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MEMOIRS OF MY DEAD LIFE

BY

GEORGE MOORE







CONTENTS


APOLOGIA PRO SCRIPTIS MEIS

I. SPRING IN LONDON

II. FLOWERING NORMANDY

III. A WAITRESS

IV. THE END OF MARIE PELLEGRIN

V. LA BUTTE

VI. SPENT LOVES

VII. NINON'S TABLE D'HOTE

VIII. THE LOVERS OF ORELAY

IX. IN THE LUXEMBOURG GARDENS

X. A REMEMBRANCE

XI. BRING IN THE LAMP

XII. SUNDAY EVENING IN LONDON

XIII. RESURGAM




APOLOGIA PRO SCRIPTIS MEIS

[_The_ APOLOGIA _which follows needs, perhaps, a word of
explanation, not to clear up Mr. Moore's text--that is as delightful,
as irrelevantly definite, as paradoxically clear as anything this
present wearer of the Ermine of English Literature has ever
written--but to explain why it was written and why it is published.
When the present publisher, who is hereinafter, in the words of
Schopenhauer, "flattened against the wall of the Wisdom of the East,"
first read and signified his pride in being able to publish these
"Memoirs," the passages now consigned to "the late Lord ----'s
library" were not in the manuscript. On the arrival of the final copy
they were discovered, and thereby hangs an amusing tale, consisting of
a series of letters which, in so far as they were written with a
certain caustic, humorous Irish pen, have taken their high place among
the "Curiosities of Literature." The upshot of the matter was that the
publisher, entangled in the "weeds" brought over by his_ Mayflower
_ancestors, found himself as against the author in the position of
Mr. Coote as against Shakespeare; that is, the matter was so
beautifully written that he had not the heart to decline it, and yet
in parts so--what shall we say?--so full of the "Wisdom of the East"
that he did not dare to publish it in the West. Whereupon he adopted
the policy of Mr. Henry Clay, which is, no doubt, always a mistake.
And the author, bearing in mind the make-up of that race of Man called
publishers, gave way on condition that this _APOLOGIA_ should
appear without change. Here it is, without so much as the alteration
of an Ibsen comma, and if the _Mayflower_ "weeds" mere instrumental
in calling it forth, then it is, after all, well that they grew_.--THE
PUBLISHER.]

Last month the post brought me two interesting letters, and the reader
will understand how interesting they were to me when I tell him that
one was from Mr. Sears, of the firm of Appleton, who not knowing me
personally had written to Messrs. Heinemann to tell them that the firm
he represented could not publish the "Memoirs" unless two stories were
omitted; "The Lovers of Orelay," and "In the Luxembourg Gardens,"--Messrs.
Heinemann had forwarded the letter to me; my interest in the
other letter was less direct, but the reader will understand that it was
not less interesting when I tell that it came from the secretary of a
certain charitable institution who had been reading the book in question,
and now wrote to consult me on many points of life and conduct. He had
been compelled to do so, for the reading of the "Memoirs" had disturbed
his mind. The reader will agree with me that disturbed is probably the
right word to use. To say that the book had undermined his convictions
or altered his outlook on life would be an exaggeration. "Outlook on life"
and "standard of conduct" are phrases from his own vocabulary, and they
depict him.

"Your outlook on life is so different from mine that I can hardly
imagine you being built of the same stuff as myself. Yet I venture to
put my difficulty before you. It is, of course, no question of mental
grasp or capacity or artistic endowment. I am, so far as these are
concerned, merely the man in the street, the averagely endowed and the
ordinarily educated. I call myself a Puritan and a Christian. I run
continually against walls of convention, of morals, of taste, which
may be all wrong, but which I should feel it wrong to climb over. You
range over fields where my make-up forbids me to wander.

"Such frankness as yours is repulsive, forbidding, demoniac! You speak
of woman as being the noblest subject of contemplation for man, but
interpreted by your book and your experiences this seems in the last
analysis to lead you right into sensuality, and what I should call
illicit connections. Look at your story of Doris! I _do_ want to
know what you feel about that story in relation to right and wrong. Do
you consider that all that Orelay adventure was put right, atoned,
explained by the fact that Doris, by her mind and body, helped you to
cultivate your artistic sense? Was Goethe right in looking upon all
women merely as subjects for experiment, as a means of training his
aesthetic sensibilities? Does it not justify the seduction of any girl
by any man? And does not that take us straight back to the dissolution
of Society? The degradation of woman (and of man) seems to be
inextricably involved. Can you regard imperturbedly a thought of your
own sister or wife passing through Doris' Orelay experience?"

