BY GEORGE MOORE

1921

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN

CONTENTS

ÉPÎTRE DÉDICATOIRE

PREFACE

III

III

IV

VVI

VII

IX

XXI

XII

XIII

XIV

ÉPÎTRE DÉDICATOIRE

17 Août, 1905.

MON CHER DUJARDIN,

Il se trouve que je suis à Paris en train de corriger mes épreuves au moment où vous donnez les dernières retouches au manuscrit de'La Source du Fleuve Chrétien,'un beau titre—si beau que je n'ai pu m'empêcher de le'chipper'pour le livre de Ralph Elles, un personnage de mon roman qui ne parait pas, mais dont on entend beaucoup parler. Pour vous dédommager de mon larcin, je me propose de vous dédier'Le Lac.'Il y a bien des raisons pour que je désire voir votre nom sur la première page d'un livre de moi; la meilleure est, peut-être, parceque vous êtes mon ami depuis'Les Confessions d'un Jeune Anglais'qui ont paru dans votre jolie Revue Indépendante;

et, depuis cette bienheureuse année, nous avons causé littérature et musique, combien de fois! Combien d'heures nous avons passés ensemble, causant, toujours causant, dans votre belle maison de Fontainebleau, si française avec sa terrasse en pierre et son jardin avec ses gazons maigres et ses allées sablonneuses qui serpentent parmi les grands arbres forestiers. C'est dans ce jardin à l'orée de la forêt et dans la forêt même, parmi la mélancolie de lat nature primitive, et à Valvins ou demeurait notre vieil ami Mallarmé, triste et charmant bonhomme, comme le pays du reste (n'est-ce-pas que cette tristesse croit depuis qu'il s'en est allé?) que vous m'avez entendu raconter'Le Lac.'

A Valvins, la Seine coule silencieusement tout le long des berges plates et graciles, avec des peupliers alignés; comme ils sont tristes au printemps, ces peupliers, surtout avant qu'ils ne deviennent verts, quand ils sont rougeâtres, posés contre un ciel gris, des ombres immobiles et ternes dans les eaux, dix fois tristes quand les hirondelles volent bas! Pour expliquer la tristesse de ce beau pays parsemé de châteaux vides, hanté par le souvenir des fêtes d'autrefois, il faudrait tout un orchestre. Je l'entends d'abord sur les violons; plus tard on ajouterait d'autres instruments, des cors sans doute; mais pour rendre la tristesse de mon pauvre pays là bas il ne faut drait pas tout cela. Je l'entends très bien sur une seule flute placée dans une île entourée des eaux d'un lac, le joueur assis sur les vagues ruines d'un réduit gallois ou bien Normand. Mais, cher ami, vous êtes Normand et peut-être bien que ce sent vos ancêtres qui out pillé mon pays; c'est une raison de plus pour que je vous offre ce roman. Acceptez-le sans le connaître davantage et n'essayez pas de le lire; ne vous donnez pas la peine d'apprendre l'anglais pour lire'Le Lac'; que le lac ne soit jamais traversé par vous! Et parce que vous allez rester fatalement sur le bord de'mon lac'j'ai un double plaisir à vous le dédier. Lorsqu'on dédie un livre, on prévoit l'heure où l'ami le prend, jette un coup d'œil et dit:'Pourquoi m'a-t-il dédié une niaiserie pareille?'Toutes les choses de l'esprit, sauf les plus grandes, deviennent niaiseries tôt ou tard. Votre ignorance de ma langue m'épargne cette heure fatale. Pour vous, mon livre sera toujours une belle et noble chose. Il ne peut jamais devenir pour vous banal comme une épouse. II sera pour vous une vierge, mieux qu'une vierge, il sera pour vous une demi-vierge. Chaque fois que vous l'ouvrirez, vous penserez à des années écoulées, au jardin où les rossignols chantent, a la forêt où rien ne se passe sauf la chute des feuilles, à nos promenades à Valvins pour voir le cher bonhomme; vous penserez à votre jeunesse et peut-être un peu à la mienne. Mais je veux que vous lisiez cette dédicace, et c'est pour cela que je l'ai écrite en français, dans un français qui vous est très familier, le mien. Si je l'écrivais en anglais et le faisais traduire dans le langage à la dernière mode de Paris, vous ne retrouveriez pas les accents barbares de votre vieil ami. Ils sont barbares, je le conçois, mais il y a des chiens qui sont laids et que l'on finit par aimer.

Une poignée de mains,

GEORGES MOORE.

