Part 5

To take the most striking example:—In ‘Jude the Obscure’ Mr. Hardy deals very largely with the emotions and reasons which animate a young woman when she decides not to sleep with her husband, when she decides that she will sleep with her husband, when she decides to sleep with a man who is not her husband, and when she decides not to sleep with the man who is not her husband. Now, all this does not matter to the mentally solid and well-balanced reader. It is not very interesting, for one thing, and apart from the fact that it is, from a workman’s point of view, astonishingly well done, it would not be interesting at all. Mr. Hardy offers it as the study of a temperament. Very well. It is an excellent study of a temperament, but it bores. The theme is not big enough to be worth the effort expended upon it. Here is an hysterical, wrong-headed, and confused-hearted little hussy who can’t make up her mind as to what is right and what is wrong, and who is a prey to the impulse of the moment, psychical or physical. I don’t think there are many people like her. I don’t think that from the broad human-natural point of view it matters a great deal how she decides. But I am sure of this—that the more that kind of small monstrosity is publicly analysed and anatomised and made much of, the more her morbidities will increase in her, and the more unbearable in real life she is likely to become. Mr. Hardy’s labour in this particular is a direct incentive to the study of hysteria as a fine art amongst such women as are natively prone to it. One of the gravest dangers which beset women is that of hysterical self-deception. The common-sense fashion of dealing with them when they suffer in that way is kindly and gently to ignore their symptoms until the reign of common-sense returns. To make them believe that their emotions are worthy of the scrutiny of a great analyst of the human heart is to increase their morbid temptations, and in the end to render those temptations irresistible. The one kind of person to whom ‘Jude the Obscure’ must necessarily appeal with the greatest power is the kind of person depicted in its pages, and the tendency of the book is unavoidably towards the development and multiplication of the type described. This is the only end the book can serve, apart from the fact that it does reveal to us Mr. Hardy’s special knowledge of a dangerous and disagreeable form of mental disorder, But it is not the physician’s business to sow disease, and any treatise on hysteria which is thrown into a captivating popular form, and makes hysteria look like an interesting and romantic thing, will spread the malady as surely as a spark will ignite gunpowder. This at least is not a mere matter of opinion, but of sound scientific fact, which no student of that disorder which Mr. Hardy has so masterfully handled will deny. In this respect, then, the book is a centre of infection, and that the author of ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes’ should have written it is matter at once for astonishment and grief. That is to say, it is a matter of astonishment and grief to me, and to those who think as I do. There is a large and growing contingent of writers and readers to whom it is a theme for joyful congratulation. It is one of the rules of the game we are now playing to respect all honest conviction.

Of Mr. Hardy, from the purely artistic side, there is little time to speak. On that side let me first set down what is to be said in dispraise, for the mere sake of leaving a sweet taste in the mouth at the end. Even from his own point of view—that lauded ‘sense of the overwhelming sadness of modern life’ which captivates the admirers of his latest style—it is possible to spread the epic table of sorrow without finding a place upon it for scraps of the hoggish anatomy which are not nameable except in strictly scientific or wholly boorish speech. But it seems necessary to the new realism that its devotee should be able to write for the perusal of gentlemen and ladies about things he dared not mention orally in the presence of either; so that what a drunken cabman would be deservedly kicked for saying in a lady’s hearing may be honourably printed for a lady’s reading by a scholar and a sage. It was once thought otherwise, but I am arguing here, not against realism per se, but against the inartistic introduction of gross episodes. Every reader of Mr. Hardy will recognise my meaning, and the passage in my mind seems gratuitously and unserviceably offensive.

To come to less unpleasing themes, where, still expressing disapproval, one may do it with some grace, one of the few limitations to Mr. Hardy’s great charm as a writer lies in his tendency to encumber his page with detail. At a supremely romantic moment one of his people sits down to contemplate a tribe of ants, and watches them through two whole printed pages. In another case a man in imminent deadly peril surveys through two pages the history of the geologic changes which have befallen our planet. Each passage, taken by itself, is good enough. Taken where it is, each is terribly wearisome and wrong.

