Avowals, Chapter 1

London: Privately Printed, 1 September 1919, pages 1-43, 14,581 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. I.

MAID. Mr Edmund Gosse.

MOORE. My dear Gosse, how glad I am to see you, and how well timed your visit is, you will acknowledge when I tell you that five minutes before the door opened I left my writings — you see them all scattered over the table — and came to this fire (which, by the way, isn't wanted on a day like this) to dream of — whom do you think? — of you, of course, and that two human beings so different as ourselves should have been friends for forty years. It must be nearly as long as that.

GOSSE. Differences in temperament draw men together.

Are we not formed as notes of music are

For one another though dissimilar?

A late spring fire is responsible for many dreams; but I should have preferred to hear that it had set you thinking of the art that has united us, rather than of superficial differences that failed to divide us. With you it has been as with me, not a day passing these forty years without our meditating on the mystery of our art. But I will not delay. I merely came —

MOORE. You must not go. This visit is most opportune. I've been trying to write this afternoon and for many previous afternoons for the last fortnight, beginning the same thing over and over again and again and starting afresh. It was my literary perplexities, teasing difficulties, that set me dreaming of you, sitting pen in hand, your eyes fixed on a clear vision, transcribing it from time to time accurately and harmoniously, sentence rising out of sentence, paragraph out of paragraph. Have I not seen your manuscript, only a word altered here and there?

GOSSE. But if I do not change on paper, I change in my mind. I sit pen in hand until the sentence is completely formed, and any quality that my prose may have it gets from the pen. If I were to dictate as you do —

MOORE. My dictation is the cartoon, and the quality, as you call it, and rightly comes when I begin to lick the sentences together.

GOSSE. I couldn't write that way.

MOORE. To me it is incredible that a man should be able to arrange his composition beforehand and execute it sentence by sentence. Your method reminds me of painting as it was done in Paris in the seventies, piece by piece, leaving off in the middle of an eye, and finishing the second half the next day. The painter's task, though difficult, was accomplished upon a drawing, but you are always, if I may so express myself, in mid-air, finding your way like the swallow. You find it, it is true, and I believe you to be without chart or compass since you say it. I believe, as the pious Christian believes, because it is incredible.

GOSSE. I hold the road in my mind's eye.

MOORE. But the mind's eye cannot carry the various aspects of the road and the multiple incidents of the road. But why do I say cannot? My own mind alone is known to me, and every time I begin a fresh subject it seems as if I should never succeed in unravelling it. Our minds are as different as our lives have been. You married early in life, and a gulf divides the man that marries in the beginning from the man who decides in the beginning that he will remain a bachelor. Your life has been spent in your own home among your family and in clubs. You look at this moment as if you had come from your club. You were educated, and you·know literature, Greek and Roman, French, German, besides a good smattering of Scandinavian. No lives were ever so different as ours, nor temperaments. It never happened to you to rush out after dinner to see a friend, or even to desire to do such a thing. Never have I known you to pay a casual visit before to-day.

GOSSE. My wife begged of me —

MOORE. It was not then a desire to see an old friend that compelled you from the Athenaeum, that august abode of prelacy and literature. I am disappointed. I can see you coming through the portals with his Grace, noticing, as soon as you are in the air, that an acid little wind is blowing through the sunshine. You finger the lapel of his lordship's overcoat, saying: Rather thin for the season, and, having deposited his Grace in his carriage and waited till the rug was tucked about the episcopal breeches, you hailed a hansom. Did you not feel yourself to be somewhat of a hypocrite when you called out — you didn't dare to call out: 121 Ebury Street, within hearing of his Grace's coachman? You lowered your voice as a man does on his way —

GOSSE. I cannot allow you to indulge your imagination any longer, though it is all very amusing. I must beg you to receive without delay my wife's message. We have some distinguished visitors coming to see us on Sunday, and she will find it hard to forgive you if you do not help us to entertain them. Among them are —

MOORE. A Scandinavian critic and a Danish poet — ­

GOSSE. I will not stay to hear you talk nonsense any longer about the nationalities of our visitors, which do not concern you at all, and I'll go so far as to say that your remarks make me regret that I broke through my usual custom of communicating by letter rather than by word of mouth. For it is, as you say, not my custom to call without an appointment, and what has happened to-day will not encourage me to repeat my experiment.

MOORE. I'm sorry indeed if my reckless imagination is to deprive me of your company this afternoon, for never in my life did I need it more. Literature needs your help, as you will see if you will forgive your volatile friend his levity, which, though incurable, is harmless. I beg of you to return to your chair, for I cannot talk to you if you stand irate on the hearthrug fuming. Can I do more than apologise for having allowed my imagination to wander about the portals of the Atheneum?

GOSSE. But I don't belong to that club.

MOORE. Then why be angry; it is only reasonable to be angry at the truth. I shall be glad to entertain your friends to the best of my ability whatever their nationalities, if —

GOSSE. You make my wife's request conditional?

MOORE. I beseech you not to be so prickly. I make no conditions. I'll come next Sunday to tea even though I cannot persuade you to stay to help me. Only this do I ask, that you will allow me to tell you that the subject I have been trying to write for the last fortnight arose out of one of the subtlest of your critical remarks, for me the most significant single sentence you ever wrote, or that any man wrote, a sentence that captured and held me ever since, driving me at last to the creation of the idea, an essay. Half-an-hour of your time is all I ask for, and your own thought having caused the need you can hardly refuse me half-an-hour of your time. Our art calls to you.

GOSSE. You have certainly set me wondering what was the epigram, maxim, aphorism, apophthegm, or truism that has caused all the trouble with which I see the dining-room table littered.

MOORE. You wrote, but when you wrote the sentence that captured my imagination I cannot tell you — it must have been in some essay or preface; a casual remark you seemed to consider it, for you did not develop the thought; I wish you had, for had you done so you might have removed some of the errors with which literary criticism is beset; but no, you just said, as if the remark was of no particular importance, that English genius had gone into poetry. And it was this remark thrown out casually that fired my imagination. A seemingly unending perspective opened up before me.

Germany, I said, expresses herself in music; France and Italy in the plastic arts; England, as Gosse says, in poetry. Our poetical literature is the most beautiful, but outside of poetry English genius has accomplished little or nothing.

GOSSE. You wouldn't go so far as to say that English genius has accomplished nothing in prose.

MOORE. English genius has certainly found abundant expression in the essay. Landor, Pater, De Quincey, Lamb. You know how I have yielded to these writers, and yourself has demurred on more than one occasion to my unorthodox faith that more human souls rise out of Landor's Imaginary Conversations than out of Shakespeare's plays. Our conversation became strained as the conversation frequently became between Bishop Parker and Andrew Marvell. You remember the extraordinary inrush of character at the words: I shudder. At these the Bishop rises into our consciousness, a spiritual entity; in all Shakespeare is there anything so swift and telling? But we must keep to the subject of this discussion, that English prose narrative is the weakest part of our literature.

GOSSE. With the exception of one or two masterpieces.

MOORE. I cannot allow that there are any masterpieces in English prose narrative, for masterpieces are written only by first-rate minds, and I think you will agree with me that only the inferior or — shall we say? — the subaltern mind has attempted prose narrative in England.

GOSSE. If we waive the smaller prose narratives of Elizabethan times, we come upon a very remarkable narrative, Robinson Crusoe. But I see your point. Defoe sold his pen willingly to whosoever could afford to pay for the writing of political pamphlets, lampoons, scurrilous novels, literary garbage of all kinds; but you must remember that a man ceases to be a hack writer as soon as he writes a masterpiece.

MOORE. I had not intended to speak of Defoe. Fielding seemed to give my essay a better start, for in Tom Jones we find the family, and in the drawing-room for the first time. Defoe was, as you say, a hack writer, and the theme of my essay is that inferior writers seized upon English prose narrative as a means of getting money; and the fact that Defoe was inspired during the first half of Robinson Crusoe does not impugn or cast a doubt on the validity of my theme. If he'd been inspired from start to finish, the matter would be different. English fiction never finishes gallantly; the writers swerve across the course or bolt out of it, or stick out their toes, turn it up, as the phrase goes. Forgive this description in racing parlance. English fiction is a hackney; French and Russian narrative shows more breeding. This can hardly be denied.

