Conversations in Ebury Street, Chapter 5

London: William Heineman, 1 January 1924, pages 84-94, 3,161 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.

V

MOORE. You will have another cup?

FREEMAN. No, thank you.

MOORE. A cigar?

FREEMAN. No, thank you; I don't smoke.

MOORE. Not even a cigarette?

FREEMAN. No, thank you.

MOORE. So you like Mr. Hardy's poems better than his novels?

FREEMAN. Yes; I think he writes verse better than prose, occasionally somewhat awkwardly; but in both, in verse and prose, he has helped the ordinary man to realise pessimism as a theory of life.

MOORE. But pessimism as a theory is as old as the world. To go no further back than Ecclesiastes, we find not a few admirable phrases depicting the worthlessness of life; and in Shakespeare we find phrases even more beautiful. If you had said that Mr. Hardy popularised pessimism and coaxed his readen into drinking from an old tin pot a beverage that had hitherto only been offered to them in golden and jewelled goblets, I should have agreed with you. You were speaking just now of Mr. Hardy's stories in verse. I have read one of these, and as an example of how to make pessimism seem trivial I think it would be difficult to find a better story than the one telling of a dead woman's dog that cannot be persuaded to leave her grave, and bow disappointed all the family are when they discover that he is not trying to scratch up his  dead mistress but a bone that he has buried.

FREEMAN. You have not chosen a happy example of Mr. Hardy's art. I could show you some poems that I think even you would find some merit in. I remember that in speaking of a certain Irish writer you say he is sufficiently a poet to become a great prose writer.

MOORE. The best prose is usually written by poets­ — Shakespeare wrote the best seventeenth century, and Shelley the best nineteenth; and I do not think I am going too far when I say that Mr. Hardy has written the worst. I will hear your protest afterwards. Allow me to read:

The persistent torrent from the gurgoyle's jaws directed all its vengeance into the grave. The rich tawny mould was stirred into motion, and boiled like chocolate. The water accumulated and washed deeper down, and the roar of the pool thus formed spread into the night as the head and chief among other noises of the kind created by the deluging rain. The flowers so carefully planted by Fanny's repentant lover began to move and writhe in their beds. The winter violets turned slowly upside down and became a mere mat of mud. Soon the snow­ drop and other bulbs danced in the boiling mass like ingredients in a cauldron. Plants of the tufted species were loosened, rose to the surface, and floated off.

…The pool upon the grave had soaked away into the ground, and in its place was a hollow. The disturbed earth was washed away over the grass and pathway in the guise of the brown mud he had already seen, and it spotted the marble tombstone with the same stains. Nearly all the flowers were washed clean out of the ground, and they lay, roots upwards, on the spots whither they had been splashed by the stream.

FREEMAN. From what book are you reading?

MOORE. Far from the Madding Crowd.

FREEMAN. One of his best books!

MOORE. Then I have done him no injustice in quoting from it. The gargoyle may direct its vengeance, but not the torrent.

FREEMAN. Would you mind reading the sentence again?

MOORE. The persistent torrent from the gurgoyle's jaws directed all its vengeance into the grave.

FREEMAN. I suppose you are right.

MOORE. The rich tawny mould was stirred into motion, and boiled like chocolate. Can that image be defended?

FREEMAN. Nobody seeks to defend it.

MOORE. A pool does not roar, and flowers do not writhe, and when Mr. Hardy tells us that the violets turned slowly upside down, my thoughts are directed to ducks in a pond, despite the fact that ducks tum quickly upside down. Soon the snowdrop and other bulbs danced in the boiling mass like ingredients in a cauldron. Is a cauldron the image that would rise up in the mind of a poet, and would he use the word ingredients? Nearly all the flowers were washed clean (sic) out of the ground, and they lay, roots upwards, on the spots whither they had been splashed by the stream. You appreciate the whither, I hope?

FREEMAN. An ill-managed phrase, truly.

MOORE. Good writers do not usually botch and bungle up every line, and of all, when they are attempting a purple passage.

FREEMAN. Do you think that he chose Fanny Robin's grave as suitable for fine writing?

MOORE. Had there not been purple in his eye, he would have written: The pour of water from the gargoyle washed away the grave-mound. A simple statement was all that was needed, and perhaps the very first among our literary instincts is the one that tells us the theme that may be developed and the theme that offers no opportunities for development.

FREEMAN. It would be difficult to say more with advantage than that the rain water pouring from the gargoyle's jaws washed away the grave-mound. But if you wish to exhibit Mr. Hardy's novels as no better than the novels the Press has for many years singled out as subjects for ridicule, you will have to show something more than that Mr. Hardy is no master of words, which is pretty generally admitted, I think, in the daily and weekly Press.

MOORE. Our critics have been on many occasions nearly fluttered out of their enthusiasms by Mr. Hardy's lack of style, but they have always neglected to tell us the qualities that led them astray.

