George and Sarah (1920), by Guy Pène du Bois, depicting George Moore with a woman who may be the great actress Sarah Bernhardt. Oil on canvas owned by the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, Massachusetts. The National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution calls this George Moore and Sarah Bernhardt, as did a patron of the painter and donor of the picture. The current owner calls it George Moore and Female Figure because the painter’s daughter doubted the identity of the strangely posed woman in red (as explained in the Iconography of George Moore). My title acknowledges all the possibilities.
George Moore’s fascination with theater and dramatic literature is evident in his books Martin Luther (1879) and A Mummer’s Wife (1885), in several other books and productions, and also in his journalism and advocacy. He tried long and hard to succeed as a playwright and stage dramatically effective plays.
I have now published five prototypes — going on six — of two titles in the Worlds pillar of George Moore Interactive. Worlds is the part of this project devoted to worldbuilding aka creative writing aka imaginative construction of alternate or augmented reality: poetry, drama, fiction, memoir.
I include memoir because it seems when George Moore chose to remember anything, he engaged in worldbuilding to make it suit his purpose and fancy. He made up stuff despite assumptions that memoirs are true autobiography. Along with much else in his legacy, his memoirs resist easy classification.
Two-and-a-half of my new prototypes are the text of a verse play Martin Luther (1879). Moore wrote it in his late 20s with the Spanish playwright Bernard Lopez coaching him.
The play and its lyrical front matter come to 24,400 words. I didn’t include the amusing Preface (11,500 words), preferring to put that in the Aesthetics pillar, in the category of Literary Criticism (where it belongs in my opinion); moreover a seriocomic Preface doesn’t really go with a tragic play.
It seems to me that Martin Luther is a sophisticated and complex tragedy, not the juvenile throwaway that some folks (including the author) have said it is. It can be read as an intriguing exploration of faith and freedom, resonating in particular with the author’s mature novels Evelyn Innes (1898), Sister Teresa (1901), The Brook Kerith (1916), and Héloïse and Abélard (1921); and with his plays on the ecclesiastical theme of The Brook Kerith: The Apostle (1911) and The Passing of the Essenes (1930).
GMi being more concerned with text than interpretation, Martin Luther must also be read as an experiment in page layout and format. To put it mildly, both are complicated. Shaping the content of the play into a form that is suitable for the digital age has been challenging!
Unwilling to decide in advance what shape that may be, I published two versions of Martin Luther on this website; a third will be available soon in the Kindle Store.
The first version, Prototype A (PA), replaces printed page layout and format with a style imposed by my WordPress theme. All PA text is left-justified, indents are gone, line leading is regular, readable web fonts are bright on a dark background, and typographical eccentricities have been replaced with normal usage.
I am no longer objective about Martin Luther, but nonetheless it seems to me that PA, though less ornate, is more readable and accessible than its printed ancestor.
The second version, Prototype B (PB), simulates printed page layout and format within the default Google Docs style. Simulation is medium fidelity, since there’s been no attempt to reproduce the exact look and feel of the 1879 first and only edition. However most of the author’s editorial decisions have been preserved in PB.
Unlike PA, which is a series of web pages, PB is one Google Doc embedded in a web page. It is scrolling black text on a white background, the kind of text that hurts my eyes but which many readers prefer (Lord knows why).
A third version, Martin Luther Prototype C (PC), is on my workbench. It will become an ebook published in the Kindle Store. I’m still investigating the tolerance of Kindle Publishing for eccentric page layout and typography; it’s possible that PC will be a hybrid of PA and PB suitable for that medium.
What I don’t like about ebooks in general is that they are not socially interactive in the way that PA and PB may turn out to be. What I mean is, PC will support passive reading by individuals, whereas PA and PB have the potential to embody active text, ignite active reading, and promote dynamic community engagement. I hope.
Apart from Martin Luther, I have likewise prototyped A Mummer’s Wife (1885) in all three of the aforementioned modes: PA, PB, and PC. This is a straightforward novel without any eccentricities on the printed page. Yay!
I thought A Mummer’s Wife would be a slam dunk when I began, but it wasn’t quite that because of length. The first edition, the one I edited for GMi and the Kindle Store, has 174,600 words. That is a large pill to swallow!
Large as it is, the quality of the novel (in my opinion) is magnificent. So the 50 hours I took to transpose it into its new forms were enjoyable. I’ll say more about quality in a moment.
First I want to add a word about what all this effort is for. What is the use case in the digital age for Martin Luther, A Mummer’s Wife, and the rest of Moore’s worldbuilding?
My first use case, as usual, is for machine learning. Texts in the Worlds pillar are to be learned and analyzed by artificial intelligence, making them auto expressive of their author’s intentions, the culture they sprang from, their impact on peers, and the interests of readers today.
You may think that computer sciences aren’t needed to perform that service because professors and scholars are already doing it. I beg to disagree.
In my opinion, the service has not been satisfactorily performed for George Moore’s literary legacy, or for any legacy stored in cellars of the Ivory Tower. Like vintage wines, legacies have been “bottled” for experts and connoisseurs only, as remote from ordinary readers as it is possible to get.
