9. The Moods of Mr. George Moore
Mr. George Moore began his literary career by writing his
personal confessions; nor is there any harm in this if he had
not continued them for the remainder of his life. He is a man
of genuinely forcible mind and of great command over a kind
of rhetorical and fugitive conviction which excites and pleases.
He is in a perpetual state of temporary honesty. He has admired
all the most admirable modern eccentrics until they could stand
it no longer. Everything he writes, it is to be fully admitted,
has a genuine mental power. His account of his reason for
leaving the Roman Catholic Church is possibly the most admirable
tribute to that communion which has been written of late years.
For the fact of the matter is, that the weakness which has rendered
barren the many brilliancies of Mr. Moore is actually that weakness
which the Roman Catholic Church is at its best in combating.
Mr. Moore hates Catholicism because it breaks up the house
of looking-glasses in which he lives. Mr. Moore does not dislike
so much being asked to believe in the spiritual existence
of miracles or sacraments, but he does fundamentally dislike
being asked to believe in the actual existence of other people.
Like his master Pater and all the aesthetes, his real quarrel with
life is that it is not a dream that can be moulded by the dreamer.
It is not the dogma of the reality of the other world that troubles him,
but the dogma of the reality of this world.
The truth is that the tradition of Christianity (which is still the only
coherent ethic of Europe) rests on two or three paradoxes or mysteries
which can easily be impugned in argument and as easily justified in life.
One of them, for instance, is the paradox of hope or faith--
that the more hopeless is the situation the more hopeful must be the man.
Stevenson understood this, and consequently Mr. Moore cannot
understand Stevenson. Another is the paradox of charity or chivalry
that the weaker a thing is the more it should be respected,
that the more indefensible a thing is the more it should appeal
to us for a certain kind of defence. Thackeray understood this,
and therefore Mr. Moore does not understand Thackeray. Now, one of
these very practical and working mysteries in the Christian tradition,
and one which the Roman Catholic Church, as I say, has done her best
work in singling out, is the conception of the sinfulness of pride.
Pride is a weakness in the character; it dries up laughter,
it dries up wonder, it dries up chivalry and energy.
The Christian tradition understands this; therefore Mr. Moore does
not understand the Christian tradition.
For the truth is much stranger even than it appears in the formal
doctrine of the sin of pride. It is not only true that
humility is a much wiser and more vigorous thing than pride.
It is also true that vanity is a much wiser and more vigorous thing
than pride. Vanity is social--it is almost a kind of comradeship;
pride is solitary and uncivilized. Vanity is active;
it desires the applause of infinite multitudes; pride is passive,
desiring only the applause of one person, which it already has.
Vanity is humorous, and can enjoy the joke even of itself;
pride is dull, and cannot even smile. And the whole of this
difference is the difference between Stevenson and Mr. George Moore,
who, as he informs us, has "brushed Stevenson aside." I do not know
where he has been brushed to, but wherever it is I fancy he is having
a good time, because he had the wisdom to be vain, and not proud.
Stevenson had a windy vanity; Mr. Moore has a dusty egoism.
Hence Stevenson could amuse himself as well as us with his vanity;
while the richest effects of Mr. Moore's absurdity are hidden
from his eyes.
If we compare this solemn folly with the happy folly with which
Stevenson belauds his own books and berates his own critics,
we shall not find it difficult to guess why it is that Stevenson
at least found a final philosophy of some sort to live by,
while Mr. Moore is always walking the world looking for a new one.
Stevenson had found that the secret of life lies in laughter and humility.
Self is the gorgon. Vanity sees it in the mirror of other men and lives.
Pride studies it for itself and is turned to stone.
It is necessary to dwell on this defect in Mr. Moore, because it
is really the weakness of work which is not without its strength.
Mr. Moore's egoism is not merely a moral weakness, it is
a very constant and influential aesthetic weakness as well.
We should really be much more interested in Mr. Moore if he were
not quite so interested in himself. We feel as if we were being
shown through a gallery of really fine pictures, into each of which,
by some useless and discordant convention, the artist had represented
the same figure in the same attitude. "The Grand Canal with a distant
view of Mr. Moore," "Effect of Mr. Moore through a Scotch Mist,"
"Mr. Moore by Firelight," "Ruins of Mr. Moore by Moonlight,"
and so on, seems to be the endless series. He would no doubt
reply that in such a book as this he intended to reveal himself.
But the answer is that in such a book as this he does not succeed.
One of the thousand objections to the sin of pride lies
precisely in this, that self-consciousness of necessity destroys
self-revelation. A man who thinks a great deal about himself
will try to be many-sided, attempt a theatrical excellence at
all points, will try to be an encyclopaedia of culture, and his
own real personality will be lost in that false universalism.
Thinking about himself will lead to trying to be the universe;
trying to be the universe will lead to ceasing to be anything.
If, on the other hand, a man is sensible enough to think only about
the universe; he will think about it in his own individual way.
He will keep virgin the secret of God; he will see the grass as no
other man can see it, and look at a sun that no man has ever known.
This fact is very practically brought out in Mr. Moore's "Confessions."
In reading them we do not feel the presence of a clean-cut
personality like that of Thackeray and Matthew Arnold.
We only read a number of quite clever and largely conflicting opinions
which might be uttered by any clever person, but which we are called
upon to admire specifically, because they are uttered by Mr. Moore.
He is the only thread that connects Catholicism and Protestantism,
realism and mysticism--he or rather his name. He is profoundly
absorbed even in views he no longer holds, and he expects us to be.
And he intrudes the capital "I" even where it need not be intruded--
even where it weakens the force of a plain statement.
Where another man would say, "It is a fine day," Mr. Moore says,
"Seen through my temperament, the day appeared fine."
Where another man would say "Milton has obviously a fine style,"
Mr. Moore would say, "As a stylist Milton had always impressed me."
The Nemesis of this self-centred spirit is that of being
totally ineffectual. Mr. Moore has started many interesting crusades,
but he has abandoned them before his disciples could begin.
Even when he is on the side of the truth he is as fickle as the children
of falsehood. Even when he has found reality he cannot find rest.
One Irish quality he has which no Irishman was ever without--pugnacity;
and that is certainly a great virtue, especially in the present age.
But he has not the tenacity of conviction which goes with the fighting
spirit in a man like Bernard Shaw. His weakness of introspection
and selfishness in all their glory cannot prevent him fighting;
but they will always prevent him winning.
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