Photography, Old and New

The Observer, 10 April 1921, page 5, 2,604 words

[Transcribed from a muddy facsimile provided by Newspapers.com. Illegible words indicated for correction with physical media or a clear scan.]

A Preface by Mr. George Moore.

School-Day Memories

Evolution of a “Dunce.”

How to Become an English Author.

We are permitted to publish the following preface, which Mr. George Moore has written for a book of his which will be published within the next few weeks: —

It was on hearing somebody hint that this volume should be adorned with a portrait of the author that a vision rose before me of many bearded or moustached men, bald-headed and pompous, of young men cast into pensive attitudes, book in hand, of deep-bosomed matrons whose billowy nakedness is barely restrained from overflow in too brief bodices, of budding spinsters exhibiting backbones to the last joint, beyond which the camera may not look without indecency, for its eye is not sensitive to colour or modelling; it cannot stress or soften a line, transpose, add to or omit; for it is without the magic touch, relating only the facts in front of it impartially, the significant and the trivial, the ugly and the pretty, missing, however, the great impartiality of Nature: photography is finite, and whatever truth it is capable of reflecting is disparate and fragmentary; if we learn anything from a photograph it is an apprehension of the ugly, for, photography being strictly circumstantial,the ugly is uglier in the plate than in Nature. “Yet it is proposed,: I said, “that I should place my natural defects at the mercy of a mechanism that registers only the casual and unimportant.”

***

On arriving home I began to consider the question anew, and rising from my armchair, I said, “The photograph’s flat, grey, uniform surfaces are repugnant to all who have become aware that Art resides not in proportion and anatomy, but in touch. Without touch there can be no Art in painting, in sculpture, in literature, in music, or in printing; Art is not in the brain but in the hand, and Apollo’s great gift is no longer in our service; the machine has taken its place. Only in the National Gallery — “ At the words. “National Gallery,” the great array of the Renaissance came into my ken. Italy, France, Germany, Holland, and I said, “Man arose from the ape gloriously, but it would see that he is now descending whence he came, for without our sense of Art man would be no better”; and on this fell to thinking that although it be true that the gorilla and chimpanzee are disappearing, we need not despair. “Their absence,” I continued, “will be but temporary: the missing link will soon be amongst us again — “ I stopped, brought to bay by a memory of the daguerreotypes of old time, sharp, clear, explicit portraits that Van Eyck would have stopped to admire.

***

“The daguerreotype was a mechanism, it is true,” O said. “but it was a fine mechanism, almost beautiful, and it is now buried among the handicrafts, of which it was not one. Alas! there is none among us now who can design a chair or a clock, and we have to buy old tea services. When these are all broken?” I asked, and, my thoughts turning abruptly towards the last art movement in England — Pre-Raphaelitism — I began to ponder on the meeting of Millais, Holman Hunt, and Rossetti in a studio in Newman -street in eighteen forty-nine, till the remembrance of a photograph of a little boy in short jacket and trousers, wearing a belt, whose portrait I had not seen for quite half a century, interrupted my thoughts and propelled me towards the writing table. And having written for it I forgot till it arrived some weeks later in a box amid so many various wrappings that it seemed as if my hands would never come upon the many-enfolded portrait. “A too meticulous caretaker,” I said, “ who puts me past my patience.” At last the portrait came forth out of a cloud of tissue, delighting my eyes and putting the thought into my mind that the old and the new photography differ as widely as Van Eyek and Kneller.