FREEMAN. If you do not like Far from the Madding Crowd I am afraid you will not like The Trumpet Major, and I doubt if your patience will bear you to the end of The Mayor of Casterbridge. It begins well, but half­ way through —

MOORE. I do not propose to read Daniel Deronda, and neither do I propose to read all Mr. Hardy's novels, for has it not been said that to have eaten a crust of bread is to have tasted of all the stars? I have read Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and my doubts began when Alec came riding by and called her to jump up behind him. We are told that he rode into a wood. Now, a wood may be large or small; it may wander hither and thither, or grow in patches. A wood may be dense, dark, solemn, forbidding, or it may be blithe, enticing, with delightful interspaces; it may be overgrown with scrub, littered with uncouth rocks, or it may be smooth. A wood may have the wet close smell of an ancient marsh, or it may be fragrant as a garden.

FREEMAN. It was not the wood that mattered, but Tess, and a long description —

MOORE. A wood may be described in two words. When Scott wrote: Land of brown heath and scraggy wood, we are in Scotland. But the woods and fields that Mr. Hardy speaks of are never before our eyes. I think he tells us that Alec rode some distance into the wood and made a couch for Tess in the dead leaves. He buttons his overcoat round her shoulders and goes away for a little while, and returns to find her asleep. The situation is one which seems to Mr. Hardy opportune for a meditation, wherefore he begins:

But some might say, where was Tess"s guardian angel? where was the providence of her simple faith? Perhaps, like that other god of whom the ironical Tishbite spoke, he was talking, or he was pursuing, or he was in a journey, or he was sleeping and not to be awaked. Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive —

a sentence, Mr. Freeman, which as a poet you cannot but admire. The French have a good word for this kind of story: coco, and coco may be translated into English as Mother Goose. After the incident in the wood Tess returns to her home, and about a year afterwards we read of her in a cornfield with a baby, who is taken ill and whom she baptises herself in the middle of the night. When the baby dies Tess continues to work in her parents' house, and then becomes a dairymaid; and in the dairy she meets Angel Clare, whom she marries, without, however, telling him that she has had a baby. But on the night of the wedding she makes up her mind to confess everything to him, and is glad when Angel Clare confides to her the fact that he had once plunged into eight and forty hours’ dissipation with a stranger, and that he has never repeated the offence. You will see, Mr. Freeman, that the interest of the story concentrates not so much Tess's confession but on the character the author gives to the confession, for, like a wood, a confession can take every kind of shape. George Eliot would have said to herself: Angel Clare may persuade her to confess; he may be anxious to know the truth for pure motives, or he may be anxious to know the truth for impure motives; he may be willing to hear, and then unwilling to hear. George Eliot's more fertile imagination would certainly have chosen one of these motives to develop, and if Mr. Hardy shrank from the essential we can but conclude that it was lack of invention, brain paralysis, something of the sort, that caused his abrupt retreat into the past indefinite:

And pressing her forehead against his temple she entered on the story of her acquaintance with Alec D'Urberville and its results, murmuring the words without flinching, and with her eyelids drooping down.

FREEMAN. You are of the kind opinion, Mr. Moore, that if a man loves a woman he would just ask her: Is it all over? And if she told him that it was, he would say: Well, don't let's speak about this any more. You have repented of your sin, and I have repented of mine.

MOORE. I should prefer even that to the past indefinite at the very moment when soul-revealing words were needed. I am sure that any of the writers about whom the Press is so constantly contemptuous would have devised something better than: Pressing her forehead against his temple she entered on the story of her acquaintance with Alec D'Urberville and its results.

Angel Clare is given to walking in his sleep, and one night picking Tess out of her bed he carries her quite a long way — if my memory does not trip me, several hundred yards, crossing the river by means of a narrow plank. What I am going to say seems incredible, but I remember certainly something about an Abbey and a stone coffin, in which he lays Tess. I have forgotten for how long she lies in the coffin, but remember that she takes her sleep-walking husband by the arm and leads him home. As I read how they approached the house, I said to myself: We are coming to something more original than a wedding-night parting due to a confession. He will put Tess into his own bed, and on awakening he will take her into his arms — a daring piece of craftsmanship! and my mind softened towards Mr. Hardy. But only for a moment, alas, for Tess persuades Angel Clare to lie down on his bed and retires to her own room. The episode, therefore, means nothing, for next morning they drive a little way together and part, and henceforth we see her getting her living as best she can in the fields.

FREEMAN. You admit that we do see Tess at work in the turnip fields.

MOORE. A solitary figure in a turnip field is a distinct feature in the landscape, and Mr. Hardy did not miss it; Indeed, we could almost wish that he had, so often have we seen this figure in pictures, as often, or very nearly as often, as we have seen harvesters returning with a dancing step from the fields, scythes over their shoulders and a moon three times too big behind their heads.

FREEMAN. You are thinking, surely, of George Mason's picture of harvesters?

