Mr. George Moore on Music and Literature

The Musician, 29 September 1897, pages 392-394, 2,283 words

[Inconsistent usage of quotation marks is original to the source material.]

Gabriel d'Annunzio’s description of Tristan and Isolde, a translation of which appeared last week and the preceding week in The Musician, gives rise to the question of what influence will the present revival of interest in the art of music exercise upon the art of literature? Mr. George Moore has been engaged for the last three years on a novel, in which all the characters are musicians. The heroine, it has been stated, is a great Wagnerian singer, and her father an organist, who believes that a revival of Palestrina and Vittoria in a London church would seriously help England towards a union with Rome. We, therefore, directed our steps towards Victoria Street.

Mr. George Moore rose from his writing-desk, and having shaken hands with us, he said, without giving us time to explain our errand, "I know what you have come to see me about; you needn't tell me, I know, you want to ask me if I have read d'Annunzio. Of course I have read Mrs. Crawford's admirable translation. I read every word of The Musician. But your question comes in the nick of time. I have just finished 'L'Intrus,' and have just begun 'L'Enfant de Volupté.' Oh, yes, d' Annunzio is a very wonderful writer — the most extraordinary writer that has appeared these many years. You see that I lay stress on the word writer. More than any other novelist d’Annunzio is a writer. He has raised himself till he stands as high as Flaubert's waistband, nearly to Goncourt's shoulder, by sheer force of expression. He is the most marvellous virtuoso that I know. He is delicate, subtle, brilliant as Paderewski. His mind does not go deeper than Paderewski's in his own compositions, but d'Annunzio's execution is as exquisite. His themes are the oldest, but he extracts new perfumes, finer distilled essences from them. He writes only of men and women who live for pleasure; there is never a question of money; the world is at their feet; their only limitations are their appetites; the limitation of appetite is the drama that he tells, and needless to say that the sexual appetite is the appetite he chooses, and very logical is this his choice. The other appetites lead to conflicts with the world, and this is what d' Annunzio would avoid; his genius does not lie in external matter but in the soul, in the recording of every shade of emotion. A man goes to an evening party with 'the most marvellous gardenia in his button-hole, and a vague inquietude in his soul. He happens to follow a lady up the staircase, and is interested in the shoulders which emerge like polished ivory, divided by a delicate pale furrow.' There, in those two sentences, you have d'Annunzio — the essential oil, as Huysmann would say, L'osmazome de son art.

At the top of the staircase the servant announces:

‘Son excellence la Duchesse de Scerni!”

Immediately after:

'Monsieur Le Comte Sperelli-Fieschi d'Agento, and it pleased him to hear his name in such proximity to this woman's.'

“This seems to me very exquisite; this floating up of a sensation from nearly unconscious depths of soul — out of the dimness it rises like a water-flower.

"In this woman the man sees his sensual idea, instinctive and acquired, and in the narrative of the changing lights and the shades of such a passion the genius of d'Annunzio exhibits itself on every page, almost in every sentence. For every sentence is exquisite. Speaking of d'Annunzio, we must not be afraid to repeat the word exquisite. He can write page after page of sentimental conversation without becoming vapid or silly, making intellectual appeal all the while. His art consists largely of the ceaseless chatter of the soul, the little egotistical soul that never ceases to bemoan its own sorrows, to exult in its own joys, to view the world from its tiny eyelet-hole."

Here Mr. George Moore paused for words, or for ideas, or for both. He walked up and down the hearth-rug; his eyes twinkled, he clearly enjoyed the comedy of the interview.

"Mind you," he hurried on, seeing that we were going to interrupt, "I do not speak from knowledge of all of d' Annunzio's novels. I have only read 'L'Intrus,' and part of 'L'Enfant de Volupté,' but I see what his limitations are, and it will surprise me if any further reading radically alters my present appreciation. In 'L'Intrus' we are never told that the hero is rich. We only learn that he is rich incidentally — he goes out riding, and one of the episodes is a visit to his country house. Of the man's personal appearance we are told nothing, nor of the clothes he wears. Without alteration the story might be transferred from modern to ancient Italy. Of the woman we hear that she has a long profile. Yes, and towards the end of the book it is mentioned that the hair spread over the pillow is fair. But we learn nothing of their individual souls. All that they feel might be felt by any of us. In this novel there are no characters. In other words, the soul is not fenced about with individual characteristics. There are no determining limits; we watch the human soul quivering; we listen to its chattering as we might watch the quivering of the human body laid open by the surgeon's knife. We do not know who is the patient. His place in social life is no concern of ours; and as the physiological student watches the quivering muscles, so does the psychological student watch the soul palpitating under the knife of passion. From the first page to the last we are, as it were, hung up in space. A great human sky is about us, the extraordinary human soul is beneath our eyes; but we cannot give the human soul a local habitation or a name.

"He has revived the psychological novel. In mid-century the soul was forgotten for the spectacle of things of which man had once been the centre; in naturalistic literature man's soul was adrift on the stream of things. d'Annunzio has restored man to his ancient position; the evanescent and perilous soul of man has again become the staple rock, and the whirl of phenomena merely a faintly seen background. d'Annunzio is the lineal descendant of Clarissa Harlowe and the Princesse de Cleves.