***

“Herein,” I said, “is the fundamental likeness that the years could not wipe away, but in a modern photograph the likeness is shadowy and evanescent, as it is in portraits by Kneller and his fellow [illegible];” and then, stirred by a desire of truth, I rang for my servants, who recognized the little boy as the original shoot from which I sprang. It was taken across to the apothecary, who knew it, and afterwards to my publisher, who said, “What a dear little boy!” I answered him, “Yes, and it is pleasing to think that I was once not as I am now.” “But why did you never think of this portrait before?” “Because Providence kept it back in my mind, reserving it by decree  for the book that you are now publishing. This portrait will prove valuable to you, for it will persuade the prudes into reading the book in the hope of discovering in the stories traces of the dear little boy in the frontispiece: he will be, I do assure you (if I may drop into the language of the journalist) your great asset, for on turning the pages to escape from some jarring incident or apophthegm, the prudes will come upon the portrait, and of a certainty the winning features will bring belief that the little boy must have fallen into evil company or been neglected in his youth, for if he had been brought up properly he would be quite different from his book — no, not his book, his descendant’s book; and fortified by the memory of the dear little fellow (who followed the photographer into the dark room in which the plate was developed in baths filled with various evil-smelling acids, and hung over him while he tinted, passing blue over the necktie and a touch of flesh colour over the face) they will return to the book and in a different mood. Without a doubt of it, Pawling, the portrait will make many friends for the book.”

***

We are always a dream from tottering childhood to tottering old age, and that little boy, whose thumb is in his belt (put there by the excellent photographer) was on his way in the ‘sixties to a Catholic school, where he might have been made into a little Catholic if he had not lost his health from the bad food, and the piercing draughts that ranged up and down the corridors and whirled in the classrooms. He was taken home to recover, and when he returned to Oscott, some two years later, he brought back with him Shelley’s poems for clandestine reading, and the flowers in “The Sensitive Plant” that

…..gaze in the stream’s recess

Till they die of their own sweet loveliness

helped him to withstand the pressure of Catholicism and gave him courage to resist threats of floggings if he did not confess his sins. In the influence of “Queen Mab” he pleaded that he had no sin to confess, but this claim was regarded as an untruth —  not one being without sin. He claimed the right, however, to lay his case before the president, and was given leave to write to his father. It would please me to tell here the story of his father’s journey from Ireland to inquire into his son’s lack of belief in priests and their sacraments, but the story is related in “Hail and Farewell,” and eschewing paraphrase and quotation I will return to the little boy who stands by the chair with his thumb in his belt, our budget of information about him being nearly exhausted.

***

I have to tell the reader that he was of an amiable and happy disposition, a docile child, yet a willful one,for although acquiescing in all that was said to him, he failed to deviate from the path that Nature had decreed him to follow, thereby introducing into this prelude the momentous question of predestination, on which the lightest and weightiest minds have pondered without being able to discover how Fate and Free Will may “double up” under the Christian blanket. It would seem that only this is clear, that everything is preordained or nothing, twin doctrines so inaccessible to our intelligence that we turn to the photograph and begin to wonder why Nature should have given such witty eyes to George (eyes that must be facts, for the camera does not invent), yet condemning him to be not only the last boy in his class, but in the last class in the school — in a word, the dunce of his school. “George’s case is really very alarming,” the president wrote to his father, and the letter contained the admission that he did not know whether George could not or would not learn. The reader is impatient for me to say whether George “couldn’t” or “wouldn’t,” and he would have from me a clear answer without subterfuge or evasion. The little boy could learn anything he chose to learn, but he was quite unable to learn anything he had not himself chosen. The reader would press me still further, “But did the little boy wish to learn?” Yes, but his desires for knowledge came suddenly and departed suddenly, like a wind in and out of a field. An alarming trait of a character this is, and one that has not been sufficiently investigated. Spelling he could not master, and when he returned home expelled for lack of belief in the confessional and other things, his father shut Master George up in a bedroom from morn to eve to learn spelling books by heart.