PREFACE

The concern of this preface is with the mistake that was made when'The Lake'was excluded from the volume entitled'The Untilled Field,'reducing it to too slight dimensions, for bulk counts; and'The Lake,'too, in being published in a separate volume lost a great deal in range and power, and criticism was baffled by the division of stories written at the same time and coming out of the same happy inspiration, one that could hardly fail to beget stories in the mind of anybody prone to narrative—the return of a man to his native land, to its people, to memories hidden for years, forgotten, but which rose suddenly out of the darkness, like water out of the earth when a spring is tapped.

Some chance words passing between John Eglinton and me as we returned home one evening from Professor Dowden's were enough. He spoke, or I spoke, of a volume of Irish stories; Tourguéniev's name was mentioned, and next morning—if not the next morning, certainly not later than a few mornings after—I was writing'Homesickness,'while the story of'The Exile'was taking shape in my mind.'The Exile'was followed by a series of four stories, a sort of village odyssey.'A Letter to Rome'is as good as these and as typical of my country.'So on He Fares'is the one that, perhaps, out of the whole volume I like the best, always excepting'The Lake,'which, alas, was not included, but which belongs so strictly to the aforesaid stories that my memory includes it in the volume.

In expressing preferences I am transgressing an established rule of literary conduct, which ordains that an Author must always speak of his own work with downcast eyes, excusing its existence on the ground of his own incapacity. All the same an Author's preferences interest his readers, and having transgressed by telling that these Irish stories lie very near to my heart, I will proceed a little further into literary sin, confessing that my reason for liking'The Lake'is related to the very great difficulty of the telling, for the one vital event in the priest's life befell him before the story opens, and to keep the story in the key in which it was conceived, it was necessary to recount the priest's life during the course of his walk by the shores of a lake, weaving his memories continually, without losing sight, however, of the long, winding, mere-like lake, wooded to its shores, with hills appearing and disappearing into mist and distance. The difficulty overcome is a joy to the artist, for in his conquest over the material he draws nigh to his idea, and in this book mine was the essential rather than the daily life of the priest, and as I read for this edition I seemed to hear it. The drama passes within the priest's soul; it is tied and untied by the flux and reflux of sentiments, inherent in and proper to his nature, and the weaving of a story out of the soul substance without ever seeking the aid of external circumstance seems to me a little triumph. It may be that I heard what none other will hear, not through his own fault but through mine, and it may be that all ears are not tuned, or are too indifferent or indolent to listen; it is easier to hear'Esther Waters'and to watch her struggles for her child's life than to hear the mysterious warble, soft as lake water, that abides in the heart. But I think there will always be a few who will agree with me that there is as much life in'The Lake,'as there is in'Esther Waters'—a different kind of life, not so wide a life, perhaps, but what counts in art is not width but depth.

Artists, it is said, are not good judges of their own works, and for that reason, and other reasons, maybe, it is considered to be unbecoming for a writer to praise himself. So to make atonement for the sins I have committed in this preface, I will confess to very little admiration for'Evelyn Innes'and'Sister Teresa.'The writing of'Evelyn Innes'and'Sister Teresa'was useful to me inasmuch that if I had not written them I could not have written'The Lake'or'The Brook Kerith.'It seems ungrateful, therefore, to refuse to allow two of my most successful books into the canon merely because they do not correspond with my æstheticism. But a writer's æstheticism is his all; he cannot surrender it, for his art is dependent upon it, and the single concession he can make is that if an overwhelming demand should arise for these books when he is among the gone—a storm before which the reed must bend—the publisher shall be permitted to print'Evelyn Innes'and'Sister Teresa'from the original editions, it being, however, clearly understood that they are offered to the public only as apocrypha. But this permission must not be understood to extend to certain books on which my name appears—viz.,'Mike Fletcher,''Vain Fortune,'Parnell and His Island'; to some plays,'Martin Luther,''The Strike at Arlingford,''The Bending of the Boughs'; to a couple of volumes of verse entitled'Pagan Poems'and'Flowers of Passion'—all these books, if they are ever reprinted again, should be issued as the work of a disciple—Amico Moorini I put forward as a suggestion.

G.M.

IIt was one of those enticing days at the beginning of May when white clouds are drawn about the earth like curtains. The lake lay like a mirror that somebody had breathed upon, the brown islands showing through the mist faintly, with gray shadows falling into the water, blurred at the edges. The ducks were talking in the reeds, the reeds themselves were talking, and the water lapping softly about the smooth limestone shingle. But there was an impulse in the gentle day, and, turning from the sandy spit, Father Oliver walked to and fro along the disused cart-track about the edge of the wood, asking himself if he were going home, knowing very well that he could not bring himself to interview his parishioners that morning.

