Conversations in Ebury Street, Chapter 19

London: William Heineman, 1 January 1924, pages 267-277, 3,682 words

Conversations in Ebury Street is a nonlinear volume of nineteen chapters. Chapters 7-11 are essays in art criticism; chapter 19 is 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 ebook of Conversations in Ebury Street in the GMi Shop.

XIX

One day in early childhood I was taken into the library at Moore Hall to be shown in a portrait of my grandfather painted in Spain when he was my age; we were compared feature by feature, grandfather and I, nose, eyes, and mouth eliciting unexpected points of resemblance. Were George in his grandfather's clothes, my father said, none would suspect that he had not sat for the portrait; and despite my protests William Malowney was told to return the little boy in green to his place above the library door. I watched him through gathering tears, for I had looked forward to wearing Spanish clothes and to bringing our visitors to see me in grandfather. But the Spanish clothes! where were they? and with my sorrow already half forgotten I seized Betty M'Donald by the hand, crying: Come, Betty, and help me to find the clothes. Master George, the clothes are not in the house. Yes, they are, Betty; in the store-room or in the lumber-room. My father and mother laughed at my impulsiveness, and I heard that my grandfather did not leave Spain till he was twenty. But he wouldn't have left his clothes behind him, I answered, whereat I was laughed at again; and determined to prove myself in the right, I beguiled Betty M'Donald into many vain searches through the litter that a century gathers, and I do not think it was until I had outgrown the Spanish uniform or Court dress that the desire to parade as my grandfather passed from me, and my interest was transferred from the little boy in green to the sad old gentleman in white waistcoat over the chimneypiece — my grandfather at the age of sixty, the author of many books, written in his library, so Betty told me.

I was pleased to hear that I had a clever grandfather, and viewed more favourably than before the prim chocolate­-coloured coat, one shoulder showing against the dead gold of the armchair, and the voluminous cravat swathing him chin-high. But more than the external aspects of the portrait, the kindly, peaceful face enticed me and led me into a love of the library in which he had lived, writing histories and reading it would seem books of travel in preference to any others. He had had a paralytic stroke early in life and could not undertake long journeys — Betty's explanation of how he came to like reading about Chile, Peru, and Paraguay. I liked better the words: Syria, Persia, and Egypt, for my father had travelled in these countries and brought home many drawings of pyramids and camels, and was easily wheedled in the drawing-room after dinner into telling stories of the bringing of a boat across the hills from Joppa to the Dead Sea. And certain that there was no Dead Sea in a country called Chile, I would turn to the round table to read of scimitars and daggers in the Arabian Nights, or to ask Betty to tell me about the robbers who sallied from our lake islands in olden time to raid the villages along the shores of Lough Carra, and from her I heard that it was Fion the Fair, the greatest robber of all, who had built the castle lying beyond the bay. She could tell me nothing about the castle lying to the left under the Brownstown shore, which was a pity, for cormorants used to roost there every evening; but Fion would put forth, she said, on a raft and carry off cattle and sheep, everything he could lay hands on, including prisoners that he held to ransom. I asked her if there was much about Fion in my grandfather's books. I don't think there can be, Master George; your grandfather was born in Spain and never heard about Fion the Fair. Why did you not tell him? He never asked me. What did my grandfather write about? I haven't read any of his books; they are far too learned for me. I shall read them when I grow up, I replied triumphantly, my enthusiasm for my grandfather's writings abating somewhat when she began to tell me that a certain Galway historian, O'Flaherty, or O'Flanagan, had got ahead of him. The words might mean that O'Flaherty knew something that my grandfather did not know, or that he wrote better, or that O'Flaherty, hearing my grandfather was writing a history, sat up at night and got his book published first.

