Avowals, Chapter 4

London: Privately Printed, 1 September 1919, pages 124-137, 4,632 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. IV.

The most that I can hope for to relieve the monotony of Ebury Street, a long narrow slum, in which I took a house in the Coronation year, is a new idea; and one has come to entertain me to-day — namely, that the English poets have beautiful names, and the English novelists dowdy ones, all but George Meredith, who was no novelist, and will be remembered by his verses. In the discovery of a name's power Bacon was before me; for he knew the importance of a name in literature, and chose the most beautiful name of all; and with each play Shakespeare grew more and more like his name, more elusive, more recondite; and for the sake of the name let no edition of Bacon's plays be put on the market. The plays are by the name. Another name, Andrew Marvell's, might have signed the poems, but the plays and sonnets required a larger name. John Milton is a name to resound for ages, a name for a Puritan poet. And we shall have to go far afield to find a better name than Wordsworth for a pastoral poet. No name is more apt than Alfred for a Victorian poet, and it may be doubted if anyone is so blind that he cannot see that the poems are sometimes Tennyson, and sometimes Alfred, and that some are by Alfred Tennyson. Swiinburne too is a significant name, and when we add the Algernon Charles Swinburne, the name is the reed through which every wind blows music.... Atalanta is by Swinburne alone, the Poems and Ballads are by Charles and Algernon, and the trivialities of that volume we attribute to Algernon alone.

That the name the writer bears should interpret the quality of his writing will only seem absurd to him who has never been awakened by a name, thrilled and inspired by a name as I was on the morning related in Confessions of a Young Man, when the family coach lumbered towards Hedford in the county of Galway, the sunlight striking through the glass, my parents sitting opposite to me, talking of a novel the world was reading, a story of a lady who married her groom because he had violet eyes, Lady Audley, who was forgotten for a while in the delight of tearing down fruit trees and chasing a cat, but my psychic eyes were all the while fixed on the book, and when we returned home I read it and its successors till I came to a book called The Doctor's Wife, a derivative Madame Bovary, a doctor's wife who read Shelley and Byron. His name, Shelley's, of course, burst like a star through the shades of my dreamy youth, and escaping from the school­ room, I ransacked the library to find at last a small pocket edition, long out of print, no doubt. It opened at The Sensitive Plant, and to read that the young winds fed the sensitive plant seemed so wonderful that I could not be kept out of my mother's bedroom, but must needs read it to her there and then. Queen Mab was read by the shores of a pale green Irish lake. Byron, too, was often in my hands; and having discovered two great poets by the light of their names, it was natural that I should seek again. The name that lured me on this third time was Kirke White, and though the syllables did not promise another Shelley they led me to expect a proud and lonely spirit. Messenger after messenger was dispatched to Castlebar, urging the bookseller to inquire again for the volume. And I remember waiting in the pantry for my messenger to return from Castlebar with it, and seizing it, a small volume in red boards, and retiring with it to a room at the head of the stairs. But the first stanza lacked the magic of the line: and the young winds fed it with silver dew; the second was duller than the first, and for many years Kirke White cast a gloom over, if it did not destroy utterly, my belief in name augury,

Some years after a sculptor spoke Balzac's formidable name at the door of his studio, and I felt a thrill, but, discouraged by the Kirke White episode, refrained from buying a French grammar and dictionary. If it had not been for thy fraudulent name, Kirke White, the reviewers would have been in the possession of an infallible guide to literature for the last five and thirty years; but for thy name they are still groping in darkness, confounding the English novel with English literature, words written yesterday, and after writing them I asked after Kirke White, for the first time, I swear it, and learnt that he was intended to be a clergyman, and died at twenty-four. A sort of Keats, I said, without Keats' talent. And fell to thinking that to die at twenty-four is a poetic act; and out of my meditation the thought arose, why it should have arisen I cannot tell, but I did say to myself: Kirke White's name is not good enough for a poet, but it might have made a good English novelist. A better name it certainly is than any we discover among our novelists — only colourless names, dry-as-dust or vulgar names like mackintoshes, names that are as squashy as galoshes. Trollope! did anybody ever bear a name that predicted a style more trollopy. Anthony, too, in front of it, to make matters worse. And Walter Scott is a jog-trot name, a round­-faced name, a snub-nosed, spectacled, pot-bellied name, a placid, beneficent, worthy old bachelor name; a name that evokes all conventional ideas and formulas, a Grub Street name, a nerveless name, an arm-chair name, an old oak and Abbotsford name; a name to improvise novels to buy farms with. And Thackeray is a name for a footman, for the syllables clatter like plates, and when we hear it we say: we shall want the carriage at half-past two, Thackeray.