GOSSE. I certainly do not deny it.

MOORE. It would seem, then, that my essay must begin with Defoe; not with Defoe, but with Defoe's last word, Robinson Crusoe, the most English of all books. We are islanders, Crusoe was one. Our business is the sea. Crusoe was constantly occupied going to and fro from a wreck. We are a prosaic people, what the French would call terre à terre. Nobody was more terre à terre than Crusoe. England seems to have expressed herself in her first narrative uncommonly well. You see, my dear Gosse, that this conversation is already beginning to bear fruit. It must be fifty years since I read Robinson Crusoe, but the construction from the first part of the story is so regular that it seems to me as if I could read the book in memory. The going back and forth on a raft to get food; the finding of the fowling-pieces and cordials. How often did he mention that he had discovered a case of cordials? I used to wonder what cordials were, and why he attached so much importance to the finding of them, for I come of a family that has been sober for many generations. It seems to me that I remember his house and the building of the boat, and the current that nearly carried him out of sight of the island, for the boat could not be steered out of the current till he hoisted a sail. It was difficult for a child to comprehend how a sail that carried him more swiftly from the island than the current was doing could at the same time enable him to steer out of the current. He was almost out of sight of the island when he put up the sail, and it was with a great relief that I read that the boat answered the helm as soon as her speed exceeded the speed of the current. The unfortunate Stevenson who tried to write books of adventures merely wrote a succession of accidents, but in Robinson Crusoe every incident is necessary; and every one is shapen perfectly, and fits into its place; at the right moment we are told that Crusoe's powder and shot began to run short, so, instead of shooting the goats, he trapped them; the wild goats became tame and gave him milk, and from the milk he may have made butter and cheese; I've forgotten. But he certainly made himself a suit of clothes out of goat skins, and what is wonderful in this adventure story is the moral idea: man alone with Nature. Defoe may have gotten the desert island from Juan Fernandez, but he got the unforgettable incident, the footprint on the sand, out of his own mind, and the subsequent discovery that cannibals had been on the island and indulged in a cannibal feast. In considering the beauty of the subject that chance dropped in front of Defoe (true that it dropped in front of many besides Defoe), it may occur to us that for full justice to be done to it a man who was at once a poet, a philosopher, and a great descriptive writer was needed, but on consideration doubts will soon begin to arise if this be so, and we begin to think that perhaps the story gains by an unaffected absence of the grand style. The first part of the story could not be improved, but the end is a sad spectacle for us men of letters — the uninspired trying to continue the work of the inspired.

GOSSE. It is quite true that very few people continue the book after Crusoe leaves the island, and your description of the uninspired trying to continue the work of the inspired must be accepted, I think, as a just criticism and judgment of the book's end; and I suppose I must allow that if a man fails to hold the mean in his narrative, and all the way, from end to end, he cannot be looked upon as a genius of the first rank.

MOORE. The man of talent may be inspired, but the moment of inspiration gone by, he writes like a dolt.

GOSSE. Not so a man of genius; he always writes well; he never gives the show away. But my apologies for a colloquialism seemingly necessary for the occasion. I see you look upon the end of Robinson Crusoe as a complete failure.

MOORE. An end that nobody reads cannot be looked upon as else than a failure, and the true end seems so plain that I am puzzled. After the evangelisation of Friday I've forgotten if Crusoe taught Friday his catechism and his prayers; if he didn't, the oversight is incomprehensible; but if we begin by supposing that he did not miss this very English point, Crusoe would be moved to consider his own life in relation to Friday.

GOSSE. He did not miss the evangelisation.

MOORE. I am sincerely glad to hear it. After Friday had been instructed in the doctrine of the Atonement, the thought would cross Crusoe's mind that his life and the savage's would shape out into an admirable romance; but he would be deterred from writing the book for a long time, thinking that no one would ever read it, not even Friday.

GOSSE. Pens and ink and paper are not available on a desert island,

MOORE. There was a wreck.

.

GOSSE. The wreck had gone to pieces long ago. True, he might have saved a good deal of writing material from the first wreck. But the dislike to pass out of this life without leaving some record of our passage through it is one entirely alien to the character of Robinson Crusoe. You would make him into an artist. Defoe was particularly careful to avoid this mistake, for he explains, as you would have seen if you had read the end of the book, that Robinson Crusoe does not write his story till he has exhausted all the occupations he can devise. It is not till he has tied up the last fruit tree that he sits down to write his story.

MOORE. A time-worn literary trick that betrays the hack writer. Let us avail ourselves, if needs must be, of it on the island; and, accepting Defoe's own subterfuge, I say that the taming and instruction of Friday being completed there remains little daily work for Crusoe. Friday does the work, and, finding the afternoons a little languid, Crusoe begins to dream, and before long his dreams are of another ship come to rescue his manuscript. Another ship, he says, will come sooner or later, and he'd just as lief be read after his death as before. Crusoe should die before Friday, for some admirable pages might be written on the grief of the man Friday, inter­mingled with fears lest his kindred should return and eat him, Friday, not Crusoe; and Friday, true to his evangelisation, would bury Crusoe with all the prayers he could remember.

GOSSE. But who would write this? You cannot have two pair of eyes on the island.

MOORE. Crusoe must not meet with sudden death, rather an accident among the cliffs that would allow him to continue his memoirs from time to time. I would have the last page of the manuscript relate Crusoe's anxiety for Friday, who he foresees will die of grief, and Friday's last act, the placing of the manuscript in the cave hard by the grave which would be necessary for the completion of the story, for it is the manuscript that explains to the captain of the next ship that visits the island the presence of the skeleton by the grave. The discovery of and the reading of the manuscript would have given Defoe an opportunity to evolve a new soul — the captain's. How the poor savage must have grieved for his saviour and master! Like a dog, the captain mutters as he turns the last page.

GOSSE. I can see that a good deal is to be said in favour of entrusting you with the task of providing new ends to old masterpieces.

MOORE. If we begin to put jokes on each other we shall never arrive at the end of our task, which is a long one, a review of the history of prose narrative in England.

GOSSE. Your end strikes me as admirable, but it would require a greater writer than Defoe to execute it, and.I'm glad you were not by to suggest it.

MOORE. Why?

GOSSE. I'm afraid the new wine would have burst the old bottles — with that end in view he might not have succeeded in writing ·the story.

MOORE. You must not think that I'm providing a definite plan for the completion of the story. I'm only throwing out hints. But there can be no doubt that Defoe would have done better had he kept Crusoe on the island. And it would be amusing to write the end on the lines I have suggested, doing for Defoe what Wagner did for Gluck and what Liszt did for many writers, Why should the arrangements of masterpieces be limited to music? Why should we not rearrange literary masterpieces?

GOSSE. The rearrangement would not prove acceptable.

MOORE. It would, if the rearrangement were better than the original.

GOSSE. Don Quixote is another masterpiece that ends unsatisfactorily.

MOORE. I'm glad you mentioned Don Quixote. Defoe called him to your mind, for he, too, was a literary hack, writing many comedies, autos and poems, unworthy trash, till he stumbled upon a subject which he wrote as well as it could be written till he came to the end of his inspiration. The coming to the end of one's inspiration is always pathetic, and for Cervantes the loss was doubly cruel, for it came suddenly and went suddenly, like a wind. A fine wind it was while it lasted; a finer never blew peradventure, not excepting the wind that carried the plays along — Hamlet and Lear. Cervantes sailed out of harbour in a grand gale,. Who lives that does not sometimes think of the Castilian gentleman, exalted by a long reading of the literature of knight errantry, discovering armour in a garret and repairing the helmet with brown paper on wire?

GOSSE. Admirable, thrice admirable is the description of the knight himself. Nor do I think that it is going too far to say that never in literature has so perfect a correspondence been found between the spirit and the flesh. And all you who have sought for this correspondence will accept the knight of the rueful countenance as the unparalleled example in which the flesh or lack of flesh proclaims the soul.

