Avowals, Chapter 9

London: Privately Printed, 1 September 1919, pages 177-187, 3,811 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. IX.

It is related in a book entitled Confessions of a Young Man that I returned home from France a little forgetful of England and her literature, a little estranged, and that while writing a novel in a Western country it came upon me to doubt if beautiful prose could be written in English; a sufficiently alarming discovery for me, if it were one, for I had abandoned my one-time project of learning French; and to this confession I might have added that, possessed of a great fear lest I should miss in the English language an instrument that would secure to me the fulfilment of my dreams, I ransacked my grandfather's library for evidence that the English language was still a literary potentiality; but not happening upon Sterne's Sentimental Journey, which might have reassured me, I sent to London for a new work by Walter Pater which was then being announced (I had heard of Pater as a writer of beautiful books), and waited, clinging to the hope that I had heard truly, till Marius rescued me from my dejection.

The first paragraph of the newly arrived book predicted something that France had not revealed to me, and when that wonderful second chapter entitled White Nights was reached I sat thinking, a little overcome, reproaching myself for not having thought of the unaffected joys of the heart, the colour of the great air about the yellowing marbles of the Roman Villa, or that by helping one's mother with her white and purple wools, and caring for her musical instruments it was possible to win from the handling of such things an urbane and feminine refinement; or that by avoiding all that leads into desire and is evidently ugly, we can make sure of a temporal life sufficiently stable and sufficient for the soul. No, I had not thought of all that.

A very trivial appreciation of Marius the Epicurean this will seem to Pater's twentieth-century readers: for few readers have the historical sense, and the truth will be overlooked that a young man without education, except what he picked up in a French café, could apprehend only the beauty of a great work of art in some external aspects. But if my appreciations were superficial, they were intense, and I cannot tell now how it was that I did not take the train to Dublin and the boat to England and seek the author out wherever he had hidden himself, and thank him, my two hands extended, for the great benefit his book had been to me. It had lifted a great mood of dejection from me, and I went about the fields saying to myself: the English language is still alive, Pater has raised it from the dead. And if I did not write to tell him of the great benefit he had conferred upon art, it was for shame of my poor English, fear that some Gallicism or blunder would betray me to the master as one that was not worthy of apostleship. It must have been thus, for I have recollections that the moment I drew a sheet of paper towards me to write about this book the pen stopped and my thoughts began to stray through the story Pater related of young Marius's ideas and sensations, a modern story, inasmuch as it was a human one. Our human nature does not change in essentials; and at every page this story seemed to have been written for me, and at moments it seemed as if Pater had divined not only my existence but even the very circumstance of my life, for Marius lived in an old family mansion, one which he was soon to leave to go to Rome, drawn thither by literature — a literary career having become a necessity through the extravagance of an ancestor; and my house, a Georgian mansion, standing on a hill-top, amid branching woods, was also neglected; like Marius's house it had fallen into the lag end of its fortunes; and while wandering round the ruined stables in which had stood a hundred horses, and through the abandoned gardens on whose high wall a peacock, the last of a long race, screamed for a mate, I remembered that my own life was to live with my widowed mother, leaving her every spring for London just before the beech woods begin to swell into pink buds.