And Dickens is a name for a page-boy, surely. If I did not believe firmly that Providence bestows names upon us in harmony with the books we are ordained to write, the name of George Eliot would convert me. The writer's real name was Marian Evans, a chaw-bacon, thick-loined name, but withal pleasing, redeemed by its character, like the shire horse. But the Providence that shapes the writer to its ends required a hollow, barren name, without sign of human presence upon it, one reminiscent of the strange sea-shells that are found only on the mantelpieces of Pentonville front parlours — striped backed, white-lipped shells in which it is impossible to believe that a living creature ever dwelt. I will put it to the reader's honour. Hand on your heart, reader, could the name, George Eliot, have written Miss Austen's novels? Of course it could not, nor could a name like George Eliot have written The Human Comedy; certainly not, cries the truthful reader. Could any name have written The Human Comedy but the name that did write it: the great name designed by the writer for the work? Balzac added the particule, feeling it to be necessary for his work. No one, cries a full chorus of readers, and having thanked them for their unanimity, I continue: when I heard this sonorous name for the first time, a Cyclopean city rose up before me, outlined against rich skies mysteriously violet. Gustave Flaubert flows on the wind like a banner, and J.K. Huysmans evokes the crooked soul of the middle ages. The K. carries the mind far away down zigzagging Gothic alleys, up high stairs, at the top of which a bell-ringer sits dreaming over the music of the bells, deploring the while the difficulty of getting a fine oil for the preparation of a salad.... But a beautiful name was required to write stories as shapely as Greek vases, and the writer of the most comely stories in the world bore the most comely name in the world — Ivan Tourguéneff. Hearken, reader, to the musical syllables — Ivan Tourguéneff; repeat them again and again, and before long the Fates coiled in their elusive draperies in the British Museum will begin to rise up before your eyes; the tales of the great Scythian tale-teller are as harmonious as they, and we ask in vain why the Gods should have placed the light of Greece in the hands of a Scythian.

This much has been learnt in the Gosse-Moore conversations, that if an art has been given to a country in which she may express herself supremely, all the other arts are minor in that country. The genius of England went into poetry, and in the course of our literary inquest we stumbled across the curious fact that Tourguéneff failed to appreciate Balzac — a fact reported by trustworthy biographers without comment, and we are in doubt whether he thought the subject worthy of his further consideration, or whether he wished to excite our curiosity by a mere statement, as Goethe did when he said that it would have been better if Luther had never been born. But no comparison is available. Goethe's life was planned with a view to occupying the literary and scientific attention of the world for centuries: and there can be little doubt that he dreamed of the last man lighting his lamp to read the autobiography. That nobody reads, I said one evening while walking home with John Eglington [sic] after the closing of the National Library, relating the many various studies in which Goethe spent his day: winding up with some midwifery, John muttered contemptuously, and for no purpose but to continue a little dribble of ink in the morning.