MOORE. Tourguéneff descried a fitting envelope for the spirit of Bazaroff, but Tourguéneff’s conception is small compared with the world- wide figure of the knight riding forth by himself in the first instance, and then returning in search of an esquire. As we watch the twain riding side by side through the highlands, we seem to be looking upon some great sculpture of Egypt and Assyria. Never was the world so wide before nor gestures so eternal.

GOSSE. And we seem to be listening to Shakespeare himself, who was a contemporary; and this sets me thinking that perhaps the special quality of their humour was not the insular possession of England, but belonged to the great century that produced these two men. They could not have known each other, and yet — ­ But I must not allow our conversation to drift into Shakespearean controversy. You said that never was the world so wide before nor gestures so eternal.

MOORE. As in the first adventures when the knight charged the flock and afterwards the windmill. And is it not thrilling to remember that they were on their way to the inn in which Don Quixote was enrolled by the innkeeper into the order of knighthood; and indeed I cannot keep myself from mentioning the vigil undertaken at the instigation of the innkeeper, or of telling you that it was the innkeeper who sent the knight home in search of an esquire. The Don returns with Sancho mounted on an ass! Was ever before an imagination so epical? And how splendid the blanketing of Sancho in the inn and the account of the evil-smelling slut stealing by mistake into the knight's bed, and he lying between sleeping and waking, dreaming of Dulcinea, instead of into the bed of the lusty waggoner who had been looking forward to her all that day for many weary miles. After reading these pages I lay immersed in genius, like a mediaeval saint in God, the host still melting on his tongue; and I continued in ecstasy till the twain reached an almost savage landscape, admirably described.

The time must have been late in the afternoon, for there still lingers in my mind a memory of peaks brilliant against the sun setting, and my ear still holds like a shell Don Quixote's voice telling Sancho that he wishes to strip himself naked and stand upon his head, and Sancho begging the knight to refrain, saying that the sight of his master's naked rump in the air will bring up his stomach.

GOSSE. You will allow me to interrupt you for a moment. The credit of introducing landscape into fiction has always been granted to Rousseau. But your mention of the rugged landscapes in Cervantes puts it into my mind that the honour of introducing landscape background into fiction really belongs to Cervantes. I remember the landscape you allude to; it is brushed in with the energy of Salvator Rosa.

MOORE. It is, indeed, and many others. But I would remind you that yourself deprecated the introduction of Shakespearean controversy into our talk, and you did well, and I did ill when I spoke of Egyptian and Assyrian sculpture, for the landscapes through which the knight and his escort follow their adventures are superterrestrial. We have left our miserable little planet for a larger one, Jupiter maybe, and the book drops from our hands in amazement when the Don throws his heels into the air. Cervantes' last inspiration, no, the last is Sancho turning in the saddle, and catching sight of the knight's shanks above his shirt, he drops into reverie, falls to considering his relation, for he is on his way back to recount the knight's last exploits to Dulcinea.

The book should have ended here, for God himself could not have invented adventures more wonderful than those that have been. I have forgotten if the meeting with the gang of convicts, and the subsequent misunderstanding, and the severe beating he receives as soon as he freed them from their chains, comes just before or just after Sancho's departure. For the sake of a clear division between the inspired and the uninspired Cervantes, I would have it come before. But it may come in the next division of the story, Nature being the real author and Cervantes no more than her mouthpiece. Nature is good at detail, but lacks rhythm; she lingers and spoils the harvest with an aftermath. It may come in the next division, yet I do not see how it can, for we are introduced to new characters, and stories are told that no one remembers — Moorish maidens who became Christians and such like. A faint memory lingers in me of a curate. Do you remember?

GOSSE. My unfortunate memory, oh, my unfortunate memory.

MOORE. There is no reason for being disheartened, not this time, for it may be doubted if even Mr Fitzmaurice Kelly could give any lucid account of these stories, though he refused to collaborate with me in an edition that would exclude all extraneous matter and follow closely the fortunes of the knight and his esquire. He was right, for his closer study of the book than mine had revealed to him, let us hope, the truth that the original inspiration was too wonderful to be continued by Gods or men; and henceforth Cervantes, the hack writer, turns the handle of his hurdy gurdy, setting Don Quixote and his esquire dancing to the old tune — Don Quixote starting out on some new adventure, Sancho holding up his hands.

GOSSE. It has often been said that a finer and nobler nature begins to appear in the knight in the second part; and I do not think that this is untrue to nature, for if we contain any grain of good it ripens as we live.

MOORE. The change in the knight, if there be any change, does not help us to any new appreciation of him, and I say this though I know in saying it I am at variance with Tourguéneff, who drew the attention of the Moscow students to the death of Don Quixote trampled to death by a herd of swine, and to the last words of the chivalrous knight. I will not ask you what they are; I, too, have forgotten them, and only remember that: though all things pass away, even beauty, chivalry and truth, goodness remains. A stupid paraphrase, doubtless, but a beautiful idea it is, truly, that he who had followed goodness all his life long should find his death at last under cloven hooves. But the herd of swine is introduced into the story casually — a casual thought introduced into a casually composed sequel in which Sancho becomes a pour of proverbial wisdom while the knight rides wrapped in his meditations, like Falstaff, for Shakespeare, too, intellectualised his knight, thereby puzzling the mummers who try to portray him. But, as you just said, we must not allow Shakespearean controversy to beguile us from our search of a first-rate mind expressing itself in English prose narrative.

GOSSE. As that is our quest, it seems to me that I cannot do better than to ask you to put a precise meaning on the words: a first-rate mind. Kant's mind was first- rate, but it was not the sort of mind that instigated works of art, and it has often occurred to me that something more than mere mind is necessary to produce the pictures — shall we say? — of Manet and Degas. Yet a mind is visible in their works.

MOORE. I wonder if we can differentiate between the mind and the instincts of the mind? If we can, I should prefer to say that instincts of the mind are discernible in the works of the great masters. But I'm always apprehensive of metaphysical quicksands and mists, and before putting down the helm I will remark that the artist's instinct is the sail that carries the boat along, and his reason the rudder that keeps the boat's head to the wind; without a rudder the sail loses the wind. The simile seems to hold good. An instinct will carry the artist some distance, but if he have not reason he will drift like the rudderless boat, making no progress at all.

GOSSE. As good an explanation as we shall get of something that will always remain a mystery. And if I may continue your thought for you I would say that works in which reason plays too large a part do not satisfy us.

MOORE. Our instincts are deeper than our reason, and it is pleasant to remember that art rises out of our primal nature, and that the art that never seems trivial is instinctive.

GOSSE. If I may do so without seeming egotistical, I would remind you that I have touched on the same point in my History of English Literature, saying that George Eliot seems trivial, especially in the books in which she was anxious to seem profound.

MOORE. Quite so. Manet was never anxious, and did not waste time at keyholes like Degas, but said, if not aloud, to himself, we are original or we aren't, but we do not become original by sending away the model who weighs eight stone, and calling in the butcher's wife who weighs twenty-nine, and asking her to strip and stand in front of a tin bath, or by painting one cheek of the wife's backside green and the other blue, like Besnard.

GOSSE. You would regard George Eliot as a trivial writer, and Sterne as serious?

MOORE. Of course I should, Gosse; you're helping me; I cannot find words to tell you how much, and my essay seems to be coming: You're not going? I will not hear of your going; back to your chair, for you're helping me even more than I expected you would, and I expected a great deal of help from you.... You are helping me, putting the words I want into my mouth, that the English novel is silly, illiterate, sentimental, erudite and pompous by turns; but serious, never! How true! And how could it be else, for in the seventeenth century we were living in moated castles defended by retainers who dined with their chief in banqueting halls, raising or lowering the drawbridge as the occasion required; life was too unsettled to admit a literature whose subject must always be, perhaps to a large extent, a description of social life; and it would seem that social life was thrust somewhat suddenly upon England, drawing-rooms or salons having just arrived from France, unintroduced by any sufficient prose literature. But without regard for this lack of preparation the drawing-rooms insisted on being entertained, and they took what they could get — Tom Jones. I see it all; there was no standard, and it was out of the enthusiasm of our first drawing-rooms that the belief arose which soon developed into a tradition, that Tom Jones should be accepted as the classic example of English prose narrative.

