George Moore , novelist. George Moore, 1852-1933 By ADRIAN FRAZIER Yale University Press ....When Father Lavelle had finished his panegyric, and the mallet blows of Michael Malia, the estate mason, closed the vault, young George (as he later constructed the scene) felt the eyes of the multitude upon him, before they dispersed to their cottages in Derrynanny, Ballyhoolly, and Ballintubber. He conjectured, using a steeplechase image for the national struggle, that they were all wondering "how much of my father's talent I had inherited, and if I would take up the running at the point he had dropped out of the race." He was not ashamed to admit that he felt no kinship with the tenants, nor were they to feel any with him. There was no denying that "in those days we looked on our tenants as animals, and they looked on us as kings." They lived in hovels, and came twice a year to pay their rent, taking out of their tall hats banknotes dirty with sweat and soil. Most of them could not speak English, and when he was a child, George recalled always having been afraid of them: he used to run into the woods when he saw the women coming up from Derrynanny with the men's dinners. On Sundays at the Carnacun chapel the family in its carriage would pass by the men in knee breeches, frieze coats, and stovepipe hats; inside the church, the men sat on one side, the women hiding their faces behind shawls on the other, while from the family pew the boy stared down on a grinning dwarf, a blind girl, and other people strange in the young master's eyes. During the sermon Father James Browne threatened them all in Irish with hellfire, making the women fall to knees and beat their breasts. GM claimed to have wondered what would happen should they meet their tenants in heaven: would the men doff their hats, and say, "Long life to yer honor?" Would the women curtsey? In the days after the funeral, they paid the heir all respects; indeed, he mischievously boasted that a woman came to the door with a donkey, laden with two creels of chickens, and her daughter, shyly hiding behind a shawl. Both the girl and the birds were an offering to the new master of Moore Hall, but he had seen, Moore later wrote, the women of London with their kits off, as painted by his uncle Jim Browne, and would have none of the shy girl. In contrast to his father's remarkable identification with his Catholic tenants, George Moore confessed that he felt for them only bewilderment, fear, and repulsion. While the tenants wondered in what way the new master would plead their cause, George Moore was becoming conscious of the fact that he had just become owner of the one of the 300 largest estates in Ireland, heir to £3,596 a year; for him, that meant that he was now free to enjoy life as he pleased. In Confessions of a Young Man, GM wrote that while he followed the hearse, the feeling of strange and horrible pleasure came back to him, and it dawned on him that his father's death "gave me the power to create myself" — that is to say, to create a complete and powerful self out of the partial self which was all that the restraint of home had permitted: "This future self, this idea George Moore, beckoned me, lured like a ghost; and as I followed the funeral the question, `Would I sacrifice this ghostly self, if by so doing I should bring my father back?' presented itself without intermission, and I shrank horrified at the answer." George Moore's inability to achieve a condition of mourning at the death of his most admirable father was more than an instance of the shocking inability of humans at all times to grieve as they should like to grieve. He could not believe that he was really the boy that had grown up as this father's son, one who from the start never measured up. Later in life he tried to understand how it was that he could never fully believe in himself, and, while truculent and bombastic to others, was himself inwardly trembling, "shy as a wren in the hedgerow or a mouse along the wainscotting." He wondered whether he was born that way, or made that way, and he traced his self-doubt back to how his parents treated him in childhood. One of his earliest memories was of Honor King, an old woman who periodically came begging at the door of Moore Hall; his parents used to joke that he would certainly end up marrying Honor King, and then they would all laugh. This became a family joke, to be repeated again and again to his confusion and their delight. He realised why they thought it was funny: "the joke rested on the assumption that I was such an ugly little boy nobody else would marry me." It is not wise of parents, the grown man reflected on the life of the growing boy, to make a youngster feel himself to be an inferior person. But he was not only made to see himself as a slope-shouldered, droopy-eyed, silly-looking child (taking after his mother, as a matter of fact), he also was made to feel stupid. Back from Parliament in 1857 and deep into Moore Hall and its stables again, GM's father employed a woman as a governess whom Moore calls "Miss Westby" in his memoirs. It was her