***

After some months of experimentation in spelling books and dictations George’s father gave up the job of his son's education, saying to his wife, “George is but a chrysalis, and we do not know if he will develop into a moth or a butterfly.” But the memory of his own glorious schooldays compelled his father to intermittent efforts to cultivate George’s mind outside of the spelling book, for when all hope was dead in him that his son would ever realise in his mind the shape of a word with such clearness as would allow him to find it in the dictionary, he bethought himself of the artifice of an occasional disparagement of Shelley’s poetry. “It is strange that you should admire mediocre verses” — and he put Pope’s Homer into George’s hands; but George’s ears were deaf to rhymed couplets, and when he was not reading “the Revolt of Islam” he was in the billiard room practising “jennys,” a stroke his father excelled in. In the midst of a break of five or six the door opened and his father entered with a large volume in his hand. “Lay aside your cue,” he said, “and read Burke’s speeches.” But George’s amiability could not overcome his instinctive dislike of Burke: Burke was the proverbial straw, and he undertook instead to teach his sister’s governess how to ride. His father acquiesced, in despair no doubt, but despite the relaxations of helping the governess into the saddle and placing her foot in the stirrup, the boy was conscious of being overshadowed by his father, and he sought his own individual life unconsciously like a sapling under a parent tree. He was unhappy in the strife, for he loved his father; his father was always, and still is, the intimate and abiding reality of his life, and the evening that his father started for Ireland for the last time is quick among his memories. George’s father returned from the front door to bid his son good-bye, and in obedience to a sudden impulse he took a sovereign out of his pocket and put it into the boy’s hand, and went away to his death resolute, for he had come to see that his death was the only way to escape from his embarrassments without injury to his family, and I can imagine him walking about the lake shores bidding them good-bye forever.

***

His last letter was to his wife, and in it he tells her that if she does not receive a message from him she is to come over by Monday evening’s train, for there will be a great deal to be done. George travelled over on Monday night, trying to console his mother, but that was impossible, for she knew what had happened, and the journey was a widow’s in the first wild paroxysm of her grief. George tells the story of his grief in his book “Confessions of a Young Man,” and how in the midst of it he began to foresee his own life in Paris, whither he went two years after to learn to be a painter, failing in this first ambition, succeeding, however, in losing a great deal of the fragmentary knowledge he possessed of the English language.

***

“But, my dear author,” says the reader of this prelude, “you are beginning to lose the thread of your argument. Your argument, as I apprehend it, was that, having been chosen by Nature for a literary career, the boy’s life was preordained. Yet you tell us of his gentle firmness not to learn anything while he was at school, and that he was sent to Paris to forget his small stock of English. The ways by which Nature leads her sheep back to the fold are no doubt devious, but even Nature is not as illogical as you represent her. If she wished to produce an English man of letters she would not send him to Paris to forget English, surely. My dear author, my belief in you fails me.”

***

In our understanding, dear reader, Nature’s [illegible] seems a crooked thing, for our minds are finite; but Nature’s mind being infinite she had to take thought of the deeply rutted road into which English fiction had fallen. And she could not do else than raise up a Parsifal, one who should resist school education, be a perplexity to his father at home, indulge himself in the pleasures of opera bouffe from seventeen to twenty-one, and go to Paris to forget English. A virgin mind, in fine, was needed, and this could only be obtained by faring him into French literature while holding him forbidden to acquire any deep knowledge of the French language, providing in this way against the danger of the boy becoming a French writer. Nature’s foresight and versatility are indeed remarkable; she is indeed altogether remarkable, this great mother of ours, as much interested in her projects for star-quakes in the constellation of Hercules as she is in schemes to release mankind from its too great admiration of the Villager, the Sailor, and the Eunuch. A profligate and sinister comment mine will seem on the ambiguities of our lives, one that will cause the ink to foam in many ink pots, so I will ask, by way of diversion, how it is that in an age that produces nothing and attempts to revive all things, no one has bethought himself of a revival of ancient photography. We can understand that the large firms are content with their profits in the grey, flat charts, maps of humanity’s features, but it’s hard to guess why some individual, some amateur sniffing about in search of celebrity, and a little money, has not turned to the Encyclopedia to read up the processes of the ‘fifties and ‘sixties. In London there’s a gang of women always ready to lend their support to every artistic movement.