“My Most Winning Book”

Evening News, 31 January 1913, page 4, 978 words

Mr. George Moore Reveals Some Confidences.

Mr. George Moore is in the way of achieving the desire of all writers, viz., a collected edition of his works, and below will be found some interesting details of the latest book of his to be reprinted and published by Mr. Werner Laurie early in February.

Mr. George Moore was telling me the story of “Impressions and Opinions” which after twenty-two years is to be reissued.

“We must begin,” he said, “with ‘Spring Days,’ an early novel of mine. It was first published as a serial in The Evening News, and then it appeared in book form. And then everybody said that it was the very worst novel that ever was printed.

“I dedicated it to an eminent critic and editor. He was very much distressed: he said that he had never read anything so futile and so silly. So I banished ‘Spring Days’ from my mind; I wiped it out, with an effort of forgetfulness, for twenty-five years.

“Then I read it again. And I said to myself: ‘This is a very good novel. If I am wrong about this, then the whole of my life is wrong!’ So the book was reissued, and then the critics and friends said the exact opposite of what they had said before, and ‘Spring Days’ was accepted as a first-rate novel.

“Wel, after the original failure of ‘Spring Days’ I wrote another story — I won’t tell you its name now — which was treated in the same way. The eminent editor and critic said, ‘This is a little better.’ Re-reading it, I can see that it is not so good as ‘Spring Days.’

Rewriting a Mistake

But after these two failures I felt done; I felt that my career was over. Then I wrote ‘Impressions and Opinions,’ and it dragged me out of the sea of despair like a Newfoundland dog. It pleased everybody; I only hope that the seesaw won’t occur, and that it will not be disliked by everybody now.

“Personally, I think ‘Impressions and Opinions’ is the most winning of all my books.”

“Do you find that your opinions have been changed or modified in the twenty-two years since the first impression?”

“No; no, I think not. Here and there, naturally, I read phrases that I would not write now. For example, I say of Dostoievsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’ that it is Gaboriau with psychological sauce. Well, I hadn’t studied Dostoievsky very deeply, and I liked the effect of the phrase; but it isn’t just.

“But I have not rewritten ‘Impressions and Opinions.’ I have done a good deal of rewriting in my day, and I have come to the conclusion that it is a mistake. Thought comes vestments in its proper garment, and if one rewrites a book one gets a conflict between the thought and its expression.

“But at the same time the book is not exactly the same as the ‘Impressions and Opinions’ of 1891. I have added some essays and articles of the same period; and one of the articles, ‘Art for the Villa,’ would not do at all; so I wrote ‘Une Rencontre au Salon’ to take its place.

“One of the added articles, ‘My Impressions of Zola,’ is one of the best I have ever written; it is the portrait of a man.”

We side-tracked here on to Zola. I said I hoped that Mr. Moore admired Zola.

“No; no, I think not. He seems to me a blown-out Flaubert; he worked from the Flaubert formula, but everything is extended and overworked till it has ceased to be significant. He liked to surround himself with rough, enormous crucifixes and images; and the characters in his books are of the same sort; they are rude carvings.

“There Will Be No Arts.”

“‘La Terre’? Yes; but I think that the people in ‘La Terre’ are false. No doubt the peasants have the vices that Zola describes; but they have other qualities also, and these he never lets you see; the whole effect of Zola is as of something hard and black. Honest? He was, I should think, a deadly honest man. Charpentier, his publisher, told him that if he went on with his Dreyfus agitation his sales were at an end. He replied, ‘I know; but I shall go on.’”

“What do you think of the future before the arts?”

“I have given my opinion as to that in ‘Une Rencontre au Salon.’ In my opinion there is no future for the arts; there will be no arts. It will not matter to us; you and I will be dead. You see, the world didn’t begin to change till the nineteenth century. Up to that time people were kept apart from one another; they didn’t see each other; and so the arts arose. Now all the races are mingled; all the world is one, and the arts will cease to exist, because everybody will be copying everybody else.

“I am writing ‘Vale’ now,” said Mr. Moore, as we ended our interview. “I am enjoying it; it is just a book of stories.”

“Impressions and Opinions,” our readers may care to know, contains essays on Balzac, Turgueneff, Verlaine — an admirable appreciation of the poet’s work, a terrible picture of the poet himself, as he lived, or rather decayed — on the barrenness of the British drama in the late ‘eighties, on the deplorable prevalence of “Mummer Worship,” and on several aspects of French and English art.

There is a “Note on ‘Ghosts’” to which I wish to call particular attention. For the less perspicuous Ibsen is a drab “realist,” or a back-parlour moralist. But he is in reality our modern version of Sophocles; and Mr. Moore points out that most significant fact.

A.M. [Arthur Machen]