Joseph S. O'Leary homepage

Sex and Gender in "Albert Nobbs"

Gender roles are ‘almost wholly learned’ as Alex Comfort recognized in 1963 (Glover and Kaplan, xx) and as is now widely understood. Judith Butler refines on this, seeing ‘gender as a kind of performance that is performative’ (in J. L. Austin’s sense, in which words and gestures bring about what they signify). She critiques ‘identity categories as a matter of social and political construction, rather than the expression of some kind of essential nature’ (Jagger, 17). Not only is there no true gender underlying the performance, but even the idea of one’s true sex is a cultural product:　‘There is nothing given about gender nor is there any pre-cultural or pre-discursive sex that provides the basis for its cultural construction. Identity is rather an effect of signifying practices rooted in regimes of power/knowledge characterized as compulsory heterosexuality and phallogocentrism’ (20). Cross-dressing can subvert these regimes: ‘When we appropriate the signals and paraphernalia of masculinity and femininity and assign them to the wrong body, we reveal the artificial and arbitrary nature of gender itself’ (Thurer, 146).

But the tide is turning against this radical constructionism. To accept the variety of gender identities and sexual orientations, no longer pathologizing them, and to recognize that people have the right to identify and express themselves as they see fit, does not entail denying that certain basics of sexual identity and sexual orientation are unchangeable, whether because they are of genetic origin or because they lie at the deepest level of the unconscious. The attempt to change such basic identities can be damaging, as in the case of the hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin, reassigned to the male gender in 1860, who committed suicide in 1868, and in her memoirs described herself as ‘a sad disinherited creature’ (Glover and Kaplan, xiv). Writing as a therapist, Shari L. Thurer has produced a judicious survey of the variety of positions, which in some way serves as a reality check for extreme ideologies. ‘Missing in Butler’s theory, despite her many disclaimers, is a palpable person… Isn’t Butler’s system just a new form of behaviorism, where there is no being, only a doing?’ (Thurer, 147). ‘In her zeal to deconstruct rigid sex/gender pigeonholing, she bypasses the suffering individual. She puts too much stock in incoherence. She fetishizes fluidity’ (150).

George Moore’s story of cross-dressing and sexual confusion, ‘Albert Nobbs,’ approaches these topics not via ideology or psychotherapy but with a sophisticated empathy learnt from literary tradition. It focuses precisely on the ‘palpable person,’ the ‘suffering individual’ that Butler is accused of bypassing, though it also contains behaviorist insights into ‘the artificial and arbitrary nature of gender itself,’ and its protagonist exhibits plenty of ‘incoherence’ and ‘fluidity.’ When he was twenty-one years old, George Moore was the jealous observer of the affair between Lewis Weldon Hawkins and ‘Alice Howard’: ‘The gender-bending, transsexualising situation is like that of one of Moore’s sacred books from his French years, Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin’ (Frazier, 33-2). In that novel of 1835, d’Albert (Gautier also used the name ‘Albertus’ for another alter ego) does not feel he really loves his mistress Rosette, and is troubled by the attraction of his supposedly male friend Théodore. When Théodore appears as Rosalinde in a performance of As You Like It d’Albert is smitten (Gautier, 255). In gender-bending style, he and Rosette vie for Théodore’s love. Théodore/Madeleine is based on the cross-dressing and bisexual opera singer Madeleine de Maupin, née Julie d’Aubigny (1670-1707), whose lovers included Albert de Luynes and Count Albert of Bavaria (Gautier, xiii). The name ‘Albert Nobbs’ echoes these various Alberts along with ‘knobs,’ slang for the breast.

Moore, always startlingly honest, confessed his own gender confusion (or rather indetermination) in the 1889 French edition of Confessions of a Young Man: ‘Never previously had the soul of a man been so intermingled with that of woman; and to explain the abnormality of this sexual sympathy, I can only imagine that before my birth there had been some hesitation as to my sex. Nevertheless, I was a joyful boy, enamored with adventure and an excellent sportsman; once I had a horse between my legs or a gun in my hands, I gave up all such morbid fantasies, all strange desires to dress up like women, to wear their little boots and dressing gowns’ (quoted, Grubgeld, 87-8). Such psychological unease with one’s assigned or biological gender identity is commonly treated as a pathology, Gender Identification Disorder, but recently we find internet communities claiming sexual identities that have broken away from the straightforward binary of male and female. Young Japanese choose the tags of chūsei, ryōsei or musei (middle sex, both sexes, no sex). Transsexual identities – MtF and FtM – are now supplemented by the ‘X-gender’ these categories point to, and people label themselves MtX and FtX (see Dale). Such self-identifications are more a recognition of one’s essential temperament, it seems to me, than the arbitrary construction of a new identity.

In the essentialist vs. constructionist (nature vs. nurture) controversy about sexual orientation and gender identification, Moore is usually on the essentialist side. His Hugh Monfert, for example, sees his homosexuality as ‘an old original instinct.’ Elizabeth Grubgeld accuses Moore of ‘sexual essentialism’ that suppresses deep analysis of the origins of his characters’ sexuality: ‘Although Moore briefly suggests that Mildred is the product of her repressive education and Momfret (sic) the product of excessive exposure to Greek statuary and Marius the Epicurean, he resorts to a simplistic declaration of “instinct” as the final explanation’ (92). In fact Moore’s phenomenology is quite sound: he differentiates between the primitive datum of sexual orientation and the cultural expressions of it; it is the latter that are influenced by Greek statuary and Pater. Grubgeld is surely not maintaining that a homosexual orientation could be the ‘product’ of such influences? The references to Pater in the story (CSS 5.69) present Pater as a catalyst enabling Monfert to embrace his sexual nature honestly. When Moore laments ‘interpretive codes: glosses learnt by heart before any attempt is made to read the text’ (quoted, Grubgeld, 92-3), he is not espousing constructivism but aiming to retrieve the original natural text of human sexuality. If he ‘proposes that gender roles are the product of culture and without absolute origin in the biological factor of sexuality’ (91), that is again a matter of the imposed interpretive codes rather than the sexual text, which cannot be seen as a cultural product. ‘Several of his characters attempt to form gender identities that combine features of male and female, but repeatedly they find their language incapable of providing a self-description intelligible to themselves and others’ (Grubgeld, 91). Moore would probably say that the fault is in the codes they are forced to live by, which impede realization and expression of their nature..

However, among Moore’s tales of celibates, ‘Albert Nobbs’ stands out as apparently espousing a radically constructionist view of gender and sexual orientation. The tale first appeared in A Story-Teller’s Holiday (1918) – a comic and carnivalesque setting, in which it figures as a story-telling performance by Moore in rivalry with his seanachie companion Alec Trusselby. It is reprinted unchanged in Celibate Lives (1927), the successor to Celibates (1895) and In Single Strictness (1922), replacing ‘Hugh Monfert’ (the new version of the 1895 ‘John Norton’). It is the clou of the collection, Moore’s inspired last word on the topic of ‘celibacy’ that haunts his work. Transferred to the chill, melancholic environment of the ‘Celibates’ series, the story loses some of its comic brio, and its deep mood of irremediable loneliness comes to the fore.

Albert’s gender identity seems the product of his/her clothes and behavior. She performs a masculine role and performatively creates a masculine identity for herself. However, the woman in her is her core reality, and even as she acts the male wooer to Helen her performance is undercut by its feminine motivation; the new sense of life she experiences is a rebirth of her buried femininity, which she had forgotten as Gautier’s heroine does: ‘Through hearing everyone call me “Sir” and seeing myself treated as if I were a man, I gradually forgot that I was a woman’ (Gautier, 287). With every motivation to act masculine, and with every social expectation in its favor, and with a record of success in a male profession, Albert nonetheless cannot perform as a sexual male; bedrock nature overflows performative superstructure. Thurer confronts Butler with ‘the obvious fact that some people with unstable identities are troubled souls’ (Thurer, 150). Albert is certainly such a troubled soul, and it is not mere miserabilism that prompts her to dwell on her trouble. Unlike stories of self-hating homosexuals, this story does not prompt the reader to cry out, ‘Albert, why not affirm your gender versatility proudly!’

‘About one third of male-to-female transgenders, including post-operative transsexuals, go on loving women… These particular transgenders’ wish was not to be conventional women, but to be lesbians. Their basic identity is female and gay, not male and heterosexual’ (Thurer, 4). Do Albert and Hubert have such a basic identity? The sex of their partners seems of little account to them and they are taken in by their own male disguise to a remarkable extent. The merry Hubert plays the male role more dashingly than the melancholic Albert, and had we more access to her psychology might be contrasted with Albert as a model of constructionist versatility.

In the final version of the story the comic dance of embarrassed pronouns begins immediately after Hubert’s recognition, ‘Why, you’re a woman!’ (192). ‘If Albert had had the presence of mind to drop her shirt over her shoulders…’ (193), whereas the 1918 text had ‘his’ here, introducing ‘her’ only three lines later. She begs Hubert not to ‘ruin a poor man,’ and is startled when he calls her ‘my good woman,’ ‘for she had been about so long as a man that she only remembered occasionally that she was a woman, (193). Loss of identity, becoming fused with the mask one dons, can reach down to affect one’s consciousness of one’s gender or sexual orientation; but that does not mean that the original gender and orientation are themselves products of such conditioning. Hubert asks ‘how long ago it was that you became a man’ (193), a locution that takes the pretence for the reality.

Albert suffers a loss of identity that precedes her cross-dressing; she was never told who her parents were. Her attitude to men is noted: ‘I was different then from what I am now, and might have been tempted if one of them had been less rough than the rest’ (194). What most holds her back is the dread of bringing another bastard into the world. ‘I was different then’ suggests that Albert has become asexual, losing all interest in men. She relates that she fell in love with one of her employers, Mr. Congreve: ‘I used to know all his suits, as well I might, for it was my job to look after them, to brush them; and I used to spend a great deal more time than was needed taking out spots with benzine’ (195). Realizing he loves another woman, ‘a sudden faintness’ comes over her, and ‘a feeling that so far as I was concerned all was over.’ Congreve announces the woman’s arrival: ‘I remember the piercing that the words caused me; I can feel them here still; and Albert put her hand to her heart’ (195). Her identity is firmly enough established as a heterosexual woman, not only in the past but in the present. Her convent puritanism may have given her a phobia toward physical sex: ‘It’s disgraceful, it’s wicked, to lead a man into sin’ (195). But this is a mask for acute sexual jealousy: ‘If only he’d spared me his kind words…, I shouldn’t have felt so much that they had lain side by side in the bed that I was making’ (196). Her loneliness, closely associated with her orphaned state, has begun already: ‘It was the hopelessness of it that set the tears streaming down my cheeks over my pillow, and I used to stuff the sheet into my mouth to keep back the sobs lest my old nurse should hear me’ (196). She considers jumping in the Thames, but then boldly invents for herself a new life, a new identity as a male waiter, in several English cities and for the last seven years in Dublin.

‘Seven years, Hubert repeated, neither man nor woman, just a perhapser’ (in all it is twenty-five years, as we learn later, p. 201); he reads on Albert’s face ‘that the words had gone home, and that this outcast from both sexes felt her loneliness perhaps more keenly than before’ (198). Overwhelmed with the sadness of her existence, Albert cannot help feeling that ‘all our trouble is for nothing and can end in nothing. It might have been better if I had taken the plunge’ (198). The word ‘nothing’ is a leitmotif recurring at every level of her story: the nothingness of her origins, of her pretended masculinity, of her thwarted plans, of her identity. Hubert shows insight into a life ‘without man or without woman, thinking like a man and feeling like a woman’ (198) and suggests, ‘you might marry a girl’ (199), revealing that he himself has done so, though he too is a woman: ‘Put your hand under my shirt; you’ll find nothing there’ (199). Of the companionate, but apparently sexless, marriage with the girl he says: ‘We haven’t known an unhappy hour since we married’ (199). Albert supposes that Hubert’s wife is ‘one of them like myself that isn’t always hankering after a man’ (200), but Hubert’s absence leaves her without further explanation.

‘What was she? Nothing, neither man nor woman, so small wonder she was lonely’ (201). Dreaming of marriage, she thinks: ‘though she would continue to be a man to the world, she would be a woman to the dear one at home’ (202). Love and companionship, a home and an identity, is what she thirsts for; she is indifferent to the sex of ‘the dear one.’ Her habit of saving now takes on a warmer significance; ‘a new life was springing up – a life strangely personal and associated with the life without only in this much, that the life without was now a vassal state paying tribute to the life within’ (202). In her fantasies of marriage she plays the man’s role. She dreams in particular of marrying ‘a woman who had transgressed the moral code and been deserted before the birth of her child. In this case it would be supposed that Albert had done the right thing, for after leading the girl astray he had made an honest woman of her’ (203). The attraction of this lies in the outlet for maternal feeling: ‘What matter whether she calls me father or mother? They are but mere words that the lips speak, but love is in the heart and only love matters’ (203).

