Mr. George Moore Vents His Spleen On the Age We Live In

New York Times Book Review, 12 June 1927, page 2, 1,843 words

 “No chance of Art Revival Until Coal and Oil Have Been Exhausted,” He Concludes

George Moore. From “The Portrait Drawings of WIlliam Rothenstein.” (The Viking Press.) [caption of the illustration]

By Henry Albert Phillips

When I found myself in the presence of Mr. George Moore in his house in Ebury Street, it seemed for a bit that Mr. Moore would have little or none of me. In other words, Mr. Moore received me crustily. He stood before the open fire. His hands behind his back – except for the brief handshake. He was a much older man than I had expected to find, for his writings had struck me always as being no older than youth with all its flame, caught in the slight shadow of reminiscence – a mellow twinkling reminiscence. He Is tall and a little bent and the backs of his hands shine as though polished by age. His thinning hair is a yellow gray and is, I imagine, usually mussed. His mustache, like his hair, is unruly and the same sere yellow. His eyes are serene and self-contained until he smiles or laughs, when they sparkle roguishly.

He stood for a moment or two regarding me inhospitably.

Well, what was it I had come for, anyway?  No subject prepared In advance to discuss? This was very annoying indeed!

It was most annoying and embarrassing from my point of view as well.

Then 1 happened to think of Mr. Moore's pronounced and controversial opinions on the supposed relationship – or irrelationship, I could not remember which – between art and nature in the artist's attempts and methods of expressing himself. It was like striking a match to a dried-out stick of tinder, transforming it almost instantly into a living, flaming torch of beauty. In a couple of minutes it was snapping and crackling vehemently. It blazed and flared in heated eloquence.

In a twinkling the crusty George Moore had become pie-crusty, delicious. Would I have one of his opulent, fat cigarettes? And I was to draw nearer the fire – so! And – ah, yes – what was he saying – ?

z’Art in writing? Modem writers do not even attempt it. Henry James took trouble – too much trouble, I may say – to write artistically. He wrote about ambassadors and people who walk on terraces. I can see him now, walking up and down a terrace, pursuing some person quite innocent of the act and offering him a cigarette. James never felt the evil hour of mechanIcs that has fallen on the art world – he never livened to its mechanical whirr. He went right along writing of the fashionable world wherein you laid your hand on a lady's shoulder and asked her to be kind to you – or asked a gentleman for a cigarette!''

Mr. Moore stood more at ease now, except for a little bungling in trying to manage at the same time one of the fat cigarettes and an old-fashioned pair of pince-nez that kept sliding down on his thin nose. His yellow-gray hair became more and more mussed, as though trying to propitiate his disgracefully straggly mustache.

“Life bas become nothing but a mechanism,” he pursued, “which within the past fifty years has come to Intrude everywhere.

“For instance, until a few years ago men drove about in a gig. Each man had a personaI fondness tor his horse. But it is not even interesting buying petrol for a clattering machine in which he now drives about through a whole city hung with flying advertisements! Nor ls it inspiring to live among pearl necklaces and port wine, much ado and more alarum! What an alarming future for our children and the people who come after us!…

“Can art rise out of such circumstances as those amongst which we live. motor cars, electric lights and international dinners?

“I was in Paris lately – in the Champs Elysées, where I remember it was once thronged with prancing horses and bright-geared carriages. And women – what women! – now it is merely a whirling mechanism! [Illegible scan] Wherever you go in modern [illegible scan], man and his spiritual potentiality. his self-reliance and expression – all are obstructed by mechanism. So. furniture, even porcelain, is not made except for use…. The same evil spirit of mechanism now proposes here in London to pull down the most beautiful bridge in Europe (Waterloo Bridge). St. Paul’s and the city churches will have to follow someday. To prop them up will cost too much money!

“Wherever you turn you are embarrassed by having to get into trains, motor cars and airplanes – excitement about trivial things – all mechanism. They neither prolong life nor happiness – they shorten life. In former times more people lived in the country; now they must live in town. They don't even grow wheat. Individual achievement has disappeared in this mass production of whirring wheels!”

Ge.nge Moore’s voice is firm and pleasing always and still holds a trace of Irish accent in it, just as his tricks of thought and speech are full of it. His manner was no longer cold, but always dignified and demanding, except for moments when he quite relaxed under the warmth of spiritual fervor and contact, then he smiled, adding a scarcely audible chuckle when he had expressed himself wittily perhaps, or with unusual felicity. Notwithstanding, George Moore is always politely attentive to your words and considerate of your opinions, although equally positive in expressing his own, which he frequently modified in an ever-present desire neither to hurt nor to offend.