GOSSE. Scion of the Georgian house.

MOORE. Yes, sprung from the Georgian house — from the Georgian drawing-room.

GOSSE. You couldn't find a better springboard for your essay.

MOORE. I'm glad you think so, and I hope you will allow me to continue talking a little longer. You've no idea what a help you are.

GOSSE. Proceed.

MOORE. I read Tom Jones in the influence of the tradition that I have just mentioned, and —

GOSSE. I hope you haven't neglected to look into the book again, for if you haven't I cannot help you.

MOORE. Yes, I've looked into the book, and it seemed more lifeless than it did twenty years before, when I read it for the first time. It was then as an old and withered tree, whitened branches and gaping trunk —

GOSSE. Ready to fall, having aged almost out of recognition in the last twenty years. An excellent impression of a decaying masterpiece; but something more than an impression is necessary in an essay.

MOORE. I can only write my own feelings, and shall have to say that at the end of the first hundred pages the book fell across my knees and set me asking myself how our forefathers had managed to read a book without a glimpse of the world without us, or any account of the world within. It is difficult, Gosse, to write vividly about an entirely empty book, vague, like a fog, yet without mystery, and so impersonal that we begin to doubt the existence of the author, and in self-defence have to urge ourselves out of the belief that the book proceeded from some curious machine, a lost invention of the eighteenth century. Machinery was in its infancy in 1750, so we know that a living man must have written it or dictated it, and the theory that it was gabbled into a phonograph is untenable. Even so, the impersonality of the book would surprise us, so empty are the pages of all traces of preferences and aversions. Since I have begun I must tell all, Gosse. Fielding seems to have been without sensibility of any kind, mental or physical, and his book is therefore the most personal and at the same time the most impersonal ever written.  Mr Allworthy, the first person we meet in it, says nothing that brings him before us; we are told nothing about him, though he is the owner of the Georgian house in which the first scenes are laid and the pivot on which the story turns, and we drop the book to consider this strange reticence, coming at last to believe that the author felt it would be difficult for him to set before the reader a man so transparently conventional that he could not be even suspected of having begotten a love child, and shrank from a task which, even if it were successful, might weary the reader, to fall back upon a simpler plan of exposition, saying to himself: the obvious is always the best, and I will call the gentleman Allworthy; the name will allay suspicion even in the most prone to suspicion. A daring interpretation this is of Fielding's mind during the composition of the first part of his notable novel which you may accept or —

GOSSE. Forgive me for interrupting you, but I would not have you fall into the mistake of finding fault with an eighteenth-century author for not writing naturalistically.

MOORE. I think my words were: without a glimpse of the world without us, and to these I might have added: without even such glimpses as we get from Jean Jacques. In Tom Jones we are in a fieldless, treeless, flowerless planet; but even Fielding's indifference to nature would not matter if the book were not passionless; any sudden movement of passion or feeling would provoke our sympathy, and we should see in our imagination the sun lighting up the middle distance and the raincloud above it. A description of Manon is not to be found in the text, but Manon is always before our eyes, for Abbé Prevost realised Manon intensely, whereas Fielding, in his attempt to describe Sophia, shows himself as insensible to the magic of woman as he is to that of nature.

GOSSE. It is probable that Fielding succeeded better with men than with women, and you will not deny that Squire Western is a very real person and one very typical of the eighteenth century.

MOORE. Squire Western goes his own gait and speaks his own lingo; we see and hear him; but, if I may say so without seeming to disparage Fielding needlessly, Squire Westem is too obvious to be considered highly; he is hardly more worthy of aesthetic criticism than the caricatures of Gilray and Rowlandson. I would not mitigate a merit, but I would have it understood that Nature draws so well sometimes that even a very bad draughtsman cannot miss a likeness. There can be little doubt that Squire Western is a rough sketch from life, and the invention of the different episodes in the book are so poor that I am inclined to believe that the one good one, the Squire's relinquishment of his pursuit of Sophia, to follow a pack of foxhounds that crossed the road in pursuit of a fox, was, like the Squire himself, taken from life.

GOSSE. But you admire Rowlandson?

MOORE. Yes, I admire Rowlandson till somebody speaks of Goya.

GOSSE. And you know that Thackeray said that since Tom Jones nobody had dared to paint the portrait of a man in fiction, meaning, I take it, that Fielding was the first to tell us that a young man might be truly in love with Sophia Western and yet commit an act of impropriety with Molly Seagrim.

MOORE. A knowledge which he might have gathered from observation of his bull terrier; and my reproach is that Fielding has not attempted to differentiate between dogkind and mankind, and that he does not seem aware that it is necessary to do so, not even in his own mind.

GOSSE. Have you nothing to say in praise of Fielding's style?

MOORE. He writes with gusto, a quality we seldom meet with in modern literature, perhaps because we are becoming more thoughtful; and he keeps it up like an actor who knows he is playing in a bad play.

GOSSE. But you have not told me how you explain away Thackeray's preference for Tom Jones.

MOORE. I find the examination of my own mind so difficult that I cannot for the moment undertake to examine Thackeray's. The best plan will be to try to believe that he spoke casually.

GOSSE. Now I must reprove you for a lack of seriousness. For nearly two hundred years Fielding has held undisputed sway as our prime novelist.

MOORE. We shall meet others in the course of our literary inquisition whose reputations seem as unmerited as Fielding's. I know, I feel that the prospect is a little alarming, but we have lighted our lanterns and are looking about for a serious writer. Let us get on.

GOSSE. But how shall we recognise him should we meet him?

MOORE. Now, Gosse, you are inventing difficulties that do not exist, and I must reprove you, for was it not you that put forward Laurence Sterne and George Eliot as typical examples of the serious and trivial in literature? and with these in mind we shall not miss a really serious writer if our lights should flash him into view. A little patience is all I ask, Gosse; other examples will be discovered later, but we may not anticipate them, for I am eager to remind you that in your History of English Literature you speak of the extreme beauty of Sterne's style, and the adjective pleases me; I cannot tell you why, but it seems to me to discover the truth, or some of it, and I would merely add that no writer has come down so unchanged as Sterne.

GOSSE. And I welcome the addition. I'm glad that we agree about Sterne.

MOORE. But, my dear friend, we are always agreed, except when you speak of Sterne's unseemly life; a sad remark that is of yours, and if I may be permitted to say so, lacking point; for we could not have Sterne's style without his unseemly life, we accept the one for the sake of the other, just as we accept the unseemliness of Christianity in practice for the sake of the words of Jesus, overlooking the Bishop of London, who —

GOSSE. I'm afraid you don't know the Bishop of London.

MOORE. My writings have placed me, alas, under interdiction, and so have yours, Gosse. You mentioned that you are not a member of his club, but neglected to say that you would have been if you had not written a masterpiece. The truth, Gosse.

GOSSE. The Athenaeum Club is becoming wearisome, and I must insist that we return to Sterne without delay. I'm glad that you approve of my adjective, but why it should have taken your fancy so completely I cannot imagine — not at this moment.

MOORE. You say that his selected elements attract the imitation of some more or less analogous spirit, meaning thereby that his selected elements excite an analogous spirit to imitation, a criticism that has a special interest for me, for before I read a line of Tristram Shandy or The Sentimental Journey, the newspapers began to say that the prose of Hail and Farewell recalled Sterne. That my best pages should recall the worst in The Sentimental Journey, if it be possible to discern a page less inspired than its fellow in a fully inspired work, pleases me to hear, for we may be pleased by flattery without being duped by flattery; and, my curiosity awakened by constant references to Sterne while my book was under review, I abstracted a little red book from the library of a common friend, saying to myself: many empty days lie before me, and though I cannot read in a railway train I may be able to read on board a ship. And I read despite the drumming of the screw, raising my eyes from time to time from the exquisite page to the beautifullest of seas, regretful that I was not reading on board a felucca, lateen rigged. The French critic you quote who compared Sterne to one of the little bronze satyrs of antiquity, in whose hollow bodies exquisite odours were stored, seems to me to have wandered near to the truth, inasmuch that The Sentimental Journey recalls antiquity, perhaps more than any other book of the modem world. Like a translation of some small Latin or Greek work, it read to me, Daphnis and Chloe, or The Golden Ass, or which other, I ask, for I am without erudition, as many of the ancients were, but I have the eyes of the ancients, I think.