But she sets herself up for crushing disillusionment as she courts the greedy Helen, in scenes that are both excruciatingly funny and excruciatingly painful. Helen’s real boyfriend Joe suggests: ‘Next time you go out with him work him up a bit and see what he is made of; just see if there’s a sting in him or if he is no better than a capon’ (207). Helen feels the oddness of Albert’s unwillingness to kiss: ‘I might as well go out with my mother’ (207). The farcical climax in which Albert declares his love for Helen: ‘I loved my old nurse very much but I never wished to kiss her like that’ (210) is laced with pathos, for Albert has pinned her heart’s affections on Helen, albeit in a sexless way. Grubgeld says that ‘she begins to feel attraction’ (100), but there is no indication of specifically sexual attraction. ‘Albert continued to plead all the way down Dawson Street, and when they were within twenty yards of the hotel, and she saw Helen passing away into the arms of Joe Mackins, she begged Helen not to leave her’ (211-12). She envies two streetwalkers: ‘For they at least are women, whereas I am but a perhapser’ (212). When she asks one of them if it is true what the other said, that she is better than a love dream, ‘Kitty answered him A shade. Only a shade, Albert returned’ (212). Kitty thinks: ‘If I can get him to come home with me I’ll help him out of his sorrow, if only for a little while’ (213), but even this shade of consolation is not to be. While Albert worries that ‘if they were to go home together her sex would be discovered,’ Kitty is whisked away by a man friend (213). ‘The street-walkers have friends, and when they meet them their troubles are over for the night, but my chances have gone by me’ (213). Mocked by Joe for his ‘old nurse’ remark, Albert is pitied by the maids for her ‘lovelorn’ state (214), and enjoys this wave of sympathy: ‘She was no longer friendless; almost any one of the women in the hotel would have married Albert out of pity for her’ (215). But nothing will come of this either: ‘There had never been anything in her life but a few dreams, and henceforth there would be not even dreams’ (215).

But there is one more cycle of dreaming: ‘from the moment that she saw herself as Hubert’s future wife her life began to expand itself more eagerly than ever in watching for tips’ (216). Hubert’s continuing absence changes her feeling; she fears that if Hubert does return it will be to squander her hard-saved money on his wife, perhaps even using her secret to blackmail her. The story is sandwiched between two references to Albert picking up and kissing the child George Moore, the second occurring here: ‘The little red-headed boy on the second floor told me, Mrs. Baker said..., that he was afraid of Albert, and he confided to me that Albert had tried to pick him up and kiss him. Why can’t he leave the child alone? Can’t he see that the child doesn’t like him?’ (217). Now we understand this molesting behaviour from within, as a reflection of Albert’s thwarted maternal longings.

After Albert’s death, the hotel staff wonder ‘what would have happened on the wedding night? Nothing, of course’ (217). Sadly, Hubert, now widowed, would have gone into partnership with Albert. Now she asks herself: ‘I wonder what is going to be the end of my life. What new chance do the years hold for me?’ (219). This leads her back to her husband, ‘who might now be a different man from the one she left behind’ (219). It is really the ‘piercing thought’ of her two daughters that draws her back. Alec suggests she could tell her husband that ‘she was taken away by the fairies whilst wandering in a wood… A woman that marries another woman, and lives happily with her, isn’t a natural woman; there must be something of the fairy in her’ (220). Simone Benmussa uses this as the closing line of her adaptation of the story, and does not have Hubert return to her husband at all. She may tilt the story in the direction of a plaidoyer for lesbian marriage, using Moore’s line: ‘It would seem that this marriage was as successful as any and a great deal more than most’ (CSS 5.201). Indeed, a lesbian strand in Hubert’s nature might be what Albert lacks; or perhaps Hubert is simply free of Albert’s constricting modesty. According to Elin Diamond, ‘the play’s utilization of Moore’s narrative frame presents Albert as a set of various signifiers, a person whose body, dress, name, and thoughts are “dispersed over a textual field; Nobbs is not singular at all but plural, a gesture, a line of description, with no wholeness of identity to structure the field”’ (Grubgeld, 96). ‘It is Moore himself who foregrounds the problem of Albert’s life as a story constructed, narrated, and heard by men’ (Grubgeld, 97), saluted by Alec as ‘the finest [story] that ever came out of Ballinrobe’ (CSS 5.220).

Gilbert and Gubar see Dublin as ‘cleansed of the queerness this woman represents’ (337), noting the Hubert goes back to being a normal wife and mother. They claim that Bernassa ‘revises Moore’s tale to expose “the genesis of the story” as a historical reality’ (33). Albert is forced to ‘confront the lack that Moore identifies with her femininity.’ But in reality Moore is lodging a quiet protest against the exorcizing of queerness in the hotel staff’s reactions and in Hubert’s return to orthodox gender identity. The story upholds the dignity of what society regards as a farcical anomaly. If its protagonists see themselves as ‘castrated men,’ this is not Moore’s view, as he highlights ‘the linguistic nature of gender identity by dispersing the narrative through the frame tale, dialogue, interior monologue, and indirect discourse’ (Grubgeld, 99). The blunt heterosexual narrative subscribed to by Joe Mackins and the hotel staff is exposed in its oppressive crassness by the subtlety of the multi-layered tale.

Moore’s deep soundings of loneliness in a repressive, sex-hating society are the best known part of his liberationist effort. Moore ‘describes, with wonderfully compassionate insight, Albert Nobbs’s daily indignities, the small revolting brutalities of an insensitive world, and above all, the constant loneliness of the “perhapser,”’ (Kennelly, 148), with ‘precisely the right kind of intense understatement’ (149). He rebels against ‘the atmosphere of unrelieved poverty and squalor; the frustration of all ideals; the suppression of individual thinking; the hysterical fear of sex as the supreme evil of which man is capable; the confusion of servility with obedience, furtive inhibition with virtuous self-denial, caution with wisdom; the fear of full expression and hence the distrust of the artist’ (153-4). But the moralistic fear of sex is not a theme of this story; the Church and other moral agencies are absent. Rather it reveals a deeper, hidden strain in Moore’s revolt, as it tackles rigid sexual and gender expectations in a way that could be fully accepted only in our time, and that generated much queasy distaste in his own.

Moore was popular as a ‘decadent’ writer in China and Japan, where his play with gender may have been more readily understood. Junichiro Tanizaki loved Moore’s autobiographies and found in his historical novels such as Heloise and Abelard a narrative style reminiscent of Chinese and Japanese monogatari (Suzuki, 153). Wim Lunsing’s ground-breaking research on ‘people who fail to fit Japanese common-sense constructions of either female or male gender’ (13) might show points of intersection between Moore’s struggle and that of such people in Japan today. The following anecdote, for example, resonates obliquely with the fates of Moore’s celibates. A man aged sixty had ‘spent his life changing from one job to another and knew very well that the fact that he was not married increasingly restricted his job opportunities. Nevertheless he always thought that it was wrong for a gay man to marry and persisted in his principles. He never had a lover because he would not start an affair with someone who wanted him if he did not love them, and, similarly, the men he fell in love with rejected his advances. Hase san spent many years of his life working as an office cleaner, which was one of the few jobs he could obtain once he was 40 years old and was made redundant at the publishing company where he worked until then’ (Lunsing, 112). The atmosphere of ‘nothing’ here has the same poignancy as in Moore. Hubert’s arrangement resembles a Japanese ‘friendship marriage’: ‘Many homosexual men see this as an ideal arrangement and also some women choose to marry a homosexual man on these terms because it gives them the status of a married woman without much of the burden, such as demands by the husband to have sex’ (125).

In China, Moore could be read without the screen of Victorian prudery and obscurantism that dominated the English critical reception and without the disapproval that his Irish compatriots felt. Shao Xunmei, who translated Memoirs of my Dead Life in 1929, gave a ‘most empathetic’ account of Moore’s ‘intellectual peregrinations,’ almost as if he were writing his own memoirs’ (Lee, 246). He saw Moore as a ‘bohemian aesthete’ (247) and a ‘hedonist,’ as opposed to the ‘decadent’ Wilde, and he ‘read Verlaine in the hedonistic light of Moore’ (249). ‘His particular fixation on George Moore’s memoirs led him to adopt what Richard Gilman has called a “romantic, even apocalyptic” view and a “ludicrous and even excessive” misreading of Baudelaire and decadence’ (248). We might probe more deeply into the sex and gender aspects of this reception of Moore as a liberator.

Almost a century old, ‘Albert Nobbs’ survives sturdily, putting in question by its psychological truth and literary density not only the conservative ideologies then dominant but also some ambitious modern theories that are insufficiently tried and tempered by reference to real experience. Setting this Dublin story alongside those of Joyce, one sees how essential is Moore’s place among the psychological masters of Modernism. Meanwhile we can look forward to seeing the film adaptation, starring Glenn Close as Albert, which should thrust Moore’s questions to the forefront of awareness again.

 

 

REFERENCES

Simone Benmussa La vie singulière d'Albert Nobbs (Paris: Éditions des femmes, 1977).

Simone Benmussa with Allan McClelland The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, 1978.

Sonya P. F. Dale, ‘X-Gender: “Gender Ambiguity” in Contemporary Japan,’ paper read at a workshop on ‘Sexual boundary crossings and sexual contact zones in East Asia,’ Sophia University Institute of Comparative Culture, Oct. 2, 2010.

Adrian Frazier, George Moore, 1852-1933 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, ed. Adolphe Boschot (Paris: Garnier, 1966).

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Vol. 2: Sexchanges (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

David Glover and Cora Kaplan, Genders (London: Routledge, 2000).

Elizabeth Grubgeld, George Moore and the Autogenous Self: The Autobiography and Fiction (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994).

Gill Jagger, Judith Butler: Sexual politics, social change and the power of the performative (London: Routledge, 2008).

Brendan Kennelly, ‘George Moore’s Lonely Voices: A Study of his Short Stories,’ in Graham Owens, ed., George Moore's Mind and Art (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1968), 144-65.

Leo Ou-Fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China 1930-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

Wim Lunsing, Beyond Common Sense: Sexuality and Gender in Contemporary Japan (London: Kegan Paul, 2001).

Elizabeth McConnell, ‘Give me a passion for God or man...’: A Study of George Moore's Celibates Series, 1895-1927 (MA thesis, University College Galway, 1992). ‘

George Moore, Albert Nobbs et autres vies sans hymen, intr. Pierre Leyris (Paris: Mercure de France 1977).

----- The Collected Short Stories of George Moore: Gender and Genre, ed. Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005) = CSS.

Joseph S. O’Leary, ‘Father Bovary,’ in Robert Welch, ed., The Way Back: George Moore's The Untilled Field and The Lake (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1982), 105-18.

----- ‘George Moore between Zola and Gide: The Case of “John Norton”’, The Harp 12 (1997):90-102.

----- ‘Introduction to George Moore (1852-1933)’. English Literature and Language 40 (2003) 33-43.

----- Review of George Moore, Parnell and His Island, Journal of Irish Studies 20 (2005):103-5.

Tomi Suzuki, Narrating the self: fictions of Japanese modernity (Stanford Univerity Press, 1996).

Shari L. Thurer, The End of Gender: A Psychological Autopsy (London: Routledge, 2005).

PUBLISHED IN Journal of Irish Studies 26 (2011)

 

 

 

Father Bovary

"THE LAKE" AND THE TRADITION OF THE NOVEL

Let Fielding, Goethe, Stendhal stand for the period in which the novel thrived on the interplay of two interests: the education or quest of the individual protagonist and the exploration and criticism of society. In a novel of this period faith in the individual and faith in society are still intact, despite the tensions between them, and this faith gives the novel the status of a wise and authoritative guide to worldly reality. In the great post-Romantic novels of disillusion, however ("Illusions perdues," "Middlemarch," "L'Education sentimentale," "Great Expectations"), the self and the world no longer seem so well-matched. The world is a cruel machine crushing the aspirations of the self and the novelist is the one who unveils the horrific laws of the mechanism. Thus Balzac relentlessly analyses the "capitalization of the spirit" [See G. Lukacs, "Studies in European Realism", London, 1950]; Flaubert convinces us that the social life of Paris and the provinces is a mediocre void; the Dickensian phantasmagoria testifies to a similar emptiness; Zola finally attempts to reduce the workings of society to a positivist formula leaving only illusory spaces for the spirit to breathe. Hillis Miller's account of the nineteenth century "doubt of the possibility of ever finding the proper form of life" ["The Disappearance of God," Harvard UP, 1963, p. 11] is confirmed by this reduction of social reality to the status of a hostile machine.

The protagonist of these novels is typically Romantic and his or her Romanticism is typically impotent, resigned or self-destructive. But at a certain point a reversal comes to pass in the fortunes of the Romantic subject, a reversal which may be loosely associated with the immense impact of Wagner and Nietzsche on the whole of literary Europe. Already in Flaubert and Zola the void in society is compensated for by an intense investment in subjective impression and sensation. The novelist ceases for the first time to be primarily a story-teller and sees himself as a stylist, a painter, a musician. Zola paints with relish the succulent meatstuffs in "Le Ventre de Paris," and George Moore too, in his early Zolaesque period, is more a painter of society than its narrational explorer (since faith that there was anything to explore had declined). Esther Waters triumphs over the monotonous oppressions of society by producing a baby, who appears on the last page as a splendid young man, and this can be read as a Romantic and subjective triumph over the world at large, albeit in the refreshingly wholesome guise of motherly love. The fatal machine grinds on, but life wells up despite it, beyond it. James and Proust maintain a passionate interest in the workings of society, but only as they nourish the development of a refined aesthetic consciousness – society exists to be consumed in consciousness, consciousness to be transformed into style, style to cement the edifice of an imaginary universe, "tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre" (Mallarmé).

"The Lake" (Gerrards Cross, 1980) celebrates the triumph of the subject in a manner not as cerebral and aesthetic as that of the writers just mentioned. It belongs to a line of novels in which interest in the workings of society is almost eclipsed by the concern to communicate in all its primitive vigour a message of self-realisation, a gospel of Life. Gospels rather than novels are the typical produce of this generation, steeped in Nietzsche's "Zarathustra," the daunting model of the genre. Whatever ironic distance the evangelist maintains towards his Christ-figure, the novels of Gide, Forster, Lawrence and Joyce's "Portrait" remain stirring affirmations of the self and of life which wrench the novel form away from its traditional social bearings. (Others will explore the existential alienation and the fragmentation of identity implicit in this proud isolation of self. In the springtime of their optimism these evangelists show little consciousness of it.) The choices of Moore's priest, Gide's immoralist, Joyce's artist, Lawrence's lovers bear a purely negative, anarchic, relation to a social context, despite dreams of social regeneration. The novel is no longer a "vade mecum" of social wisdom, but a vehicle of utopian unrest, preaching a fulfilment society has failed to provide. Madame Bovary is no longer crushed by the world. Her reinforced rebellious subjectivity, now backed by the collusion of the artist, subverts the established order.

