that it would be difficult to find in L'Education Sentimentale three consecutive lines of dialogue. Arnaud meets Frederick in the Boulevard. How are you? said he, and taking Frederick's arm he spoke to him for half-an-hour about indifferent things.  Poor old Flaubert, he fell into this formula and stuck in it.  My lecture must however be free from exaggeration, for although Flaubert does not sit on the throne, he is entitled to a seat on the steps of the throne, as Yeats would say; he must not be hustled out of the throne-room unceremoniously, for it can be said with truth that he is better than his fellows, better than Zola, better than Daudet, better than Goncourt — for this last one I have still a leaning, and remember Manette Salomon, despite his frills and furbelows! It will be enough for me to say that the business of a narrator is to narrate, and that Flaubert had little or nothing to narrate. And to say this will be justifiable, and to point out that a narrative should never be the same, but always moving, and to make my meaning clear I shall have to speak of Apuleius and his Golden Ass, saying: a delicious dancing narrative, always alive, always sparkling like the Odyssey, for Apuleius spent many years of his life in Athens, and learnt the secrets of Greek narrative. Everything comes from Greece, I said, and was falling asleep when a remembrance of Fotis awakened me, and I said: the most truly human love scene written for eighteen hundred years, neither animal nor angelic, and so pretty, as graceful as a kitten, and I continued to admire till the very words of the old Roman poet began singing in my head:

She had about her middle a white and cleane apron, and she was girded about her bodie under her pappes with a swathell of redde silke, and she stirred the potte and turned the meate with her fayer and white handes, in such sorte that with stirrings and turnings the same, her loines, and hippes did likewise move and shake, whiche was in my minde a comely sight to see. These thinges when I sawe, I was halfe amased, and stoode musinge with my selfe, and my courage came then upon me, whiche before was skant. And I spake unto Fotis merely, and said: O Fotis, how trimly you can stirre the potte, and how finelie (with shakinge your buttockes) you can make potage. O happy and twise happy is he to whom you give leave and licence but to touche you there.

We have been writing love scenes for eighteen hundred years, yet it may be doubted if one could be discovered as free from subterfuge and deceit as Apuleius's relation of the pleasure he felt in watching the swing of Fotis's hips and the poise of her body as she moves among her pots and pans. Be it noted that she is displayed as she would wish to be, for what young girl would not like a young man to admire the sway of her hips? It requires great talent to omit all sentimentality and to keep the thing what it essentially is — a pretty sight. And Apuleius has done this. We forget that the girl is a servant girl, and that Apuleius is a scholar, and that the twain are in the kitchen. We forget all detail, so intense and complete is the humanity. The touch is exquisite throughout, spontaneous and true; and never more so than when Fotis promises to relieve Apuleius of his desire and redeems her promise, coming to him when he lies in bed with wine and flowers, kissing him prettily. And then I seemed to lose control over my thoughts, and must have fallen asleep soon after.