Thus digitization and computational study of the canon may be as liberating for us as the philosophies and activism of Pierre Abélard and Martin Luther were for our medieval forebears. We shall see.
This is all very well for machine learning, but is there a use case for engaging human readers with dormant literary legacies? I suspect there is, but I haven’t worked it out yet. And that’s okay!
As is often the case in technical innovation, despite the maxims of Steve Blank, ideas may follow praxis rather than the other way around. Build it and they shall come? Not exactly, but more like build it and allow it and its users to decide what it’s for. If it’s for anything. We’ll all get to decide only if we build it first.
Literary Quality
I said a moment ago that I would return to the quality of A Mummer’s Wife. It was Moore’s first commercially successful novel. Nowadays it is caricatured as a drab imitation of French realist or naturalist fiction that preceded it. That caricature is, frankly, BS.
What makes the book relevant today is not its similarities to other books, but rather the pathos of its subject, its exquisite writing style, and the lift it gives to the author’s aestheticism. Or rather than “lift,” let me say the brilliant standard that it sets.
There is absolutely nothing, not a single word among more than 174,600 in the novel, that is argumentative or preachy or theoretical or vain. The story exists wholly as a gem-like work of art by a consummate young artist who had no axe to grind and no devoted fans to please. That is my opinion.
Rather than tell you more of my opinions, though, I will defer now to George himself. He wrote the following passage about another writer’s book that he loved, but did not imitate:
In these concluding pages [of Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education], we feel that not one man has fallen, but that all have fallen; life has been ravished of all the enchanting illusion through which she works out her sublime deception for an end which we may never fathom, which lies perchance behind the stars. I do not stop to argue with those who ask of what use is the demonstration of such unpalatable truths? My concern is not with those who look upon literature as another form of bicycling, or with those who believe in the progress or the reformation of mankind. I write in the hope of attracting the attention of those few who understand that the sadness of life is the joy of art. Those few will lay the book down, when they have read the last pages, happy and exalted. Their thought will collect in the happy cloudland of contemplation, and they will see that this book is as wonderful as Michelangelo’s sculpture, Velasquez’s portraits, or Wagner’s operas. They will recognize that this is a tragic novel.
“A Tragic Novel” in Cosmopolis (July 1897, page 58)
George Moore wrote that about fifteen years after he wrote A Mummer’s Wife. I must be one of those who understands that “the sadness of life is the joy of art,” because when I reread the last tragic pages A Mummer’s Wife, fifty years after my first time, I felt happy and exalted indeed.
But unlike fifty years ago, I can now say I have personally known real people like Kate Ede. I can appreciate how brave George Moore was to invent and ideate and sympathetically render her, with grace and delicacy and honesty, when the temptation (then as now) is to dismiss women like her as a “slut.”
Collections
Speaking of uncertain use cases, I recently stumbled upon an article in the New York Times about the The New York Public Library’s acquisition (by donation) of the late Jonathan Mann’s Abraham Lincoln collection. The article sheds light on the seventh pillar of GMi named Collections.
I am forever fond of the NYPL because it’s where my commitment to George Moore took root. After reading some of his books as a student at New York University, and then taking a grand tour by bicycle in order to ponder life’s unanswered questions (though I was not one of “those who look upon literature as another form of bicycling”), for a few marginal months I spent five days a week, from morning until evening, at the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature in the NYPL, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, transcribing George Moore’s letters. This I did as an unaffiliated scholar, like I am now but with no money to support my habit.
Anyway, my love of Moore took root in the NYPL, and now the Library has acquired a collection of Lincoln artifacts. Why mention it here? Because of this quote in the newspaper about collectors and collecting:
Mann’s other labor of love was The Rail Splitter, a journal for Lincoln fanatics that he founded in 1995 with Donald Ackerman, who remains editor in chief. Now a website, it offers articles, book reviews, announcements and gossipy “splinters,” geared to the particular interests of collectors, whose relationship with historians often involves plenty of mutual side-eye.
“Simply put, we offer in this forum exactly what WE want to read,” the founders declared. “New finds. Details on items in the market. What something sold for in an auction. Who are the players? And how do we know if something is a fake?” The community, it continued, “has no borders but enjoys the commonality of a shared passion: the love of Lincoln, the love of American history.”
Jennifer Schuessler, “A Lincoln Trove Lands at the Library,” New York Times, 24 January 2024).
The Collections pillar of GMi may similarly become a forum for exactly what WE (folks who “get” George Moore) want to read. If you’re a collector you surely understand what Mr. Mann meant. He has provided me with a model use case for Collections, expressed more neatly than I ever imagined it.
Special Thanks
My affection and gratitude are due to a volunteer in Dublin whom I prefer to call colleague, who created the first-ever digital transcript of Martin Luther (at least the first I’m aware of) at the National Library of Ireland.
I have already said that this rare little gem is a monster on the digital workbench. Without the thought leadership and technical skills of my Irish colleague, the revived Martin Luther on GMi and the Kindle Store simply would not exist.