Moore is more Wagnerian than Nietzchean, in that his conception of Life consists more in an opening up to Nature and Love than in the Promethean assumption of one's own destiny as something original, unique and self-created. Moore's priest is portrayed as journeying back to normality where Joyce's Dedalus aspires to a creative abnormality; Father Gogarty defrocks himself in the end, whereas Stephen robes himself as a priest of art. Moore's quest is for the native harmonies of the soul, stifled by the conventional conscience, and so his art is obliged to "aspire to the condition of music". But Joyce, more radically, aims at an "uncreated conscience" and is impelled to do more serious violence to inherited forms.

THE MUSICAL STRUCTURE OF "THE LAKE"

A certain drabness characterises the 1905 versions of "The Lake" insofar as Moore attempts to give Father Gogarty's self-realisation objective social correlatives. Through Rose Leicester's letters he learns to know the great world and becomes involved, at a distance, in the novelistic plot constituted by her adventures abroad. But in the 1921 version (five years after Joyce's "Portrait") Rose Leicester (now Nora Glynn) dissolves into a presence as vague as the rose-coloured clouds which are her symbol. The priest's dialogue is with the lake and the wood – the lake calling forth the responses of his heart, varying shades of joy or sadness, the wood nourishing his mind with a deepening sense of the complexity and mystery of life. [For the pattern of nature symbolism in the first edition, see Eileen Kennedy, "Design in George Moore’s ‘The Lake’", in Raymond J. Porter and James D. Brophy, ed. "Modern Irish Literature", New York, 1972.] If, within the space of a year, the priest moves from emotional and intellectual dormancy to a mature and autonomous decision for life, this is not the effect of contact with the world, but of the constant persuasive murmur of lake and forest, summoning the sleeping self to consciousness. The drama, as Moore insists in the 1921 preface, passes within the priest's soul. And paradoxically the other characters are more convincing, now that they are reduced to the function of agents and stimuli of Gogarty's self-realisation, than they were when Moore tried to present them in their full social reality. This is because the narcissistic orbit of Father Gogarty's quest clashed with the residue of conventional narrative in the early versions. In the 1921 version Moore espouses more faithfully the limits of his theme, lets the objective world recede, and brings the form and texture of the novel into harmony with the psychic processes which constitute its real plot.

It is paradoxical too that in the 1921 version Moore has more successfully distanced the priest's quest. We have less the impression that we are being preached at, that we are being asked to participate in a fantasy of wish-fulfilment. This is mainly because Rose Leicester no longer rushes to fulfil the priest's longings – her silence allows the priest's quest to develop with all its tensions, bewilderment and solitude, instead of smothering it with gratuitous commentary. Thus, though the novel is more intensely concentrated on the priest, the sharper definition of his situation creates a satisfying fictional distance. The tensions and ambiguities in the priest's soul, no longer smoothed over by too helpful voices telling us and him what to think, provide the co-efficient of friction which the objective world provided in the traditional novel. In the 1921 version a silence persists, right to the end of the novel, the silence of the lake's undeciphered enigma. Moore knows now that this silence is the heart of the novel, that the message of self-fulfilment is secondary to the growing sense of mystery the priest's experiences bring, and so he treats much more lightly and discreetly the themes that were so important in 1905, in order to convey in its purity the elusive poetic essence of the novel.

These improvements are reflected in the texture of the1921 version, which is far more genuinely musical than in 1905; now there are no lectures on Wagner, and the crude labelling of motifs (e.g. those associated with Rose's name) is avoided. Instead the motifs are left to speak for themselves, in their varying degrees of opacity, just as in Wagner. Moore no longer has any desire to attach a message to the priest's experience, realising that it is enough to have evoked the murmur of the heart's discontent. The rhythm of the narrative is more closely attuned to the impulses which constitute the principal material of the priest's psychic life, the wavelets on its surface. Indeed Gogarty's character is delightfully suited to the theme of the novel. He is a man of reveries (at several points in the story he falls into a distracted trance), timid, superstitious, his mind easily played upon by thoughts and fancies – "thoughts are rising up in my mind"; "I am, as it were, propelled to my writing-table" (p. 140). When we meet him all his movements betray "his desire… to be freed for a while from everything he had ever seen and from everything he had ever heard" (p. 4) and his soul remains as changeable as the landscape right through the novel even up to his final escape.

The direct expression of feeling in this novel attains a limpidity which again and again really does seem to convey "the essential rather than the daily life of the priest" (p. x). This is because the melodic line gives the simple diction a musical tone (in the absence of all sophisticated chords, i.e. complex psychological observations) that makes it seem to come from the heart: "Loneliness begets sleeplessness. And sleeplessness begets a sort of madness. I suffer from nightmare" (p. 93). But the transparency of this language is supported by the opacity of the motifs – these are like a cloudy piano accompaniment lending subtlety to a song in which the vocal line is naive.

While readers have been enchanted by the motival texture of "The Lake" it may be that they have overlooked the musical effects created by the formal structure of the novel, which seems to bear a resemblance to sonata form. One may regard the first four chapters as an exposition section to which the last four chapters correspond. The intervening development comprises three phases: the trip around the lake (chapters five and six); Father O'Grady (chapter seven); and Father Gogarty's agonized winter (chapters eight to ten). It seems important to take account of this structure in order to appreciate the admirable spacing and timing of the changes in the priest's soul. The structure also lends their full significance to the motifs, which often have a structural function as well as a psychological and narrative one. For instance, it is towards the end of the exposition that Gogarty murmurs to himself: "Every man… has a lake in his heart" (p. 35). The completion of his thought comes at the structurally corresponding place at the end of the novel. Again, towards the end of the exposition Gogarty releases ducklings into the water, which corresponds to his own swim to freedom at the novel's end.

The yacht which appears in the exposition (and thereafter vanishes) stimulates the priest's dreams of escape and is linked with the images (from "Siegfried") of the birdsong and the forest breezes. But just as in Siegfried the song of the bird has to be interpreted by the hero, so Father Gogarty is occupied in interpreting the signs that surround him all through the book. The yacht is one of many symbols of a nameless longing. To label it the Nameless Longing motif would however be as preposterous as the musicological practice of labelling even the most elusive of Wagner's motifs. Most of the motifs retain their opacity in Moore's novel even though the priest's soul grows into kinship with the message they convey to him.

The yacht illustrates the musical handling of motifs rather well. At the transition from the first theme of the exposition (Father Gogarty's soul) to the second (Nora Glynn), at the start of the second chapter, the chief motifs of Gogarty's restlessness are recapitulated: "A breeze rose, the forest murmured, a bird sang, and the sails of the yacht filled" (p. 15). The yacht recurs at the end of the chapter (and at the end of the exposition of the second theme) on page 25. Finally it returns at the very end of the exposition on page 38. The animal dartings in the undergrowth – the fox on page 2 for example – are associated perhaps with the stirrings of life in Father Gogarty; these too recur at the end of the exposition – the rabbit and weasel on page 38. The duckling he releases recalls the ducks warbling in the opening paragraph of the novel. The twilight scene which closes the exposition of the Nora Glynn theme at the end of the second chapter is transformed into a dawn scene at the end of chapter four (reflecting his ecstasy at Nora's forgiveness): "Rose-coloured clouds descended, revealing many new and beautiful mountain forms, every pass and every crest distinguishable" (p. 25); "At last a red ball appeared behind a reddish cloud; its colour changed to the colour of flame, paled again, and at four flared up like a rose-coloured balloon" (p. 37). The end of the exposition thus prefigures the happy conclusion of Father Gogarty’s travail: "life emerges like the world at daybreak" (p. 144).

The symbolism of dawn probably owes something to the dawn scene in "Goetterdaemmerung," as the phrase "blow a horn on the hillside to call comrades together" in the same letter recalls Siegfried's horn call in that scene, Thus where the symbolism of the exposition recalled "Siegfried," Act II, in which the adolescent hero seeks his way to Brunnhilde, the symbolism of the recapitulation alludes to the scene in which Siegfried has become a man, ready to leave Brunnhilde in order to confront the world at large. Moore claimed that the style of "The Lake" owed much to his frequent listening to the "Lohengrin" Prelude. The movement from indeterminate vagueness to dazzling radiance and back to dreamlike vagueness again, which we may note in Moore's treatment of lake and sky (and of the priest's soul), is certainly reminiscent of that music. Wagner's programme note reads: "Out of the clear blue ether of the sky there seems to condense a wonderful yet at first hardly perceptible vision; and out of this there gradually emerges, ever more and more clearly, an angel-host bearing in its midst the sacred Grail." Another Wagnerian note: Siegfried first learns fear as he trembles when approaching Brunnhilde; Parsifal learns of sorrow and compassion from Kundry's kiss. That there is a Wagnerian character in Gogarty's awakening is suggested by the following: "There have been cases of men and women going mad because their love was not reciprocated, and I used to listen to these stories wonderingly, unable to understand, bored by the relation" (p. 126). Like Parsifal, Gogarty was a "pure fool" and has become "knowing through compassion." It is in this Wagnerian tonality that we should hear the remark Gogarty lets drop in an amusing conversation with Moran: "Woman is life" (p. 230).

At the start of the recapitulation, in chapter eleven, the Nora Glynn theme re-appears as Gogarty receives her letter, breaking a long silence, on the very anniversary of the opening scene. The lake seen through the priest's eyes may be intended to register an advance from the indeterminacy of that scene: "more blue in the sky, less mist upon the water" (p. 135). The twilight, when it recurs, is again a moment of clarity and splendour, imaging goddesses around a celestial lake; but, that vision gone, vagueness enshrouds the terrestrial lake again: "And he watched the earth and sky enfolded in one tender harmony of rose and blue – blue fading to grey, and the lake afloat amid vague shores, receding like a dream through sleep" (p. 139). Chapter twelve is the corresponding recapitulation of the Gogarty theme, taking the form of a letter in reply to hers. He goes over the story of his vocation for the third time in the novel: the first time, in chapter one, it was presented at its face value; in the dialogue with Father O’Grady in chapter seven the ambiguities first emerge into consciousness; here, finally, the true perspective is established, the authentic vocation emerges from behind the false one. The animals of the exposition section come back into the picture (all has been dead in the preceding chapters) as he writes of "the bleat of the lamb and the impatient cawing of the rook" (p. l44).

"WITHIN THE PRIEST’S SOUL"

Structurally the 1921 version is a great improvement on both the 1905 versions, an improvement reflecting Moore's closer attention to the essential subject of the novel. In the second 1905 version there is a passage in which Gogarty's fellow-clergy discuss, with much coarseness and narrow-mindedness, his action in denouncing Rose Leicester from the pulpit. This piece of anti-clerical satire is a regression to the "Protestant" Moore’s public critique of Catholicism; it impedes his effort to map the private obstacles Father Gogarty must overcome, obstacles whose personal, inward shape must be allowed to come to light in the course of his lakeside broodings. In the 1921 version it is Father O'Grady who drops in at this point, although it is only five days since he has written to Gogarty from London without giving any warning of a visit to Ireland. Despite this unlikelihood O'Grady's visit gives the story a backbone which is missing in the earlier versions. Rose Leicester's gushing correspondence is also drastically reduced. Her souvenirs of Bayreuth are no longer supposed to influence the process of Gogarty's liberation in any way, nor is there any attempt to parallel his growth with her own discovery of a bigger world. Wagner was no longer a "cause" in 1921 was Bayreuth the only temple of his genius. (Shaw, in a late foreword to "The Perfect Wagnerite," indicates that better performances could be attended in London at this time.) The. Bayreuth material had in any case been re-used in a charming, comic vein in "Ave" (1911). However, another genius had appeared on the scene and it may be that the O'Grady episode owes something to Freud.

The unlikelihood of Father O'Grady's visit is finely integrated into the texture of the novel by the long evocation of the unease with which both men are smitten, an unease which on Gogarty's part shows his fear of the painful probings to which the encounter exposes him. The scene could seem predictable and melodramatic to a cursory reader; closer reading shows it to be a study of considerable psychological finesse. The apparent melodrama of Gogarty's cry: "I'm frightened, frightened, my fear is great and at this moment I feel like a man on his deathbed… Can I be forgiven if that soul be lost to God?" (p. 81), and of the absolution administered by Father O'Grady, disappears when one realises that Gogarty's cry is an amalgam of several displacements or self-deceptions. His fear is not really fear of divine judgement but of them moment of truth which is facing him, the immanent judgement of his growth in self-awareness; he is on his deathbed in the sense that his clerical persona can no longer provide him with a satisfactory identity; his obsession with Nora's soul is of a personal and erotic nature, the cultural shield of clerical convictions preventing it from finding correct expression as yet. His confession serves the purpose of opening him up to the real nature of his anxiety. At the moment of absolution he rejoins the life of instinct in an undistorted form: "conscious of the green grass showing through the window, lighted by a last ray of the setting sun" (p. 81), and is more ready for the _real_ confession which ensues. "What had he confessed? Already he had forgotten." He asks O'Grady a question which touches a deeper level: "if he discovered any other influence except an intellectual influence in Mr. Poole"; and complains that he "might have warned Nora of the danger" (this is the first time in the interview that Gogarty allows himself to call her "Nora" rather than "Miss Glynn"). O'Grady puts two leading questions "as if he wished to change the subject": "Tell me how it all came about"; and "Was no attempt… made to marry you to some girl with a big fortune?" Gogarty then begins to talk with growing self-awareness. He is "a little dazed and troubled in his mind"; "he rambled on, telling his story almost unconsciously"; he "continued, like one talking to himself.". Father O’Grady, catalyst of this emergence of truth, listens, "seriously moved by the story" (that is meant to ward off the reader's temptation to a slight scorn for Gogarty's confusions), almost murmurs, "Now, I'm beginning to understand," and finally leaves, without comment, "as if he felt that the object of his visit had been accomplished." So it has. "He goes as a dream goes," thinks Gogarty, "Why did he come here? And he was surprised that he could find no answer to any of the questions that he put to himself" (p. 84). O'Grady's visit has brought about a state of lucidity and of crisis – the desolation of the opening words of the following chapter: "Nothing will happen again in my life – nothing of any interest," and the inner storm matched by an outer one which he describes in his letter to Nora. The first words of her reply helpfully confirm that he is on the right path: "You are a very human person after all" (p. 97).