job to teach young George to read. Two years later, when the boy was seven, his father picked up an early edition of Burke's speeches, and asked George to read a few pages out loud, but he had not got very far when he ran up against double s's printed like long f's, and faltered, to the alarm of his father, who marched in Miss Westby and his mother for a conference about his backward heir — why, he himself could read The Times by the time he was four. This trial was such an ordeal that his son recalled it in three different books of recollections. After George Moore grew up, he often asked his mother if he really had been so stupid as a child, but he could never get a straight answer out of her. After the trauma of failing the reading examination, the boy was evidently left largely alone again to play with his spinning top on the gray and blue tiles of the entrance hall to the big house; to steal grapes from the greenhouse; to hunt the laundry cat as if it were a hare or squirrel, knocking it from a tree and beheading it with boyish savagery, using his jackknife; to shoot the seagulls on the lake (such lust to kill as astonished him later); or to climb the beech by the stable-yard to watch Fright, the stallion, cover a mare. Sometimes his father would tell George stories of the Far East while he shaved, or row out with the family to Castle Carra for a picnic, where father would recite Walter Scott's Marmion to mother, but mostly the boys seem to have been left alone, like wild young beasts, the pups of WolfDog Moore, set among a flock of deferential sheep. In July 1861, when George was nine years old, he went over with his mother, father, and the racehorse Croaghpatrick to Cliff's racing stable, where — as noted earlier in this chapter — they left him behind and followed Croaghpatrick to his Goodwood and Chester victories. The winnings enabled George Henry Moore to begin to look after his firstborn's education, or to employ another to do so. He took him from Cliff's stables to his alma mater, St Mary's College, Oscott, a Catholic boarding school outside Birmingham, and left him there, the youngest of 150 boys. Master George was accustomed to large liberties and to having to do a lot to capture the attention of rather negligent adults. In an early incident in Dublin, he had thrown his clothes in the hawthorns of a park, and danced naked up the avenue out of reach of his nursemaid. This was not the way to get on in school. The first day, told to be quiet on the march to the rectory, he turned to his neighbor and asked in a loud voice why the priest told him he wasn't to talk. After lunch, he offered to fight the smallest boy he could find ("it seemed to me a fine thing"), and got pummeled. By 1864, a few winters, many floggings, iridescent beef, and cheese like soap or decayed cork had all conspired to break down his health. Apparently he could read, because he recalls lying in the sickroom with his companions in whooping cough, trying to read Lord Lytton's The Last of the Barons. He failed to make anything of the plot, until he discovered that his schoolmates advanced his marker twenty pages every time he left the room. But he certainly could not spell, to judge from his lonely letters home, asking for food packages, new clothes, and news of the racehorses. He remained at Oscott, hungry and unhappy, until a lung infection sent him home for all of 1864, setting back the course of an education that had not yet gone anywhere. Back at Moore Hall, he was tutored by the Carnacun parish priest, Father James Browne, a tall gaunt man with tufted nostrrils, who was able to appreciate the distinctions between the Iliad in Greek and in Irish (Archbishop MacHale's translation), and between the virtues of Caesar for a landlord's son, and the dangers of Propertius (GM was eager, he says, to read the latter). One morning Father Browne told the boy that he would some day give up all his sports for the classics, and GM rode home in elation. When he told his mother this priestly oracle, she treated it like a joke, so he did the same. It may also have been during his Moore Hall sojourn of 1864 that another augury in his life occurred, recalled in Confessions of a Young Man, when he stole away from the schoolroom to the library and found a pocket edition of Shelley, which opened, with the magic of sortilege, at "The Sensitive Plant." For months later he read the little book, comprehending little, yet loving a great deal. Knowledge for GM was something better stolen by the student, than administered to him. He often also recalled an earlier theft, the one that had ultimately led him to Shelley. He had been riding in the great family coach along a narrow Mayo road; opposite him and his sleepy little brother in their smart clothes, his parents were talking about a novel, Lady Audley's Secret (published in 1862 by William Tinsley, who was to publish GM's first novel A Modern Lover in 1883): did Lady Audley murder her husband, or did he escape alive? Once they returned to Moore Hall, young George lost no time in stealing M. E. Braddon's hugely