And it was in the year that I went to Moore Hall to write Muslin that I read Marius the Epicurean. Yes, it must have been in 1885, so long did the springtime seem to me coming, and I weary of waiting for it, my thoughts away in London where men and women were reading and talking about Marius. Even the day rises up in my memory when I walked with mother on the windy lawn facing the grey lake, remarking to her that the spring was later that year than I had ever known it before. You promised to stay with me, George, till the leaves came, and you know they do not come until May. My thoughts are set, mother, on Kensington, on Earl's Terrace, whither the Robinsons have gone from Gower Street to live, for it will be there I shall hear an interesting appreciation of Marius the Epicurean. Only in Earl's Terrace can I learn how the book has been received in London. What matter to you, George, how the book has been received in London, since you like it? You're always asking people for their opinions, but I don't think you ever take them. We do not borrow people's opinions, we assimilate them, I answered, and fell to thinking that my curiosity to hear what people were saying about Marius was not caused by lack of confidence in my judgment; my instinct, for it was one, would not allow me to think else than that Pater had added an immortal prose masterpiece to the English language; though all the world said nay I should answer: pooh. My mind was itching to cry out in the Robinsons' drawing­ room: Pater has added a prose work to English literature, a thing that English literature stands in need of. I shall affirm this, I said to myself, with Pauline accent, and Mary Robinson will answer something unexpected, picturesque, altogether out of the common. But nothing falls out exactly as we expect it, and two months later, in May, Mary seemed to me almost aloof, getting into corners as if unwilling to enter into serious conversation, Her sister Mabel, on whose judgment I reposed much trust, distressed me with remarks regarding what she termed Pater's mannerisms, saying they were too marked for a great work of art, and you're putting it forward as one of the greatest ever written. I'm afraid that what you regard as mannerisms I regard as the great craft necessary for the conveyance of the subject. Without what you term the blandness, you would have had the subject without texture, and a book without texture —

New visitors were announced, and the conversation about Pater had to cease, but as soon as the odds and oddments left (odds and oddments collected even at the Robinsons') Mary led the conversation back whence it had started, and Mabel compared Pater to Renan, a comparison that did not seem to annoy her sister as it should have done, Mary's thoughts being at that time away in France. And I could make no sufficient answer, not having read Renan; the best I could do was to interpose that a French writer comes to us in the investiture of a language that we only half understand. If the conversation occurred to-day I should answer: a writer whom I admire for his lucidity and power of exposition, whilst disliking the ecclesiastical sleekness with which he raises Jesus out of godhead, a stupid third-century invention, no more than that. And once more the conversation slipped away from Pater. Vernon Lee's book, Euphorion, had just been published, and Mary was anxious to speak about it, which was tiresome. But to be just, Vernon Lee did not try to prolong the conversation; like myself, she was more interested in Marius than in anything, and it was she who led the conversation back to him, and was speaking with extraordinary eloquence regarding his use of words, when we were again interrupted. This time the visitor was Henry James.

A flutter of feminine attention began at once about the important American, and while he talked in his pompous but not unfriendly manner, addressing his conversation by turns to Mary and Mabel Robinson, a little careless, I thought, of the attentions of Vernon Lee and her admirations of his style, I was left to my meditations, and these began in a recollection of Henry James's size, which seemed to have enlarged since I last saw him — a man of great bulk and such remoteness that one did not associate him with The Portrait of a Lady. He did not carry my thoughts towards a man who had known women at first hand and intimately, but one who had watched them with literary rather than personal interest. And these thoughts drew my eyes to the round head, already going bald, to the small dark eyes closely set, and to the great expanse of closely shaven face. His legs were short, and his hands and feet large; and he sat portentously in his chair, speaking with some hesitation and great care, anxious that every sentence, or if not all, at least every third or fourth, should send forth a beam of humour. I had met him at the Robinsons' some two years before, and was, of course, much impressed, for he was the first English writer I knew whom I could look upon as an artist. We had had some conversation at the Robinsons', and it is my belief that I left their house with him, or it may have been my good fortune to have overtaken him on his way to the Kensington railway station. Be this as it may, we travelled some distance together, and he told me to look out for an article by him on the art of fiction in Longman's Magazine. It will appear, he said, next month, and might be considered in some respects to be a partial answer to Robert Louis Stevenson and to Andrew Lang, who had been contributing to this magazine, articles on the art of fiction. I listened to him, hoping for an opportunity to relate the subject of A Modern Lover, which I was then writing; the chance came, and my narrative was successful; a change of expression that I recognised as one of envy passed over the vast face, a change of expression that seemed to admit at least that he thought the subject would have suited him very well. It was after the publication of this book that I retired to Moore Hall to begin A Mummer's Wife, and when that book was published a controversy began about its morality in The Pall Mall Gazette, and to secure Henry James's advocacy, I sent him the article I had contributed on the subject and the book. A few weeks later a long letter came from him, a letter that would have embellished these pages if l possessed it, but only a few stray memories of it remain. He said, and he said truly, that the book seemed to him to have been thought in French and inadequately translated; and I remember too that he expressed an opinion regarding its length, which he recognised as disproportionate to the matter related, a pronouncement which sent my thoughts flying back to the time long ago when Henry James's name first broke upon my ears in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, to the lady who lent me Daisy Miller, Four Meetings, Madame de Mauve, A Passionate Pilgrim, and a host of other stories, Roderick Hudson among them, all of which, with a story entitled The Madonna of the Future, revealed to me a refined and accomplished writer, possessed of a style that he must have brought into the world with him, for it had already borne a number of volumes. We should seek English literature vainly for a more beautiful description of Raphael's Madonna than his Virgin of the Chair, and even at that time I foresaw in him a writer who could apply Gautier's celebrated phrase to himself: to me the visible world is visible. He might have added, and to me the invisible world is even more invisible than it was to Gautier. The addition might not be in keeping with his conception of himself, I said, and turned to his letter again. It contained hints of psychological ambitions that interested me, but consideration of these was interrupted by a great curiosity to learn why The Portrait of a Lady was not too long, though it contained more text than A Mummer's Wife, and much less subject matter, and while gazing between the islands across the grey lake I fell to thinking what sort of answer he would make to the letter that had gone to the post.