"The habitual colour of d'Annunzio's mind is mauve, and the obvious flower to compare him to is an orchid — exquisite sensations of mauve and pink, evanescent as a ruined sunset, and as unrememberable! Ah, that is a point. d' Annunzio is hardly more rememberable than the first thrill of intoxication from faint white wine. He exists like love in contact, like colour in sight, like perfume in inhalation. How faint is our recollection of the sense of a kiss, of the tint of a sunset cloud, of the scent of a rose. But how intense are these sensations at the moment of endurance. So is d'Annunzio intense, so is he unrememberable."

There were some questions we should have liked to have put, but Mr. Moore checked us — questions disturbed the train of his ideas. He said he must be allowed to ramble on, and the scratching and dotting of the shorthand writer began again.

"From no writing do I get pleasure so akin to the pleasure I get from music as I do from d'Annunzio's. I called him just now the Paderewski of stylists — I might have said the Sarasate or the Joachim. His writing is more like the violin than the piano. It is like the prolonging of notes on the highest register of the violin till the strained sense dies in delight akin to pain. A wonderful virtuoso! In 'L'Intrus' the house of swallows, their coming and going, and the delicious suggestiveness of their wings and piercing cries, and then that extraordinary description of the singing of the nightingale! But the resemblance of this literature to music goes deeper than the exquisite fluidity of the execution. I thtnk I perceive in it an attempt to write by means of motives. Flaubert has done this but he did it unconsciously. d'Annunzio has done something to systematize this new method. And I do not see why literature should not partake of the musical art of Wagner. If we consider a life we find that it consists of a conflict and an interweaving of motives. In the story, for example: of a girl who leaves her father's house with a lover who has promised to help her in her career as a singer we have at once four dominant motives: her love for her father, her love for her lover, her love for her art (out of which springs a subordinate motive, her desire for fame), and the motive of destiny. In the development of such a story the writer would find himself obliged to use these themes separately and in combination, just as a musician would, and these motives would easily subdivide into some half-dozen more. If the girl were a religious girl, the religious instinct would furnish a principal motive, which could be treated as Wagner treats the Love Feast motive in Parsifal as a foundation for the motive of the salvation to the saviour; the Love Feast motive is an imperfect version of the motive of salvation to the saviour which imperfect men sing until the Redeemer comes."

"This story of the girl who leaves her father's house, and its development by means of motive are, no doubt, derived from the novel you are writing — 'Evelyn Innes'?"

"Perhaps there may be an analogy," he said, smiling. "But we will not go into that. You want to know if a verbal phrase can be repeated like a musical phrase in the intention of recalling attention to some phase or aspect of the subject? Yes, in a way, but in the employment of such artifice the writer is in danger of overstepping the natural limitations of his art. True that the arts overlap, and the tendency is to maraud each other's territory. Wagner was the first musician who marauded literature, but in the middle of the century the habit of the novelist was to maraud the territory of the painter; naturalistic literature chose the most objective of the arts; the psychological novelist will choose the most subjective music. In d'Annunzio the bias is very decided. The very artifice which I depreciate as a violation of the border he employs unhesitatingly. Although we are told very little about the personal appearance of the woman in 'L'Intrus,' we are constantly referred back to her pallor — she is as pale as her chemise; a little later on in the book she is again as pale as her chemise, then she is as pale as the wall against which she is leaning; further on she again becomes as pale as her chemise; then she is as pale as muslin; later still you can only distinguish her hands from the sheets by the blue veins; the comparison is again varied, and he finally returns to the original key — she is as pale as her chemise. The employment of such a trick by a less skilful writer would be intolerable, but I do assure you that d'Annunzio saves himself; every moment he seems as if he were about to fall over the brink; as a virtuoso it is his business to venture to the extreme edge. I do not read for distraction, I read to learn, I read as an expert, and never once did I regret the repetition of the phrase, so exquisitely is it used — just in the right place, just at the right moment it comes in, like the love motive of the Volsungs — always exquisitely modulated, suggesting or completing the sensation .... But I'm talking a great deal. I'm afraid I'm tiring you."

"No, you're only tiring the shorthand writer. And so that she may recover herself will you answer me a few questions briefly? When do you expect to finish 'Evelyn Innes'"?

"In about another year."

"Is not that a long time? Three years!"

"Tolstoi spent six years writing 'Anna Karenina,' Flaubert some seven or eight writing 'L'Education Sentimentale.' The ordinary writer is not capable of recasting; all he is capable of seeing he sees in the first glance."

"Is the book advanced?"

"Fairly so I'm writing the last third. Evelyn has sent away her lovers and is making a retreat in the convent of some Passionist sisters at Wimbledon. She has just sung Cherubini's Ave Maria at Benediction.".

"Half the book passes on the stage, half in the convent?"

"Yes, it is pretty equally divided."

"May I ask what suggested the subject, for it is an usual one — to you?"

"Oh, yes. It was three years ago. I had been to Bayreuth and was passing through Paris. Mary Robinson, Madame Darmstetter, told me of a little actress who had scruples of conscience about her lovers, and had gone into a convent. She could not stop there because the nuns were all so childlike. It seemed to me a wonderful subject, and I've been thinking about it ever since."

"You find it very difficult?"

"Very; more difficult than 'Esther Waters.' But I never lose interest in it. Perhaps something may come of it; anyway it has been an absorbing occupation. I wish it were as easy as writing articles or being interviewed, Now good-bye, you to your newspaper, I to my book,"