Avowals, Chapter 16

London: Privately Printed, 1 September 1919, pages 286-310, 8,097 words

Avowals is a nonlinear volume of sixteen chapters. Chapters 12 and 15 are essays in 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 GMi Kindle edition of Avowals.

CHAP. XVI.

BALDERSTON. Your coffee is as excellent as ever, yet you have parted with your cook.

MOORE. Years ago, after supping some of his fragrant Mocha, I said to Frank Harris: I knew you as a bachelor, Harris; I knew you as a married man, and now I know you divorced or separated, but the coffee is always the same. The coffee is the same, he answered, but not for my luck in finding cooks at the several stages you have mentioned who could make good coffee — that were impossible; I teach them all to make coffee. For the making of good coffee only an earthenware coffee pot fitted with a strainer is required; the complicated apparatus we see brought into the dining-room is useless. From three to four spoonfuls go to make a cup. And now comes the secret. Your water is boiling on the gas stove; you pour a little on to the coffee, returning the kettle to the stove to boil up again; and when the coffee has gone through you pour a little more boiling water to get the virtue out of the coffee. And three doses are needed. The cook will try to avoid the trouble but you must insist, for coffee that is not made in this way is worthless.

BALDERSTON. A precious secret this must be to you who are indifferent to wine. But is it really true that you do not care for wine, or is it one of your affectations to say so?

MOORE. My only affectation is complete naturalness, for I am of Emerson's opinion, that it is better to be than to seem. Yes; I am indifferent to the seductions of wine, almost aggressively, it would seem, for one of my oldest friends, Théodore Duret, rarely dines with me without delivering himself of an exordium of my impenitence, in his high falsetto voice. It is extraordinary that a man who likes all the good things of this life and has enjoyed them, art and beautiful women, and to some extent the pleasures of the table, should have missed the taste for wine, he cries.

BALDERSTON. The wine we had for dinner to-night seemed to me all right.

MOORE. An excellent vin ordinaire, bought at the Café Royal before the war at about eighteenpence a bottle, a price at which it will never be bought again; and it may be doubted if the St Julien of the future will be as honest a wine as the one we have drunken to-night. Wine there always will be of a sort, on a downward path leading to the apothecary's shop, for the old world is sliding from under our feet, Balderston, and more rapidly than ever.

BALDERSTON. When the war is over —

MOORE. Have I not heard you say we shall all be crying for the good old days of the war? You have not Iived long enough in the world, Balderston, and, of all, not thought sufficiently, about the old world come down to us from Nineveh and Babylon —

BALDERSTON. To feel afraid of change. But change did not begin yesterday. The world was never still, not even in the days of Babylon.

MOORE. True; we are always becoming, but till the advent of the nineteenth century the world changed in­sensibly. The changes were not des changements à vue. It may even be maintained that the eighteenth century continued till 1830 or 1840, in England; it continued in Ireland to 1870. You see, Balderston, I was born in feudalism, and my world is over and done. It may not be as far away as the Stone Age, but it is as dead.

BALDERSTON. You are not opposed to all progress?

MOORE. No; but I deprecate calling change progress; for men are the same as they always were, and men's instincts make the world to-day as heretofore.

BALDERSTON. But why speak as if the world could only deteriorate? Why should you assume that it can only change in one direction?

MOORE. The earth supports certainly a larger number of human beings than it did in the past, but we're discussing not the earth but the world; and progress in aesthetics is impossible: we cannot believe in sculpture greater than that of Athens and Rome. You will say, if not you another, that the genius of Phidias cannot be proven like a sum in arithmetic; all the same it will never die, for there will always be art of a sort in the world to keep it alive in man's conscience.

BALDERSTON. But what are your reasons for assuming that the art of the future will not equal the art of the past?

MOORE. My reasons are clear and explicit reasons -­–  

BALDERSTON. Forgive me for interrupting you, but would it not be better to begin by defining art?

MOORE. Tolstoy in his work — What is Art? — prints dozens of definitions, gathered from the best works on aesthetics, but so little did these satisfy him that he found himself obliged to seek another out, and the one he asks us to choose in preference to Herbert Spencer's definition, that art amuses grown-ups just as dolls amuse children, is that art is a medium whereby we communicate sensations to others, a definition that satisfies me less than Herbert Spencer's, for if a man treads upon my toe violently, he communicates a sensation, but it can hardly be contended that by doing so he creates a work of art. A thing does not cease to exist because it cannot be defined. Let us talk about art, and in the course of conversation you will gather my reasons for believing that the democratic world which lies ahead of us will fail to produce anything that will make the art of Phidias and Michelangelo seem shabby.