MOORE. Perhaps I am; it would not surprise me if the picture you speak of got mixed up in my memories of Tess, so entirely in keeping are the dancing harvesters and the moon three times too big with the seducer, who returns in clerical garb and disappears from the story, returning again for Tess to murder him with a carving knife and the blood to soak through the ceiling, and for Tess to be hanged later on, after spending a splendid honeymoon among the monoliths of Stonehenge, with Angel Clare waiting outside the prison to see the black flag run up.

FREEMAN. Have you ever seen any plays by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones?

MOORE. Yes; I have seen a good many.

FREEMAN. You know what Oscar Wilde's advice to dramatists was? He said that there were three rules to be observed; the first rule was not to write like Mr. Henry Arthur Jones.

MOORE. And what were the second and third rules?

FREEMAN. They were the same as the first. And if you were called upon to give advice to young novelists, you would adopt Oscar Wilde's formula.

MOORE. The two men are curiously alike, and the physical likeness is as striking as the mental. William Archer once asked me if I had ever seen Mr. Hardy. I said that I hadn't, and he answered: Well, you'd be surprised at the likeness, the physical likeness: same height, same build, same type of face, same complexion. And it so happened that a few days afterwards Mr. Hardy was pointed out to me going round the pictures with his wife, and I said: Archer is right; the two men are very like each other.

FREEMAN. The subject of your charge is that Mr. Hardy is often melodramatic; but I don't think any of his admirers would deny that he does, on occasion, avail himself of exaggeration, and in his defence they would speak of the three witches in Macbeth, of the two murders interrupted by the comic porter, of Banquo's ghost, and many other melodramatic scenes. Nor would their inquiry be limited to Macbeth. Hamlet rises frequently into melodrama, or, as you would put it, lapses frequently into melodrama. It seems to me that you are bringing into this criticism a great deal of your own temperament. You don't like melodrama, and you are right not to like it, for whenever you get an effect it is by understatement rather than by overstatement; but that is not a reason why you should condemn a method which is employed by both Mr. Hardy and Shakespeare.

MOORE. The charge is often brought against the critic that his admonitions are no more than a reflection of his own temperament. Of course, since all he sees, hears, feels, and knows, is but a reflection of his temperament. Like his author, he speaks out of himself. But I think my best answer to your defence of melodrama is that there is melodrama that rises into the empyrean, and melodrama unredeemed by poetry. The first walks with divine gait, in silken raiment and with stars in her hair, whilst the other proceeds with shambling gait from ale-house to ale-house, shouting stories in broken English out of her husky throat of murder, arson, robbery, rape, and vengeance. Shakespeare appeals to all the senses, it is true, but he never fails to appeal to the mind. Macbeth's deeds and Hamlet's are transported into art, and are therefore only understood by the few, though they may be undoubtedly relished by the many.

FREEMAN. You remind me now of Don Quixote charging the windmills, mills that only exist in his imagination. Nobody compares Tess and Jude the Obscure with Hamlet or Macbeth.

MOORE. Oh, yes, they do! Several articles have appeared in which analogies are discovered between Jude the Obscure and Prometheus Bound, and I would not advise any critic who valued the world's opinions to challenge these appreciations.

FREEMAN. I certainly hope that you do not speak to others as openly as you do to me.

MOORE. You would not like, then, truth to prevail?

FREEMAN. Like Pilate, I ask you: What is truth? Your judgment is at variance with opinions that proceed from the highest to the lowest. Everybody believes — ­

MOORE. The entire Press believes, and would shed the last drop of its ink in defence of the literary opinions of the many.

FREEMAN. You would then set aside the literary opinions of the many? Even that of your friend, Mr. Edmund Gosse, who salutes Mr. Hardy as the poet who is, without dispute, the head of the literary profession, and so I believe the first of living men of letters in the world?

MOORE. Mr. Gosse speaks out of his lights, and I speak out of mine, and I do not think that anything would be gained by my decrying his as a false light and mine as a true. A great deal of what I am saying, Mr. Freeman, will appear in print as soon as Mr. Hardy steps on board Charon's boat.

FREEMAN. You think that others share your opinions and are probably at this moment anxious to utter them, but refrain....

MOORE. Lest truth should appear to many as bad taste. But I would think only of how he may be saved from invidious familiarity when he advances to meet our God, for never having known him on earth he may, when he steps from Charon's boat, ask the God to point out his (Mr. Hardy's) seat to him; or it may be that he will seek his seat himself, and not finding it next to Shakespeare or AEschylus, he will return and complain to Apollo, who will ask: Who is this one? A messenger will answer: This is Hardy, the author of Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. And the author of these absurd works, the God will reply, would place him­self next to AEschylus and Shakespeare! The messenger will answer: he has listened long to the quackers that beset the shallows of mortality. All the same, let him be hurled into the hollows we have reserved for — and the God will quote three names which I am not called upon to transcribe.