The culturally deflected interpretation of his inner turmoil which ensnares Father Gogarty for so long, his difficulty in thinking his way out of his ready-made clerical categories, is handled by Moore with remarkable empathy, and the paradoxical conversion of those categories in the final scene is a convincing resolution of the priest's struggle towards self-understanding. There the lake provides the true equivalent of the baptism over whose external forms a bizarre wrangle between Catholic and Protestant peasants had earlier developed, and the rocks become a natural altar on which Gogarty sacrifices his dead clerical identity. Joyce laughed at the dimpled buttocks and earmarked the scene as a comic mythology for use in "Finnegans Wake." But the comic touch is not unintentional; Moore will not let his priest keep up a dignified sacerdotal air and take his new sacraments more seriously than the old, for the serious theme of his novel is what passes within the soul, and its external enactment is better left as muddled and tragicomical as ordinary life will have it. The combination of this external comedy with the sober chronicle of inner states, in which neither is over-emphasised at the other's expense, is a fine achievement, possible only to one with a long schooling in the bitter-sweet art of Maupassant or Turgenev.

MOORE AND THE CATHOLIC PRIESTHOOD

Mary McCarthy claims that "Madame Bovary" is the novel that best speaks to the condition of modern American women. If I may add another extra-literary claim, which may not be without literary relevance after all, I would suggest that "The Lake" is the novel that best speaks to the condition of the contemporary Catholic clergyman, insofar as that condition is one of discontent, and that recent history has verified the psychological finesse of Moore's portrait to a surprising extent. Of course there is another dimension, which Moore and Father Gogarty but distantly recognise. That is the dimension of grace, the quest for the essence of the Gospel, sublimely, perhaps too sublimely, expressed in Bernanos "Diary of a Country Priest." But I cannot think of any novel which evokes as subtly and as exactly as Moore's does the oppressive aspects of a clericalist culture and the psychology of a revolt of which most priests will have some idea, however they resolve the resultant tensions. What distinguishes Moore's treatment from such crude attempts as Zola’s "La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret" is an affectionate feeling for the life of the Irish presbytery and convent. The pathos of "The Lake" is that of revolt against an environment which has claims on the heart. The priest's choice for life on larger terms thus has a boldness and tension to it which it would not have were it merely a matter of fleeing a detestable prison. Again and again good reasons for staying in the rut present themselves, and subtle discernment is needed to overcome this false conscience and strive onward to self-realisation. The indecisive and wavering temperament of Gogarty adds to the interest and subtlety of the drama. Father Gogarty has to tear himself away. Had Moore introduced a more tragic clash of duties, in the manner, for instance, of "Anna Karenin," his novel might have been greater, a novel of adulthood rather than of late adolescence. But the lack of that dimension too takes nothing from the truth of the novel. Indeed, in presenting the priest, like the hero of "So on He Fares," as a psychological orphan torn between two mothers, Eliza and Nora, the Church and Nature, Moore may have sensed an aspect of the drama of the Catholic priesthood which has more sociological weight than might appear.

Contemporaries of Moore in Ireland queried the verisimilitude of his clerical portrait, but perhaps for reasons similar to those that caused people to shudder at Flaubert's "moeurs de province.". Stephen Gwynn, for instance, in "Irish Literature and Drama" (1936), assured us that "an Irish reader, though well aware that many an Irish priest has succumbed to sexual temptation, will almost certainly say that neither such a priest nor such a school-mistress as Moore depicts ever drew breath in the province of Connaught. A novelist, if he is to succeed, must make himself believed" (99. 168-9). Yet Canon Sheehan's Luke Delmege, in the novel of that name published four years before Moore's (London, 1901), shares many traits with Moore's protagonist. Luke's history is swathed in much pious trash and moralizing intrusions, and his problems are traced to intellectual discontent rather than to a nostalgia of the heart, but at times we can hear in his musings too "the mysterious warble, soft as lake water, that abides in the heart" (1921 preface):

"Was this to be his life? Dreary days, spent in idleness and unprofitable attempts to raise a helpless and dispirited people; and dreadful evenings, when he could not escape from himself, but had to face the companionship of thoughts that verged on despair." (p. 343)

"The morning was fine, and a gray mist hung down over field and valley, and wet the withering leaves, and made the red haws, that splashed the whole landscape, as if with blood, glisten and shine. But the mist could not conceal the gray, lonely fields... 'It's a land of death and ruin,' said Luke." (p. 332-3)

Luke's affective starvation and sensitivity of temperament produce effects at least as strange as anything experienced by Gogarty:

"'I have seen colouring across the moors and the breasts of the mountains that would make an artist's fortune, could he fix it on canvas. And, then, certainly the little children are very attractive. The one thing that strikes every English visitor to Ireland are the children's eyes – _das Vergissmeinnicht blauste Auge_!'" (p. 348)

"Luke thought, and was tempted. He said goodbye to the mother, and stooping down touched with his lips the wet, sweet mouth of the child. He walked away, leaving serious wonderment in the child's mind, but infinite gratitude in the mother's; but he had to steady himself against a tree for a few moments, whilst a current of strange, unwonted feelings surged through his veins… it was a fatal kiss! Luke had examined his conscience rather too scrupulously that night, and decided that these little amenities were rather enervating, and were not for him." (p. 360)

It may be that a taboo surrounding the intimate life of the priest in rural Ireland is the reason for Gwynn's inability to recognise the precision of Moore's insight. Or it may simply be a case of that inattention to the finer resonances of the narrative against which Moore pleads in the 1921 preface: "It may be that I heard what none other will hear… and it may be that all ears are not tuned, or are too indifferent or indolent to listen." Again, a moral prejudice can utterly block awareness of what is going on in the book, so that it is read as an anti-clerical satire. It might very easily have become so, had Moore yielded to his baser instincts. What saves it from becoming so is perhaps above all the potent image of the lake itself.

The lake imposes a spell on Father Gogarty, cutting him off from his conventional existence – from Tinnick where his sisters live, just across the strait – and condemning him to an inward journey. The lake contains the secret of his identity in its bosom – symbolised by the two islands, Castle Island where he wished in youth to build a hermitage (and where George Moore's ashes now lie) and Church Island, the haunt of Marban, a saint of the times when Irish religion was still a communion with nature and with life. The secrets of this haunting and melancholy Irish landscape, secrets never laid bare, not even in the moonlight clarity of Gogarty's swim to freedom, come from a realm older and wiser than all clericalism and anticlericalism. Perhaps the lake is the indeterminate maternal principle which holds sway over all of Gogarty's life, enticing him to religion with Eliza or to a flight from religion with Nora. Its grey monotony induces boredom and discontent, its subtle motions seem an invitation to escape, its magic, the magic all too rarely attaching to an individual place, commands him to remain – there is no Wagnerite who will not feel at home with such ambivalence! Later, in "The Brook Kerith," Moore tries to evoke directly the essence of religion, and if it entirely eludes him in that work, as I fear it does, that is not only because his strategy of having a revivified Jesus repent of his apocalypticism (discovered by Weiss and Schweitzer) and return to a diluted Renanism is an unreal and academic one, but above all because the foothills of Jericho and the Judean desert have no genius loci comparable to that of the Irish lakeside. Not even his Arimathean's faintly homoerotic reveries prevent this later attempted vision from being swallowed by the sand. In "The Lake" however the vision presses in, greater than the explicit issues of the narrative. Yeats wrote: "I said once: ‘You work so hard that, like the Lancelot of Tennyson, you will almost see the Grail.’ But now, his finished work before me, I am convinced that he was denied even that ‘almost’" ("Autobiographies," London, 1970. p. 438). It may be that here is the one point at which the judgement is confuted, the one point at which the Grail, the constant object of the aesthetic quest, the regulative idea of a thousand revisions, is inexplicably unveiled.

                                                                      Joseph S. O'Leary

From: Robert Welch, ed. "The Way Back". Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1982.

Moore: 'Parnell and His Island'

George Moore, "Parnell and His Island", ed. Carla King; Standish James O’Grady, "Sun and Wind", ed. Edward A. Hagan; Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, "Irish Recollections", ed. Patrick Maume, in the series ‘Classics of Irish History’, General Editor: Tom Garvin. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2004.

The latest three of the seventeen volumes that have appeared in this series contains one very exciting title, Moore’s "Parnell and His Island", which has the reputation of a "livre maudit". An honest, indiscreet and sharp-tongued man, George Moore underestimated the prickly sensitivities and long memories of Irish nationalists. He had to absent himself from Ireland for twelve years after publishing this work, and the venomous pen of Susan Mitchell was still citing it against him three decades later. It was never republished. Steeped in the naturalism of Zola, Moore may have had no consciousness of being a bird who fouls his own nest. The mirror held up to Ireland in the great novel he composed at the same time, "A Drama in Muslin" (1886), is just as unflattering, but its focus is primarily on the foibles of the Ascendancy, whereas ‘Parnell’ pours vials of Swiftian scorn on the peasantry as well.

Moore’s fluent style and judicious ordering of his material make Parnell and His Island a very readable book. His beloved desolate landscape of lake and bog is a lyrical backdrop to eye-opening vignettes of Irish life at the time of the Land League agitation. These are gripping documents that merit a place among "Classics of Irish History". Moore poses as a spoilt Parisian aesthete, at first enthralled by the beguiling externals of his native land: ‘Seeing Dalkey one dreams of Monte Carlo, or better still of the hanging gardens of Babylon, ofmarble balustrades, of white fountains, of innumerable yachts, of courts of love’ (p. 2), but this vision of an ‘Irish France’ (p. 5) comes crashing on the squalid reality of the dowdy uncultured capital and the ruins of the countryside. There is a touch of self-mockery in the way he chronicles how ‘a primitive country and barbarous people’ (p. 89) shock his refined soul. The climactic scene is a harrowing description of an eviction.

Chapters like ‘A Hunting Breakfast’ already show the influence of Turgenev’s "A Sportsman’s Sketches", which later served as the model for "The Untilled Field", and to which Moore with his horsy, hunting background must have been drawn from early on. Turgenev was his artistic hero alongside Manet and Zola, and he met him once in December 1876. He wrote a Fortnightly Review article on Turgenev in 1888. Moore’s sketches could have been as influential as Turgenev’s, which prompted the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861. But middle class Ireland, squeamishly distancing itself from “pigs in the parlour,” was in no mood to tolerate this outspoken, angry writing.

The work first appeared as "Lettres sur l’Irlande" in Le Figaro in the summer of 1886 and then as "Terre d’Irlande". Carla King reproduces (with some irritating inaccuracies) and translates the passages omitted in the English version, generally of an erotic nature, including a melodramatic evocation of a homosexual scandal involving the Royal Irish Constabulary (p. 104). The English original of these passages appears to be lost. King identifies the French writers Moore quotes, but does not trace the quotations themselves. She points to Balzac’s "Les paysans" and Huysmans’ "En rade" as sources of inspiration.

She chastises Moore for presenting a tenant farmer as belonging to a degenerate pre-Celtic race, linking this to the simian caricatures of Punch and ponderously explaining that ‘the archaeological record now suggests a level of cultural and economic development in Ireland prior to the Celtic period that is far from Moore’s insinuation that these were somehow closer to an anthropoid type’ (p. 116). Moore’s ‘extraordinarily racist’ portrait shows ‘all the prejudice and class fear of the Irish landlord’ (p. xvii). Moore’s language is indeed indefensible, but some allowance should be made for the extravagances of humour and the less politically correct mentality of his times. Usually, he was in advance of his times, as in his opposition to the Boer War; and even his attacks on Ireland have a reforming purpose.

Moore’s attitude to Catholicism shows a similar ambiguity, as King notes (p. xviii). In this work we meet ‘The Priest’ , a figure who fascinates Moore in The Untilled Field and The Lake: ‘Father Tom was very anxious to convince you of his modernity, and curiously enough this is the very quality that he is lacking in’ (p. 45). The rocklike continence of the clergy bemuses him: ‘their utterances on the altar savour strongly of incentive to murder, but of other immorality they know nothing’ (p. 44).

There is a steep drop in literary level from Moore to Standish O’Grady’s essays on Greek heroes in "Sun and Wind", and a still steeper drop to Charlotte Tonna’s religious memoir, "Irish Recollections". Are these really ‘Classics of Irish History’? Edward Hagan presents O’Grady’s work (composed between 1911 and 1928) as ‘the final testament of the “Father of the Irish Literary Renaissance”’ (p. vii) and parses its ideological debts to French and Russian anarchism and socialism, showing how its utopian account of prehistoric Greece provides ‘prescriptions for an ideal Ireland’ (p. ix) and for ‘avoiding entry into history’ (p. x) and ‘attempts to reconstruct Irish Catholicism’ (p. xviii). This anarchic ‘back to nature’ message was opposed to that of O’Grady’s fellow classicist, Mahaffy, who invoked the civilization of Athens as a model for backward Ireland. Hagan makes the rather strained claim that ‘O’Grady reveals himself as a thoroughly modern writer in his belief that the old ways had failed and that the writer must be a new kind of cleric, preaching a vastly different salvation’ (p. xx) and that the very title "Sun and Wind" suggests that he ‘had become a modern ecologist’ (p. xxi). To talk of the book as offering a ‘programme for Ireland’ (p. xi) and as ‘striving to keep the Irish free from the traders and the dissipation that accompanies contact with them’ (p. xvi) is misleading, since Irish issues are touched on only on a few pages and in the cloudiest way. The sad fact is that O’Grady’s effusions do not speak to us now, and probably did not then either.