On a sudden resolve to escape from anyone that might be seeking him, he went into the wood and lay down on the warm grass, and admired the thickly-tasselled branches of the tall larches swinging above him. At a little distance among the juniper-bushes, between the lake and the wood, a bird uttered a cry like two stones clinked sharply together, and getting up he followed the bird, trying to catch sight of it, but always failing to do so; it seemed to range in a circle about certain trees, and he hadn't gone very far when he heard it behind him. A stonechat he was sure it must be, and he wandered on till he came to a great silver fir, and thought that he spied a pigeon's nest among the multitudinous branches. The nest, if it were one, was about sixty feet from the ground, perhaps more than that; and, remembering that the great fir had grown out of a single seed, it seemed to him not at all wonderful that people had once worshipped trees, so mysterious is their life, so remote from ours. And he stood a long time looking up, hardly able to resist the temptation to climb the tree—not to rob the nest like a boy, but to admire the two gray eggs which he would find lying on some bare twigs.

At the edge of the wood there were some chestnuts and sycamores. He noticed that the large-patterned leaf of the sycamores, hanging out from a longer stem, was darker than the chestnut leaf. The re were some elms close by, and their half-opened leaves, dainty and frail, reminded him of clouds of butterflies. He could think of nothing else. White, cotton-like clouds unfolded above the blossoming trees; patches of blue appeared and disappeared; and he wandered on again, beguiled this time by many errant scents and wilful little breezes.

Very soon he came upon some fields, and as he walked through the ferns the young rabbits ran from under his feet, and he thought of the delicious meals that the fox would snap up. He had to pick his way, for thorn-bushes and hazels were springing up everywhere. Derrinrush, the great headland stretching nearly a mile into the lake, said to be one of the original forests, was extending inland. He remembered it as a deep, religious wood, with its own particular smell of reeds and rushes. It went further back than the island castles, further back than the Druids; and was among Father Oliver's earliest recollections. Himself and his brother James used to go there when they were boys to cut hazel stems, to make fishing-rods; and one had only to turn over the dead leaves to discover the chips scattered circlewise in the open spaces where the coopers sat in the days gone by making hoops for barrels. But iron hoops were now used instead of hazel, and the coopers worked there no more. In the old days he and his brother James used to follow the wood-ranger, asking him questions about the wild creatures of the wood—badgers, marten cats, and otters. And one day they took home a nest of young hawks. He did not neglect to feed them, but they had eaten each other, nevertheless. He forgot what became of the last one.

A thick yellow smell hung on the still air.'A fox,'he said, and he trailed the animal through the hazel-bushes till he came to a rough shore, covered with juniper-bushes and tussocked grass, the extreme point of the headland, whence he could see the mountains—the pale southern mountains mingling with the white sky, and the western mountains, much nearer, showing in bold relief. The beautiful motion and variety of the hills delighted him, and there was as much various colour as there were many dips and curves, for the hills were not far enough away to dwindle to one blue tint; they were blue, but the pink heather showed through the blue, and the clouds continued to fold and unfold, so that neither the colour nor the lines were ever the same. The retreating and advancing of the great masses and the delicate illumination of the crests could be watched without weariness. It was like listening to music. Slieve Cairn showing straight as a bull's back against the white sky, a cloud filling the gap between Slieve Cairn and Slieve Louan, a quaint little hill like a hunchback going down a road. Slieve Louan was followed by a great boulder-like hill turned sideways, the top indented like a crater, and the priest likened the long, low profile of the next hill to a reptile raising itself on its forepaws.

He stood at gaze, bewitched by the play of light and shadow among the slopes; and when he turned towards the lake again, he was surprised to see a yacht by Castle Island. A random breeze just sprung up had borne her so far, and now she lay becalmed, carrying, without doubt, a pleasure-party, inspired by some vague interest in ruins, and a very real interest in lunch; or the yacht's destination might be Kilronan Abbey, and the priest wondered if there were water enough in the strait to let her through in this season of the year. The sails flapped in the puffing breeze, and he began to calculate her tonnage, certain that if he had such a boat he would not be sailing her on a lake, but on the bright sea, out of sight of land, in the middle of a great circle of water. As if stung by a sudden sense of the sea, of its perfume and its freedom, he imagined the filling of the sails and the rattle of the ropes, and how a fair wind would carry him as far as the cove of Cork before morning. The run from Cork to Liverpool would be slower, but the wind might veer a little, and in four-and-twenty hours the We lsh mountains would begin to show above the horizon. But he would not land anywhere on the We lsh coast. The re was nothing to see in Wales but castles, and he was weary of castles, and longed to see the cathedrals of York and Salisbury; for he had often seen them in pictures, and had more than once thought of a walking tour through England. Better still if the yacht were to land him somewhere on the French coast. England was, after all, only an island like Ireland--- a little larger, but still an island—and he thought he would like a continent to roam in. The French cathedrals were more beautiful than the English, and it would be pleasant to wander in the French country in happy-go-lucky fashion, resting when he was tired, walking when it pleased him, taking an interest in whatever might strike his fancy.