On Making Studies

New York Tribune, 2 September 1894, page 14, 375 words

Mr. George Moore rather resents the current cant phrase which describes an author as “making studies” in real life for his work in fiction. “What it means,” he said to an English “interviewer,” “I honestly have not the slightest idea. What are ‘studies,’ and does anybody make them, and if so, how? No, ‘Esther Waters’ originated not in any studies, but in the Strand, and by chance. One day I happened to buy a paper. I don’t remember what it was, but a remark in it struck me. The eternal servant question was up at the time, and some writer in this paper said, ‘It’s all very well to talk about what we suffer from servants, but do not let us forget what servants suffer from us.’ That remark was the origin of my book.”

Mr. Moore’s father, when the author was a child, used to keep racehorses – one of them won the Goodwood Cup – and in his reminiscences of that time were found the material for much of the betting phrases of the book. “If there is any merit in the book,” Mr. Moore said, “it comes from my not knowing too much about the subject, and so having scope for such creative imagination as I am capable of. Low life often proves much better material for a novelist tha the life which he himself lives. If one writes a novel of the drawing-room the temptation is to reproduce what one has heard and seen and known, without any act of creative imagination at all; and if that is what is wanted for a work of literary art, why, then, some Lady Jeune, let us say, should have been our great novelist. But what I found so satisfactory in the subject of ‘Esther Waters’ was this: that I knew just enough about it to set my imagination at work, and just not enough to deaden it by the substitution of merely recorded knowledge. And so I believe it is the best work I have done. The subject, I feel sure, was a grand one. If some great master – if Tolstoi had chanced upon it, he might have written another ‘Anna Karenine.’”