popular sensation novel about a woman with a past. When abandoned by her first husband, Lady Audley had been forced to foster out their child and turn to bigamy to support herself. By and by, her first husband returns, and she schemes to dump him down a well, but he crawls out with a broken arm, years later to return from foreign travels yet once more. GM's own fascination may have been with Lady Audley's nephew Robert, an idle flăaneur living in the Temple near London's Fleet Street, not much attracted to women, but very much a friend of her first husband. It is he who traces the crimes of Lady Audley. GM buried himself in whatever novels of M. E. Braddon he could lay his hands on, until he found in The Doctor's Wife a heroine who loved Shelley and Byron, and through their names as through magical portals, he says that the romance of unintelligble poetry came over him. In January 1865, a month before his thirteenth birthday, he was sent back to Oscott, this time with his younger brother Maurice, and he came armored with Shelley against the priests. He continued his education by caprice, reading novels and poems, and refused to study by rule. After a year's tuition there, J. Spencer Northcote, the principal, wrote to G. E. Moore on 22 December after the boys had returned to Moore Hall for Christmas. He reported that Maurice, with greater application, might do well, but he hardly knew what to say about George. There was one other case in the school almost as bad, but that boy was improving. There were ructions between George and his father through the holidays. When George returned in January to Oscott, he was under orders to write his father three-page letters every day in order to prove his progress in spelling and composition. Within weeks, he earned a paternal reprimand for not writing on schedule. GM answered it in a battling spirit on 25 January (the misspellings are George's at fourteen years of age): "I did not willfully disobey your commands ... I could not as it was quite impossible for me to do it every day if you will only try it for a week or two you will find it more difficult that you expect just you write me thee pages every dad you will soon get puzzled about you could say to fill up the three pages keep my poket money if you will but cant keep me here during the vay [vacation][sic]." Anyway, he ended, he was making rapid progress and would soon know how to "spill" perfectly. The letter, two pages long, not three, brought further scolding from G. H. Moore, but Master George was still bucking under the saddle. It was no good being cross, he lectured his father. Why didn't his father just correct his mistakes, and return the letter, so GM could learn? George could then write less frequently, and at shorter stretches than three whole pages. "I am sure that we will do much good," he concluded the letter to G. H. Moore, "if you will only follow the advice in this letter." The high-spirited child so ready to advise his father sagely was reduced to a frightened, blubbering coward within six months. The long vacation had begun at Oscott on 4 July, and all the other students had packed up and gone, but George was left behind for further lessons; he hated the laughter of his departing schoolmates. He begged his father on 5 July, "If you will only take me home for this vacation I will try to improve myself If you only knew what I will suffer by stopping here for goodness sake take me home." Later in life, he had nightmares about being sent back to Oscott for spelling lessons. In another letter of that summer, he hoped that his father would allow him to come home if he wrote one correctly spelled letter, and in its second (unpunctuated) sentence, he bewailed his condition as "the onely boy left here." It is unknown if GM had to spend the whole lonely summer at Oscott, but he was back there by 20 September, when Northcote again wrote G. H. Moore, and pondered the singular backwardness of the future Parnassian stylist. He just would not pay attention. As an old man, GM printed a conversation with Edmund Gosse about the novels of the mid-century he had read as a boy, and Moore recalled a number of them with affection and in detail: those by the Brontčes, for instance, four or five by Lord Lytton, and a few by Disraeli (whom he found unendurable). It appears that the inattention so much regretted by Northcote involved GM setting up his Latin grammar between himself and his teacher, putting his head between his hands, and then dreaming of the romantic novels he would return to reading when classes were over. The priests could do nothing with the dreamy, stubborn son of an Irish landlord. If he did not make progress by Christmas, Northcote wanted to throw in the towel. The family could hire a private tutor at home. This leaves the impression that George Moore was expelled from Oscott as ineducable, and that he was. But in his many reminiscences on the strangeness of his beginnings as a man of letters, and a man of letters who wrote a good hand, usually spelled correctly, and labored for a perfect correctness of form, George