       *       *       *       *       *

The address of the charitable institution and his name are printed on
the notepaper, and I experience an odd feeling of surprise whenever
this printed matter catches my eye, or when I think of it; not so much
a sense of surprise as a sense of incongruity, and while trying to
think how I might fling myself into some mental attitude which he
would understand I could not help feeling that we were very far apart,
nearly as far apart as the bird in the air and the fish in the sea.
"And he seems to feel toward me as I feel toward him, for does he not
say in his letter that it is difficult for him to imagine me built of
the same stuff as himself?" On looking into his letter again I
imagined my correspondent as a young man in doubt as to which road he
shall take, the free road of his instincts up the mountainside with
nothing but the sky line in front of him or the puddled track along
which the shepherd drives the meek sheep; and I went to my writing
table asking myself if my correspondent's spiritual welfare was my
real object, for I might be writing to him in order to exercise myself
in a private debate before committing the article to paper, or if I
was writing for his views to make use of them. One asks oneself these
questions but receives no answer. He would supply me with a point of
view opposed to my own, this would be an advantage; so feeling rather
like a spy within the enemy's lines on the eve of the battle I began
my letter. "My Dear Sir: Let me assure you that we are 'built of the
same stuff.' Were it not so you would have put my book aside. I even
suspect we are of the same kin; were it otherwise you would not have
written to me and put your difficulties so plainly before me." Laying
the pen aside I meditated quite a long while if I should tell him that
I imagined him as a young man standing at the branching of the roads,
deciding eventually that it would not be wise for me to let him see
that reading between the lines I had guessed his difficulty to be a
personal one. "We must proceed cautiously," I said, "there may be a
woman in the background.... The literary compliments he pays me and
the interest that my book has excited are accidental, circumstantial.
Life comes before literature, for certain he stands at the branching
of the roads, and the best way I can serve him is by drawing his
attention to the fallacy, which till now he has accepted as a truth,
that there is one immutable standard of conduct for all men and all
women." But the difficulty of writing a sufficient letter on a subject
so large and so intricate puzzled me and I sat smiling, for an odd
thought had dropped suddenly into my mind. My correspondent was a
Bible reader, no doubt, and it would be amusing to refer him to the
chapter in Genesis where God is angry with our first parents because
they had eaten of the tree of good and evil. "This passage" I said to
myself, "has never been properly understood. Why was God angry? For no
other reason except that they had set up a moral standard and could be
happy no longer, even in Paradise. According to this chapter the moral
standard is the origin of all our woe. God himself summoned our first
parents before him, and in what plight did they appear? We know how
ridiculous the diminutive fig leaf makes a statue seem in our museums;
think of the poor man and woman attired in fig leaves just plucked
from the trees! I experienced a thrill of satisfaction that I should
have been the first to understand a text that men have been studying
for thousands of years, turning each word over and over, worrying over
it, all in vain, yet through no fault of the scribe who certainly
underlined his intention. Could he have done it better than by
exhibiting our first parents covering themselves with fig leaves, and
telling how after getting a severe talking to from the Almighty they
escaped from Paradise pursued by an angel? The story can have no other
meaning, and that I am the first to expound it is due to no
superiority of intelligence, but because my mind is free. But I must
not appear to my correspondent as an exegetist. Turning to his letter
again I read:

"I am sorely puzzled. Is your life all of a piece? Are your 'Memoirs'
a pose? I can't think the latter, for you seem sincere and frank to
the verge of brutality (or over). But what is your standard of
conduct? Is there a right and a wrong? Is everything open to any man?
Can you refer me now to any other book of yours in which you view life
steadily and view it whole from our standpoint? Forgive my intrusion.
You see I don't set myself as a judge, but you sweep away apparently
all my standards. And you take your reader so quietly and closely into
your confidence that you tempt a response. I see your many admirable
points, but your center of living is not mine, and I do want to know
as a matter of enormous human interest what your subsumptions are. I
cannot analyze or express myself with literary point as you do, but
you may see what I aim at. It is a bigger question to me than the
value or force of your book. It goes right to the core of the big
things, and I approach you as one man of limited outlook to another of
wider range."