Charlotte Tonna (1790-1846) writes the jargon of a thousand tracts. Her brutal first husband dragged her to Ireland in 1818 and she was active in ‘a well-established Evangelical subculture centered on the Ossory Clerical Association’ (p. ix). Her second marriage, to the 29-year-old Lewis Tonna in 1841, provoked comment. She opposed Catholic Emancipation, and ‘attacked those postmillennialist providentialists who held that God governed the world through immutable economic laws’ (p. xiii). She authored, anonymously, one of the first English social novels, Helen Fleetwood, in 1843. She saw Ireland as ‘mystically linked to the Jews, whom the Irish had never persecuted’ (p. xiv). The interest of her memoir for Irish history lies in its reflection of ‘the sense of siege felt by small Protestant communities during the agrarian violence of the 1820s’ (p. xvi). Through the enveloping piety of her language some scenes of Ireland at that time emerge vividly enough from time to time: a bonfire night enlivened by jigs and strange pagan rituals (pp. 10-11), a ‘gentle, affectionate, elegant nun’ (p. 38) in Kilkenny, who seeks to convert Charlotte even as Charlotte seeks to convert her; the cruel penances imposed by two priests on a woman guilty of ‘having heard the bible read, and having prayed in the company of heretics’ (p. 78) – but these pickings are scanty.

                                                                               Joseph S. O'Leary

Journal of Irish Studies 20 (2005)

George Moore between Zola and Gide: The Case of "John Norton"

Moore's Oeuvre: The Record of a Temperament

Nietzsche's thesis that the type and degree of a man's sexuality is manifest even in the highest productions of his mind is verified in the work of George Moore. His oeuvre projects a distinctive sexual profile, and to bring this profile into clear focus is a key to the full appreciation of it. Probably dyslexic (Grey, 41), Moore created his persona by dint of an endless struggle with the written word. He brought into being `the self on whose creation I was enthusiastically determined' (quoted, Grey 51). As in the case of Andr* Gide, this self-creation was conceived as a contribution to wider social liberation. A rhetoric of liberation was central to his work: the early novels denounce the injustices on which his own landlord class throve; Esther Waters, 1894, strikes a blow for single mothers; disgust at the Boer War prompted his move to Ireland; indignation at Ireland's oppressive puritanism animates The Untilled Field, 1903, and The Lake, 1905, while Hail and Farewell, 1911-14, aims to rescue the Irish Literary Renaissance from its own retrograde tendencies.

Moore battled against the constraints placed on what could be published by the influential booksellers, Smith and Mudie. He writes to Zola in 1882: `You can't realise how we stand, you are unaware of the combinations which force us to be sentimental, to write flat and conventional novels and which prohibit all observation and analysis' (Hone, 94). It is thus unfair to contrast Moore with the much-censored Joyce as `the sort of stable and safe writer that any publisher in financial difficulties would be thrilled to represent' (Leonard, 321). Moore's writings frequently verged on the scandalous. In his `extraordinarily immature fantasies about every known aspect of sex' (Grey, 7), Moore was at the cutting edge not only of naturalist psychological analysis, but of the confessional recit which the Wilde scandal curtailed in England but which flourished in France with Gide. In this period Moore stands out by the relative daring of his self-revelation, especially in the frank sexual comedy of Memoirs of My Dead Life, 1906. Usually chary of the scabrous (he is no Frank Harris), he nonetheless sometimes slips in remarks on such taboo topics as coprophagia (HF, 501).

More startling is the psychological frankness of his self-exposure: he was `scarifyingly honest... about his innermost feelings' (Grey, 51). His self-exposure is leavened with irony and suggestions of fabulation - `Some men kiss and tell, Mr. Moore tells but doesn't kiss' (Mitchell, 47). `It seems possible that even at this early period of his life such sensuality as he experienced was very readily assuaged, and perhaps even more easily, and from his viewpoint much more conveniently sublimated into verse, or his own peculiar form of what in these days is known as faction' (Grey, 74). His amours are `curiously unconvincing' (Grey, 72); `Mr. Moore, who desires to pose before the world as the passionate lover, is quite unconvincing in this part' (Mitchell, 50). Ned Carmody in `The Wild Goose' coldly registers the decline of passion for his wife, in a scene reminiscent of his break-up with `Stella' in Hail and Farewell (the wife, like Stella, says `I will conquer this'):

He was sorry that she was the one to suffer, of course, but he could not disguise from himself that he looked forward to the enjoyment of a bed to himself, and when she asked him if his resolution never to come into her room again was irrevocable, he answered: `I cannot tell you. I am engaged upon my work and have no thought for anything but it'. (The Untilled Field, 187)

She diagnoses: `you could not live with anyone, at least not always'. Such honesty in revealing the defects of his own temperament is a chief source of the interest of Moore's work. It is a plaint of Job against heaven, which had made him an `almoster' - almost seeing the Grail, almost painting, almost having style, talent, genius, almost writing the great English novel, the great Irish novel, almost being a devout Christian, almost being an Irish Voltaire, emotion failing at the crunch in every department - in religion and art, love and sex. Every expression of feeling in his work is self-consciously mounted as an artistic exhibit, yet the range of real feeling that he is able to express is slight: a few elegiac impulses, a few spurts of indignation.

Moore was ardently attracted to women, but in a double way: male desire was accompanied with a passionate identification with the feminine: `Never previously had the soul of a man been so intermingled with that of woman; and to explain the abnormality of this sexual sympathy, I can only imagine that before my birth there had been some hesitation as to my sex' (French edition of Confessions of Young Man, 1889, quoted in Grubgeld, 87). That is one of the overtones in the following statement: `I am penetrated through and through by an intelligent, passionate, dreamy interest in sex, going much deeper than the mere rutting instinct; and turn to women as a plant does to the light, as unconsciously, breathing them through every pore, and my writings are but the exhalation that follows this inspiration' (HF, 182). Such a relation to women was too contemplative, too sisterly, to converge decisively on sexual performance. He loved company, and his quest for a male boon companion is described near the beginning of Hail and Farewell:

What I am seeking in London at the present time is a boon companion. In many respects he must resemble your amant de coeur. He must like my company... My boon companion must be between thirty and fifty. Until a man reaches the age of thirty he is but a boy, without experience of life. (HF, 86)

Analysts attempting to pin down Moore's sexual profile dabble in terms such as `impotence' and `voyeurism'. There is no need to suppose `organic impotence' (see Grey, 11), for Moore's psychological temperament sufficiently explains the diversion of his sexual interest from the genital to the polymorphous perverse. The margins of his sexual identity were as fluid as his entire style and personality, allowing a sympathetic interest in homosexuality (both male and female). Recalling the publication problems of Maurice and The Well of Loneliness one wonders what negotiations with threatened censorship presided over Moore's handling of homosexuality. One story on the topic he wrote three times: first as a novel, A Mere Accident, 1887, then as `John Norton', one of the three stories in Celibates, 1895, and finally as `Hugh Monfert' in In Single Strictness, 1922, which is replaced by `Albert Nobbs', another homosexual tale, in Celibate Lives, 1927. No瑛 surmises that a reading of Havelock Ellis may have helped Moore, and notes that Moore was in tune with homosexuality already in 1895; but A Mere Accident and especially the remarkable portrait of the lesbian Cecilia in the Austenesque masterpiece, A Drama in Muslin, 1886, show that Moore was good on the topic from the start.

That the constraints of censorship were particularly irksome here is suggested by a plot outline Moore proposed to William Heinemann, in which a man discovers on the bridal night his unsuspected impotency, and departs on a world cruise:

he meets a plump little sailor-boy, and lives happily ever afterwards. `There', exclaimed Moore, `is a plot for you!' Heinemann protested that no such book could be printed and published in England. But Moore contended: `Why not! it is simply a modernizing of the Greek practice which pleased and thrilled the male and in addition gave protection to the innocence of Grecian women'. (quoted in Grubgeld, 89)

This sounds like a satire `aimed at many targets: then-current "Greek" apologias for male homosexuality, the standard of feminine sexual innocence' (Grubgeld, 89). Yet the plot is that of the John Norton/Hugh Monfert stories, in which what Moore advances here under the camouflage of provocation is handled with an attempt at psychological subtlety and moral probing.

A Mere Accident (1887)

John Norton, the protagonist of A Mere Accident, exhibits a misogyny laced with Nietzschean sadism: `the unspeakable feminality of those maid-servants... I should like to scourge them out of the place... I believe there is much to be said in favour of whipping' (MA, 62), and intensified by a Schopenhauerian horror of sex: `Ignorance of the material laws of existence had extended even into his sixteenth year, and when, bit by bit, the veil fell, and he understood, he was filled with loathing of life' (MA, 135-6; C, 367). His pessimism and obsession with purity are rooted in homosexuality: `the blood-stained heavenly breasts, the loin-linen hanging over orbs of light... Listen! ah! the voices of chanting boys, and out of the cloud of incense come Latin terminations, and the organ still is swelling' (MA, 133). In the later version the last phrase becomes `the Latin hymn afloat on the tumult of the organ' (C, 365). The passage echoes Verlaine's `Parsifal': `Et * ces voix d'enfants chantant dans la coupole'. His inner moral drama is enveloped by a certain dreaminess: `Once there had been a sharp struggle, but Christ, not Apollo, had been the victor, and the great cross in the bedroom of Stanton College overshadowed the beautiful slim body in which Divinity seemed to circulate like blood; and this photograph was all that now remained of much youthful anguish and much temptation... His sense of reality had always remained in a rudimentary state; it was, as it were, diffused over the world and mankind' (MA, 134-5; C, 366-7);

At a certain point, however, his misogyny is overcome by a rise of heterosexual passion: `the dark dawn of a late nubility quickened into manhood' (MA, 178); `this sudden and singular obsession of his spiritual nature by a lower and grosser nature' (MA, 180) destroys the plausibility of the character. The homosexual theme is muffled. In the melodramatic second half Moore has lost an essential thread of his story. `Peut-etre ne s'est-il pas cru capable de decrire ce mariage manque... Il n'a trouve d'autre solution que romanesque' (Noel, 143). Norton's marriage is averted by the `mere accident' of the fiance's molestation by a sexual prowler in the woods which leads to her falling from the window as she withdraws from Norton. The final catastrophe has no psychological justification.

`John Norton' (1895)

Moore wrote to Dujardin in 1887 that A Mere Accident `has not been understood either in England or in France as I would have liked, I must have blundered somewhere... I shall change the end, or perhaps extend the book a little in the new edition' (Hone, 136). Could it be that the homosexual theme is what is referred to here? Even the second version of the story met imperceptive responses in this regard: `John Norton is the voyager who hugs the shores of life; who has no confidence in his own nature; who is austere rather from timidity of temperament than from any moral self-consciousness' (Mitchell, 49).

The novel's execrescences are pruned in `John Norton'. The Huysmanesque disquisitions on Christian Latin (MA, 78-99) are dropped; the list of impressionist paintings is replaced with a more functional discussion of Wagner's Kundry. The protagonist becomes a more normal young man, no longer subduing `an intense and ever pulsatory horror of death' (MA, 28) by Schopenhauerian cynicism: `"Bad enough that I should exist! Why precipitate another into the gulf of being?" "Consort with men whose ideal hovers between a stable boy and a veterinary surgeon"' (MA, 31). The Balzacian descriptions of his dwelling and physiognomy and the Zolaesque theories of hereditary weakness also disappear. Above all, `La psychologie du personnage est presente sous un eclairage different... Il suffit de trois ou quatre reflexions ajoutees' (Noel, 260). His attitude to women is no longer a violent misogyny suggesting repressed heterosexual sensuality, but an indifference correlated with homosexual feeling: `The boyish slightness of her figure led John to think of a statuette done in a period of Greek decadence. "Others", he thought, "would only see her as a somewhat too thin example of English maidenhood. I see her quite differently"'. (C, 354-5).

Much of this story recounts long quarreling dialogues between mother and son. Norton's mother:

spoke enthusiastically of the girl's beauty. `I could never see it. It never appealed to me in the least'. `But no woman does. You never think a woman good-looking'... `Her figure is slight even to boyishness. She's like a little antique statue done in a period of decadence. She has the far-away look in the eyes which we find in antique sculpture, and which is so attractive to me. But you don't understand'. `I understand very well. I understand you far better than you think', Mrs. Norton answered angrily. (C, 381-2).

Norton's sexual confusion and self-deception are skilfully analysed:

In his admiration for other women there had always been a sense of repulsion; this feeling of repulsion seemed to be absent from his admiration for Kitty... He hardly perceived any sex in her; she was sexless as a work of art, as the women of the first Italian painters, as some Greek statues.
   Then by natural association of idea his mind was carried back to early youth, to struggles within himself, and to temptations which he had conquered, and the memory of which he was always careful to keep out of mind... He found himself asking if sufficient change had come into his nature to allow him to accept marriage. (C, 395-6)

This self-mystification culminates in the embarrassing comedy of the proposal scene, which is a considerable improvement on the earlier version. Prompted by a fortune teller's `story of a handsome young gentleman who would woo her' (C, 408), `he trembled, and the victim of an impulse which forced him toward her, he threw his arms about her and kissed her violently' (408-9). He explains his action: `I suppose it is natural desire to kiss what is beautiful' (409); the word `natural' is ironic here. His clumsiness bespeaks a forced gesture. The girl's forgiveness of it betrays but represses her awareness of a deeper deficiency in his love-making: `I forgive you, John, I know you didn't mean it, you meant nothing' (410). His intention to convert her to Catholicism supplements his lack of more solid reasons for marrying her; this topic is dealt with more heavily and less functionally in MA.