GOSSE. I should like to hear why The Sentimental Journey reminds you of classical literature. Just a feeling —

MOORE. A feeling, certainly, but no vague one; it is his sense of touch which never fails him, rather than his speech which often does, that carries my thoughts back to the flowers and leaves and garlands and pilasters and white butterflies of the city disinterred, only known to me through photographs and Mary Hunter's dining-room which came from Venice. Italy never lost her paganism, and the disinterment of Pompeii was, in a sense, unnecessary. Italy never forgot her antiquity, nor could she forget it — her coasts washed on either side by the bluest of seas. And, as I said, I longed for felucca lateen rigged, for its half-dozen rough Italian sailors would not have seemed out of harmony with the fabled sea, the birthplace of all our beautiful European gods as the passengers were who, despite my admonitions, passed through the Straits of Messina, forgetful of Proserpine gathering flowers on the plain of Enna. I spoke to them of rugged Polyphemus peering over some cliffs and discerning Galatea in the foam, I besought them to remember Jupiter, who, disguised in the form of a bull, carried Europa away, and then, turning as a last resource to a more human story, I spoke of Dido weeping on the shores of the African coast.

GOSSE. Without enlisting any recruits?

MOORE. Nobody on board would listen.

GOSSE. Did you try to win the sympathies of the passengers with your theory that art is touch?

MOORE. Why not, Gosse? All audiences are good. I would sooner speak to Bishops than remain silent for six days. Of course, I tried to interest the passengers in the legends of the bluest and beautifullest of seas. I spoke of bitter Medea, Swinburne's best adjective, or one of his best.

GOSSE. So you refrained from entertaining the passengers with such literary discourse as I am enjoying now. Strange —

MOORE. It is strange, and much stranger than you would think for, to find oneself cut off from all communication with one's ideas, for on board the ship that took me there was nobody of my kin, nobody who knew me or my writings, or who had read any book that we have read, or seen any pictures that we have seen — a strange sense of estrangement that can be likened to an island and savages, with this difference, that the passengers and myself spoke the same language, but a language alienated from ideas avails us nothing, and you will appreciate my alarm when I tell you that the nearest thing to intellectual sympathy I could find on board that ship was a man who explained his invention for building piers out of concrete. It appears to have been successful somewhere in India. He was on his way thither to lay down more boxes of concrete, and his account of his invention interested me, for there was nothing else to listen to. The Sentimental Journey is not a long book, unfortunately. Only one other spoke to me; I've forgotten what his occupation in life was; but his ignorance is rememberable: what book are you reading? he asked one day. I answered him: The Sentimental Journey, and began to tell my surprise and delight in coming upon the famous phrase : God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb. A phrase, I said, that many believe to be in the Gospels, for it sounds like Jesus. It isn't, nor is it Sterne's. He got it from a half-witted shepherdess, and does not give her French. The proverb seems to be forgotten in France; but Sterne's version started it on a new life in England. God tempers the wind is better than: God measures the wind, which may be the French turn of phrase. It was not, however, this improvement that gave the proverb immortality — but the substitution of lamb for yoe. A shepherdess would not be likely to speak of a shorn lamb. Without doubt it is the yoe that is shorn. I spell the word phonetically, Gosse, for I prefer the word as shepherds pronounce it. Sterne changes yoe into lamb, thereby bringing a little pathos into the proverb; and, we being a sentimental people, I was saying to the passenger when he interrupted me: do you really mean to tell me that he said God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb? Yes, I answered. Which shows, the passenger replied derisively, that he knows no more about lambs than he does about pheasants. A howler it was when he said that pheasants ate mangel wurzels; but this is a worse one; who ever heard of shorn lambs?

My absent-minded companion imagined that I was speaking of Lloyd George! It was Lloyd George, he thought, who said: God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, and it seemed useless to point out his mistake to him.

Why, here's tea, Gosse; you'll have a cup with me?

GOSSE. You've detained me already a long while, and my wife is expecting me with your message that you have kindly promised to come and entertain our visitors.

MOORE. But, my dear friend, you promised to hear me out, and just as we arrive at the interesting part of the story, you say you must go, puzzling me rather than helping me, throwing a rope to a drowning man and withdrawing it before he reaches the bank. There are Johnson's Rasselas and Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield to speak about, but these works need not detain us long; neither is significant of the novel of family life that was preparing; Rasselas does not even hint at it, The Vicar of Wakefield only faintly. And the next writer of notoriety, if not of importance, is one of whom I know little, only some passages, and I shall be beholden to you for information regarding Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle and Humphry Clinker, titles that do not make show of the poetic, serious literature we are in search of, presaging rather abundant horseplay and obscene jests.

GOSSE. Smollett didn't avoid either. But have you never read Smollett?

MOORE. To say that I have read him would be untrue, and to say that I have not read him would be nearly as untrue. My memory of him is gusto, and plenty of it, and an outlook on life in strict conformity with his style.

GOSSE. Smollett is no doubt a most unseemly writer, but in view of the influence he exercised and still exercises on the English novel I would have you consider him more carefully than you seem inclined to do, for Smollett was not only the translator of Gil Blas, but the master builder of this special kind of novel of adventure. It came to him from Spain, a country he says he had travelled and knew inside out and from end to end. I should be inclined to regard this as an over­ statement, and to think that the spirit and form alike of Don Quixote escaped him. The picaresque novel —

MOORE. Before we go any further, will you tell me in what the picaresque novel consists?

GOSSE. I think I can define it. In the picaresque novel the reader is entertained by a quickly changing spectacle: scenes tacked together, it hardly matters how loosely, the object of the writer being to amuse the reader with what is passing before his eyes, regardless of what has happened before and what may happen afterwards. In one chapter we are in a thieves' kitchen, and in the next we are taken across the street to hear a young man paying court to a young woman, or to watch couples assembled for dancing, or to any other spectacle that may please the lively fancy of the author to exhibit for our pleasures. A thing that seems to me worthy of your attention is the passage of Gil Blas through France without leaving a trace on French literature, a point that criticism has very strangely passed over in silence or very nearly in silence, to influence our literature profoundly; and it would be interesting, so it seems to me, if you were to trace this influence all the way down the long road leading from Smollett to Dickens. It penetrated into Ireland. We find it in Lever and Lover, in Handy Andy, for instance.

MOORE. All you say moves me so deeply that I cannot fail to remember it, and my contribution to the criticism advised by you will be that what did happen might have been predicted. A great psychologist of races who was a great aesthetician as well would have been able to say: the French having a sense of synthesis will not be attracted to the picaresque novel, but the English being without this sense will be drawn to it like flies to a honeypot. How right I was to ask you to stay to tea, Gosse. And now, is there anybody between Smollett and Walter Scott worthy of our consideration?

GOSSE. Nobody of importance, none that may impede the flights of your fancy.

MOORE. Then I'll pick up the story of the novel where I left it; the Georgian house created a demand for the drawing-room entertainment, and Fielding fell in with the humour of our first drawing-rooms accidentally. He was followed by Johnson and Goldsmith, who wrote stories, hoping, of course, that their stories would please somebody; the desire of an audience does not imply willingness on the part of the author to write anything he thinks the public will buy; Smollett may have made a good deal of money by writing, but he wrote to please himself, I think — in the main, for literature had not yet become a trade.

GOSSE. It was Walter Scott that made it one.

MOORE. It doesn't surprise me. His name was always antipathetic to me; even in the days when my father read The Lay of the Last Minstrel aloud, I could not keep out of my mind the image of an amiable grocer, counting the jingling couplets off on fingers full of sand and sugar. My father knew the first two cantos practically by heart, and my mother long passages from Marmion, which she would repeat under the archway when we went to Castle Carra to picnic. It must have been the prices paid to Scott for poems that duped them. You mention in your History of English Literature that £1000 was paid for The Lay of the Last Minstrel.