BALDERSTON. If we may not try to define what art is it might not be amiss to come to terms regarding the origin of art.

MOORE. An instinctive desire in man to imitate nature. You may indeed, if you like, throw a stumbling-block in my way, saying that the springhead of art can be discovered in superstition, inasmuch as the excellent drawings done by cave men of deer and horses were inspired by the belief that to draw the animal was to put him to death potentially. But I submit this to be but scientific psychology, for have we not, among our collections of prehistoric drawings, one of a woman in the family way, and it can hardly be pleaded that this drawing was made so that she might be potentially killed and eaten. So in the absence of any proof to the contrary we will continue to believe that the sketch of the woman with child was man's first comment on the mysteries of nature; a very natural and touching comment it is too, an awakening of poetry in the heart. The cave men in their visitings overlooked each other's drawings, so to, the original instinct there came a second, the instinct to take hints from the neighbour in the hill over yonder; and when the races assembled in the plains of Mesopotamia to build cities, the first artistic period had passed by, inasmuch as it was now mixed with many other visions, and out of this mingling of vision arose the strange awe-inspiring winged bulls of Assyria, for Assyria was before Egypt. Art as it turned westward inclined towards naturalism, as an Egyptian lion in the British Museum tells us plainly, while warning us that a new art formula was forming in men's minds in a year somewhere, shall we say, not later than a thousand before our era. Be the date of this lion what it may, the general question is not affected thereby, that many minds are required for the invention of a complete art formula, that we must peep over each other's shoulders occasionally, but only occasionally, and that before the days of locomotion nations, speaking broadly, knew little of one another. It may be said that Greek art came from the Egyptian, but it was a long way from Memphis to Athens — a trip which few men took and at such long intervals that Greek genius had time to absorb all the barbarous gods of Asia, turning Jehovah into Zeus and Astoreth into Venus. We owe everything to the Greeks, even Jesus, and it behoves me to remark here (the phrase, we must only occasionally look over our neighbour's shoulder, being insufficient) that if a shipload of Elgin Marbles had been landed in Yokohama in the seventeenth century, there would have been no Japanese art. The Japanese would have said: this is the thing to do, and they would have imitated the Greeks as badly as the Romans and every other European race have done.

Now it was in or about the fourth century that the Greek tradition died, leaving the world without art till the thirteenth century, for it was about that time that men began to invent the Gothic, a style arising out of ignorance of the Parthenon; and it was in or about the fourteenth century that Greece was rediscovered, bringing to birth the Renaissance, a combination of classic and Gothic, so it has been described and perhaps with some truth; a book might be devoted to the discussion of this subject, but though it could be shown that some of the Gothic tradition can be discovered in a Renaissance cathedral it is plain that the desire of the Renaissance was to escape from all Gothic influence; and if they did not return to the Greek temple it was because Christianity had drawn the populace to religion; it was no longer sufficient that the priests should honour the Gods in the name of the people; more room was required, and the palatial period known as the Renaissance built palatial cathedrals. It was all palace in those days. The painters and sculptors of the sixteenth century never lost sight of the palace; it was always in their minds, inspiring their art just as the house inspired the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century. We have now arrived at a sixth artist period, one which may be designated by a single word — atmosphere, for atmosphere was never out of the minds of the Dutch painters even in their Italian journeys. A Dutch mist is about in Cuyp's pictures even when he was preoccupied by the golden glow which Fromentin says came to him from Italy; the great critic-painter might have added, that if we cannot acquit Rembrandt of having snatched little figures from Pinturicchio, we must allow that he raised them out of littleness.

BALDERSTON. Steal, therefore, if you can, for to do so is a virtue if you can turn the stolen penny into a ducat's worth by your handicraft, and steal from the poor by all means, for their light is hidden under a bushel.

MOORE. I approve your every word, for true art and true Christianity have nothing in common, and we can easily imagine the great joy it would have been to the Italian to whom Rubens was indebted on beholding the realisation of his dream in Antwerp. Such unselfish participation in the glory of art was possible in the happy time before art was, in Whistler's phrase, turned on to the town, a wench to be chucked under the chin by every passer-by, the whimsey, as he would have liked to word it, of art critics and baronets. In the Ten o'Clock he blared his dislike of the art patron before he met the baronet, without, however, telling us how the artist would live if there were no patrons; which is the parasite, it is hard to say, but it is safe to look upon patrons as co­-essential, and coeval though not necessarily coequal with the artists. The twain have thriven on each other, and will continue to do so while there are artists.

