A Mummer's Wife

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Title: A Mummer's Wife

Author: George Moore

Release Date: February, 2005 [EBook #7508] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on May 12, 2003] [Date last updated: December 8, 2004]

Edition: 10

Language: English

*** START OF THE PROJECT BookishMall.com EBOOK A MUMMER'S WIFE ***

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A MUMMER'S WIFE

BY GEORGE MOORE

A DEDICATION TO ROBERT ROSS

I

In the sunset of his life a man often finds himself unable to put dates even upon events in which his sympathies were, and perhaps are still, engaged; all things seem to have befallen yesterday, and yet it cannot be less than three years since we were anxious to testify to our belief in the kindness and justice with which you had fulfilled your double duties in the Morning Post towards us and the proprietors of the paper.

A committee sprang up quickly, and a letter was addressed by it to all the notable workers in the arts and to all those who were known to be interested in the arts, and very soon a considerable sum of money was collected; but when the committee met to decide what form the commemorative gift should take, a perplexity arose, many being inclined towards a piece of plate. It was pointed out that a piece of plate worth eight hundred pounds would prove a cumbersome piece of furniture—a white elephant, in fact—in the small house or apartment or flat in which a critic usually lives. The truth of this could not be gainsaid. Other suggestions were forthcoming for your benefit, every one obtaining a certain amount of support, but none commanding a majority of votes; and the perplexity continued till it was mooted that the disposal of the money should be left to your option, and in view of the fact that you had filled the post of art critic for many years, you decided to found a Slade scholarship. It seemed to you well that a young man on leaving the Slade School should be provided with a sum of money sufficient to furnish a studio, and some seven or eight hundred pounds were invested, the remainder being spent on a trinket for your personal wear—a watch. I have not forgotten that I was one of the dissidents, scholarships not appealing to me, but lately I have begun to see that you were wise in the disposal of the money. A watch was enough for remembrance, and since I caught sight of it just now, the pleasant thoughts it has evoked console me for your departure: after bidding you good-bye on the doorstep, I return to my fireside to chew the cud once again of the temperate and tolerant articles that I used to read years ago in the Morning Post.

You see, Ross, I was critic myself for some years on the Speaker, but my articles were often bitter and explosive; I was prone to polemics and lacked the finer sense that enabled you to pass over works with which you were not in sympathy, and without wounding the painter. My intention was often to wound him in the absurd hope that I might compel him to do better. My motto seems to have been 'Compel them to come in'—words used by Jesus in one of his parables, and relied on by ecclesiastics as a justification of persecution, and by many amongst us whose names I will not pillory here, for I have chosen that these pages shall be about you and nothing but you. If I speak of myself in a forgotten crusade, it is to place you in your true light. We recognized your critical insight and your literary skill, but it was not for these qualities that we, the criticized, decided to present you, the critic, with a token of our gratitude; nor was it because you had praised our works (a great number of the subscribers had not received praise from you): we were moved altogether, I think, by the consciousness that you had in a difficult task proved yourself to be a kindly critic, and yet a just one, and it was for these qualities that you received an honour, that is unique, I think, in the chronicles of criticism.

II

Memory pulls me up, and out of some moments of doubt, the suspicion emerges that all I am writing here was read by me somewhere: but it was not in our original declaration of faith, for I never saw it, not having attended the presentation of the testimonial. Where, then? In the newspapers that quoted from the original document? Written out by whom? By Witt or by MacColl, excellent writers both? But being a writer myself, I am called upon to do my own writing…. Newspapers are transitory things—a good reason for writing out the story afresh; and there is still another reason for writing it out—my reasons for dedicating this book to you. We must have reasons always, else we pass for unreasonable beings, and a better reason for dedicating a book to you than mine, I am fain to believe, will never be found by anybody in search of a reason for his actions. My name is among the signatories to the document that I have called 'our declaration of faith'; and having committed myself thus fully to your critical judgment, it seems to me that for the completion of the harmony a dedication is necessary. A fair share of reasons I am setting forth for this act of mine, every one of them valid, and the most valid of all my reason for choosing this book, A Mummer's Wife, to dedicate to you, is your own commendation of it the other night when you said to me that no book of mine in your opinion was more likely to 'live'! To live for five-and-twenty years is as long an immortality as anyone should set his heart on; for who would wish to be chattered about by the people that will live in these islands three hundred years hence? We should not understand them nor they us. Avaunt, therefore, all legendary immortalities, and let us be content, Ross, to be remembered by our friends, and, perhaps, to have our names passed on by disciples to another generation! A fair and natural immortality this is; let us share it together. Our bark lies in the harbour: you tell me the spars are sound, and the seams have been caulked; the bark, you say, is seaworthy and will outlive any of the little storms that she may meet on the voyage—a better craft is not to be found in my little fleet. You said yesterevening across the hearthrug, 'Esther Waters speaks out of a deeper appreciation of life;' but you added: 'In A Mummer's Wife there is a youthful imagination and a young man's exuberance on coming into his own for the first time, and this is a quality—'No doubt it is a quality, Ross; but what kind of quality? You did not finish your sentence, or I have forgotten it. Let me finish it for you—'that outweighs all other qualities' But does it? I am interpreting you badly. You would not commit yourself to so crude an opinion, and I am prepared to believe that I did not catch the words as they fell from your lips. All I can recall for certain of the pleasant moment when, you were considering which of my works you liked the best are stray words that may be arranged here into a sentence which, though it does not represent your critical judgments accurately, may be accepted by you. You said your thoughts went more frequently to A Mummer's Wife than to Esther Waters; and I am almost sure something was said about the earlier book being a more spontaneous issue of the imagination, and that the wandering life of the mummers gives an old-world, adventurous air to the book, reminding you of The Golden Ass—a book I read last year, and found in it so many remembrances of myself that I fell to thinking it was a book I might have written had I lived two thousand years ago. Who can say he has not lived before, and is it not as important to believe we lived herebefore as it is to believe we are going to live hereafter? If I had lived herebefore, Jupiter knows what I should have written, but it would not have been Esther Waters: more likely a book like A Mummer's Wife—a band of jugglers and acrobats travelling from town to town. As I write these lines an antique story rises up in my mind, a recollection of one of my lost works or an instantaneous reading of Apuleius into A Mummers Wife—which?

G.M.

A MUMMER'S WIFE

I

In default of a screen, a gown and a red petticoat had been thrown over a clothes-horse, and these shaded the glare of the lamp from the eyes of the sick man.