Moore suggested that in some ways he managed his own departure from Oscott for the more pleasant environs of Lough Carra; in short, that his efforts to be expelled were ultimately crowned with success. One of his stories was that he brought his copy of Shelley to the prefect, and said, hoping to be expelled, that he had been reading the book constantly, and wondered if that could be right, for Shelley denied the existence of God. The result was that the priest took away GM's favorite book. Then Moore set himself up as the college odds-maker, taking bets on the horse races of the season, in correspondence with a London turf accountant; his letters were intercepted, and his little business shut down. Next he set up a prize fight, and again got caught — "always in a row of some kind," his brother Maurice confirmed. One of George's finer pieces of devilry occurred after he was asked by the Latin teacher to stay after classes for private tuition, while the other boys played cricket. The priest put his arm around George when he recited his lines, and finally had his hand nearly into the boy's trouser pocket. To be avenged for the loss of his recreation on the cricket ground, George mentioned the incident in the confession. After 1907 when GM was arguing against a Catholic boarding-school education for his nephews, against everything Catholic in fact, he liked to crow that the secrecy of the confessional was not kept, because the tall, baldheaded Latin teacher with a love of boys disappeared soon after Moore's confession. In Confessions of a Young Man, he provided this account of the coup de grăace: Shelley led him to atheism, and after refusing to go to confession at Oscott, he was sent home. It is true that no memorial exists of any period in which George Moore believed in God. When Moore writes of churchgoing, he depicts himself as a spectator of religious conduct, watching others worship — such as the four girls in the Clogher pew, just behind the Moores — and not worshipping himself. He can give a fine description of the blind girl who lifts herself to receive on her tongue the wafer, and then sinks back, overcome, overawed, to wait for the next Sunday; however, he never describes the experience of taking Communion himself. His amazement is that it could have meant so much to somebody else. He did not so much lose his faith, as wake up to the fact that he never had any. Maurice Moore recalled a moment for Joseph Hone, when GM, standing on the staircase of Moore Hall, declared himself an unbeliever; his mother startled him by merely saying she was sorry, then passed on. Perhaps, Hone suggests, she thought silence and indifference the best policy. Since her strange son evidently wanted to shock, she would attach no importance to his opinions. Certainly, GM sometimes did things just to astonish, but in the case of religion, he had taken a stand on his own sense of the world, and never backed away from it. Living by his instincts was to be his law in life, and it had already taken him from killing the laundry cat at age twelve to twisting a tiger's tail when he was just fifteen. After all, he supposed, it wasn't a real tiger anyway. By the time Moore wrote Salve (1912), he elaborated a scene in which his father was called to Oscott — this would have been in April 1867 — because George had been caught giving a bouquet to an Oscott maidservant, a low-sized girl named Agnes. The girl was threatened with dismissal, and GM wrote to his father that if she were sent away, he would follow her and marry her. When G. H. Moore arrived for an interview with George and the great-bellied, hairy-knuckled headmaster Northcote, the matter was raised of GM's refusal to go to confession, even on penalty of flogging. GM claims to have got the better of Northcote by saying he had his doubts, and Northcote as a former Oxford Anglican led by Cardinal Newman to convert to Catholicism (widowed and still with a son in the school) ought himself to be able to sympathise with youthful uncertainties, since there was a time in the headmaster's own life when Northcote could not have believed in the sacrament of confession. Northcote was thus triumphantly discomfited, and G. H. Moore, as his son pictured the scene, had to turn away to hide his laughter. Maurice Moore could recall very little of the Agnes incident, and the whole episode may just have been the famous storyteller's revenge on one who thought him a hopeless case. In the story "Hugh Monfert" (1922), the Northcote-figure (a convert and school principal) has a son who is the homosexual love-object of the hero (patterned on GM's friend Edward Martyn). Whatever the cause, whether it was idleness, worthlessness, or incorrigibility; girls, betting, atheism, or fagging, it was agreed by principal, father, and son alike that George's days at Oscott should end that summer in 1867. (C) 2000 Adrian Frazier All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-300-08245-2 http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/f/frazier-moore.html
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