BALDERSTON. Do you think the time is coming when there will be no more artists?

MOORE. The Muses are averse from locomotion.

BALDERSTON. When Stephenson was asked what would happen to a cow if the animal should stray on to the railway line he replied that it would be bad for the cow; and if he had been a prophet as well as an inventor he would probably have said: of cows there are plenty, and we can afford to lose a few, but I trust the Muses will keep off the lines.

MOORE. I cannot recall at this moment the names and employments of the nine, nor which Muse has charge of the plastic arts.

BALDERSTON. I too should be puzzled to recall all their names. It would seem they have all perished; such sedate and high-browed females would have been run over easily; Terpsichore, indeed, might have skipped out of the way of the train, but Calliope, Melpomene and Urania walk in meditation.

MOORE. The old world walked in meditation dreaming a more beautiful world, but the present dreams of locomotion only: how it may speed through the landscape almost unconscious of it.

BALDERSTON. Or above it, at a speed of a hundred miles an hour.

MOORE. Gazing on the esurient waiter who proffers café au lait with such exasperating aggressiveness that the other day in the Tube railway I started from my seat, saying: I cannot sit opposite that man. My travelling companion arose indignant, but smiled when I explained that my remark did not refer to him, but to the waiter. Of art the aerial traveller will know the lady nurse who bears Benger's food with a look of more than mortal calm on her face; he will feast his eyes on the enormous udders of the girl who advertises condensed milk; and upon the four joyous whisky drinkers, passing on to the face of the family doctor that accompanies the advertisement of Hall's wine — a veritable masterpiece this is in symbolism, a face that launches upon us the villa, the perambulator, the missus, the cook and parlourmaid, and the patient.

BALDERSTON. But may not aerial travelling be used with advantage by art students pressed for time who would visit Madrid with a view to studying the methods of Velazquez and Goya?

MOORE. I am sorry, Balderston, that you should have thrown out that ingenuous apology to aerial travelling. I was looking forward to reading it in the columns of our art critics.

BALDERSTON. You will read it in their columns, dear master, be without fear. But were not the elder civilisations, those we left behind, founded on slavery and oppression of the poor, and is not the happiness of millions worth a marble statue?

MOORE. That men are happier to-day than they were in the past is not part of the present discussion. Allow me to return to aesthetics? In the past the State did not provide art schools for all and sundry.

BALDERSTON. But do not these disseminate a love of art?

MOORE. The art schools set up in Paris in the nineteenth century have attracted students from all parts of the world, and have produced mannerisms, skill, short cuts, that fill the student with shame as soon as he leaves the school; and if he have any talent at all his business is to unlearn all he has been taught. But we do not escape from what we have been taught, and it is no longer easy to say whether a portrait was painted in Lima or Christiania.

BALDERSTON. In The Confessions of a Young Man you report Renoir as saying: it may be that men will sacrifice themselves for a picture or a book, but the arts that depend on the support of the public are dead.

MOORE. Renoir thought that the capital could hold out though the suburbs had passed over to our enemy the public! He was wrong. Art holds together in all its forms. To remove one stick is to loosen the bundle. Beautiful furniture and porcelain will not be made again, and the time is by again when nobody will be able to illustrate a book. We pick up for a few shillings a copy of La Fontaine's Fables filled with illustrations engraved on steel, and recognise in them an art that has passed away for ever.

BALDERSTON. While giving an attentive ear to all you say, I have been trying to pick out of my wretched memory the names of the Muses one by one, and I think I have gotten them all: Calliope, the Muse of rhetoric and heroic poetry, stands at their head, and next to her is Thalia, the Muse of pastoral poetry; Erato, the Muse of amatory poetry, comes next, crowned with roses. Clio and Melpomene, Muses of graver mien, preside over history and dramatic poetry. All wind instruments are in the keeping of Euterpe. Urania watches the stars; Terpsichore directs the dance, and —  

MOORE. And the ninth —  

BALDERSTON. I have racked my brains but to no avail, which is a pity, for the ninth may be the Muse that was killed on the railway track.

MOORE. And there being no Muse to look after them, the Plastic Arts strayed on to the railway track incontinently and were killed. Your contention then is that all the forms of literature, eloquence, dramatic and pastoral poetry, lyrical and amatory, history, have been saved; a bold contention conceived in a moment of absentmindedness, for you know that the desire of our best authors is to provide a literary fare that will compare favourably with an international dinner at an up-to-date hotel, and this ambition will be realised as soon as they have gotten the universal language, which cannot be long delayed in coming.