“In the midst of my work. I once said to myself,” he continued reminiscently, “I can't write about this mechanism. I may write about men and women,. but only of such during a period when there was little or no mechanism. So I wrote ‘The Brook Kerith,’ a Syrian story of the time of Jesus, Paul and Pontius Pilate. Such a story required no mechanism, but creation: invention of a world I had never seen and could only dream. After that I wrote ‘A Story Teller's Holiday.' in whIch I go to the west of Ireland where we tell tales. Again I get something outside the Carleton Hotel anld theWhite Star Line. My next story was 'Eloise and Abelard.’ In this story of the twelfth century I was practically separated from all things mechanical. The twelfth century was the great century when all things began again. Thus in a story of nearly a thousand years ago – while the substance of the book was there – it left my imagination free to create – there was no mechanism.

“Prose narrative does not consist merely in going to a party and writing down all you've heard said. Such things as, 'Won't you have a cigarette?’ or 'Will you be kind to me?' That is the sort of thing I read today. They rush through without actually observing anything. That sort will never succeed in producing either pictorial or literary art. So we are rapidly driving into a period as far removed from art as the Stone Age. Nor do I see any chance of art revival until coal and oil have been exhausted….”

And therein you have the literary philosophy of George Moore.

He talked along in gusts. Then for a long enchanted stretch it was like the waters of ”The Brook Kerith” flowing by. Very often he paused to correct his own words, editing his speech as though it had been a manuscript; blue-penciling an infelicitous word and underlining its substitute with fine emphasis. It was like reading long passages from one of George Moore's exquisitely worded later works – and something Infinitely more, the spirit of George Moore speakIng for itself – which my notes cannot begin to express.

Then we settled down to cigarettes and a genuine "conversation in Ebury Street” that wan less didactic, less formal, but which bristled with George Mooreisms; takIng pot-shots at the conventIons both past and present, he chuckling at every coddled white dove he brought down.

"

“Religion is a thing of the past. Nobody believes anything! There was a day when they fought bloody battles over as to where Jesus came from. Now, no one gives a damn! The thing that interests Is some morbid current – to dig up an ancient King of Egypt perhaps and publish a full account of it.

“Knowledge is a curse! Let us purity ourselves in ignorance!” – St. Paul's words, or my own, I don't remember which. Every child that is thoroughly educated, his life is blighted for him. There is no mystery left. One of the biggest follies Is the belief that you can recreate men by pouring a curriculum down their backs as children. We spend millions in destroying, despoiling, taking the edge off men's natural intelligence, or putting what is soft steel on a harsh grinding stone. Nobody sets more value on self-education than I – but enforced education Is destructive, damnable! Teaching yokels Latin and servants to play the piano! They lose their birthright, they fail, then they linger about public houses and become demagogues who stir up trouble for the people who taught them. And for what must they qualify? A diploma!

“I could never pass an examination in anything, particularly in English composition – because I couldn’t spell! I don’t know anything I could pass In. I can't add up a half-dozen figures, so my cook and I have a difficult time with my accounts. My father used to think that I was – well, not exactly an idiot, but deficient. So I determined at an early age to become educated. I was a failure. I could never have written my books if they had educated me!

“What Swinburne did In poetry (‘Songs and Ballads') horrified every one of that day. I determined to liberate fiction in the same manner from the conventions and wrote ‘The Mummer's Wife.’ Up to that time George Eliot, I think it was, in ‘The Mill on the Floss,’ had gone so far as to have a young man and a young woman go out for the day. He seized her arm and kissed it fervently. Who wouldn't? It was such a pretty arm! Whereupon George Eliot (not the young people, of course) had the young woman say, ‘I shall go stralght home, if you are going to do this sort ol thing!' Of course they were going to do that sort of thing: that's what they came out for!

“I had quite a debate in the press with a parson about it. He said my people were not moral. ‘What do I care,' I told him, ‘whether they are moral or not? They are natural. Theirs ls natural morality and yours is artlflcial morality,' I went on, ‘that’s the difference. Neither you nor your morality are natural.'

“Yes, I led them all at one time on this question. Now I can't keep up with. Them – and don’t  want to. They have made it all so carnal.”