GOSSE. And £4000 for Marmion. Abbotsford was no doubt a great sinning house till the crash came, but when it came you must not forget that Scott ceased to improvise novels to buy farms, as Carlyle charged him with doing. Henceforth his pen was dedicated to the payment of his debts.

MOORE. Thereby accepting the morality of the grocer as applicable to the artist, a thesis the absurdity of which I never fully appreciated till the other day, when a friend of mine withdrew his manuscripts from an agent who had put his wife aside to live with his clerk. The agent re­proached the novelist with having done likewise. But the morality of the artist, said the novelist, is not to be confused with the morality of the agent. The agent, being the intermediary between the artist and the public, must be a man of irreproachable morals. Don't you see? Of course, the poor man saw, but the spell of Aphrodite was upon him.

GOSSE. Lo, the white implacable Aphrodite. But we're straying from the questions at issue.

MOORE. Only from Scott to the literary agent. Abbotsford! A literary agent would have rejoiced in the vocables! Abbotsford, Abbotsford! he would say, is a name to conjure with, and I can hear him in imagination muttering on the terrace: Sir Walter must have money to keep it up, and by a judicious management of the serial rights for New Zealand it can be done, and it must be done, for the public likes its author to live in towers. There were towers, Gosse, at Abbotsford, or Scott's literary agent would not have allowed him to take the place. I have forgotten the architecture, but there must have been towers, for nothing else but the upkeep of the towers could have compelled a man to continue rhyming the romantic page morning after morning.

GOSSE. But are you sure that, in speaking about Scott, you have not dropped into subterfuge, evasion, or — shall I say it? — humour? I seem to miss in your criticism the fine, direct, simple thinking the absence of which in the English novel afflicts you. I would ask you, in your own interest, mind you, so that when you sit down to write

your essay it shall be with a clear mind, embracing every aspect of your intricate and difficult subject, if some of what I believe to be a sincere aversion from Scott's poems and novels (I presume the novels fail to please you almost to the same extent as the poems) may not be attributed to Scott's attempt to live on literature as the barons of the Middle Ages lived upon forays.

MOORE. The works of our successful authors do not allow us to believe that they wrote to please themselves, and to do them justice they do not pretend that their works could interest anybody who is not more debased than themselves.

GOSSE. I am not certain that what you say is not true; but an inquiry would lead us far from the task in which we are engaged, nor should we ever arrive at any clear knowledge of the psychology of successful authorship through inquiry, for the authors we have in mind could not tell us even if they would. We can only know the successful author through our common humanity; and I am inclined to think that everybody writes to please himself, and that although the writer may know his books are not as good as the books on the shelves above him, he will continue to take pleasure in his own work with a sigh of regret perhaps that it isn't better. It is possible that you yourself heave a sigh after reading Landor's Helen and Achilles; but for that you do not destroy your manuscript, and, this being so, you should be able to put yourself in the position of the most inferior writer amongst us and understand that he, too, as much as Landor, writes as well as he can and takes pleasure in it.

MOORE. I believe you're right. I remember a friend in the old days saying to me: I know that I could not write like Ibsen, and I wouldn't if I could. He was a successful dramatist, who —

GOSSE. Who liked to please his public just as you like to please yours.

MOORE. You're a better psychologist than I imagined you to be, Gosse, and your last admonitions contain signs and traces of the mind that wrote Father and Son.

GOSSE. Every man writes what pleases him and the choice is not given to him to do otherwise. Scott could not breathe the pure air of Mount Ida — calm heights where the intellect sits enthroned.

MOORE. Amid snows unsoiled even by eagles' talons. Vocal sculpture over against marmoreal seas. But Landor could descend at will into the boudoir and be witty. You remember, no doubt, how delightfully the Duchesse de Fontanges talks to Bossuet, and will agree with me that Balzac has little to show as true, or Ingres anything more beautiful. And you remember her who gazes across melancholy Flemish lands dreaming her soul away in thoughts of one in Paris — thoughts that she herself is only faintly aware of. But I urge no fault. I was meditating on the beautiful things that few ever see or hear. Time can do nothing. Nor is it likely that Pater's and Landor's readers will increase; but there will always be a few. You know the prophecy, arriving early and staying late. All the same, the thought is a sad one that the next generation may be more concerned with my writings than with Landor's or Pater's, and merely because they are inferior. Ah, there is the sting.

GOSSE. Does your distress extend to my writings?

MOORE. No, Gosse, I hadn't thought of yours, but I am sure you would shed the last drop of your blood to make Landor and Pater known to the next generation.

MOORE. I wonder if you would shed the first drop of yours? But we're wasting time.

MOORE. Wasting time! Are you, then, so eager to return to Scott, who never seems to have suffered from writer's cramp? It was my father's wont to tell that Scott wrote for three or four hours every morning, and spent the afternoons on horseback, a mode of life that seemed to me disgraceful, the romantic page requiring in my ten-year-old imagination all the poet's life, as the cocoon requires all the silkworm's. It was some years after that my dislike of forays and joustings suited to family reading was stirred up again by an engraving in which a benevolent grey-haired old gentleman sat under a purple curtain, pen in hand, not writing, nor thinking, for when a man thinks, his countenance empties, losing all expression. Scott was not thinking; there was little time for thinking; he was writing off his debts at the time, and had given an hour to a portrait painter; and his right hand held the grey goose quill, while his left hand caressed the head of an intrusive deerhound. I saw another portrait later, after my father's death, and my misgivings were increased by the insipid face that Raeburn discerned as the real author of Ivanhoe.

GOSSE. It might be as well to leave out deductions drawn from personal appearances. You've been painted a great many times, and I'm not certain that some of your portraits might not lead to unfavourable interpretations of the value of your own writings. We'll say no more on this point, but will return to the prose narratives. Of course, Ivanhoe was put into your hands, and you were bidden to read it.

MOORE. Ivanhoe, Burke's Speeches, Macaulay are enduring memories of an unhappy childhood. But I liked The Bride of Lammermoor. The romantic prediction:

When the last heir to Ravenshood to Ravenshood shall ride

To woo a dead maiden to be his bride,

He shall stable his steed in the Kelpet's flow

And his name shall be lost for evermo'.

finds an echo in most hearts (in every heart), for the note is a true note seldom struck though often sought; and Carlyle could not have been indifferent to its appeal, though he makes little of it, telling in his vindictive essay how, the romantic page being finished, Scott donned a green jerkin and mounted a palfrey and prepared to go away hunting; but one morning a pig could not be persuaded to leave the hounds, and Sir Walter had to intervene, and cracking his whip, to the amusement of his retainers he drove away the romantic porker. Carlyle's account of the episode amounts almost to assassination; it exceeds his fell and ferine account of Coleridge as the poet shuffled across the terrace muttering: subjective, objective. But you must not go, Gosse, till you've heard Mr Waverley in a love scene. I opened the book this morning.

GOSSE. And it opened at the page you are going to read to me. How very remarkable.

MOORE.

Forgive me, Mr Waverley. I should incur my own heavy censure did I delay expressing my sincere conviction that I can never regard you otherwise than as a valued friend. I should do you the highest injustice did I conceal my sentiments for a moment — I see I distress you, and I grieve for it, but better now than later; and O! better a thousand times, Mr Waverley, that you should feel a present momentary disappointment than the long and heartsickening griefs which attend a rash and ill-assorted marriage!

Good God ! But why should you anticipate such consequences from a union where birth is equal, where fortune is favourable, where, if I may venture to say so, the tastes are similar, where you allege no preference, where you even express a favourable opinion of him whom you reject?

Mr Waverley, I have that favourable opinion, and so strongly, that though I would rather have been silent upon the grounds of my resolutions, you shall command them, if you exact such a mark of my esteem and confidence.

I have often heard you lament, Gosse, the ineptitude of the female novel, but can you say, hand on your heart, that it is possible to discover in the serial story published in the servant girl's magazine a page more inept than that I have just read — more removed from human thought and feeling, more trite, calling up no image unless that of two sleek rotund inoffensive little animals, guinea-pigs, that — But see I distress you.