John is wise enough to set little store on the value of writing. And in this he is like Tourguéneff, who wrote for it was as natural for him to write as to breathe; and when he had said all he had to say about the world he had been pitchforked into he told the editor of a newspaper who had come to him for a story that he had laid down the pen for ever. He did not speak in the hope of instigating the thought that the world would henceforth be poorer; he knew the value of life, and never sought to obtain a title from the Tsar; he wore no decorations, refrained from literary banquets, and, when he went abroad, from speaking in the name of Russia. He did not try to be wise, he was wise, so very wise that he was content to be, incredible as it may seem, as wise and no wiser than nature made him. As much cannot be said of Goethe, who was not, perhaps, so pompous as George Henry Lewes makes him appear. No man, happily, was ever that, but we must not allow George Henry Lewes to divert us from our path, and to come back to it I will say that I believe that when Tourgueneff spoke depreciatingly of Balzac he said just what was in his mind, simple Slav that he was, thinking, and thinking rightly, that his inability to appreciate Balzac's genius was not a matter worthy of many words. He knew, but he did not brood on the fact that he knew, and it was part of his genius to be able to put things aside that did not concern him, for there was a good deal more of the simple and natural, of the lilies of the field that toil not, neither do they spin, in Tourguéneff than in Goethe; a sort of Jesus of Nazareth he was in art, who did not need to make mystery by muddying pure water as Goethe was prone to do, so that it might seem deeper than it was. Tourguéneff could be clear and deep, for he saw into nature deeply, and without trying to understand, he understood. And in this he differed from Balzac. A mighty brain Balzac's, but we are conscious that the brain is in labour; and very often it spits forth lava and ashes. But Tourguéneff's art is unconscious as nature; he makes no effort to understand life. Why should he? for he knew; and as soon as we know, effort ceases. A story that any other writer would reject as commonplace, he relates, and raises it in his relation by showing the eternal heart beating in it. To be original without being eccentric! Ah! there's the rub. There have been no other tale-tellers but Balzac and Tourguéneff, only two out of the myriad have been able to write tales that are read by succeeding generations. How very difficult tale­ telling must be, for there have been many poets, many painters, many sculptors, many musicians, but there have been, I repeat, only two tale-tellers. Tolstoy writes with a mind as clear as an electric lamp, a sizzling white light, crude and disagreeable, and Flaubert's writing is as beautiful marquetry, or was thought to be so once. Be this as it may, he is no tale-teller; his best books are not novels, but satires. There is Huysmans with En Route, and the Goncourts have written interesting pages, which some future generation may glance at curiously. There have been men of genius who wrote novels, Dostoieffsky, for instance, but vapour and tumult do not make tales, and before we can admire them modern life must wring all the Greek out of us. His farrago is wonderful, but I am not won. Maupassant wrote perfect tales, but they are so very little.

Only a verse narrative is as difficult to write as a prose. There is but one; and drama is difficult, doubly difficult when it is in verse; and it may be argued that opera is as difficult as narrative, for no one has written many operas successfully — none, except Wagner. Mozart is next best. But what concerns us now is Balzac and Tourguéneff.

I have compared Balzac to many things at different times. I can see him now as some great conqueror — and The Human Comedy like a great city as we approach it extending great outlines enclosing the horizon. We are attracted by its extent, and by the vitality which animates its every part; we do not, it is true, pause anywhere to scan some perfect temple or to examine a carven portico. But what matter? we say. Does not life come before form? Life, we say, is the thing, and we argue with ourselves and ask ourselves if it is not life that we seek in our friends and acquaintances, in books, in statues and in pictures; if this be so, and who shall say it is not so, then Balzac is the greatest. He narrates the ornaments on the chimney­ piece, the clock and the candelabra, and they live with strange intensity. The grey sunshade in Un Lys dans la Vallée lives, and with the same intensity as a sunshade painted by Manet. Twenty years ago it was opened for me. There is life in Balzac's bats and neckties, in the watch he drops into the gentleman's fob, in the rings he puts on the lady's fingers, in the buckles be stitches on her shoes, and the coat-of-arms he paints on her carriage. Balzac is life as we live it, a writer in whom we find all life; and he seems to have exhausted daily life, for the writers that have succeeded him have done no more than to lead us into some corner of his genius. Sometimes the light is that of a star, sometimes that of a lamp, sometimes that of a taper, but there is always light, and the light reveals things great or small, but there is always revelation; and if the light wanes we know it may well burn up again at any moment. Maupassant shows us human nature as beetles. He lifts a stone and the beetles run away, seeking to hide themselves. But in a tale by Tourguéneff we are with life as it exists in our own hearts — sad, unchanging, mysterious. He seems to have brought into the world a perfect comprehension of life. He did not need to learn life from experience; he knew it, and seems to have always been conscious that life is full of folly and evil; that morality is a myth, an academic discussion; and that the artist can only teach by giving the world images of beauty. He was passionately interested in the emancipation of the serfs, but he only advocated their emancipation in­directly, and in The Memoirs of a Nihilist he never tells the acts that caused the man to be condemned to solitary confinement; to describe his life between the four walls of his cell was enough for Tourguéneff. As I have said, this great man seems to have known from the beginning that life as we see it is but an unhappy accident; when I say life as we see it, I mean the surface of life; for few look below the surface, agitated like the surface of the sea, full of strange and cruel life, creatures preying on each other; but below the surface, in our instincts there is calm immortality, and Tourguéneff was a plunger and could read the shadowy designs that he discovered among the rocks.