The violence of the rape scene, deplored by Walter Pater (the tramp says `What about those pretty eyes?' and `she broke her parasol across his face' (MA, 227), is toned down in the new version - it is refracted through Kitty's consciousness: `She grew conscious that these thoughts were fictitious thoughts, and that there was a thought, a real thought, lying in the background of her mind, which she dared not face' (C, 415). She sees her father's face and John's face as masks, concealing the monster -- in a fit of hysteria she throws herself out the window and dies. John is relieved to be absolved of the responsibilities his proposal so unwisely incurred (C, 438). He wonders: `Had she guessed that when it came to the point that he would not, that he might not have been able to marry her?' (445). He figures at her funeral as `a broken-hearted lover' (447):

He never could have married her - no, not when it came to the point. He thought of the wedding-breakfast, the cake, the speeches, the congratulations, and of the woman with whom he would have gone away, of the honeymoon, of the bridal chamber! He knew now that he could not have fulfilled the life of marriage. If those things had happened he would have had to tell her - ah! when it was too late - that he was mistaken, that he could not, in any real sense of the word, be her husband. (450-1)

The problem of his sexual insincerity is muddied by a more melodramatic theme: `he had kissed her by force! "My God! then the difference between us is only one of degree, and the vilest humanity claims kinship of instinct with me!"' (452). This element causes Moore to lose the thread of the plot; only in 1922 did he spin it out to its logical conclusion, drawing the drama from the protagonist's temperament rather than from `mere accidents'.

Hail and Farewell (1911-14)

Probably because of the Wilde scandal, homosexuality does not feature in Moore's writing in the decades after 1895. In Hail and Farewell, Moore draws a non-fictional portrait of the model for John Norton, his cousin and colleague Edward Martyn. The account of Martyn's play, with its pagan overtones of sublimated pederasty (161) and the innuendo about his interest in choirboys (see 696, n. 164) and indifference to women (see 157-8) provide a lighter variant of the comic side of the Norton stories. The text falsifies Grey's claim that `no question of homosexuality was ever involved or even suspected; he was a natural-born Irish bachelor' (Grey, 183). `Norton is a mere stick of a celibate and remains dead on the page. In Hail and Farewell Martyn comes alive under his own name in all his pure foolishness' (William F. Blissett, in Owens, 72); the allusion is to Wagner's Parsifal, der reine Tor. `A story would be necessary to bring Edward into literature, and it would be impossible to devise an action of which he should be a part. The sex of a woman is odious to him' (HF, 596). Is Moore here implicitly criticizing the melodramatic story-line of `John Norton'? The most striking point of contact with the Norton stories is the portrayal of Martyn's bullying mother (HF, 157-8). Moore's Schadenfreude at her disillusionment and defeat resonates with the resentment he felt at the castratory role played by his own mother (see HF, 197; Grey, 7-8, 40-1).

The Brook Kerith (1916)

Innately attracted to men, the young Joseph of Arimathea, in The Brook Kerith, feels for his teacher Azariah `an almost uncontrollable desire to go and sit on his knee' (16). Azariah initiates him into Greek culture (coded for homsexuality) and talks to him of David and Jonathan: `It had come into his mind to ask his father how it was that he had never read the story of Jonathan and David to him' (31). The father's unease about Azariah's hellenizing influence signals early anxiety about his son's sexual orientation. A Greek sculptor is interested in the boy: `My very model! a bearded man cried out one morning... the sculptor's eyes lighted up, for he had accepted Joseph's answer as tryst' (33). Admiring his son's `slim loins and great shoulders', Dan suddenly feels `a new disquietude': `very often men like Joseph did not marry' (51). Joseph reflects: `The Essenes would at least free him from the necessity of telling his father that there was no heart in him for a wife; and if he did not take a wife he might become - ' (66). What does this unfinished sentence hint at? Perhaps at a conscious level Joseph would wish to conclude it in heterosexual terms, but the unconscious and repressed conclusion would be a homosexual one. In his rather blurry self-awareness, Joseph is a placid John Norton in Palestinian clothing: `With the view to discovering the turn of his sex instinct he called to mind all the women he had seen, asking himself as each rose up before him if he could marry her... He had seen some Greek women, and been attracted in a way, for they were not too like their sex' (161). He has a self-deceiving account of his sexual feelings: `Joseph could not help thinking that it were better to put women out of his mind altogether than to become inflamed by the sight of every woman. he believed that was why he had always kept all thoughts of women out of his mind.' (160). But Joseph never needs to develop beyond this point; his psychology is not a central concern of this novel. Moore's ability to portray a homosexual temperament serenely and non-problematically indicates a certain ripeness of vision.

`Hugh Monfert' (1922)

The same confident handling is evinced in `Hugh Monfert'. One gay reader was appreciative: `Our dead friend was much struck by this reconstruction of the story, and he complimented me on my divination of a side of life alien to me' (letter to Gosse, 17 December, 1918, quoted, Noel, 261). Hugh is farther than Joseph from the Martyn persona, whose possibilities had been exhausted in Hail and Farewell; he is more sensual, less intellectual (no `mere stick'); his desires lead to a revolt unthinkable in Martyn.

`Hugh Monfert' seems at first a prosy, mealy-mouthed yarn, which toys around with suggestions of homosexual love, but loses its thread again and again in rambling discussions. `L'auteur et ses personnages ont un peu l'air de faire ecole buissonniere' despite the clearer psychology of the story (Noel, 506). The constant deferral of the homosexual theme causes the `melodic line' to peter out indecisively. The drama of incapacity interests Moore more than its obverse, a positive homosexual thrust. But this time the tale's conclusion is thoroughly logical and the entire story is perfectly contained within the bounds of credibility. As Hugh edges toward awareness of his sexual feelings impatient readers may feel they are being teased by a timorous author; but the vagueness and meandering are a good reflection of Hugh's imperfect self-awareness.

Dr. Knight, Hugh's beloved mentor, the widowed father of Beatrice and Percy, has become a Catholic priest. This rather unusual situation is essential to the story's tight web of relationships. Knight is the paternal embodiment of all the values of Catholicism, balanced by the mercenary, manipulating mother, who stands for social constraints, above all the imperative to marry and beget. Hugh's pious trust in the Church, his cult of chastity, and his relatively tender years (he is 22) explain the sexual mystification that leads him to the marriage-bed. His devotion to Knight is stressed (`You were my one friend', ISS 60) in order to point up the disillusionment he will experience when this reasonable and tolerant father-figure eventually fails him. He asks Knight to mediate between him and his mother: `Every woman who comes here is considered by her as a possible wife and mother, and it's getting upon my nerves; it's driving me out of my wits' (47). Casually understated here, the maternal oppression gathers weight as the tale proceeds. Her devotion to the family residence has already cheated him of higher education: `He had had to give up Oxford, and he and his mother had spent fifteen thousand pounds rebuilding Wotton Hall' (51). Her worry about the continuation of life at Wotton Hall screens a deeper anxiety: `he sought the cause of his mother's anxiety to see him married - Married to anybody, for it is not my happiness she seeks but her own ends' (48). Despite a strategic obtuseness, she is evidently aware of her son's orientation and seeks to suppress it. She is shown as a prompt and skilful liar, not least when it comes to lying to herself.
   
Moore again explores the procedures of self-mystification in the mother's brooding: `if she could convince Dr. Knight that marriage was the only safeguard in certain cases (she need not speak of her husband - it would be enough to say that though some young men might not like ladies they might like common women)... And so convincing did the story that she had prepared seem to her that she slept quietly that night' (65). Knight's assurance, `I don't think that you have any need to fear that he will contract any of the highly reprehensible relations to which you allude' (68), leaves her unsatisfied: `Feeling that Mrs. Monfert was about to say that she would sooner Hugh sinned and repented that that he should remain a chaste man, the prelate coughed, thereby saving her from the end of her sentence' (69).
 
Hugh's ramblings with the seventeen-year-old Percy are mostly in the spirit of boon companionship. But a quickening of intimacy, and on Hugh's side a note of passion, comes when Hugh tends to Percy who has been knocked unconscious by a blow: `To put Percy to bed was Hugh's task evidently... He fell upon his knees to pray that God might not take his friend from him... I pray thee, O my God, to spare his life, for I need him and cannot live without him.' (87-9). When Percy recovers, he says: `Hugh give me your hand; and the hand-clasp was not relaxed till Mrs. Jones brought in Percy's breakfast' (92). Another moment of intimacy is the scene in which the two sleep under the stars. The naturalness of homosexual instinct is lightly sketched: `A fish is happy in the water, a bird in the air, he said, and I have come into the circumstance in which I can be, perhaps, as happy as they' (123). Hugh admires Percy as he bathes: `so beautiful in his slimness that Hugh bethought himself of some early Italian sculpture imbued with the Greek spirit' (127).

When Hugh meets Percy's sister `he was not carried away at first sight, and missed a great many of the wonders he had been told he would find in her' (145). Nor is she convinced of his heterosexual ardour: `You don't like tapestry, Beatrice asked. Yes, I do, he answered, in a way. But only in a way, she said, as you like women'; `We shouldn't have got on so well as we did, at least not so quickly, if you hadn't known Percy first, or if you had not found a great deal of Percy in me' (154-5). His fantasy is ignited by Beatrice but drifts to Percy: `he sought to keep forbidden thoughts from his mind, thoughts of Beatrice and Percy - very often he could not tell of which he was thinking, and in his dreams they were often by him, singly and together' (163). The mother precipitates a proposal of marriage by spreading a rumour of their engagement. Hugh goes through with it: `he took her in his arms and kissed her on the cheek', then runs off to write some letters, leaving the two women `wearing, it seemed to him, a triumphant air' (165). A letter to Percy betrays self-alienation as painful as the scene in Gotterdammerung in which Siegfried disguised as Gunther betrays Brunnhilde:

Not believing myself to be an artist, as you are, I do not feel justified in withholding myself from the natural life of marriage. I might have done so if I hadn't met Beatrice, but I was fortunate enough to meet her, the only woman that I could have married, of that I am sure. (172)

Similar self-misunderstanding is worked through in the epistolary exchanges in The Lake (see Grubgeld 176, 220-1; O'Leary 1982). Like Fr Gogarty, Hugh is `searching for a vocabulary by which to interpret his life' (Grubgeld, 223).

Beatrice expresses her doubts: `He kissed me, Beatrice replied, as he might -- well, as he might have kissed you, Mrs. Monfert. I can't get it out of my head that there is something wrong' (ISS, 167). After the marriage Mrs Monfert is still uneasy: `Once a man is married, however, his whole nature changes, she thought' (174). She is summoned to Calais by a telegram, and the disappointed wife explains: `when he took me in his arms a change came over him and he almost put me away... He said he could never be any woman's husband... I think he said he could love me as a sister but not as a wife... For one moment it seems to Mrs. Monfert that she hated her son, and looking at the stricken girl she asked herself how it was that it befell her to bring such a man into the world' (177-8).

Hugh rushes to see Knight, and explains: `her womanly body was no help, only a hindrance, and the moments I spent with her were the most dreadful of my life' (182-3). Knight offers hollow reassurance; `every man,... who is not a brute, is seized with an excessive timidity on entering his wife's room for the first time... Go back to your wife and put your trust in Nature' (183). As Hugh proclaims the unalterability of his sexual desires (he has discovered he is in love with Percy), Knight urges chastity. Hugh replies:

how can one hate and abhor that which is part of oneself? ... You know I am not the first man who discovered himself to be as I am, averse from women. In the Bible --
   It is always condemned, the prelate interjected. (187)

Knight has suppressed his own homosexual feelings: `I loved my wife deeply, and in telling me your story you are only telling me my own, with this difference - that I did not run away' (183). Hugh dreams that Knight is travelling in North Africa: `But what brought the prelate to Laghouat? What instinct had tempted Dr. Knight into the desert?' (194). Knight leads him to a cafe in which an appointment has been made. The influence of Gide's L'immoraliste, another tale of an unquiet honeymoon, is detectable in the ensuing lines:

Are you seeking Osman Tahar, the Kurd's mignon? an attendant asked them. Before the prelate could reply a young Arab rose, graceful and indolent, out of the gloom in which he was seated and began to tell them of the difficulties he had had to overcome and the danger of coming to the cafe. He spoke French fluently, and stopping suddenly in his narrative he took Hugh's hand, saying: Amenez moi a Paris, je serai votre domestique et je vous aimerai bien. (195)

The French here recalls the tourist Italian in the banter between the narrator and a Sicilian boy in L'immoraliste: `Anche tu sei bello ragazzo' (Gide, 462). The story ends with a recollection of this dream:

he recalled the tone of the Arab voice, which he would know again. He felt sure that the words had been spoken but when they were spoken and where they were spoken and by whom they were spoken, he could never know, nor by what magic they had come into his dream. (ISS, 197)

Compare the last page of L'immoraliste:

Cet enfant qui, devant les etrangers, se fait sauvage, est avec moi tendre et fidele comme un chien... Elle [the boy's sister] rit et plaisante de ce que je lui prefere l'enfant. Elle pretend que c'est lui qui surtout me retient ici. Peut-etre a-t-elle un peu raison... (Gide, 472)

But if Gide's protagonist is presented as a criminal, and his new life as haunted by fear and guilt, Hugh Monfert seems rather to relax naturally into his freedom, with scant regard for the distress of his abandoned bride. Indeed, there is a touch of comedy; Moore may be parodying Gide here as the scene of the embarrassing kiss parodies Parsifal (cf. HF, 159: `But would you have yelled as he did when Kundry tried to kiss him?').