I do not know that any critic has yet recorded Mr. Hardy’s singular limitations as to the invention of plot. Speaking from memory, I cannot at this moment recall a novel of his in which some trouble does not circle about a marriage licence, and I can recall many instances of going to church to get married and coming back single. That, indeed, is Mr. Hardy’s pièce de résistance in the way of invention, and it crops up in one book after another with a helpless inevitable-ness which at last grows comic.

But here we can afford to have done with carping, and can turn to the much more grateful task of praise. I do not think it too much to say that Mr. Hardy has studied his own especial part of England, has made himself master of its landscape, its town and hamlet life, its tradition and sentiment, and general spiritual atmosphere, to such triumphant effect as to set himself wholly apart from all other English writers of fiction. His devotion to his own beloved Wessex has brought him this rich and merited reward—that he is the recognised first and final master of its field. His knowledge of rustic life within his own borders is beautifully sympathetic and profound. His impression of the landscape in the midst of which this life displays itself is broad and noble and alive. His literary style is a thing to admire, to study, and to admire again. All worthy readers of English fiction are his debtors for many idyllic happy hours, and many deep inspirations of wholesome English air. And if, at the parting of the ways, we wave a decisive farewell to him, we are not unmindful of the time when he was the best and dearest of our comrades, and we leave him in the certainty that, whatever path he has chosen, he has been guided in his choice by an ambition which is entirely honourable and sincere.

VII.—UNDER FRENCH ENCOURAGEMENT—GEORGE MOORE

That salt of sincerity which saves ‘Jude the Obscure’ and ‘Tess o’ the D’Urber-villes’ from being wholly nauseous, is absent from ‘A Modern Lover’ and ‘A Drama in Muslin,’ and its flavour is but faintly perceptible in ‘Esther Waters.’ Except on the distinct understanding that Thomas Hardy and George Moore are bracketed here, for the sake of convenience, as being both ‘under French encouragement,’ it would be a gross critical injustice to couple their names together at all. It is not one man of letters in a hundred who has Mr. Hardy’s mere literary faculty, which is native and brilliant, whilst Mr. Moore’s has been painstakingly hunted for and brought from afar, and is, after much polishing, still a trifle dull. Mr. Thomas Hardy is distinctly one of those men who see things through an atmosphere of their own. Mr. George Moore has borrowed his atmosphere. The one is a man of genius as well as labour, and the other is a man of labour only.

It is very much of a pity that, a year or two ago, somebody’s sense of Mr. Moore’s position in the world of letters should have been very absurdly emphasised. It was solemnly advertised that a certain number of copies of a book of his might be had on large paper, with the autograph of the author. This was to be regretted, for Mr. Moore, in his own way, is worth taking seriously, whilst the trick is one of those which, as a rule, can only be played by the poorest kind of literary outsider. But that the author should have permitted himself to be thus made ridiculous is a characteristic thing, and one not to be passed in silence if we wish to understand him.

Consulting the critics, one of the first things we find about Mr. Moore is that he is an observer. As a matter of fact, that is absolutely what he is not. He is so far from being an observer that he is that diametrically opposite person, a man with a notebook. The man who amongst men of letters deserves to be ranked as an observer is he who naturally and without effort sees things in their just place, aspect, proportion, and perspective. The man who is often falsely described by the title which expresses this faculty is a careful and painstaking soul, who is strenuously on the watch for detail, and who takes much trouble to fill his pages with it.