The reader will not suspect me of vanity for indulging in these
quotations; he will see readily that my desire is to let the young man
paint his own portrait, and I hope he will catch glimpses as I seem to
do of an earnest spirit, a sort of protestant Father Gogarty,
hesitating on the brink of his lake. "There is a lake in every man's
heart"--but I must not quote my own writings. If I misinterpret him
... the reader will be able to judge, having the letter before him.
But if my view of him is right, my task is a more subtle one than
merely to point out that he will seek in vain for a moral standard
whether he seeks it in the book of Nature or in the book of God. I
should not move him by pointing out that in the Old Testament we are
told an eye for an eye is our due, and in the New the rede is to turn
the left cheek after receiving a blow on the right. Nor would he be
moved by referring him to the history of mankind, to the Boer War, for
instance, or the massacres which occur daily in Russia; everybody
knows more or less the history of mankind, and to know it at all is to
know that every virtue has at some time or other been a vice. But man
cannot live by negation alone, and to persuade my correspondent over
to our side it might be well to tell him that if there be no moral
standard he will nevertheless find a moral idea if he looks for it in
Nature. I reflected how I would tell him that he must not be
disappointed because the idea changes and adapts itself to
circumstance, and sometimes leaves us for long intervals; if he would
make progress he must learn to understand that the moral world only
becomes beautiful when we relinquish our ridiculous standards of what
is right and wrong, just as the firmament became a thousand times more
wonderful and beautiful when Galileo discovered that the earth moved.
Had Kant lived before the astronomer he would have been a great
metaphysician, but he would not have written the celebrated passage
"Two things fill the soul with undying and ever-increasing admiration,
the night with its heaven of stars above us and in our hearts the
moral law." The only fault I find with this passage is that I read the
word "law" where I expected to read the word "idea," for the word
"law" seems to imply a Standard, and Kant knew there is none. Is the
fault with the translator or with Kant, who did not pick his words
carefully? The metaphysician spent ten years thinking out the
"Critique of Pure Reason" and only six months writing it; no doubt his
text might be emendated with advantage. If there was a moral standard
the world within us would be as insignificant as the firmament was
when the earth was the center of the universe and all the stars were
little candles and Jehovah sat above them, a God who changed his mind
and repented, a whimsical, fanciful God who ordered the waters to rise
so that his creatures might be overwhelmed in the flood, all except
one family (I need not repeat here the story of Noah's Ark and the
doctrine of the Atonement) if there was one fixed standard of right
and wrong, applicable to everybody, black, white, yellow, and red men
alike, an eternal standard that circumstance could not change. Those
who believe in spite of every proof to the contrary that there is a
moral standard cannot appreciate the beautiful analogy which Kant
drew, the moral idea within the heart and the night with its heaven of
stars above us. "It is strange," I reflected, "how men can go on
worrying themselves about Rome and Canterbury four hundred years after
the discovery that the earth moved, and involuntarily a comparison
rose up in my mind of a squabble between two departments in an office
after the firm has gone bankrupt.... But how to get all these vagrant
thoughts into a sheet of paper? St. Paul himself could not proselytize
within such limitations, and apparently what I wrote was not
sufficient to lead my correspondent out of the narrow lanes of
conventions and prejudices into the open field of inquiry. Turning to
his letter, I read it again, misjudging him, perhaps... but the
reader shall form his own estimate.

"I honestly felt and feel a big difficulty in reading and thinking
over your 'Memoirs' for you are a propagandist whether you recognize
that as a conscious mission or not. There is in your book a
challenging standard of life which will not wave placidly by the side
of the standard which is generally looked up to as his regimental
colors by the average man. One must go down. And it was because I felt
the necessity of choosing that I wrote to you.