It was Renan that said, and said beautifully, that a tale by Tourguéneff is the most beautiful thing that art has given since antiquity. Balzac is more astonishing, more complete, but not so beautiful; he is not so perfect; and in the same way Tourguéneff, though not so astonishing or so complete as Balzac, is more beautiful and more perfect.

There are tales that Tourguéneff calls Dream Tales, but all his tales were dream tales. In one of these a man wakes in the middle of the night hearing a sound, the sound of a harp-string, and a voice tells him to go next evening to the blasted oak by the edge of the common. He goes, and meets a phantom, and the phantom tells him not to be afraid; and they fly over the world and see many things. It seemed to me, and it seems to me still, that in this tale we are taken to the verge of life; we seem to look over the very edge; we feel that the great secret is going to be revealed to us. In The House of Gentlefolk a man has made an unfortunate marriage. His wife has lovers, and he leaves her; years pass and he hears she is dead; he believes her to be dead, and meeting a girl who loves him and whom he loves, it is agreed that they shall marry. But the wife returns, and the girl tells the man that he must go back to his wife. No more than that, and it would be hard to find a subject more trite, more commonplace, one that the man of talent would certainly disdain; yet it is out of this trite and commonplace material that genius speaks in telling how Lavretsky comes back after many years and finds a new generation. The garden is changed; trees have grown, and the young people want to play hide-and­-seek; but the melancholy man intimidates them, and sitting on the seat where he sat with Liza, he begs of them to go to play. We old people, he says, have a resource which you don't know yet, and which is better than any amusement — recollection.

On the Eve tells the same tale. The young girl is the same age as Liza, and her parents are thinking of her marriage. Young men come to the house — artists, politicians and professors. A professor speaks to her about Goethe; the artist laughs at him. Helen says: why not? And at that moment we begin to know her. That Why not? is as extraordinary as any one of the motives in The Ring. An hour later we see her sitting by her window facing the summer night. She feels something holy half rising out of, half falling into, her heart, and we know her to be the eternal maiden — she who looked at the stars ten thousand years ago, and who will look at them ten thousand years hence, after a talk with a professor of literature; but her fated lover is a Bulgarian, the pro­fessor's friend. I am not willing to tell the story that Tourguéneff tells, and love it well enough to refrain. So go to it, reader, and find in it the joy that I found in it. But I shall not look into it again, for it may not be the book that I love but my memory of it. Like Lavretsky, I indulge in recollection, but this much I will say, that none will ever tell the tale of love's delight as well again. Helen holds happiness to her breast amid a Venetian spring, and happiness passes from her as the season passes, her fate affecting us as no personal misfortune can affect us; for when her lover dies she goes we know not whither, but we hear her cry in the wilderness, and we see her lonely as Hagar amid the rose granite rocks of Arabia under a lowering sky.

Tourguéneff wrote a story called Spring Floods. In it a man is about to marry a beautiful girl, but he meets the temptation that haunts all Tourguéneff's stories and wastes his life following her. The story is as beautiful as his other stories, but Tourguéneff did not think it sufficiently perfect in outline and strove to perfect the outlines in a novel called Smoke, losing thereby some of the fresh colour of the earlier tale.