Let me offer a concrete illustration. In ‘Esther Waters’ Mr. Moore is curiously and meaninglessly emphatic in his description of a certain room in which the heroine of his action sleeps. Esther, we are told, slipped on her nightdress and got into bed. It was a brass bed without curtains. There were two windows in the room. One of them was flush with the head of the bed, and the other was beyond its foot. A chest of drawers stood between them. An observer, unless he had a special purpose in it, would never have dreamt of writing down this bald detail. Nothing comes of the statement of fact. Nothing hangs on the relative position of the bed and the windows and the chest of drawers. Nothing happens in the course of the story which justifies the flat and flavourless statement. It is wholly without meaning, apart from the fact that it affords rather a plain insight into the author’s method of work. If a child of three after visiting a strange bedroom were able to tell as much about it as Mr. Moore has to tell about this apartment, his mother would probably be proud of him, and his nurse would say that he was a notice-taking little creature; but the critics would hardly hold him up to admiration as an observer. Yet the child would tell us just as much and just as little as Mr. Moore tells us in this particular instance. It goes without saying that this is not a fair specimen of Mr. Moore’s faculty, but it is significant of his general literary knack. He makes it his business steadfastly to jot down what he sees, and it is not impossible that in the course of a long and laborious life a man might in this way cultivate to a reasonable growth a turn for observation originally less than mediocre; but it is not the natural observer’s method of seeing things, and it is not the natural artist’s method of presenting them. If the critics in this case were in the right we should have to acknowledge an auctioneer’s catalogue as a chef d’ouvre.

To the sympathetic reader it was evident from the first that Mr. Moore was not greatly enamoured of his work for its own sake, and that he chose his themes, not because of any imperative attraction they had for him, but simply and purely for the use to which he could put them. His choice of subject has always been the result of a deliberate search for the effective. The mental process which gave rise to ‘A Mummer’s Wife’ is easily traceable. The domestic life of the class of people he made up his mind to treat was as little known to him as to almost anybody, but if properly handled it was pretty sure to make good copy. He must know it first, however, and so he set himself to learn it. This is the Zola method, but it is that method with a difference. The great French master started with an inspired and inspiring scheme, his idea being no less than to paint the society of an epoch from top to base, to present in a series of books, the writing of which should fill his literary lifetime, a completed portraiture of the whole people of his land and day. In the course of such a labour as he had courageously appointed for himself, many lines of special inquiry were necessarily indicated, but the details for which he searched were all employed with an artistic remorselessness in the building of that one great scheme of his, and each successive book which left his hands was like one more nail driven home and clinched for the support of his argument. Mr. Moore, as those who are honoured by his personal acquaintance know better than those who only read his books, resents with some warmth the obvious parallel which has been drawn between Zola and himself; but he is a copyist of Zola’s method for all that, and but for Zola’s influence would never have been heard of on his own present lines. In the writing of the ‘Mummers Wife’ the first obvious impulse came from Zola, It should be the writer’s business to discover a section of English life not hitherto exploited—it should be his business to explore it with a minute thoroughness—and it should, further, be his business to depict it as he found it. To be thoroughly painstaking in inquiry, and without fear in the exposition of facts discovered, were the aims before the writer. But Mr. Moore forgot, as was inevitable in the circumstances, that no desire for knowledge of things human is of real value without sympathy. He followed the fortunes of a theatrical company touring in the provinces, and though it is true enough that people who know that kind of life find trivial errors here and there, it has to be admitted that on the whole he gave a true and characteristic picture of the outside life of such a community. How a certain class of theatrical people dress and talk, what their work is, and what their outer ways are like, he has discovered with infinite painstaking; but the fact remains that it is the work of an outsider. He has never once got under the skin of any one of his people, and this is true, because he was impelled to write about them, not because they were human, and therefore endowed with all human characteristics of hatefulness, and lovableness, and quaintness, and humour, and vanity, and jealousy, but because he saw good copy in them. He neither loves nor hates, nor, indeed, except for his own sake, is for a. second even faintly interested. He is there to make a book, and these people offer excellent material for a book. He is astonishingly industrious, and his minuteness is without end, but he never warms to his subject. His aim, in short, is one of total artistic selfishness. It is very likely that he would accept this statement of his standpoint, and would justify it as the only standpoint of an artist. But it is answerable for the fact that his pages are sterile of laughter and tears, of sympathy and of pity.