"'Memoirs' is clearly to me a sincere book. You have built your life
on the lines there indicated. And there is a charm not merely in that
sincerity but in the freedom of the life so built. I could not, for
instance, follow my thoughts as you do. I do not call myself a coward
for these limitations. I believe it to be a bit of my build; you say
that limitation has no other sanction than convention--race
inheritance, at least so I gather. Moral is derived from mos. Be it
so. Does not that then fortify the common conviction that the moral is
the best? Men have been hunting the best all their history long by a
process of trial and error. Surely the build of things condemns the
murderer, the liar, the sensualist, and the coward! and how do you
come by 'natural goodness' if your moral is merely your customary? No,
with all respect for your immense ability and your cultured outlook, I
do not recognize the lawless variability of the right and the wrong
standard which you posit. How get you your evidence? From human
actions? But it is the most familiar of facts that men do things they
feel to be wrong. I have known a thief who stole every time in pangs
of conscience; not merely in the fear of detection. There is a higher
and a lower in morals, but the lower is recognized as a lower, and
does not appeal to a surface reading of the code of an aboriginal in
discussing morals. That, I think is only fair. Your artistic sense is
finely developed, but it is none the less firmly based, although there
are Victorian back parlors and paper roses.

"You see you are a preacher, not merely an artist. Every glimpse of
the beautiful urges the beholder to imitation and _vice versa_.
And that is why your 'Memoirs' are not merely 'an exhibition' of the
immoral; they are 'an incitement' to the immoral. Don't you think so?
And thinking so would you not honestly admit, that society (in the
wide sense, of course--civilization) would relapse, go down,
deliquesce, if all of us were George Moores as depicted in your book?"

His letter dropped from my hand, and I sat muttering, "How
superficially men think!" How little they trouble themselves to
discover the truth! While declaring that truth is all important, they
accept any prejudice and convention they happen to meet, fastening on
to it like barnacles. How disappointing is that passage about the
murderer, the sensualist, the liar, and the coward; but of what use
would it be to remind my correspondent of Judith who went into the
tent of Holofernes to lie with him, and after the love feast drove a
nail into the forehead of the sleeping man. She is in Scripture held
up to our admiration as a heroine, the saviour of our nation.
Charlotte Corday stabbed Marat in his bath, yet who regards Charlotte
Corday as anything else but a heroine? In Russia men know that the
fugitives lie hidden in the cave, yet they tell the Cossack soldiers
they have taken the path across the hill--would my correspondent
reprove them and call them liars? I am afraid he has a lot of leeway
to make up, and it is beyond my power to help him.

Picking up his letter I glanced through it for some mention of "Esther
Waters," for in answer to the question if I could recommend him to any
book of mine in which I viewed life--I cannot bring myself to
transcribe that tag from Matthew Arnold--I referred him to "Esther
Waters," saying that a critic had spoken of it as a beautiful
amplification of the beatitudes. Of the book he makes no mention in
his letter, but he writes: "There is a challenging standard of life in
your book which will not wave placidly by the side of the standard
which is generally looked up to as his regimental colors by the
average man." The idea besets him, and he refers to it again in the
last paragraph; he says: "You see, you are a preacher, not merely an
artist." And very likely he is right; there is a messianic aspect in
my writings, and I fell to thinking over "Esther Waters"; and reading
between the lines for the first time, I understood that it was that
desire to standardize morality that had caused the poor girl to be
treated so shamefully. Once Catholicism took upon itself to torture
and then to burn all those it could lay hands upon who refused to
believe with its doctrines, and now in the twentieth century
Protestantism persecutes those who act or think in opposition to its
moralities. Even the saintly Mrs. Barfield did not dare to keep
Esther; but if she sent her servant away, she spoke kindly, giving her
enough money to see her through her trouble; there are good people
among Christians. The usual Christian attitude would be to tell Esther
that she must go into a reformatory after the birth of her child, for
the idea of punishment is never long out of the Christian's thoughts.
It is not necessary to recapitulate here how Esther, escaping from the
network of snares spread for her destruction, takes refuge in a
workhouse, and lives there till her child is reared; how she works
fifteen hours a day in a lodging house, sleeping in corners of
garrets, living upon insufficient food; or how, after years of
struggle, she meets William, now separated from his wife, and consents
to live with him that her child may have a father. For this second
"transgression," so said a clergyman in a review of the book, Esther
could not be regarded as a moral woman. His moral sense, dwarfed by
doctrine, did not enable him to see that the whole evil came out of
standard morality and the whole good out of the instinct incarnate in
her; and he must have read the book without perceiving its theme, the
revelation in the life of an outcast servant girl of the instinct on
which the whole world rests.

