Mr. George Moore

Evening News, 19 June 1912, page 4, 1,379 words

A Talk About the Book He Could Not Kill

I have been having a talk with Mr. George Moore about his reissued novel, “Spring Days” — and also about things in general.

Mr. Moore told the tale of the war that he waged upon this book of his.

“Everybody said that it was the worst book that had ever been published. I got quite frightened; I set to work to destroy it, and whenever I came across a copy I threw it into the Thames. You can’t burn a book, you see; it’s a messy business, and almost as difficult as burning a body.

“But, as your readers know, ‘Spring Days’ refused to be drowned. It rose from the depths, and at last I read it over once more, and finding it not half as black as it had been painted, I have reissued it.

“And, by the way, do you know who introduced the feuilleton into the English daily Press? I did. I knew the editor of an evening paper, and I pointed out to him that French newspapers had stories; wh shouldn’t our daily Press follow their example?

“So he consented; and so the first English feuilleton was, ‘Spring Days,’ and the paper was The Evening News.”

Thirty Years Ago.

I asked Mr. Moore his judgment on an interesting point.

“You have been a man of letters,” I said, “for more than thirty years. Now what is your opinion as to the literary prospect — the literary atmosphere — of 1880 as compared with that of 1912?”

“My opinion is that thirty or forty years ago people read more literature than they do now. Thackeray, Dickens, and George Eliot wrote as well as ever they could, and they got a large public. George Eliot endeavoured to write philosophical novels — I don’t admire them myself — and she was able to get three or four thousand pounds for each novel.

“But now things are different. The number of readers has been quadrupled, but the circle of judicious readers, of the people who want the book with the idea — with the mind behind it — has diminished.

“Take an experience of my own; one must argue from what one knows. That last book of mine, ‘Hail and Farewell,’ seems to have raked in everybody ‘round literature’; all people in the least degree bookish appear to have read it; and yet the sale has been comparatively small.

“I’ve no complaint to make; I’ve done well with my books; but I do think that in the course of the last thirty years the outlook for the man who tries to put brains and ideas into his books has grown steadily worse and worse; and as far as I can make out a sale of 5,000 copies for a piece of imaginative literature is as much as anyone can now expect. The circle of readers who understand and appreciate is certainly narrower than it was.”

“Why is this so?”

“Because we have taught everybody to read; and that has almost killed literature. You can teach people to read, but you can’t give them brains.”

The Defect of Popular Education.

We had got round to popular education. I exhibited one of my King Charles Heads.

“Don’t you think,” I said, “that popular education is a failure because it makes its appeal to the memory instead of attempting to stir and awaken the imagination?”

“I don’t believe that the mass of the people are born with the imaginative faculty at all. The greater number came into the world to work with their hands. What is the good of teaching a man to read and then telling him to go down into a coal mine? You only make him wretched and discontented. If you could teach a horse to read it would refuse to draw wagons.”

“You think, then, that popular education is as absurd as asking a miscellaneous crowd to walk into a chemist’s shop and help themselves to the invaluable medicines it contains?”

“Yes, I think that is a very good analogy. You can’t teach a man to be a poet, you can’t even teach him to appreciate poetry unless the faculty is born in him.

“It’s all an affair of every man doing his own job; you come into the world with the sensations proper to your job; and it’s of no earthly use to teach a hare to play the tambourine.

“Of course there are the exceptional cases. If a ploughboy came to me and said that he had heard somebody reading Greek, or had heard some translations from the Greek, and that he felt he should like to learn Greek very much, then I would do all in my power to have him taught Greek. In the driest ground you will find an occasional flower.”

Mr. George Moore thinks that the lowering of the prices of new books is a very bad thing.

“Perhaps I oughtn’t to say so, as I began it myself. I was the inventor of the new six-shilling novel. In the early ‘eighties, when novels were published at 31s 6d., a man had to write books to please the Libraries or not write at all.

I found that my books didn’t please the Libraries, so I suggested to poor Vizetelly that he should issue my next book at 6s. He did so, and now the price is getting lower and lower. What is to become of the author? How many copies of a half-crown book have you got to sell before you make anything by it?

On the Modern Novel.

“Then there is another thing which is against good books and the makers of good books: that is that clerks and typists have got tired of their bicycles.

“It was all right when they rode bicycles, but they have got tired of them, as I say, and they have taken to reading novels instead. And what novels!

“You and I like novels with a mind behind them; they don’t. YOu and I love the expected; to them the unexpected is the shocking, the immoral. That’s natural enough, I suppose; by its derivation morality means the accustomed, the familiar.

“Let me sketch you the plot I should choose if I wanted to write a really popular book: something that would go into thirty or forty thousand.

“I should write about Two Lovers. I should separate them for some reason; not much of a reason. Then I should scatter some very ordinary incidents through the book.

“I should make a point of cutting the Two Lovers off by the tide; and when they find that they are cut off, they would kiss each other full on the lips. They should kiss each other full on the lips as often as possible in the book. And the ending — don’t let me startle you — should be a happy one.”

Recipe for Happiness

It was at this point, I think, that we “hied back” to the topic of the present discontents. I suggested  to Mr. Moore that, after all, the great recipe for content and happiness is to be found in the creative faculty.

“I entirely agree with you,” he said. “Mind, I do not limit ‘creation’ to the writing of poems, or the painting of pictures, or the building of cathedrals. If a man builds his own cottage, he is a creator: if he makes his own spear to go out hunting with he is a creator.

“Look at children: the dolls that they really love and enjoy are the dolls that they fashion themselves — the objects that they ‘make believe’ into dolls. They don’t care twopence for the dolls you buy for them in a shop.

“The fact is, that life was once a very complicated business, and then men were happy. Now it has become simplified, and it is getting more and more simplified; and we are bored to death in consequence.

“People talk such nonsense about savage simplicity — “

I remarked that the Table of Affinities in the Book of Common Prayer was bare simplicity indeed compared with the marriage laws and taboos of primitive man.

“Exactly; savage life was extremely complicated; and, therefore, highly entertaining.

A.M. [Arthur Machen]