I was sorry indeed that my grandfather had failed as an historian, for that much of Betty's story I believed, but not the part about O'Flaherty. Galway and Mayo were rival counties, Galway being always a little ahead of Mayo in hunting and in shooting, but until the name of O'Flaherty was spoken I did not know that Galway had a priority of literature. And my thoughts turning from Betty to my father, I began to ask myself if I dared speak to him about his father. I had been enjoined by my mother never to mention the name of Augustus, his brother's name, or to speak to him of my grandmother, who had died within my memory; but it seemed to me that I might ask him why grandfather had not written about pyramids, scimitars, and the Dead Sea (my father never wearied of telling his travels in Syria). What did he write about? My father answered: Your grandfather, George, wrote several historical works, notably one on the English Commonwealth; all are in the library: and the question I longed to put: Why didn't people buy his books? died on my lips, so aloof and distant was his manner. I cannot recall the words with which my father escaped from me and would not fill the gap with an invention. My next memory is of myself standing before the portrait sorry for my grandfather, realising for the first time that he lived among his wife and children conscious of his alienation. And not daring to question my father again, I turned to my mother, who, though she had never seen her father-in-law, had heard of him from his wife, and she told me that my grandfather had left five hundred pounds to defray the expenses of publishing his history of the French Revolution. My mother did not know why the executors had not published the history, nor to what purpose the five hundred pounds had been applied, and I was never altogether free from the suspicion that my father had acted dishonourably, till my brother showed me the preface to the history of the French Revolution in which my grandfather tells that he shrank from the task of putting the finishing hand to his history. Having published, he says, several times, but never with success, I am tired of publication­ in my lifetime.  Rather than exhibit himself in his own house as a failure, he preferred that fame should be posthumous. And turning to my brother, I asked him if it were not his duty to complete and revise his grand­father's work; he, in his tum, said that I was the person to edit the history, to which I made no answer but stood looking at the portrait, thinking that it was becoming like me — I mean that I was becoming the portrait of my grandfather in old age. He was sixty-seven when be died, and the thought crossed my mind there and then that if I lived to that age the likeness would have reached its height, and that if I lived on into my seventies the likeness would begin to wane, some of it remaining recognisable to the end: the high, round forehead, the large nose, the small, truthful eyes. For my eyes are truthful, I said to myself; they belie me if they are not; and I fell to thinking that though truthful they did not tell a soul as beautiful as my grandfather's.  He brought, I said, a beautiful soul into the world and took it away with him, leaving little of it to his son, and none, I am afraid, to his grandson.  But I regret nothing, for had Nature given me my grandfather's beautiful soul — a soul of almost Virgilian melancholy — I should have remained at Moore Hall, reliving my grandfather's life.

Nature designs no two leaves alike. I needed my grandfather and my grandfather needs me, for none other would have admired his portrait as I do, understanding all the pretty accents that the painter caught among the grey hair tossed about the forehead; none other would have valued the sincere and simple drawing of the eyes, or been able to affirm that the portrait was painted by one of Lawrence's pupils, who, however, included much more of the individual life of his sitter than is to be found in any of the master's portraits. As the portrait was painted in the beginning of the nineteenth century, about 1830 or 1833, it lacks the art of the great periods; and yet it may be doubted if even the great periods told a story more plainly than Wyatt, a little too plainly, perhaps, but how truthfully the reader will be able to judge for himself without seeing the painting, for my grandfather's artless confession is a literal translation of Wyatt's portrait.

I, this day, complete my sixty-fourth year. I have for some time been engaged in a history of the French Revolution. I early in life began collecting books on this subject, and they now fill up an entire side of my very pretty library in this beautiful place. They are most of them bad in style, and worse in spirit and sentiment. There are few of them which I could endure reading were it not for the task I have laid down for myself. This task has the effect of giving interest to the most wretched productions. Any book which offers me the choice of a new fact, or the solution of any difficulty attached to old facts, interests me, and I find amusement in examining it. Amusement and the banishment of what the French call ennui are my principal objects. Beautiful as this place is, and much as I love it, I confess I have not always been able to exclude ennui from its precincts. There are hours in which I have not been able to keep it away; general vague reading, without any specific object, afforded me no protection against it, but since I have sat down to my tuk I have scarcely known what it is. I have a rough copy carried on nearly to the present time. To every written page I have left a blank one, in which I put down any new facts or reflections or news. I wish to go on for some time longer in this manner. But my age, as mentioned at the head of this preface, admonishes me there is no time to be lost if I wish the public ever to have an insight into my history. My rough copy with alternate blank pages it is impossible for anyone to make anything of, and it is not till after my death I wish my history to appear, not in the form in which my rough copy exhibits it.

