1887-10-20 to Herbert Wigram

Autograph letter signed, National Library of Ireland, 437 words

[Edited for paragraph breaks, capitalization, spelling and punctuation.]

The Green,  Southwick, Sussex

[Thursday, 20 October 1887]

Dear Mr Wigram

You did not offend me. I like you all too well at Paternoster Square. — There never will be any offence either on my side or yours; I merely stated my case as well as I could.

I return you some proofs marked with blue pencil; my concessions are liberal and large and I hope they will satisfy your scruples. No one objects to anyone saying, "I don't believe,” the only thing that can be taken objection to is abuse.

You will see that I have cut out every abusive epithet; the passages as they now stand are mere statements. To take Christ as the socialist of Galilee, using socialist as I clearly do in the sense of the God of pity, is not offensive; the rest is a bare statement of the fact that the modern positivist, the socialist, denies Christ, therefore that Christ is lost and whelmed in the final triumph of Christianity.

This may is not be orthodoxy but it is not blasphemy, and I take it that you conduct your business from the same as liberal standpoint as Kegan Paul or Chatto & Windus. Why I should not say that the new god, the god the positivists will create, will be dressed in broadcloth and wear a redneck tie, I cannot even conjecture — you struck out this passage. Besides this part of the Confessions sounds worse than it is because it is not read in conjunction with the next chapter — there the first sentence shows that the paganism is merely a passionate outburst and must not be taken too seriously.

However I am sure that as it now stands it does not pass beyond the most ordinary and usual limitations of modern speech.

Tell the printer to print from what I send you leaving out the passages marked in blue. You may tell him too to send me to the end of the September number; if he has not got in page to send it in slip.

Yours very truly

George Moore

I thought this number of the magazine the best you have had. The article on De Quincey was excellent, first rate, good enough for the Nineteenth Century; the article on dogs was very good. I did not read

anything else.

I think it would be well to print my portrait in the Confessions. It would attract attention for I have a photograph that is very like the author of the Confessions.