BALDERSTON. You think it will be brought over in aeroplanes like rabies?

MOORE. With this difference, that though we are averse from catching rabies the common lot would like to speak a few words of as many languages as possible without learning any.

BALDERSTON. I might remind you that you have admitted on more than one occasion that you owe a great deal to France and the French language, but if I were to press you to extricate yourself from the dilemma you are clearly in, I should miss hearing you on a more interesting subject — the decline of language, of the English language presumably, which may be said to have had its beginning at the end of the fifteenth century as a literary language, and to have reached its prime at the end of the sixteenth. You have not forgotten that in Elizabethan days there was already talk of decline.

MOORE. But why should I talk on a subject in which you are more knowledgeable than I am?

BALDERSTON. Because you went to Ireland on a grammatical crusade, and remained there upwards of ten years, regretting the dropping of the Anglo-Saxon cases; and I suppose it is arguable that prepositions are not as graceful as cases.

MOORE. I am altogether with you regarding the cases, but the loss of these is but a small loss compared with that of the second person singular of the verb.

BALDERSTON. Which we Quakers tried to revive for moral reasons.

MOORE. A most interesting experiment, which dropped you into quagmire, the beautiful nominative thou disappearing, and thee serving for nominative and dative, a barbarism that sets me thinking that our race is altogether insensible to the charm of grammar.

BALDERSTON. You would not place grammar above idiom?

MOORE. Idiom is lord over grammar; yet it is hard to imagine a language in which there is no rule, only usage.

BALDERSTON. But a language in which every word agrees with another word, like Latin, moves with difficulty and in stricken attitudes.

MOORE. But is that true? We never meet anybody unwilling to admit that if he had to choose verses other than his own he would choose to sign Virgil's. I remember Catulle Mendès likening, one night of great moonlight in the Place Pigalle, French poetry to two horses yoked to a chariot cantering in perfect rhythm, and English poetry to winged horses that could rise above the earth.

BALDERSTON. But is it not well to rise from the earth?

MOORE. It is indeed, but on the condition that you do not lose yourself in the clouds; a misfortune that may happen if grammar is thrown to the winds. You see I am still thinking of the aeroplane. You has become singular, yet it is used with a plural verb; and the eighteenth century was right, we should say you was; and having lost its grammar, it would seem that the English language is in a fair way of losing its romantic idiom, by which it lives as a literary language, for every Board School teacher deems it her duty to wring all living idiom out of the children. I hear a good deal of thouing and theeing going on, so I suppose you wish to remain little peasants all your lives, the teacher cries, speaking from the threshold to the little ones at play.

The Board School is the enemy of the writer as the photographer is the enemy of the painter, and literature is snuffed out by the Minister of Education, who is, of course, resolute that everybody shall receive a huge dose of education before going to work in the factory or the mine. The curriculum includes a course of modern languages, despite the fact that nobody can learn a second language, and very few a first. The Minister cannot hold a conversation in French, and knows he could not learn French if he were to spend years at it, but he thinks he can teach; alas, everybody thinks he can teach. And in accordance with this belief hundreds come up to Kensington to pass examinations in modelling clay apples, getting a diploma thereby, which will enable them to teach sculpture in the provinces. A little drawing, a little sculpture, a little piano, and of all a little French, for every boy and girl must have a chance of learning French; and the result of the French lesson is that the middle classes will soon know as much French as the upper, which amounts to no more than a sufficiency of French words for the corruption of the English language. To many people it sounds refined, even cultured, to drop stereotyped French into stereo­ typed English phrases. To use badinage for banter, and to think that there is a shade of difference, or I suppose I should say, a nuance of meaning. Yes, Balderston, I am looking forward to reading in the newspapers a précis of a resumé of a communique. You see I omit the accent on the last e, and I wish you would tell me if the people who speak and write this jargon think that resumé is more refined than summary, abridgment, compendium. In society every woman is très raffinée. I once met an author who had written small and petite, and when I asked him why he did it, he said: petite means dainty as well as small; I said: no, it doesn't, but if you wanted to say dainty, why didn't you say dainty? One of the most beautiful words in our language is bodice, but it has given way to corsage, and there is no author now living amongst us who would not prefer to write: the delicious naïveté of it, rather than: the delicious simplicity of it, or the delicious innocency of it. None seems aware that naïveté is a dead word in our language, yet the wretches say they cannot express their ideas unless they be permitted to use French, to which I answer: do not worry about the ideas, think of the words, and of all, try to distinguish between the quick and the dead. Innocency and simplicity have been in the language for more than two hundred years, and are fragrant of it. For the last four months we have had armistice, never truce, and it is hard to discover a modern book in which the writer does not flaunt his knowledge of the word métier. I say flaunt, for he must know that he has three words to choose from: trade, business, craft. Our language is becoming leaner. Translate Memoirs of my Dead Life, and you get Mémoires de ma Vie Morte. I have a cousin in a convent at Lourdes, and thinking she might have forgotten English in the twenty years she had spent in France, I wrote to her in French, and there came into my letter this phrase: Nous sommes les deux rêveurs d'une famille peu rêveuse, a phrase difficult to render into English owing to that lack of grammar which the unity of our Empire demands. Everything has its price­ — Empire assuredly: it would seem that we must furnish a language that can be learnt easily by our dependencies, and we are doing it, shall I say, by leaps and bounds. In America you invent new words, and all that comes out of our own imagination is welcome; yet many who would not write stunt, take pleasure in that disgraceful word camouflage, turning it recklessly into a verb, a thing unthinkable to a Frenchman or to anybody who has acquired even a small part of the French ear. But can you tell me which possesses the most complete grammar, English or Sioux?