GOSSE. It is not so much our opinions that divide us as our tempers — yours allows you to speak with studied disrespect of one who once occupied the highest position in literature to which a man can attain. You know that Balzac was a great admirer of Scott, and the fact makes the change that has come over public taste regarding the Waverley novels incomprehensible to me at least. I have listened to your reading a declaration of love that doubtless moved our grandfathers and grandmothers to tears, and heard your comment that it reminded you of nothing unless perhaps the almost mute and wholly unnecessary guinea-pig. And what aggravates my position is that I cannot say truthfully that I feel what you have read is not ridiculous.

MOORE. There are many more.

GOSSE. If you will allow me to continue a little while longer I will draw your attention to a matter about which you may find it convenient to speak in your essay, that though we admire Shelley's poetry we are unable to admire the poetry Shelley admired. He admired Byron, and I'm afraid that nobody will be able to explain to us how it was that Shelley's exquisite ear took pleasure in the versification of The Bride of Abydos, Lara, The Corsair, and Childe Harold. Shelley's admiration and Goethe's are incomprehensible unless we allow that Byron possessed qualities in 1820 that he does not possess in 1918. I admit that it is not easy to believe that texts must be regarded as les petits vins du pays, wines that lose their flavour after a certain number of years; but if we do not raise or lower poetry to the level of the wine list, how are we to explain the loss and gain? Whereas Byron has lost, Shakespeare has gained; like the fine wines of Bordeaux he seems to have gathered flavour and aroma, and is to-day a greater poet than he was in the Elizabethan days.

MOORE. Excellently well said, Gosse; we know that Shakespeare was rough on the palate in 1603, and that for more than fifty years Beaumont and Fletcher retained their supremacy.

GOSSE. After the Restoration they began to lose their fragrance, and have continued to lose it; and if some writers come down to us deteriorated, why should we find it hard to believe that others have gained? And, since change for better or worse is observable in all, is it certain that any writer is destined to be read as long as there are readers in England? The romantic movement swept Pope away, and no reputation was more securely established than his. Who shall say that another change will not sweep Wordsworth and Shelley out of popular favour?

MOORE. So you think, Gosse, there is no standard of taste, and that the mere caprice of a generation is accountable, whether it admires Scott or Balzac.

GOSSE. Do you think there is one?

.

MOORE. I think we find one in antiquity. Who can doubt \hat Virgil, Horace and Catullus would stare at us very blankly if we were to rouse them from their sleep to ask their opinion of Quentin Durward? And it requires no great effort of the imagination to discover the very words with which Apuleius would answer us. He would say: in my day there was a great deal of Christianity creeping about, and we did not think much of it; but we did not suspect it would lead you into an admiration of such dullness as Scott. But Apuleius and Longus, Virgil, Catullus, Horace and Homer, Sophocles and Aristophanes would take off their hats to Shakespeare. Every one of them would understand Hamlet and Macbeth and Lear. The Tempest would enchant them, and they would appreciate all our great prose writers — Landor, De Quincey, Pater. Why, therefore, should they fail to understand our narrative prose if there be any worth in it?

GOSSE. But do you think that an appeal to antiquity is altogether fair to Scott or to any modem writer?­ — modern life being so different from ancient life. Do you think that Virgil would have understood Miss Austen?

MOORE. You have put an interesting question, for which I am obliged to you, and my answer will fall out naturally in the course of the conversation. Pride and Prejudice was published many years after it was written. How many?

GOSSE. Fourteen years, and you can reckon on her to support your contention that the literature that interests the next generation is not written for money.

MOORE. I have written my essay here and there, a manner of writing which I acquired from Pater through Symons. It seems to me that a better occasion couldn't occur for giving it a trial.... May I read to you what I have written — a few pages only?

GOSSE. I shall be delighted to listen.

MOORE. Scott's centenary must have fallen flat, for I remember nothing of it, but I have a very distinct memory of the articles that celebrated Miss Austen's. Praise there was in plenty, and if the writers of the articles could not discover the qualities that stirred their enthusiasm, it was because they were not themselves writers of prose narrative. It may be said that nobody understands anything so intimately as the craft he practises, and though the praise of the amateur is always welcome it is the criticism of the fellow-craftsman that counts. The praise was all right and very pleasing to me, who was nevertheless puzzled and unable to explain how the gentlemen could have written so much and said so little, the subject being Miss Austen, about whom so many interesting things might be said. I should not have wished them to omit the obvious that Miss Austen was a delightful writer who described the society of which she was part and parcel; it was necessary to say as much, of course, but it was not easy to see why this very trite appreciation should be expanded into many columns when so much remained unwritten about this delightful writer who, etc. After having mentioned for the tenth time that she described the society of which she was part and parcel, I should have liked the critics to have pointed out that Miss Austen was the inventor of a new medium of literary expression; it will no doubt come as a surprise to the critics to hear from me that Miss Austen was the inventor of the formula whereby domestic life may be described; and that every one of us, without exception, Balzac and Tourguéneff' as much as Mrs Henry Wood and Anthony Trollope, is indebted to her.

GOSSE. A perfect blossom. Her craft —

MOORE (reading). A great deal has been written about her craft which we must allow to be good, and it is wonderful when we remember that she discovered it. Nor is it too much to say that she was her own potter, decorator, vintager, and that her jars were mostly well shapen, the painting witful, and the wine excellent, without doubt the purest our island produces — a delicious wine, whole­ some, palatable, one that can be drunk with pleasure by all, especially by men and women of letters, by whom it is especially recommended. Though divided on all other points, it seems we are united on this, and were not my rooms too small to contain the entire sodality, it would have pleased me to invite all here and put a certain matter to the vote — the only certain way of settling anything; but as that is impossible I have taken upon myself the responsibility of speaking in the name of the sodality; we are agreed, I say, that if the great dead were to reawaken, the Austen wine might be offered to Virgil, Catullus, Horace, Longus, Apuleius and Petronius Arbiter without fear that they would run to the window to puke, making wry faces.

It is many years since I have read Pride and Prejudice, but the two principal characters, Mr Collins and Elizabeth, are still clear to me. Mr and Mrs Bennett still keep a place in my recollection, and, unless my memory retains the good and forgets the false, this book tends towards the vase rather than the wash-tub, which is rare in English novels; but it will be safer for me to speak of Sense and Sensibility, which I read lately, for in that work it often seemed to me that Miss Austen is at her best and at her worst.

Her subject is what is known as County, and her narrative opens as it should open in a large commodious house situated in the middle of a park as far as possible from the high road. Miss Austen's intention in this book is to present a highly strung, romantic girl who believes the time for love is twenty or before, for at two-and-twenty young women have passed the bloom of youth. Marianne is, of course, certain that whosoever loves once can never love again. But in setting forth the mental attitude of her young people, it seems to me that Miss Austen falls into something like the sententiousness of Mr Waverley. She fails to see that the writing of a long exordium of common-sense is inadequate exposition, and that many pages would be needed to lead the reader into a gradual comprehension of the subject, that Elinor represents common-sense and Marianne romance. States of soul cannot be conveyed in speeches, and in speeches delivered by girls whose acquaintance we have only just made.

Of his sense and goodness, continued Elinor, no one can, I think, be in doubt who has seen him often enough to engage him in unreserved conversation. The excellence of his understanding and his principles can be concealed only by that shyness which too often keeps him silent. You know enough of him to do justice to his solid worth. But of his minuter propensities, as you call them, you have, from peculiar circumstances, been kept more ignorant than myself. He and I have been at times thrown a good deal together, while you have been wholly engrossed on the most affectionate principle by my mother. I have seen a great deal of him, have studied his sentiments, and heard his opinions on subjects of literature and taste; and upon the whole I venture to pronounce that his mind is well informed, his enjoyment of books extensively great, his imagination lively, his observation just and correct, and his taste delicate and pure. His abilities in every respect improve as much upon acquaintance as his manners and person. At first sight his address is certainly not striking, and his person can hardly be called handsome till the expression of his eyes, which are uncommonly good, and the general sweetness of his countenance is seen. At present I know him so well that I think him really handsome, or, at least, almost so. What say you, Marianne? I shall very soon think him handsome, Elinor, if I don't now. When you tell me to love him as a brother I shall no more see perfection in his face than I do now in his heart. Elinor then tried to explain the real state of the case to her sister. I don't attempt to deny, said she, that I think very highly of him, that I greatly esteem, that I like him. Marianne here burst forth with indignation:

Esteem him, like him, cold-hearted Elinor, oh, worse than cold-hearted, ashamed of being otherwise. Use those words again, and I'll leave the room this moment.