Not until writing these lines did I ever think of "Esther Waters" as a
book of doctrine; but it is one, I see that now, and that there is a
messianic aspect in my writings. My correspondent did well to point
that out, and no blame attaches to him because he seems to fail to see
that I may be an admirable moralist while depreciating Christian
morality and advocating a return to Nature's. He belonged to the
traditions yesterday, today he is among those who are seekers, and
to-morrow I doubt not he will be among those prone to think that
perhaps Christianity is, after all, retrograde. His lips will curl
contemptuously to-morrow when he hears the cruelty of the circus
denounced by men who would, if they were allowed, relight the bon
fires of the Inquisition;... he is a Protestant, I had forgotten.
Gladiators have begun to appear to us less cruel than monks, and
everybody who can think has begun to think that some return to pagan
morality is desirable. That is so; awaking out of the great slumber of
Christianity, we are all asking if the qualities which once we deemed
our exclusive possession have not been discovered among pagans--pride,
courage, and heroism. Our contention has become that no superiority is
claimed in any respect but one; it appears that it must be admitted
that Christians are more chaste than pagans, at all events that
chastity flourishes among Christian communities as it has never
flourished among pagan. The Christian's boast is that all sexual
indulgence outside of the marriage bed is looked upon as sinful, and
he would seem to think that if he proclaims this opinion loudly, its
proclamation makes amends for many transgressions of the ethical law.
All he understands is the law; nothing of the subtler idea that the
ethical impulse is always invading the ethical law finds a way into
his mind. Women are hurried from Regent Street to Vine Street, and his
conscience is soothed by these raids; the owners of the houses in
which these women live are fined, and he congratulates himself that
vice is not licensed in England, that, in fact, its existence is
unrecognized. Prostitution thrives, nevertheless; but numbers do not
discourage the moralist, and when he reads in the newspapers of
degraded females, "unfortunates," he breathes a sigh; and if these
reports contain descriptions of miserable circumstance and human
grief, he mutters "how very sad!"

But the assurance that the women are wretched and despised soothes his
conscience, and he remembers if he has not been able to abolish
prostitution, he has at all events divested it of all "glamour." It
would appear that practical morality consists in making the meeting of
men and women as casual as that of animals. "But what do you wish--you
would not have vice respected, would you?" "What you call vice was
once respected and honored, and the world was as beautiful then as
now, and as noble men lived in it. In many ways the world was more
moral than when your ideas began to prevail." He asks me to explain,
and I tell him that with the degradation of the courtesan the moral
standard has fallen, for as we degrade her we disgrace the act of
love. We have come to speak of it as part of our lower nature,
permissible, it is true, if certain conditions are complied with, but
always looked upon askance; and continuing the same strain of
argument, I tell him that the act of love was once deemed a sacred
rite, and that I am filled with pride when I think of the noble and
exalted world that must have existed before Christian doctrine caused
men to look upon women with suspicion and bade them to think of angels
instead. Pointing to some poor drab lurking in a shadowy corner he
asks, "See! is she not a vile thing?" On this we must part; he is too
old to change, and his mind has withered in prejudice and conventions;
"a meager mind," I mutter to myself, "one incapable of the effort
necessary to understand me if I were to tell him, for instance, that
the desire of beauty is in itself a morality." It was, perhaps, the
only morality the Greeks knew, and upon the memory of Greece we have
been living ever since. In becoming _hetairae_, Aspasia, Lais,
Phryne, and Sappho became the distributors of that desire of beauty
necessary in a state which had already begun to dream the temples of
Minerva and Zeus.