BALDERSTON. When I was at Harvard, Sioux was optional.

MOORE. Probably the Sioux is, and it would have been better if you had adopted Sioux, for there is no extensive literature in Sioux, I believe; and the womb being young and Indians uneducated you would get an influence comparable to that which the peasant exercised before English was corrupted by the Board School. Peasants use images inspired by what they look at. If I ask my parlour-maid, who was a peasant a while ago, to find something I have lost, she will say: I'll have a look around. If I ask you, you will answer: I'll try to find it. Which phrase conveys the image? But it seems to me, Balder­ston, that I have been exceptionally talkative this evening, and I beg you to say something and allow me to slink into silence for a little while.

BALDERSTON. When you went to Paris and became the friend of all the great writers and painters of the seventies and the eighties, you listened to them; you did not interrupt Goncourt with crude opinions, for in the seventies you were only beginning to form the opinions which you can cast into words to-day.

MOORE. A gracious and a sensible answer, and yet almost a reproof.

BALDERSTON. No reproof was intended; a statement of a fact can hardly be considered as a reproof.

MOORE. Quite true; the reproof came from me. I reproved you for leaving me to do all the talking.

BALDERSTON. As soon as the position of the armies on the Flanders front creeps in my tum will come, and lest it should come too soon I will remark that I see a brown book on the table. Whistler's The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. The very thing! Let me set him against you. He shall speak for me, giving reasons, which you will find hard to refute, why there never was an artistic period, and that the artist is a man apart from and uninfluenced by his fellows, thereby denying that segregation, locomotion, or any external conditions can have any influence whatever upon art, since art is the artist.

MOORE. Thereby asserting that if he, Whistler, had been born in the fifteenth century, he would have painted pictures similar in style to those he painted in the nineteenth. We sparred round that question in Paris, and Whistler began to explain that he had been misunderstood, and as that meant in Whistlerian that he had begun to think he had gone too far, I did not tease him, saying, that an artistic period only meant a time in which there are more good artists than at another time, asking him if he was prepared to deny that there were more great artists in the sixteenth century than in the tenth, that Michelangelo, Donatello, Andrea del Sarto and Leonardo lived contemporaneously in a town half as big as Chelsea and so forth. As a sledge-hammer is not a weapon to pursue a butterfly with, I will tell a tale. Story, a sculptor, had given evidence favourable to Whistler in the Whistler-Ruskin action for libel, and ever afterwards Whistler felt himself compelled to speak of the trays of little figures six inches high which Story used to exhibit in the Grosvenor Galleries as very similar, if not altogether equal to the Elgin Marbles, and I being in those days entirely submissive to Whistler's genius, did not dare do else than to acquiesce in this strange appreciation of Story's very small talent. Every time his name was mentioned my face brightened. Story — Elgin Marbles, of course! But no sooner was the master's back turned than my face darkened, and I began to ask myself why Story's figures were like the Elgin Marbles, and all spare moments were spent in trying to unriddle the riddle; till one day in the Grosvenor Gallery, as I stood pondering the problem of the likeness of Story's figures to the Elgin Marbles, I caught sight of Whistler coming down the Gallery. Now or never, I said, is my chance to find out the Why, and catching the master by the arm, I said: tell me, sir, why these figures are like the Elgin Marbles? Well, you see, Whistler answered: you know — well — you see you can take it up and you can put it down; and then, you see, you look at it; you can take it up; you can put it down; you look at it again — and that which is­ — why, of course, the relation of art to nature — the prerogative of the artist, for art is not nature because it is art, and nature is not art because it is art — nature which is not art because it is nature — art which is not nature because — well, because the spontaneous creation and living creation of the artist is — And leaving his sentence still hung up, he cried: come along, my dear fellow — come along, lunch, bunch — lunch, bunch — lunch, bunch — lunch, bunch.