I have several times published, but never with any success, so that I am tired of publication in my lifetime. Besides, as I foresee my history will be pretty voluminous, I do not like the trouble of superintending the proofs. As I am a man of fortune, I leave by my will five hundred pounds to defray the expenses of publication. As the publication is in this manner ordered and appointed by me in my testamentary deposition, no one who survives me will be answerable for anything it contains. I foresee many things I say will give offence, but my objects are truth and my country. As amusement was my great object in undertaking this task, it may be said I have already gained my end in never knowing ennui since I began it. But having written a history of the French Revolution, impregnated with all the feelings and sentiments of an Englishman, and written in a style, I hope, purely and thoroughly English, I am ambitious it should be read after me. I have had no celebrity in my life. But a prospect of this posthumous fame pleases me at this moment. I may say with Erasmus: Illud certe praesagio, de meis lucubrationibus, qualescumque sunt, candidius judicaturam posteritatem, though I cannot add with him: Tametsi nec de meo seculo queri possum. Having missed the applause, and even notice, of my age, I ought perhaps to be indifferent about the opinions of those that follow; their applause, should I ever gain it, will not reach me when the grave has closed over me. This is true; but we are so made that while we are living we think with pleasure that we shall not be forgotten after our deaths. The nature of this feeling is beautifully expressed by Fielding in a passage which Gibbon has transcribed in the account of his own life. What adds to my wish that my history should be read after my death is, that I am convinced no account of the great event of the French Revolution in all its parts will be fair and impartial coming from a Frenchman, none certainly will do justice to my country. I am anxious to have the merits of the Duke of Wellington duly appreciated as having done more in war than any captain that ever existed. He entered on the contest with more disadvantages on his side, as will be explained in the history. He had greater difficulties to encounter, and arrived at more glorious results. Though not a Frenchman, I am perfectly acquainted with the French language, and there are few Frenchmen better informed with respect to the history, literature, and what are called the statistics of France than I am, so that I conceive my­self perfectly well qualified, as much as any Frenchman, for the task I have undertaken. In this improved copy which I am now transcribing, I break the history into chapters, with a view to the grouping of the facts of which it consists. It is this which I call grouping that distinguishes the task of the historian from that of the annotist, and there is no point of greater importance in a history than the manner in which this grouping is executed. The deficiencies of some celebrated historians in this particular may be noticed….

In reading this fragment the reader, if he have an ear for English rhythms, will remember Goldsmith, for the influence of this very English writer is visible almost everywhere down to the close of the century and long afterwards in Ireland. His comment will be: An almost anonymous prose, a still reflection of the writer's mind, altogether free from that pleasure and pride in writing which began with Carlyle and was continued by Meredith and Stevenson. For a man to write so well as my grand­father and to miss the satisfaction of readers, demands a more searching explanation than Betty M’Donald's, and I think we find the explanation we need in the preface; for does he not speak of himself as an amateur, and literary history furnishes few examples of men of fortune attaining literary celebrity, none, I think, of a man of fortune living in exile among an alien people, and how alien England is to Ireland the Irish Protestant knows. Protestants and Catholics do not mix, and the Moores of Ashbrook and Moore Hall were always staunch Protestants; an ancestor fought on the side of William at the Battle of the Boyne. Two centuries of Ireland do not make an Irishman, though two centuries may succeed occasionally in absorbing those of English stock; but in the next generation ancestral memories break out, and whosoever does not yield to them loses himself, as I think my grandfather did in the house overlooking Lough Carra, and as I should have done had I remained there. He would have done well to have left his house for a country upon whose traditions he could draw whilst using Moore Hall as a dreaming house, his spirit going forth at the end of the day's work to wander in the deserted corridors, in and out of the empty rooms, the doors opening before him, meeting everywhere pleasant detentions, finding one in an almost forgotten water-colour, another in a faded curtain of remembered pattern, and still another in a chess-board. We had relatives in India who sent home ivories and porcelains and rare carpets, but his own books would in the end beguile him from these; and a book out of its place catching his eye, he would ask himself who was the negligent reader who had forgotten to put it back on its appointed shelf, and write instructions to Betty M'Donald for the better keeping of his library, without, however, asking that a needed book should be sent to him. Moore Hall, he would feel, must not be despoiled of anything, for so did I feel always, and I cannot think that my grandfather thought less kindly of the house over against Lough Carra, nor that he was blinder than I was to the complete enjoyment of it. No fear could have ever disturbed him that a Land Act would rob him of his dreaming house, or that it would be burnt by Irish rebels. He never was roused from his bed by a fetch-light and flung, as I was, across the hearthrug, breaking my wrist in the fall.

