by George Moore
Unto the shadow of the deepening skies
Goes forth a train of human memories,
Crying: the past must never pass away.
Yet, in this time of ruin and decay,
The fragrance of an unborn summer sighs
Within the sense, before my dreaming eyes
Passes the spirit of an ideal day.
Then, fervid hours of sunlight and repose,
The warm delights, the tears that true love knows,
Are mine, are thine; until in sweet belief
We dream, beside our broken prison bars,
Of love exceeding joy, defying grief,
And higher than the throbbing of the stars.
A Mummer’s Wife
Published in 1885 by Henry Vizetelly (who was later imprisoned for publishing English editions of Zola’s novels), this novel was labelled by W. B. Yeats as the first naturalist novel written in English and he forbade his sister to read it. Literary naturalism is a movement that observes in a detached and dispassionate way the everyday lives of people and records them in fiction almost like a report, with much detail included as a matter of course. The author sees the fictional character’s future as predetermined, by forces beyond her or his control. Émile Zola is credited as the literary pioneer of naturalism, adapting the thoughts of French philosopher Auguste Comte to his own art. The book is dedicated to Moore’s friend, Robert Ross. It is likely that this is the Robbie Ross, who was a close friend of Oscar Wilde and Wilde’s literary executor.
To research this story, Moore stayed for a while in Hanley, Staffordshire, to accurately record the atmosphere of a typical small factory town; he also toured with a theatrical company – touring theatrical groups and a factory town are central elements in the story. Moore needed to observe and accurately note as many aspects of these disparate worlds as he could, in order to fulfil the naturalistic aim of meticulous, realistic descriptions; there is almost an element of reportage in the prose. The chapter featuring pottery making is described in minute detail and is a good example of naturalistic writing. This and two other of Moore’s titles (A Modern Lover and A Drama in Muslin) were removed from the influential Mudie’s circulating library because of their “questionable character” – that is, they were considered by Charles Mudie, the proprietor, to be immoral. This led to an acrimonious exchange of opinions between Moore and Mudie. Moore, who had been encouraged by Zola to take on the circulating libraries, retaliated to the ban with a blistering critique of circulating libraries, Literature at Nurse, or Circulating Morals (published in the Pall Mall Gazette 10 December 1884), which defends the “sexual” content of A Mummer’s Wife . Such attacks made no difference to the likes of Mudie, who saw himself as a guardian of the sensibilities of his aspirant customers; Mudie’s hostility was certainly not personal to Moore either, as other novels, destined to become recognised Victorian classics (such as Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles), were also banned on the grounds of immorality or inappropriateness. It also made no difference to the popularity of A Mummer’s Wife, which ran to fourteen editions in the first year alone; in fact, the dispute had probably increased sales rather than diminished them.
Moore was known for revising his work when given the opportunity, such as the publication of a new collection of his writing. A Mummer’s Wife, A Modern Lover and Drama in Muslin amongst others were all revised and it has been suggested (in the case of A Mummer’s Wife, by Moore himself) that a significant reason for Moore’s revisions was to make the influence of Balzac less obvious.
Kate Ede lives with Ralph, her querulous, semi-invalid husband and her mother in law, running the family drapery business and making ends meet by letting out the spare bedroom to a lodger. Kate feels trapped by the bickering, drudgery and monotony of her life; she escapes into her own cerebral world by reading novels and exercising her vivid imagination. Perhaps because of her love of make-believe, Kate defies her family to let their “stranger room” to Dick Lennox, an actor-manager from a travelling theatre production of Les Cloches de Cornville. Lennox is heavily built, but tall and good looking and with a “bohemian” theatricality to his mannerisms and he proves to be a courteous and accommodating guest. After an awkward start to the “tenancy”, Kate is anxious to please her intriguing, larger than life tenant and goes with him on a tour of a local pottery, where it becomes clear there is a frisson of attraction between them; despite Kate’s determined resistance, she undergoes an inner struggle to retain any vestige of aloofness to her “coarse and largely sensual” companion. In fact, Kate secretly revels in the attraction, holding it close: “A great part of her happiness was in the fact that it was all within herself, that none knew of it”. She becomes increasingly emotional and resumes her girlish interest in romantic verse and fiction and elaborate daydreams, as she allows herself to be drawn into a passionate liaison with Lennox, taking more and more risks in order to continue the affair. Soon the inevitable happens – Lennox and his troupe are on the last night of their stint in Hanley and must move on the next day. He invites Kate to leave her husband and her life of unremitting toil and to join him on the road, as his lover and companion, assuring her: “I never liked a woman as I do you.” Kate must now make a momentous decision. Does she follow her heart and run away with her lover, or stay within the secure, albeit dreary marriage that is all too familiar to her?