His difficult writing appeared again in a few days, and it began with an admission that The Portrait of a Lady was much too long. A delightful admission truly, but one that he spoilt by a qualification, for he said that the woman in The Portrait of a Lady represented a higher intellectual plane than Kate Ede, and proceeded to draw from the alleged fact the conclusion that she lived an intenser life than the workwoman. He said, too, that he gathered from my book that Kate Ede's intelligence was not part of the subject as I conceived it, which, of course, was true, her emotions and instincts having seemed to me enough. And so the question came how a clever man could deceive himself so thoroughly. For what are his lady and the group of people that surround her, I said, but idle, passion­less Americans wandering over Europe in search of amusement, not even amusement, distraction. A husband who collects cameos; an American friend whose occupation is to keep his hands in his pockets, and a lady who vainly struggles with perjured washerwomen — perjured washerwomen! How a man's adjective betrays his ambitions. And to this group comes a lover who, after a long siege, kisses the lady; the kiss is one of the worst in literature, proclaiming the fact that Henry James knows very little about kissing, and that it does not interest him. The lady breaks away; and next day the lover calls on her, but he only meets her friend, and is told that she has gone to Rome. Was there ever in this world so bloodless and ineffectual a conclusion? Yet, I said, he writes to me about psychology, mistaking, I could not help thinking, trivial comments about men and women, only faintly imagined, for psychology. That which is firmly and clearly imagined needs no psychology. Hamlet and Don Quixote are psychologies, and so is Dick Lennox, though a long way off. The first business of the writer is to find a human instinct; it is as necessary to him as a fox is to the fox-hunter; and Henry James does not fulfil the first conditions of the chase; as well bring out a pack of foxhounds to hunt a rat; and I remembered the shadowy souls one meets in his books walking up and down terraces, and their needless struggles whether they should offer each other cigarettes or refrain. He mistakes detail for psychology, I continued, and going to my little store of books and picking out The Madonna of the Future, I read the tale again, letting the volume drop on my knees so that I might recall the original story, Balzac's, a story of a great artist who had painted many beautiful pictures, and who closed his studio to all his friends, saying he was engaged upon a masterpiece. The years went by, leaving the masterpiece unfinished; for to finish it a certain model had to be found, and he agreed to let a fellow-craftsman see the masterpiece if Pourbus brought his mistress with him, she being the model the great artist had sought vainly throughout Europe and, I think, Asia. Pourbus and the model pass through rooms hung with beautiful pictures that have lost all interest for the great artist, the picture that interests him is one that has been stippled and glazed and repainted, and begun again so often that of the original picture only one beautifully painted foot remains. In Henry James the artist wastes his life looking at an empty canvas, hardly enough to justify rewriting Balzac, I said, and sat asking myself how it was he overlooked the variation that might have justified the retelling of the story, returning to my first idea that Henry James lacked the psychological sense altogether, at least as I understood it, till forgetful of the presence of Mary and Mabel Robinson, and of Vernon Lee, I sought justification for the heresy in a memory of his description of Raphael's Madonna, one to which Gautier would have taken off his hat. It was natural to recall his descriptions of the English landscape in The Passionate Pilgrim, and the complete breakdown that follows when the psychological situation enters in the person of the owner of the house and property — an early story, it is true, but a man shows what he is going to do the moment he puts pen to paper, or brush to canvas. Manet's words to me, and he was incontestably a man of genius.