Elinor's resemblance to Mr Waverley in this speech is very striking, and I confess that I thought Miss Austen had succumbed to the influence of her time, and was about to put the book aside, but continued it, and fortunately, for as soon as the family reached Devon, I began to understand how the confused opening had come about: Miss Austen had found herself unable to resist the temptation to include a scene not, strictly speaking, in her subject — a grave fault with which we must, however, sympathise, the scene being one of the wittiest in literature: a dialogue between the heir, Mrs Dashwood's son, and his young wife, as to the amount Dashwood shall contribute to his mother and sisters' maintenance. The omission of this scene would have been a loss, but the book would have gained in shape, and if the pages occupied by the dialogue had been given over to an exposition of Elinor and Marianne's different mental attitudes Sense and Sensibility would have gained as a whole though it had lost something.

Dear, dear Northlands, Marianne asks; when shall I cease to regret you ! When learn to feel at home elsewhere! Oh! Happy house, could you know what I suffer now in viewing you from this spot, from whence perhaps I may view you no more! And you, ye well­ known trees! you will continue the same. No leaf will decay because we are removed, or any branch become motionless, though we can observe you no longer! No, you will continue the same, unconscious of the pleasure or the regret you occasion, and insensible of any change to those who walk under your shade! But who will remain to enjoy you?

This sententiousness — is it really sensibility? — is continued for about forty pages, and is not dropped until the sisters go with their mother to the Devonshire cottage, and our attention has relaxed considerably; but Miss Austen regains it when a young man appears whom Marianne recognises as the one she has been craving for ever since her girlhood, and within a very few weeks she is convinced that he is the only one worth living for. At last the theme becomes clear, and we perceive that the author's intention is that Marianne shall be cheated of her desire, and marry in the end a man whose years once seemed to put him among those that can no longer hope to inspire passion. Passion alone is valid, and we begin to comprehend the scheme, which is that the young man must break with her; it is essential to the story that he should, and the bringing about of the rupture, I said, will put the skill of the narrator to the finest test. The story will begin to creak in its joints if the greatest care be not taken. In about three weeks the young man expresses a desire to leave the neighbourhood, and the reason he gives for his return to London is not satisfactory; indeed, his manner alarms Marianne, and her disquiet is increased by many little incidents. So far so good, but the question has to be answered: is the author to take the reader into her confidence and tell that the young man has flirted with Marianne merely to pass the time away, his thoughts being fixed on a rich marriage, or is the author going to keep the secret from the reader, thereby appealing to that sense of curiosity which is in everyone? Strange as it may seem, Miss Austen chose to appeal to the curiosity of the reader, and we are well advanced in the novel before we hear that the young gentleman has succeeded in allying himself to money. The motive of curiosity seems to me to lie a little outside of her art, and it would have been better for her to have taken the reader into her confidence and told that the young man was seeking a rich marriage, and had no intention of applying his life to the worship of a poor girl; and later on Miss Austen's inexperience in her craft,leads her into a blunder that cannot be condoned. She brings back the young man after his marriage to tell Elinor that he is very sorry, and my heart failed me when I saw the scene rising up in the narrative, and prayed that it might not come to pass. But she was the first, a Giotto among women, and when she wrote there was no prose narrative for her to·learn from. It is easier for us to avoid these mistakes. A writer of inferior talent — shall we say Maupassant? — would have known that the scene could not be written, for there are scenes in life that cannot be written, even if they can be proved to have happened. The writer must choose what can be written, and a worse exhibition of skill than this scene is not discoverable in literature. The young man apologised, blubbered, and went away, and with his disappearance from the book my fault-finding ends.

Remember that the theme of the book is a disappointment in love, and never was one better written, more poignant, more dramatic. We all know how terrible these disappointments are, and how they crush and break up life, for the moment reducing it to dust; the sufferer neither sees nor hears, but walks like a somnambulist through an empty world. So it is with Marianne, who cannot give up hope, and the Dashwoods go up to London in search of the young man; and every attempt is made to recapture him, and every effort wrings her heart. She hears of him, but never sees him, till at last she perceives him in a back room, and at once, her whole countenance blazing forth with a sudden delight, she would have moved towards him instantly had not her sister laid her hand on her arm, and in the page and a half that follows Miss Austen gives us all the agony of passion the human heart can feel; she was the first; and none has written the scene that we all desire to write as truthfully as she has; when Balzac and Tourguéneff rewrote it they wrote more elaborately, but their achievements are not greater. In Miss Austen the means are as simple as the result is amazing. Listen to it again. A young girl of twenty, jilted, comes up to London with her mother and sister, and she sees her lover at an assembly; he comes forward and addresses a few words more to her sister than to herself within hearing of a dozen people, and it is here that we find the burning human heart in English prose narrative for — the first, and, alas, for the last time.

Miss Austen's imagination has not spent itself in this supreme scene. She can develop her motive, and the narrative is continued amid gossiping women coming and going into the house taken for the season; the drawing­-room is never empty; in and out the visitors come and go, asking questions about Marianne's marriage. Each of these questions is like a burning knife thrust into the girl, and she has to keep a steady face upon it all. She has to bear with it all, listening to the chatter till she wishes herself dead, at all events in some silent world, and what is so admirable is that while the reader's heart is wrung with pity for the girl, he is amused by as good chatter as has ever been written; and a great deal of good chatter has been written by the great writers, for the power of writing chatter is the sign manual of the great writer. Perhaps the French word boniment will explain my meaning better; chatter, being an abstract word, does not express as much as boniment. The word boniment is associated with the showman, and the word recalls to our mind the rapid, almost incoherent, talk of the man who stands at the end of the booth, crying: walk up, walk up and see my show! Rabelais was a great master of patter, and next to him is Shakespeare. Balzac too, could write good patter, but Mrs Jennings' patter in Sense and Sensibility is as good as any. She sometimes, it is true, includes an important statement in the patter, one that is necessary for the comprehension of the narrative, and this to me is a mistake, for the pleasure we find in patter is merely the pleasure of words run together rapidly. You have not read Sense and Sensibility for a long while, Gosse, and will let me read some of Miss Austen's patter:

Well my dear, 'tis a true saying about an ill wind, for it will be all the better for Colonel Brandon. He will have her at last; ay, that he will. Mind me, now, if they ain't married by midsummer. Lord! how he'll chuckle over this news! I hope he will come to-night. It will be all to one a better match for your sister. Two thousand a year without debt or drawback — except the little love­ child, indeed; ay, I had forgot her; but she may be 'prenticed out at a small cost, and then what does it signify? Delaford is a nice place, I can tell you; exactly what I call a nice old-fashioned place, full of comforts and conveniences; quite shut in with great garden walls that are covered with the best fruit trees in the country; and such a mulberry-tree in one corner! Lord! how Charlotte and I did stuff the only time we were there! Then there is a dovecote, some delightful stewponds, and a very pretty canal; and everything, in short, that one could wish for; and, moreover, it is close to the church, and only a quarter of a mile from the turnpike road, so 'tis never dull, for if you only go and sit up in an old yew arbour behind the house, you may see all the carriages that pass along. Oh! 'tis a nice place! A butcher's hard by in the village, and the parsonage-house within a stone's throw. To my fancy, a thousand times prettier than Barton Park, where they are forced to send three miles for their meat, and have not a nearer neighbour than your mother. Well, I shall spirit up the Colonel as soon as I can. One shoulder of mutton, you know, drives another down. If we can but put Willoughby out of her head!