Criticism has been made of the “excessive” detail used by Moore in the descriptions in this novel, in his pursuit of the naturalistic ideal. However, although it is clear that Moore has gone out of his way to add details of everyday life, they are carefully done and draw one in to a world of everyday detail that social historians can learn a great deal from. The detail is not intrusive and does not detract from the pace of the narrative either, which draws the reader along with an appropriate level of tension and good characterisation; one can imagine family historians revelling in the detail as they try to imagine what the lives of their ancestors might have been like on an everyday basis. Although the story of infidelity and its consequences is a well used one, on this occasion it is a story extremely well told.
The first edition’s title page
CONTENTS
A DEDICATION TO ROBERT ROSS
I
II
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
XXVII
XXVIII
XXIX
XXX
Émile Zola (1840-1902), the French novelist, playwright, journalist and the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism.
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.
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. In the pale obscurity of the room, his bearded cheeks could be seen buried in a heap of tossed pillows. By his bedside sat a young woman. As she dozed, her face drooped until her features were hidden, and the lamp-light made the curious curves of a beautiful ear look like a piece of illuminated porcelain. Her hands lay upon her lap, her needlework slipped from them; and as it fell to the ground she awoke.
She pressed her hands against her forehead and made an effort to rouse herself. As she did so, her face contracted with an expression of disgust, and she remembered the ether. The soft, vaporous odour drifted towards her from a small table strewn with medicine bottles, and taking care to hold the cork tightly in her fingers she squeezed it into the bottle.
At that moment the clock struck eleven and the clear tones of its bell broke the silence sharply; the patient moaned as if in reply, and his thin hairy arms stirred feverishly on the wide patchwork counterpane. She took them in her hands and covered them over; she tried to arrange the pillows more comfortably, but as she did so he turned and tossed impatiently, and, fearing to disturb him, she put back the handkerchief she had taken from the pillow to wipe the sweat from his brow, and regaining her chair, with a weary movement she picked up the cloth that had fallen from her knees and slowly continued her work.
It was a piece of patchwork like the counterpane on the bed; the squares of a chessboard had been taken as a design, and, selecting a fragment of stuff, she trimmed it into the required shape and sewed it into its allotted corner.
Nothing was now heard but the methodical click of her needle as it struck the head of her thimble, and then the long swish of the thread as she drew it through the cloth. The lamp at her elbow burned steadily, and the glare glanced along her arm as she raised it with the large movement of sewing.
Her hair was blue wherever the light touched it, and it encircled the white prominent temple like a piece of rich black velvet; a dark shadow defined the delicate nose, and hinted at thin indecision of lips, whilst a broad touch of white marked the weak but not unbeautiful chin.
On the corner of the table lay a book, a well-worn volume in a faded red paper cover. It was a novel she used to read with delight when she was a girl, but it had somehow failed to interest her, and after a few pages she had laid it aside, preferring for distraction her accustomed sewing. She was now well awake, and, as she worked, her thoughts turned on things concerning the daily routine of her life. She thought of the time when her husband would be well: of the pillow she was making; of how nice it would look in the green armchair; of the much greater likelihood of letting their rooms if they were better furnished; of their new lodger; and of the probability of a quarrel between him and her mother-in-law, Mrs. Ede.
For more than a week past the new lodger had formed the staple subject of conversation in this household. Mrs. Ede, Kate’s mother-in-law, was loud in her protestations that the harbouring of an actor could not but be attended by bad luck. Kate felt a little uneasy; her puritanism was of a less marked kind; perhaps at first she had felt inclined to agree with her mother-in-law, but her husband had shown himself so stubborn, and had so persistently declared that he was not going to keep his rooms empty any longer, that for peace’ sake she was fain to side with him. The question arose in a very unexpected way. During the whole winter they were unfortunate with their rooms, though they made many attempts to get lodgers; they even advertised. Some few people asked to see the rooms; but they merely made an offer. One day a man who came into the shop to buy some paper collars asked Kate if she had any apartments to let. She answered yes, and they went upstairs. After a cursory inspection he told her that he was the agent in advance to a travelling opera company, and that if she liked he would recommend her rooms to the stage manager, a particular friend of his. The proposition was somewhat startling, but, not liking to say no, she proposed to refer the matter to her husband.