A Collis fracture, Tonks said it was, and he went away in search of a surgeon, returning an hour later with one who set my wrist, and whilst setting it questioned me about the accident. But I could tell him no more than that I had broken my wrist in a dream; on seeing a flame shoot up, I had plunged forward to quench a burning house. A burning house! they said; but what house? I answered that I did not know, nor was it till the burnings of our houses began two years ago in Ireland that I connected my dream with the burning of Moore Hall; but when the spark was put to the train of thought, a day seldom passed without my seeing in my imagination Moore Hall blazing amid its woods, casting a fierce light over the tranquil lake, lighting up the old ruins on the island. The lake, I said, is several hundred yards distant, and the water that will be pumped from it will not avail to quench the fire. My house will burn like a torch. Moreover, even if the villagers came to quench the flames, the Republican Army would not allow them to do so. Every­thing will be lost; and I doubted not the fulfilment of my dream; and my thoughts turning to an eighteenth­-century Dresden tea and coffee service, my heart began to ache till I could no longer endure the thought of its possible perishing and moved from my armchair to the writing-table to ask that it might be sent to me. But no more than a few lines of the letter were written; the thought that a trained packer would be needed to ensure safe transport stayed my hand. The news, I said, of the emptying of the house will be a signal for the burning of it; and I returned to my chair thinking of my grand­father's portrait: Which my steward can take from its frame and wrap in a newspaper for Tom Ruttledge, who is coming over to London; why should he not bring it with him? And it was I know not how many days after the posting of the letter to Reilly that a telegram was handed to me: Moore Hall was burnt last night.

Conventionally we die only once in a lifetime, but in truth our lives are beset with deaths, small and great. I lost father and mother and brother without conscious­ness of any deadly disaster having befallen me, an admission that will be interpreted as an absorbing egoism, a hardness of heart; but this judgment will be reversed by a memory of Virgil's line: Sunt lacrimae rerum et men­tem mortalia tangunt. The words will rise to the surface of the mind like a strain of music; they have attained to the condition of music in the long years and to the condition of drama when the woman in the play tells that she is not thinking of her dead children but her five beautiful dolls. We left the theatre railing against what we wished to consider as nonsense, but could not even then, and since then only the bluntest have remained aliens from the thought that the sorrow occasioned by the loss of little things is often deeper than any we can feel for greater things. Her dolls were the half-witted woman's dreams, and to-day I stand in near relation to her, for my dreaming house is gone, with only the portrait saved to hang on the first landing in Ebury Street in a little lobby, whence it looks out and catches my eyes as I come downstairs, a sort of fetch-light or corpse-candle, reminding me that my race is over, betrayed, scattered, and in exile. Every race has its day, it says, and every creed; every grief, every joy, dies sooner or later. Memory outlives the dead; it, too, dies, but we are powerless to crush or to bury it; and were I to remove the portrait to a garret and tum its face to the wall, my grandfather's eyes would still haunt me and oblige me to rehang it in the lobby, for I shall lack strength always to write to the director of a public gallery and ask him to relieve me of it.