As I recalled the thoughts that Henry James's letter had raised in my mind the word Pater transported me from Moore Hall back into the Kensington drawing-room. Vernon Lee was now speaking about Pater's infallible use of words, and I said to myself: Henry James will find fault with Marius for reasons analogous to those he gave for preferring the lady whose portrait he painted to Kate Ede. He will say that Marius does not represent life as intensely as his friend Flavius, and that Flavius, therefore, should have been the hero of the story. But he had not been speaking for long before I began to recognise an extraordinarily able critic. A man, I murmured, too analytic for creation, finds his job in criticism; and prone though I was then, as now, to resent any fault-finding in Marius, I could not but yield to his challenge, that although the whole of the first volume is given over to praise of Pagan civilisation, a large part of the second is turned over to an equal admiration of Christianity. And Henry James's point was that we cannot admire opposites equally. Somebody, very likely it was Vernon Lee, said that an artist could admire a Raphael and a Rubens, one as much as the other. Henry James answered: intellectually, perhaps, as craftsmen, Raphael and Rubens may be admired equally, but the admirer must, if he tell the truth, admit to a prepossession in favour of one painter or the other. He may think The Descent from the Cross and The Transfiguration great pictures, but if human nature overrules our intellect in art, he continued, causing a bias that our intellect does not approve, how much more potent it must be in religion, religion being dependent altogether on our emotions for support. How well he reasons, I said to myself, and lost several sentences, for the thought was still in my mind that literature had lost an excellent critic. It may have been a minute or five I was away, I know not, but when I heard him again he was telling that in a certain chapter towards the end of the second volume Pater took Christianity under his personal wing, diminishing thereby the aesthetic value of his work and unnecessarily, for in the next chapter he allows us to see the power that Christian ceremonial exercises on Marius. His words are — May I have the book, Miss Robinson? Mary returned with the book and James read: what has been on the whole the method of the Church as a power of sweetness and patience in dealing with matters like Pagan art was already manifest; it has the character of the divine moderation of Christ himself. Now no human or divine being, James said, laying the book aside, was ever less moderate than Christ himself, and it is hard for me to believe that Pater read the Gospels so carelessly that the outbursts escaped his notice. But, my dear Mr Henry James, Pater wishes to present Jesus in two aspects. It seems to me, Miss Robinson, the words divine moderation present him in one. Pater may hint darkly that there is another side, but he keeps that other side out of sight, but if we say any more we shall be provoked into a morass of Biblical disputation; so I will say that when Miss Vernon Lee spoke as she did just now of Renan, I understood her to mean that Pater adopts a tone as conciliatory as Renan. I have praised Pagan civilisation, but you shall see in a moment how nicely I can speak about Christian. But would you not have had him speak nicely about Christian civilisation, Mr James? interposed Mabel Robinson, who held fast to Christianity in its orthodox forms; and thinking that perhaps Henry James had said enough, Mary Robinson broke in gaily: I'm afraid Pater will not come in to-day to hear us talking about him. But does Pater come here? I said. I didn't know that you knew him. Yes; he used to live in Oxford, but he has come to live in London at Number Seventeen Earl's Terrace, only three doors from here. You're sure to meet him this week or the week after.

The reader may be sure that I did not fail to turn into the Robinsons' on their next at-home day. But Pater did not come, not on that day nor on the following Tuesday. But one day Mary said: Pater is coming to-day, he told me so this morning; you won't be disappointed again. And again I waited, talking to my friends mechanically, thinking all the while of the great moment when the door would open and the servant would say: Mr Walter Pater.