As I have said, Story had given evidence for Whistler in his suit against Ruskin, and Whistler's notion of gratitude was to compare Story's work to the Elgin Marbles.

BALDERSTON. A very amusing anecdote. But I should like to hear why Whistler said that an artist stands apart and is uninfluenced by his surroundings.

MOORE. One day we were out walking, the master and I, and he said: Moore, what stupid, ugly boots you're wearing. And in great surprise I answered: stupid, ugly boots! Why are they ugly? I thought them a remarkable good fit. They came only a week ago from Bull's in the Burlington Arcade, and he is reputed to be — Why wear such ugly boots? the master continued. Boots with toes pointed like yours are not fit to be worn by a man who — A burst of laughter cut the sentence short, and presently I heard that a square-toed boot is the only boot that any artist who considers himself can wear. I had not thought pointed toes shocking or frightful, but, never thinking to contest Whistler's judgment, I determined forthright not to order another pair, and not to wear the pair on my feet except in the country, when nobody was looking. It was not long afterward that I met Mrs Whistler, and fortuning to say something about her husband's views of aesthetic boots, she answered: Jimmie has to wear square toes for he has a deformed foot. So you see, his foot being deformed he found himself obliged to evolve a theory that square toes were beautiful and pointed toes ugly, and because he was an American and America had no artistic tradition, he found himself obliged to declare at the top of his voice that there had never been an artistic period and that the artist was apart from and uninfluenced by his fellows. He learnt his painting in Paris from Courbet and others, but to hide the fact that he was a product like every man he spoke of his days in Paris as idle days, saying that while others were at work in the studios he was sauntering in the public gardens or dreaming along the quays. I am that I am, was his belief as much as it was lahveh's; more than it was his Palestinian predecessor's, for he did not call in his Moses to write his commandments, he wrote them himself, and Ten o'Clock was written to compel others to regard him as a prodigy, a sort of sacrament, an article of faith.

BALDERSTON.. I see that he has written in your copy of The Gentle Art. May I read?

MOORE. Certainly.

BALDERSTON. To George Moore — for furtive reading.

MOORE. You see Whistler had read Modern Painting, and finding that there were some pages in the book which fell in with his own appreciation of the.art of painting he could not do else than suggest to me that Modern Painting was derived from the Ten o'Clock, hence the inscription. He asked me if I would mind if he wrote something, that which, etc. I cannot remember how the sentence ended. It probably did not end, but his manner led me to understand that he wished to put a joke upon me, so I begged him to have his joke, and there it is recorded in his own hand: for furtive reading, which means that anything George Moore writes — anything good that he writes about painting — was plagiarised from me, James McNeill Whistler.

It requires your genius, as Degas said to him, to save you from ridicule. An absurd man in his vanities he was, but his paintings are as original as any, and the Ten o'Clock is one of the dainty bits of prose in the English language. Let me read you a passage.

False again, the fabled link between the grandeur of Art and the glories and virtues of the State, for Art feeds not upon nations, and peoples may be wiped from the face of the earth, but Art is.

It is indeed high time that we cast aside the weary weight of responsibility and co-partnership, and know that, in no way, do our virtues minister to its worth, in no way do our vices impede its triumph!

How irksome! how hopeless! how superhuman the self­-imposed task of the nation! How sublimely vain the belief that it shall live nobly or Art perish.

Let us reassure ourselves, at our own option is our virtue. Art we in no way affect.

A whimsical goddess, and a capricious, her strong sense of joy tolerates no dullness, and, live we never so spotlessly, still may she turn her back upon us.

As, from time immemorial, she has done upon the Swiss in their mountains.

What more worthy people! Whose every Alpine gap yawns with tradition, and is stocked with noble story; yet, the perverse and scornful one will have none of it, and the sons of patriots are left with the clock that turns the mill, and the sudden cuckoo, with difficulty restrained in its box!

For this was Tell a hero! For this did Gessler die!