Yet Hugh's declaration of revolt, worthy of Stephen Dedalus, is not undercut by this irony: `Ideas, principles, beliefs, he said, are lashed into us by our mothers, our fathers, by priests, schoolmasters, and our lives are spent going through our tricks, our antics, in fear and trembling, till the original wild instinct breaks out in us and we fall upon our trainers and rend them' (ISS, 197). The story could not have been continued beyond this point without turning Hugh into a different character, or showing how this assertion of anarchic desire is tempered by compromises with his old self. The priest in The Lake is conveniently abandoned at the same moment of transition.

The climax of `Hugh Monfert' does not redeem its longueurs by a retrospective revelation that Moore has not dropped a single stitch, but we are sent back to read it from the beginning and to appreciate its analysis of the conspiracy of self-deception generated by the taboo on homosexuality, so intense in post-Wilde England.
   
`Albert Nobbs' (1927) and the Question of Essentialism

`Albert Nobbs', 1927, plays fast and loose with gender-identity in a way that seems closer to Wilde's `constructionism' than to Gide's `essentialism', in that sexual desire seems less a matter of inborn instinct than of assumed mask. In contrast with the determinism Moore elsewhere borrows from Spinoza: `If the stone rolling down the hill were to become conscious, it would think it was rolling itself' (Memoirs of my Dead Life, 96), the carnival of `Albert Nobbs' reveals the conventionality of gender roles (see Grubgeld 97-102). Elizabeth Grubgeld claims that Moore:

exhibits considerable confusion as to the origins of what he can only call an `instinctual' rejection of heterosexual norms... In `Mildred Lawson' and `Hugh Monfert' he attributes to `instinct' a meaning inconsistent with his other writing and that, as an assertion of sexual essentialism, suppresses further analysis of the origins and nature of their sexuality. (Grubgeld, 92)

Her argument draws on Michel Foucault:

Moore's liberationist model of `natural love' follows exactly the line of argument Michel Foucault traces to a fundamental misapprehension of the relationship between power and sexuality... Foucault argues that the discourses of sexuality may themselves be created by the forces of power (power being here imagined as dispersed among many facets of a given society). In the light of such a critique, the role of transgressive hero, which Moore cultivated since his early years in Paris, would be very difficult to affirm. The definition of the self through repudiation of national origin depended upon his myth of autogeny, and in particular, the belief that his own discourse of nature was itself natural and unique. (Grubgeld, 224)

Against this, one should note that Foucault himself, when asked if he queries the `distinction between an innate predisposition to homosexuality and social conditioning', replies: `I have strictly nothing to say on that point. No comment... I do not think it useful to speak of things that are beyond my area of competence' (Foucault 1994, 321).

Grubgeld quotes a passage from Conversations in Ebury Street, 1930:

I submit that it is rare to approach life except through interpretative glosses: glosses learnt by heart before any attempt is made to read the text... The Dean of St. Paul's knows, too, that sodomy is essentially a Christian sin. He knows that the Greeks... married to continue the race but did not love their wives except in rare instances, yet modern conventions might compel him to advocate or at least to acquiesce in the persecution of those afflicted with abnormal love. (Grubgeld, 93)

She comments:

The idea of culturally perpetuated `interpretative glosses' by which the body is read differently in various historical periods here opposes the notion that certain individuals are `afflicted' with various forms of desire; typically, we find Moore straddling a middle ground between explanations. (Grubgeld, 93)

But there is no deep inconsistency here. In claiming that homosexual love flourished while heterosexual love languished under the social conditions of Greek culture, Moore is not abandoning the idea that sexual orientation is an instinctual given. The `text' is the given sexual disposition, the `gloss' is the ideology that occludes it. Moore's studies of how homophobic taboo blocks access to sexual self-understanding (as when Hugh's mother instils in him the fear of Hell, ISS, 138-40) echo theorists who `argued for the congenital rather than the environmental origins of sexual orientation'. To call this `deterministic essentialism' (Grubgeld, 93) commits one to the implausible alternative that Norton's or Monfert's homosexuality is a product of their environment. Postmodernist fashion could easily slide into homophobia, ascribing to their sexuality rather than society's view of it the status of an interpretative gloss. (On `sodomy' as a `Christian sin' see Jordan, 1997.)

                                                                                      Joseph S. O'Leary

REFERENCES
Works of George Moore:
   The Brook Kerith: A Syrian Story. Penguin Books, 1952.
   C = Celibates. London: Walter Scott, 1895.
   HF = Hail and Farewell, ed. Richard Cave. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1985.
   ISS = In Single Strictness. Carra Edition. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923; repr. Kyoto: Rinsen, 1983.
   MA = A Mere Accident. London: Vizetelly, 1887.
   Memoirs of My Dead Life. Carra Edition, 1923.
   The Untilled Field. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1990.

Others:
Foucault, Michel (1994)
   Dits et Ecrits 1954-1988, IV. Ed. Daniel Defert and Francois Ewald.
Gide, Andre (1958)
   Romans. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade.
Grey, Tony (1996)
   A Peculiar Man: A Life of George Moore. London: Sinclair-Stevenson.
Grubgeld, Elizabeth (1994)
   George Moore and the Autogenous Self. Syracuse University Press.
Hone, Joseph (1936)
   The Life of George Moore. New York: Macmillan.
Jordan, Mark (1997)
   The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology. University of Chicago Press.
Leonard, Garry M. (1993)
   Reading `Dubliners' Again: A Lacanian Perspective. Syracuse University
   Press.
Mitchell, Susan L. (1916)
   George Moore. Dublin and London: Maunsel.
Noel, Jean C. (1966)
   George Moore: l'homme et l'oeuvre. Paris: Marcel Didier.
O'Leary, Joseph S. (1982)
   `Father Bovary', in The Way Back: George Moore's `The Untilled Field'
   and `The Lake', ed. Robert Welch. Dublin: Wolfhound; Totowa, NJ: Barnes
   and Noble, pp. 105-18.
Owens, Graham, ed. (1968)
   George Moore's Mind and Art. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd.

From The Harp 12 (1997)

Introduction to George Moore (1852-1933)

  The study of literature has been impoverished by excessive concentration on the big names and neglect of the minor figures in the background. There are a thousand superfluous essays on Shakespeare for every one on the neglected but fascinating dramas of contemporaries and successors such as Jonson, Webster, Massinger, Middleton and Ford. There are a thousand essays on Yeats, Joyce or Beckett for every one on George Moore, and even the little critical attention Moore has received has tended to focus on his personality, often in a gossipy or prurient manner, rather than on his thought or his immense literary achievement. If we broaden our outlook, and take the entire landscape of Irish literature in English into view, Moore emerges as a seminal figure whose influence spreads far and wide. His early novel of the landlord class, A Drama in Muslin, sets a tone taken up in the ‘Big House’ novels of Elizabeth Bowen, Jennifer Johnston and Molly Keane. His dramas are at the heart of the Irish theatrical revival centred on the Abbey Theatre. His comic autobiographies lie behind Joyce’s Ulysses, the witty memoirs of Oliver St. John Gogarty. He is the father, along with Chekhov, of the Irish short story, a genre distinguished by the exquisite work of Frank O’Connor, Sean O’Faolain, Mary Lavin and many other delightful writers. But Moore is seminal also as one who brought into English literature the most advanced currents in the French literature of his time, beginning with his early Pagan Poems, which make Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal a presence in English verse, and going on to draw on Flaubert, Zola, Huysmans and the Goncourts in a series of novels that brought Naturalism and Decadence to the Victorian reading public.   

  Neglect of Moore is perhaps partly due to the nationalistic character of much current criticism of Irish literature. Moore was too inclined to make fun of his native land, and too much at home in Paris and London, to win the warm appreciation of post-colonialist critics whose audiences expect the ‘national question’ and the ancient oppression of Ireland to be treated in tones of unrelieved solemnity. As one of the first Senators of the Free State, Moore’s brother was a hate-object of the unreconciled Republican opposition and Moore’s birthplace, Moore Hall, was burnt by the IRA in 1923, one of many Big Houses destroyed in this way in the twenties. Nationalist dislike of Moore is reinforced by sexual Puritanism and by religious orthodoxy. Moore came of the small minority of Roman Catholic families in the landlord class, but he publicly renounced his church in a flamboyant letter to the Irish Times in 1900 and joined the (Anglican) Church of Ireland. Politically, morally, and religiously, Moore was identified by his sensitive compatriots as a mocker, and was himself made an object of constant mockery in turn. He shielded himself against this by his own self-mockery, and achieved a remarkable triumph of humour over pettiness in his sunny and serene memoir, Hail and Farewell, the work that most attractively establishes his portrait for posterity.

　 The rather misty, if not marshy, sensibility of George Moore is a product of Mayo soil, but it was in Paris that he was born as a writer, though he had gone there under the misconception that he was to be a painter. In Paris Moore’s Protean nature revealed itself both in his receptivity to aesthetic influences and his capacity to mingle with the world, striking up friendships with such giants as Zola, Manet and Mallarmé. His courtship of the muse was no less adroit and persistent. Yet though it produced a vast oeuvre, there hangs about it an air of disappointment. The final consecration won by his detested rivals, Hardy, Conrad, and James, was withheld. His was not a name to launch a thousand monographs and a million exam questions. But he is sufficiently central to English and Irish literary history to draw a constant trickle of visitors to his neglected temple, where they may still stumble on undiscovered delights.

Haunted by the unattainable perfection of Madame Bovary and steeped in the psychological and environmental realism of the naturalists and decadents, Moore, in his first public role as the inventor of the English realistic novel, did not conceal his contempt for the conventionality, prudishness and artlessness of Victorian fiction. It was not literary sophistication, however, but his own abundant powers of observation that allowed him to import successfully the techniques of the French masters. The best of the early novels, and the most gripping for Irish readers, is A Drama in Muslin (1886, revised as Muslin in 1915). A tale of Ascendancy girls in search of suitable husbands is set against the background of the Land League agitation; Austenesque delicacy in Flaubertian counterpoint to Zolaesque animality. Moore was a chronic reviser of his own writing, and a comparison of the two versions of this novel would be of particular interest. The second version comes after his stint in Ireland as a pillar of the Literary Renaissance (from 1901 to 1911). One might trace the degree to which it tones down his earlier aversion to Ireland, as expressed also in Parnell and his Island (1887), which he had disowned as ‘mere gabble’ (Hail and Farewell).

　 His youth at Moore Hall in a world centered on racing supplied rich material for the horsy elements in Esther Waters (1894). The racing scenes there are depicted in a manner that realizes,if only in the medium of words, Moore’s early ambition to be a painter. Its account of the frustrations of a single mother battling Victorian bureaucracy and moralism is painfully convincing. Its marked Englishness and its focus on an eponymous heroine (compare Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Tess of the D'Urbervilles) may have helped give this novel the ‘classic’ status it enjoyed. Nowadays it is rather an absentee from the canon of English fiction. Esther is too little crushed by her woes to attain the tragic grandeur of Tess or Emma Bovary. Moore was impeded by excess of sympathy with her, though in A Mummer's Wife (1885), when the French influence was still fresh, he had come closer to the ruthless sadism with which Flaubert and Hardy treat their creatures. The sedulous and weighty account of the life of the pottery, the heroine’s seduction, and her bumpy ride with the travelling theatrical company she takes up with make this an authoritative novel, even if it holds out little urgent attraction for readers today. This makes it just the kind of novel that most deserves the services of the literary critic, who can bring out excellences neglected by the impatient reading public. But perhaps the best way to save all of Moore’s output is to regard it, in Goethe’s phrase, as ‘fragments of a great confession’ and to carry further the psychological delving that most commentators on Moore have attempted. My own hypothesis is that he writes as a psychological orphan: he spent his time with the stable labourers as a boy and seems to have suffered parental neglect; the protagonists of The Lake or ‘So on he fares’ and the uprooted exiles of other stories in The Untilled Field all seem cut off from family context; the mother in the John Norton stories is cold, manipulative and oppressive, whereas the idealization of motherhood in Esther Waters suggests that Moore is seeking to fill a lack in himself, to mother himself into being; his capacity to empathize with dissatisfied and frustrated women (in Muslin, A Mummer’s Wife, Evelyn Innes) no doubt reflects his quest for an affective harbour that eluded him.

　 In this regard, special interest attaches to a string of minor works in which Moore used his cousin Edward Martyn as copy for the analysis of a homosexual temperament: A Mere Accident (1887), ‘John Norton’ in Celibates (1895), along with its revision as ‘Hugh Monfert’ in In Single Strictness (1922). These aim at a Huysmanesque psychological finesse, but fail to carry their full punch; the narration meanders dreamily. This vein is more felicitously exploited in the sly comedy of Hail and Farewell (1911-14) or when the homosexual protagonist reappears as Joseph of Arimathea in The Brook Kerith (1916), knit into the larger tapestry of a plot later imitated by D. H. Lawrence (‘The Man who Died’) and Nikos Kazantzakis (The Last Temptation of Christ). Moore rewrote the end of ‘Hugh Monfert’ between the London and New York editions of 1922 (failing to adjust the pagination in the table of contents accordingly). In the New York edition the protagonist at last casts off the shackles of family and church to indulge a Gidean dream of erotic encounter with Arab boys. One can hear Moore chortle with satisfaction as he cocks a snook at the nannyism and censorship that had blocked realism in English literature and that had made him fell like an Ishmael or a Cain in the English literary world. But even here one is left with an impression of second-hand literary pastiche. It is only when Moore indulges a riotous, carnivalesque sense of humour in the transvestite story, ‘Albert Nobbs’ (Celibate Lives, 1927) that he can handle the topics of sexual heterodoxy in a fresh and individual way.