In ‘A Modern Lover’ and ‘A Drama in Muslin’ we find him dealing with a life he knows. He is no longer on ground wholly foreign to him, and it is no longer necessary that he should grope from one uncertain standing place to another, verifying himself by the dark lantern of his note-book as he goes. He moves with a more natural ease, views things with a larger and more comprehensive eye, and has at least that outside sympathy with his people which comes of community of taste and knowledge, and of familiarity with a social milieu.

In ‘Esther Waters’ the earlier characteristics break out again, and break out with greater force than ever. What he calls—with one of those tumbles into foreign idiom which occasionally mark his pages—‘the fever of the gamble’ has never been truly diagnosed in English fiction, and the theme is undeniably fertile. He knows absolutely nothing about the manifestations of the disorder, to begin with; but that is of no consequence, for the world is open to observation; and the note-book, the inquiring mind, and the sleuthhound patience are all as available as ever. Then a combination occurs to him. Servantgalism awaits; its painter. The life is picturesque from a certain point of view: it impinges more or less on the lives of all of us, and nobody has hitherto thought it worth while to search into its mysteries, and to tell us what it is really like. He knows nothing at all about this either, but he will make inquiries. He does make inquiries, and they result in a picture which is, on the whole, a piece of surprising accuracy. But still all the fire is for the work. The subject is sought for, the details are gathered, the workman’s patience and labour are truly conscientious—at times they excite admiration and surprise—but the net result is lifeless. In the way of waxwork—it would be hard to find anything more effective than the people in ‘Esther Waters.’ They are clothed with an exactitude of detail which would do credit to Madame Tussaud’s exhibition in its latest development. They are carefully modelled and coloured and posed. They are capital waxwork, and if the author had only cared a little bit about them, they might have even that mystic touch of life which thrills us in the finer sorts of fiction. It is eternally true that the wounded is the wounding heart, and the mere descriptive and analytical method not only misses the natural human movement, but it is untrue in its results. Vivisection teaches something, no doubt, but it does not bring a knowledge of the natural animal. To get that knowledge you had better live with him a little, and even love him a little, and teach him to love you. All the scientific inquiry in the world is not worth—in art—one touch of affectionate understanding.

Esther Waters is to go to a lying-in hospital, and thither goes her author before her, bent on what he can picturesquely set down about her surroundings. Her husband is to go to a hospital for consumption. Thither goes the author, and sets down things seen and heard with the wooden, conscientious precision of a bailiff’s clerk. The conception of things inquired into seems never to move him to interest, though one is forced to believe that once, at least, he has narrowly escaped the contagion of a great scene. Esther’s illegitimate child is born, and the mother, who has temporarily left him for his own sake, to accept a position as wet-nurse, is inspired by a hungry maternal longing, which drags her irresistibly from warmth and comfort to a poverty whose bitterness has but a single solace—the joy of satisfied motherly love. There are writers who have not a hundredth part of Mr. Moore’s industry who would have moved the reader deeply with such a scene. But, if Mr. Moore feels at all, he is ashamed to show it. This mother-hunger is apparently just as affecting a thing to him as the position of the chest of drawers between the two windows—a fact made note of, and, therefore, to be chronicled. Either the writer is content coldly to survey this rage of passion, or he would have us believe he is so; and in either case he misses the mark of the artist, which is, after all, to show such things as he deals with as they truly are, and to seize upon their inwardness. We do not ask for a slavering flux of sentiment, or an acrobat’s display in gesticulation. But, from a gentleman whose corns when trodden on are probably as painful as his neighbours’, we are content with something less than a godlike indifference to the emotions of humanity. Let us suppose, charitably, that this is no more than a pretence, and that Mr. Moore is neither at heart so callous nor in vanity so far removed from mere emotional interests as he would seem.