Art, the cruel jade, cares not, and hardens her heart, and hies her off to the East, to find, amid the opium-eaters of Nankin, a favourite with whom she lingers fondly­ caressing his blue porcelain, and painting his coy maidens, and marking his plates with her six marks of choice­ — indifferent in her companionship with him, to all save the virtue of his refinement!

He it is who calls her — he who holds her!

But, Balderston, there is another that you must hear.

That Nature is always right, is an assertion, artistically, as untrue, as it is one whose truth is universalJy taken for granted. Nature is very rarely right, to such an extent even, that it might almost be said that Nature is usually wrong: that is to say, the condition of things that shall bring about the perfection of harmony worthy a picture is rare, and not common at all.

This would seem, to even the most intelligent, a doctrine almost blasphemous. So incorporated with our education has the supposed aphorism become, that its belief is held to be part of our moral being, and the words themselves have, in our ear, the ring of religion. Still, seldom does Nature succeed in producing a picture.

The sun blares, the wind blows from the east, the sky is bereft of cloud, and without, all is of iron. The windows of the Crystal Palace are seen from all points of London. The holiday maker rejoices in the glorious day, and the painter turns aside to shut his eyes.

How little this is understood, and how dutifulJy the casual in Nature is accepted as sublime, may be gathered from the unlimited admiration daily produced by a very foolish sunset.

The dignity of the snow-capped mountain is lost in distinctness, but the joy of the tourist is to recognise the traveller on the top. The desire to see, for the sake of seeing, is, with the mass, alone the one to be gratified, hence the delight in detail.

And when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairyland is before us — then the wayfarer hastens home; the working man and the cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleasure, cease to understand, as they have ceased to see, and Nature, who, for once, has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master — her son in that he loves her, her master in that he knows her.

To him her secrets are unfolded, to him her lessons have become gradually clear....

Through his brain, as through the last alembic, is distilled the refined essence of that thought which began with the Gods, and which they left him to carry out.

Set apart by them to complete their works, he produces that wondrous thing called the masterpiece, which surpasses in perfection all that they have contrived in what is called Nature; and the Gods stand by and marvel, and perceive how far away more beautiful is the Venus of Melos than was their own Eve.

So beautiful is it, it brings tears to the eyes. Would you like to hear it again?

BALDERSTON. I should indeed.

MOORE. Very few of the younger generation open The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, and fewer still have seen Ruskin's beautiful drawings, for Whistler's dogged egotism forced him to speak disparagingly of them, though none knew their worth as well as he. How much better it would have been to have spewed out of his mouth the thick clotted prose of The Seven Lamps of Architecture, and to have praised the pencil that followed pensively the vaporous folds in a certain range of mountains fronting the seashore.

BALDERSTON. You reproved me for my silence, for being too good a listener.

MOORE. You should have forgotten that reproof if it were one.

BALDERSTON. I shall, If by observing a leak in your argument I may make amends for my attention.

MOORE. By all means.

BALDERSTON. Music has not been affected by the steamboat, the railway, the telegraph wire.

MOORE. I am glad you have dragged music into the discussion, for I can tell a tale, how last night in the course of a varied conversation I mentioned to Jean Aubry that I had heard three pieces of music that had set me thinking. I will describe the three pieces to you, I said, and it will be interesting to see if you can guess the composers' names. The first piece was a quintet. The instruments employed were clarinet, violins, viola and violoncello, and in the first movement the composer seemed to have thought only of the melody he might give to the clarinet; and a great pour of rich voluptuous song he gave to it on a background of strings vaguely murmuring, twittering dimly, the cello uttering now and then a few grave notes. And my imagination lighting up at the idea half expressed, I said: a nightingale sings in a bare elm branch, keeping the birds in the hedgerow awake; linnets, willow-wren, chaffinch and garden warbler, cannot sleep, so overpowering is the song. Again it broke forth, provoking the violins to twittering just as if they were no more than linnets, I said, And then the viola awoke suddenly and my thoughts began to seek some bird to which to match it, but before pitching upon one the clarinet, just like a nightingale, compelled me to give all my thoughts to it; curve after curve rising out of melodious curve, spirals forming and melting, new sound shapes rising and passing away like the clouds. I might talk to you of Shelley's Skylark, I said, but through that beautiful ode runs a moral thread, and I heard none in the clarinet. You compared the clarinet to the nightingale, Aubry replied.