Moore’s primary concern in these fictions is not, however, comedy (though it will keep breaking in), but liberation from the constrictions of social convention. The New York version of ‘Hugh Monfert’ strikes this note: ‘Ideas, principles, beliefs, he said, are lashed into us by our mothers, our fathers, by priests, schoolmasters, and our lives are spend going through our tricks, our antics, in fear and trembling, till the original wild instinct breaks out in us and we fall upon our trainers and rend them’. Here sounds, in the characteristic rather naïve accents of Moore, the gospel of self-fulfilment also preached by Samuel Butler (The Way of All Flesh), E. M. Forster, Gide, Lawrence and Joyce. But Moore as a liberator has failed to stir the world; instead there has been much petty speculation on the erotic experience, or lack of it, from which his fictions grow. A full appreciation of Moore’s intellectual range and of his insight into the human comedy has been impeded by this reductive biographical focus. But perhaps if the biography were pursued more subtly, in a mapping of its most basic psychological or psychoanalytical dynamics, a coherence between the various achievements and failures, convictions and postures, farces and melodramas that make up the Moore kaleidoscope might begin to emerge.

　 To hear the worst about Moore one may turn to Yeats's ‘Dramatis Personae’ (in Autobiographies). Here we meet a noisy, impulsive, egotistic and irresponsible gossip, ill-bred, ill-read, and wallowing in ‘now sentimental, now promiscuous amours, the main matter of his talk’. ‘It is so hard not to trust him, yet he is quite untrustworthy. He has what Talleyrand calls “the terrible gift of familiarity”’. The Moore blood was coarsened, Yeats coarsely tells us, because as Catholics they were forced to marry peasants. But Moore Hall was not quite the wilderness Yeats imagines. Moore recalls his grandfather, author of a lost history of the French Revolution: ‘He stops short almost in the middle of a sentence, and I can see him in my thoughts staring at the lake, associating it in some dim way with his own loneliness’. As a boy Moore would read for hours in the old man's library, with its ‘view of the lake winding sadly mile after mile by low shores’ (Conversations in Ebury Street, ch. 5).

　 The spontaneous, insinuating Moore, unable to flatter, was a thorn in the side to all who took themselves too seriously, and his irreverence cost him dear. There is a credibility gap between Yeats’s remarks, ‘He spoke badly and much in a foreign tongue, read nothing... I doubt if he had read a play of Shakespeare’s even at the end of his life’, and Moore's droll Paris lecture on Shakespeare and Balzac, written in an easy French (Conversations in Ebury Street, ch. 4); could Yeats read it with ease? But amid his strictures, Yeats singles out as ‘great novels’ A Mummer's Wife, Esther Waters, Sister Teresa (1901), Muslin and The Lake (1905, greatly improved in the second revision of 1921), counting the latter two, which are set in Ireland, as ‘masterpieces’. Sister Teresa is the sequel to Evelyn Innes, which Yeats perhaps leaves unmentioned because in one of its versions a principal character is a caricature of Yeats himself. This saga of an opera singer who tires of profane love and takes refuge in the religious life probably contains valuable material for those who would like to define Moore’s psychological profile. Even Moore’s ‘great novels’, Yeats added, ‘gained nothing from their style’. A ‘misunderstanding of his powers’, a misguided search for a ‘charm and rhythm’ for which he was unfitted, condemned Moore to wrap himself in the shroud of Pater in other works, presumably The Brook Kerith or Heloise and Abelard (1921), which was admired and imitated by Jun’ichirô Tanizaki, or A Story-Teller's Holiday (19　), another autobiographical jaunt in which Moore jousts with a seanachie (storyteller) in relating tales from Kuno Meyer, the German Celtic scholar.

　 No doubt Moore’s success as a stylist inadequately repays the labour it cost him, labour all the greater in that he seems to have suffered, like Yeats himself, from some variety of dyslexia. It is reported that even at the height of his renown for style and technique his first drafts were an ungrammatical chaos. But without the striving for style Moore would not have been Moore, a man assembling his striking literary personality out of disordered fragments. Style triumphs in the last version of The Lake, which gives voice to the innermost lyrical core of his imagination. Lake Carra, the site of Moore's birthplace and of his grave, with its meandering outlines and changing hues, murmurs in the background of all his writing, in the fleeting lyrical moments of Esther Waters for example. But in The Lake this childhood landscape becomes a glorious symbol of the riddle of life, as Father Gogarty circles it in fretful meditation until at last he plunges naked into its baptismal embrace, to assume a new life on the other side. The scene is echoed in Forster's The Longest Journey, another novel of existential confusion, self-division and the quest for liberation. Should any phenomenological literary critic map Moore's imaginative world, its centre would be the image of the lake. The protagonist murmurs: ‘There is a lake in every man's heart,... and he listens to its monotonous whisper year after year, more and more attentive till at last he ungirds’. The apparent shallowness of a world of impulse and indecision would in certain lights turn out to have its own precious integrity. When Moore’s stylistic fumblings touch that ‘unchanging, silent life within every man that none knows but himself’ (‘Home Sickness’ in The Untilled Field, 1903), something magical happens and his name acquires the lustre of a poet's.

   There is perhaps a tension between the aesthetic dimension of The Lake – its lyrical style, its psychological introspection, its symbolism and its musical structure (use of Wagnerian leitmotifs and a structure that can be analyzed as a sonata movement, with exposition, development, reprise and coda), on the one hand, and its wish to comment on church and society in Ireland, on the other. The latter element is less convincing and is largely erased in the final version. This novel was originally intended as the concluding story of The Untilled Field, a collection in the manner of Turgenev’s A Sportman’s Sketches, originally published in an Irish language translation, in which there is a piquant to-and-fro between the register of humour and satire and that of poignant evocation.

The longest story in the collection, ‘The Wild Goose’, gives a portrayal of Irish rural life through the bemused eyes of an Irish-born American journalist, which like similar material in ‘Home Sickness’ has documentary interest today. Again the story centers on a romance: ‘But it was her eyes that fascinated Ned at the time and ever afterwards; long after he had bidden her goodbye for ever he saw her turquoise eyes looking at him through a blue veil’ (compare ‘Home Sickness’: ‘a woman’s soul looked at Bryden out of her soft Irish eyes’). The failure of the romance and the long perspective of nostalgia are established even before the romance has begun (‘ever afterwards’, ‘long after’, ‘for ever’) and the reader acquainted with Bryden’s treatment of Margaret in ‘Home Sickness’ expects to see the naive and patriotic Ellen lose her heart in an affair doomed to early blight because of Ned’s ambivalence about Ireland: ‘He could just distinguish the sluggish roll of the Dublin mountains, dim and grey, and he asked himself if he would like to live in this queer, empty country, accepting its destiny as part of his destiny, the last remnant of barbarous Europe petering out, notwithstanding all Ellen might say to the contrary’. But Ellen captures Ned, as symbolized by her catching a trout, whereas Margaret was depicted, by the symbolism of Bryden’s hooking of a frog, as a helpless victim. Ned accepts the political role she designs for him, but gives it an anticlerical twist that undermines their marriage. Ellen faces the situation stoically, murmuring ‘I will conquer this’, while with the fickle blitheness typical of Moore’s male protagonists, Ned slips away. The story ends on a bitter-sweet note: ‘If he had stayed he would have come to accept all the base moral coinage in circulation; and he stood watching the green waves tossing in the mist, at one moment ashamed of what he had done, at the next overjoyed that he had done it’. The story is a pallid expansion of ‘Home Sickness’, desultory in its pacing, without a tight or gripping development, and in its lack of passion it squanders the romantic potency of the other story. Its image of Ireland, too, remains drab, in contrast to the other story’s closing image of ‘the green hillside, and the bog lake and the rushes about it, and the greater lake in the distance, and behind it the blue line of wandering hills’. Whereas Flaubert’s realism is crushing and Zola’s naturalism involves high melodrama, Moore’s realism too often flattens the contours of his characters and plots, drowning them in banal details, and sabotages his aesthetic effort as well.

　 Beside the naturalist and the stylist, Moore has a third, perhaps stronger literary persona. As a novelist he worked in the shadow of unsurpassable models, but, he boasted, ‘I can write auto-biography as well as anyone that has yet written it’. Yeats was not well placed to enjoy Moore's autobiographical writings, in which he transforms all his social failings into literary virtues. They are stupendous outpourings of personal and literary gossip, punctuated by occasional sighs of the lakeside dreamer concealed behind the comedian and satirist. These works are pervaded by a quiet self-mockery and a fund of good humour little appreciated by the objects of his unconscionable ridicule. The character of a buffoon was thrust upon him by the bitter tongues of Dublin, and he triumphed by assuming the role of court jester and playing it to the hilt in his autobiographical compositions. The role allowed him to blurt out indiscreet truths, including sexual innuendos, and his denigrators tried to respond in kind, producing volumes would-be witty gossip about Moore, to the detriment of serious appreciation of his art. Henry James is reported as declaring, to a hostess who had thrust them into one another’s company, that he had never met anyone ‘as unimportantly dull as Mr. George Moore’. All readers of Moore will know what he meant. But Moore, at his best, could turn the dullest events and thoughts into scintillating comedy, by a whimsical, seemingly distracted treatment reminiscent of Sterne’s manner in A Sentimental Journey. The humour is mixed with a light play of sentiment, and this vein of sentiment is siphoned off to provide the rather elegiac mood of his fiction, which can easily drop into inert prosiness, and which becomes hollow melodrama when he tries to raise it to the pitch of passion. But in the relaxed medium of autobiography he can allows his impulses to play back and forth like spring breezes, in a pellucid style that well that matches the ingenuous radiance of twentieth century Ireland’s literary springtime, and that magnifies even as it mocks.

The entertainment bubbles on generously in Avowals (1919) and with diminished spate in Conversations in Ebury Street (1924), both from Moore's later years as a fuddy-duddy literary bachelor in London. When Moore pursues some literary McGuffin, such as the thesis that Catholicism is inimical to literature, or that the English novel is not the full shilling, he frankly deplores lacunae in his reading and memory, gives the autobiographical context of the scraps he remembers, and eagerly begs his scholarly visitors for further information; and somehow in the course of this amateurish floundering he strikes off one startling and persuasive literary judgement after another. Avowals is not less rich in insight than Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927); indeed it is a crystalline stream beside Forster’s fussy swamp. The quality of the entertainment varies with the dialogue companion Moore puts on stage; the best supporting roles are played by his brother Colonel Maurice Moore, Edward Martyn and Sir Edmund Gosse.

　 If Moore Hall is rebuilt, it could become a centre for international Moore scholarship. This is likely to be a thriving concern, given Moore's chameleonic diversity as a switchboard of literary influences both received and transmitted, the centrality yet elusiveness of his literary presence, and the complexity created by his revisions (seven different versions of The Untilled Field). The most comprehensive critical study is Jean C. Noël, George Moore: l'homme et l'oeuvre (Paris: Marcel Didier, 1966). The fullest biographies are Joseph Hone, The Life of George Moore (Macmillan, 1936) and Adrian Frazier, George Moore, 1852-1933 (Yale University Press, 2000). I lauded the latter on the Amazon.com site in the following terms: ‘Unlike Yeats, Joyce, or James, George Moore did not have a strong and confident sense of his own identity, and has in consequence remained a rather dim and shadowy figure on the literary landscape of his time. Frazier has succeeded uncannily in getting inside Moore's skin, almost to the point of understanding him better than he understood himself. For the first time the many divergent facets of Moore's career come together in a coherent and gripping narrative. We see that though his enthusiasms, literary loyalties, and amorous propensities were as changeable as the clouds above Lake Carra, Moore was tenacious in a Quixotic quest for truth and freedom. His witty, indiscreet conversation, still so fresh in the pages of Hail and Farewell, Avowals, and Conversations in Ebury Street, was calculated to puncture many a pompous ego. A master of ridicule, he was repaid in kind. But a lifetime of struggle against British philistinism, Irish parochialism, and French cliqueishness cannot be written off as mere clowning. Moore often let himself down, yet his achievement as a whole deserves the epithet “heroic”. Had Irish Catholics and Nationalists, in particular, listened to his enlightened critique, they might have spared themselves a century of repression, mystification, and violence. Frazier illuminates Moore's sexuality (especially his relationships with Pearl Craigie and Lady Cunard) with Starr-like thoroughness. This serves to enhance our appreciation of his fiction: masterpieces such as Muslin, The Lake (1921 version), and In Single Strictness take on a new glow as we discover the erotic humus from which they spring, while the lesser or flawed works take on new interest as fragments of a great confession. Frazier has buried the George Moore of stale gossip and caricature and replaced it with a portrait as distinguished as Manet’s on the front cover – a portrait securely grounded in wide-ranging historical research’. My enthusiasm was not shared by another reader, who claimed that the biography continues the tradition of diminishing Moore by focussing on his sexual life and failing to take seriously his intellectual contributions, for instance in the field of art criticism. Among critical studies, the following may be recommended: Malcolm Brown, George Moore: A Reconsideration (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1955); George Owens, ed., George Moore's Mind and Art (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970); Richard Allen Cave, A Study of the Novels of George Moore (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1978); Robert Welch, ed., The Way Back: George Moore's The Untilled Field and The Lake (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1982); Elizabeth Grubgeld, George Moore and the Autogenous Self (Syracuse University Press, 1994). Elizabeth McConnell’s valuable discussion of the ‘John Norton’ stories, ‘Give me a passion for God or man...’: A Study of George Moore's Celibates Series, 1895-1927 (MA thesis, University College Galway, 1992), confirms my own findings in ‘George Moore between Zola and Gide: The Case of “John Norton”’, The Harp 12 (1997), pp. 90-102. The review English Literature in Transition has many articles on Moore and there are four entries in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. See also: Brendan Fleming, Rethinking the Cultural Politics of George Moore (Diss., Oxford, 2002); John Montague, The Figure in the Cave and other essays (Dublin: Lilliput, 1989); Robert Welch, Changing States: Transformations in Modern Irish Writing (Routledge, 1993); Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics (Granta, 2001).

                                                                             Joseph S. O'Leary