The words of Blake come into my mind, "the daring of the lion or the
submission of the ox." With these words I should have headed my letter
to the secretary of the charitable institution, and I should have told
him that many books which he would regard as licentious are looked
upon by me as sacred. "Mademoiselle de Maupin," "the golden book of
spirit and sense," Swinburne has called it, I have always looked upon
as a sacred book from the very beginning of my life. It cleansed me of
the belief that man has a lower nature, and I learned from it that the
spirit and the flesh are equal, "that earth is as beautiful as heaven,
and that perfection of form is virtue." "Mademoiselle de Maupin" was a
great purifying influence, a lustral water dashed by a sacred hand,
and the words are forever ringing in my ear, "by exaltation of the
spirit and the flesh thou shalt live." This book would be regarded by
my correspondent as he regards my "Memoirs," and its publication has
been interdicted in England. How could it be permitted to circulate in
a country in which the kingdom of heaven is (in theory) regarded as
more important than the kingdom of earth? A few pages back the idea
came up under my pen that the aim of practical morality was to render
illicit love as unattractive as possible, and I suppose, though he has
never thought the matter out, the Christian moralist would regard
Gautier as the most pernicious of writers, for his theme is always
praise of the visible world, of all that we can touch and see; and in
this book art and sex are not estranged. I have often wondered if the
estrangement of the twain so noticeable in English literature is not
the origin of this strange belief that bodily love is part of our
lower nature. Our appreciation of the mauve flush dying in the west
has been indefinitely heightened by descriptions seen in pictures and
read in poems, and I cannot but think that if the lover's exaltation
before the curve of his mistress's breast had not been forbidden, the
ugly thought that the lover's ardor is inferior to the poet's would
never have obtained credence. There is but one energy, and the vital
fluid, whether expended in love or in a poem, is the same. The poet
and the lover are creators, they participate and carry on the great
work begun billions of years ago when the great Breath breathing out
of chaos summoned the stars into being. But why do I address myself
like this to the average moralist? How little will he understand me!
In the Orelay adventure which horrified him there was an appreciation
of beauty which he has, I am afraid, rendered himself incapable of.
Myself and Doris were spiritual gainers by the Orelay adventure,
Doris's rendering of "The Moonlight Sonata," till she went to Orelay,
was merely brilliant and effective; and have not all the critics in
England agreed that the story in which I relate her contains some of
the best pages of prose I have written? But why talk of myself when
there is Wagner's experience to speak about? Did he not write to
Madame Wasendonck, "I owe you Tristan for all eternity"? She has not
left any written record of her debt to Wagner, perhaps because she
could not find words to give the reader any idea how great it was.

Histories of human civilization there are in abundance, but I do not
know of any history of the human intelligence. But when this comes to
be written--if it ever should come to be written--the writer will
hesitate, at least I can imagine him hesitating, how much of the
genius of artists he would be justified in tracing back to sexual
impulses. Goethe, as my correspondent informs me, looked upon love of
woman as a means of increasing his aesthetic sensibilities, and my
correspondent seems to think that he did them wrong thereby, whereas I
think he honored them exceedingly. Balzac held the contrary belief, so
Gautier tells us, maintaining that great spiritual elation could be
gained by restraint, and when inquiry was made into his precise
beliefs on this point he confessed that he could not allow an author
more than half an hour once a year with his beloved; he placed no
restriction, however, on correspondence, "for that helped to form a
style." When Gautier mentioned the names of certain great men whose
lives offered a striking refutation of this theory, Balzac answered
they would have written better if they had lived chastely. Gautier
seems to have left the question there, and so will we, remarking only
that Balzac was prone to formulating laws out of his single
experience. I remember having written, or having heard somebody say,
"in other writers we discover this or that thing, but everything
exists in Balzac." And in his conversation with Gautier we do not find
him praising chastity as a virtue, but extolling the results that may
be gotten from chastity as a Yogi might. It is said that English
missionaries in India sometimes drive out in their pony chaises to
visit a holy man who has left his womenfolk, plentiful food, and a
luxurious dwelling for a cave in some lonely ravine. The pony chaise
only takes the parson to the mouth of the ravine, and leaving his wife
and children in charge of his servant, the parson ascends the rocky
way on foot, meeting, perchance, a fat peasant priest from Maynooth
bent on the same mission as himself--the conversion of the Yogi. It is
amusing for a moment to imagine these two Western barbarians sitting
with the emaciated saint on the ledge in front of the cave. Thinking
to win his sympathy, they tell him that on one point they are all
agreed. The Brahman's eyes would dilate; how can this thing be? his
eyes would seem to ask, and it is easy to imagine how contemptuously
he would raise his