And he guessed the composer's name correctly. I'm afraid, I said, I cannot give as picturesque a description of the second quintet for the same instruments: clarinet, viola, violins and violoncello, for the piece did not evoke any picture or image in my mind, only a certain admiration for the skill with which the composer broidered the clarinet into the musical texture, never leaving it to outsing the other instruments: excellent music, it was, no doubt, lacking little but nationality and individual genius; the mark of a man who seems to have admired the dry bits in Beethoven. Aubry made two bad guesses and then a good one.

The third piece, I said, began with fifteen or twenty bars of jiggering rhythm that anybody could write if he chose to transcribe what he might hear in a barn in which peasants had assembled for dancing, a ragged prelude to a second movement, one in which I faintly apprehended a sort of chant intended to represent monks singing in a monastery. The instruction given how to produce the maximum amount of discord seemed to be ingeniously contrived, and the last movement (the word movement seems out of keeping with such ragged stuff) represented a juggler at his antics, so one of the musicians informed me; it might have been that or anything else. But you, Aubry, who have much knowledge of modern music, may risk your reputation in the adventure of a guess. He began with guesses wide of the mark, but before admitting defeat, he asked: is it English music? And on my telling him it was not, he said: then it is — , and he blurted out the right name. Of course he may have been feigning a cunning ignorance whereby to astonish me with his cleverness in guessing the authorship of several pieces of music from my verbal description of them. But it doesn't matter if he duped me, for the point I wish to make is that these three pieces of music tell how art is inspired in the first period, sustained by craft, skill, erudition in the second, and falls afterwards into sterile eccentricities.

BALDERSTON. If I were not afraid that the question would lead us far from the subject of this conversation, I should like to ask you the names of the three composers whom your friend was clever enough to guess, but before you tell me, I'd like to ask if art has come to the end of her spool in Europe, may not the Goddess begin to unwind again in America.

MOORE. That art is proved among the gone should not concern us overmuch, for the history of art is complete, as Whistler observed in his Ten o'Clock; and at the risk of making my own prose seem contemptible I will quote from him again:

Therefore have we cause to be merry! — and to cast away all care — resolved that all is well — as it ever was — and that it is not meet that we should be cried at, and urged to take measures!

Enough have we endured of dullness! Sure!y are we weary of weeping, and our tears have been cozened from us falsely, for they have called out woe! when there was no grief, and alas! where all is fair!

We have then but to wait — until, with the mark of the Gods upon him — there come among us again the chosen­ who shall continue what has gone before. Satisfied that, even were he never to appear, the story of the beautiful is already complete — hewn in the marbles of the Parthenon­ — and broidered with the birds upon the fan of Hokusai at the foot of Fusiyama.

Every sentence in the page reminds one of the etcher's needle, so exquisite is the touch. Touch he had almost in excess in oil and water and in prose too. But enough of praise. You want an answer to your question: will art go and will art return — and I'll give the best I can find to-day: it is certain that the formula whereby we have known art for the last four centuries will not return; the field has been reaped, the corn has been garnered.

BALDERSTON. Might not another formula arise in America, a new country?

MOORE. Whistler's vanity forbade him to accept the only too evident fact that one man does not create a formula. Many men of genius are needed and certain conditions of life. But as Whistler counsels us we need not make moan over the disappearance of the goddess; other things have taken her place. Locomotion we have of all kinds; we shall soon travel to see and hear the same sights and sounds from one end of the earth to the other? But why make moan? Art will come back to us when these conditions are replaced by others, Balderston. You know, we all know, that for about eight hundred years there was no art; and whatever has happened once will happen again. The best friends have to part often so that they may meet again. Art has been with us for about four hundred years, and four hundred years are a long visit.

BALDERSTON. But will she return in eight hundred years?

MOORE. As likely as not, for the coal that supplies the railways and the manufactories in England will be exhausted in another hundred years.

BALDERSTON. Other means will be discovered — electricity.

MOORE. Why so pessimistic, Balderston? Now it is I who am the optimist, finding happiness in the thought that in about one hundred years the population of England will begin to dwindle, and in about two hundred years there will be fields and gardens where to-day there are cinder heaps. America will remain longer in ugliness, for your coal deposits are larger, and there is more petrol. But coal and petrol are not endless even in America; and as soon as both are among the gone, the world will start on a new race again: the pack horse will be seen on the down; the archer will be met in the forest bending his bow to catch the swift deer with a swifter arrow as he crosses the glade; women will come back to the cottage doors to spin the thread for the weaving of the sheets they lie in; pottery will be made on the wheel; and men will paint it, having recovered the use of their hands, and a new idea of beauty be given to mankind.