The beginning of Smoke is: however, one of the most memorable things in Tourguéneff. A student is spending his holidays in Baden-Baden, and a Russian countess calls at the young man's hotel, and not finding him in she leaves a bouquet of heliotrope for him. He puts the flowers in a glass of water and sits down to write letters. But the suave, subtle odour disturbs him, like something half remembered, half forgotten. He puts the glass away, finishes his letters and goes to bed. But the suave, insinuating odour follows him into the next room and under the bed-clothes.

There is a story of a man who hears a woman singing in Sorrento. He is in the street, and the windows of a house are open, and a beautiful voice singing some melody of Schubert or Schumann floats out into the night air. He hears the voice again on the steppes in Russia, and he meets the singer afterwards in a ballroom in Moscow. I remember no other fact. I only remember the emotion, the evocation of an immortal yearning by a voice heard in the streets of Sorrento, heard afterwards on the steppes in Russia. There is, of course, some mysterious correspondence between her appearance in Sorrento and her reappearance on the steppes. The mystery of these hauntings is implicit in their mysterious recurrence; the same temptation occurring again, amid other circumstances, leads to a belief in an eternal return, in a fate from which we cannot fly, it being part of ourselves. In ancient Greece and Italy men met it in the woods when they spied a white breast between the leaves and were for ever after unable to love mortal woman. They knew the malady by the beautiful word nympholepsy. The ancient woods are now empty of dryad and nymph, but the disease is with us still. Nor is it necessary to go to Sorrento to find it: many a man has found it amid the artificial glades of painted canvas. A nymph flying through the limelight has inspired as deep a passion as a nymph flying through the reeds. I have known such a one. The victim sat out a melodrama a hundred times for her sake. They only met once face to face, and then only for a minute. Her marriage and her death might have inspired Tourguéneff. But he wrote her story. I remember a story by Tourguéneff of a little clerk who went to hear an actress sing. The actress wrote to him, and the pathos in Tourguéneff's story lies in the fact that the little clerk was loved when he thought he was being laughed at. Tourguéneff speaks of the fish that swims to and fro under the boat apparently at liberty, though the hook is in its gills. Ah, he knew the disease in its several symptoms, and he was at once the victim and the perfect chronicler of the disease.

Whitman spoke of Tourguéneff as the noble and melancholy Tourguéneff, and no words could describe him better. He also spoke of Tourguéneff as a most wonderful tale-teller, and the choice of the word proves Whitman to have been an artist even in his casual talk. The choice of the word proves that he understood Tourguéneff as well as I understood Corot, and when I wrote my first article about Tourguéneff many years ago I said: these tales come from the East; he told tales, and we write only psychological novels. I expressed myself badly, for I then only had an inkling of the beauty I have learnt, and that I am still learning to comprehend — a tale by Tourguéneff and a landscape by Corot.

Balzac and Wagner have exalted me; I have joined in the processional crowds, and have carried a blowing banner. My life would have been poor without them, but neither has been as much to me as Tourguéneff and Corot. They have been and still are the holy places where I rested and rest; together they have revealed to me all that I needed to know. For all things are contained in them. He who has seen Corot has seen all the universe, for could we find in the farthest star anything more beautiful than evanescent cloud and a nymph gathering summer blooms by the edge of a lake? A cloud floats and goes out, and the blossoming wood is reflected in the lake; and Io! he has told us the tale of a spring morning. All the outward externalities of nature which Rousseau sought vainly to render, Corot knew how to put aside. He knew that they were but passing things, just as Tourguéneff knew that all the trivial disputes of the day are not worthy to make art, and these twin souls, the most beautiful ever born of woman, lived in the depths where all is still and quiet; where the larch bends, and the lake mirrors a pellucid sky; where a man longs for a woman that has been taken from him; where a woman holds her desire to her breast for a moment, loses it, and is heard of in Bulgaria as a nurse, or is heard of as a Sister of Charity, but about whom nothing certain is known.

That Tourguéneff loved Corot, I think; and Monet loves Corot, for he told me; he loves too, Balzac, and they are alike in this: neither had a point of view; and perhaps this was why Corot did not like Monet any better than Tourguéneff liked Balzac.