Scan 18
Musical Courier 1898-06-22: Vol 36 Iss 955, 1898
54 lines. Read by computer on 21 September 2026. Printed page 19. See the scan on archive.org.
1ner with the keen nose of the decadent only the decomposition of an art. He senses Wagner as a creator of the erotic-sublime and he minimizes the real Wagner when he attempts to theorize about his art. Yet the Celtic intelligence of the man, his sympathy with certain sides of life and his gift of verbal expression, allow him to compass what brighter intelligences often cannot. For me Moore is the reverse of Stevenson, whose lovable personality sticks out of his every page. Moore has a repellant magnetism—if I may be excused the bull—but he can grip you when he tries, and so I read "Evelyn Innes" at a sitting.
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5The new story deals with several episodes in the life of a singer. She is the daughter of a devotee of archaic music and archaic instruments. She has a voice, but her father is so absorbed in the revival of Palestrina, of Vittoria, of old English writers, of the Plain Chant, that he neglects the girl's vocal possibilities. She plays the viola da gamba and sings at sight. Her mother was a celebrated operatic singer, of chaste life and coloratura tastes. She died before the girl was developed. The dreamy father, the high-strung, ambitious girl, a dreary home at Dulwich, near London, and a rich baronet of musical tastes, crazy for notoriety in London musical life, and you may imagine the rest.
7Evelyn goes to Paris with him—and with a certain Lady Duckling as a chaperon. The scene at Marchesi's—for of course Madame Lavelli is Marchesi—is capitally done, and there is a Henry James lightness of touch and humor in the description of Lady Duckle and her dislike of Wagner's music.
9"No, my dear Owen," she cried, "I am not a heretic, for I recognize the greatness of the music, and I could hear it with pleasure if it were confined to the orchestra, but I can find no pleasure in listening to a voice trying to accompany a hundred instruments. I heard 'Lohengrin' last season. I was in Mrs. Ayre's box—a charming woman—her husband is an American, but he never comes to London. I presented her at the last Drawing Room. She had a supper party afterward, and when she asked me what I'd have to eat, I said, 'Nothing with wings!' * * * Oh, that Swan!'"
11Now, this is distinctly witty, and it is a pity that we get only a mere sketch of this chatty body.
13Without explaining the processes Evelyn becomes a great singer, a great interpreter of Wagner, and it is precisely this hiatus that deprives me of much pleasure. I dislike these persons in fiction who have become full fledged artists at the turning of a page. Mr. Moore was treading upon dangerous ground, and he knew it; so he wisely omitted the study years. Evelyn, whose character shows little growth, conquers London and at last goes to her father to ask his pardon. This episode is the strongest and most original in the book. Indeed I cannot recollect anything in English fiction like it. She falls at his feet and is Brünnhilde kneeling to Wotan. As she phrases her petition for pardon she acts, consciously or unconsciously, the third act of "Die Walküre"; "War es so schmählich?" She mentally implores, and the simple instrument maker is vanquished. It is very subtle, and the dual nature of the lyric artist is wonderfully indicated.
15But such a father, such a daughter! If you were to frankly ask me if a girl could sacrifice everything for art I would as frankly reply, yes; lots of them have. I have met a dozen myself. Moore does not believe that the moral sense can flourish in an artistic atmosphere. Perhaps he is right.
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19Evelyn is dissatisfied with success. Her nature is too complex to find gratification in the society of Sir Owen Asher. A new man looms up. He is dark, has winsome teeth, is a mystic, a Rosicrucian, perhaps a Diabolist. He is a Celt and is composing to a Celtic legend a great music drama; his musical forms are antique, and he wins Evelyn, wins her after the first performance of "Isolde." This scene will cause all the bell boys of literature to cry "horrors." If your nerves are strong read it. I confess, however, that the second love is incomprehensible. It its entered into in too cold-blooded a manner.
21She becomes still more dissatisfied, and after a week of insomnia her early religious beliefs get the uppermost and she goes to confession. But you feel that she has only met a third will stronger than her own. A Monsignor Mostyn, the best male portrait of the book, bends her knee to God, and she goes into conventual retreat. We get a few closing chapters—dreary ones—devoted to convent life, and then Evelyn goes forth once more into the world. To sin again? Perhaps; certainly to repent if she does.
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25Her character is exceedingly well drawn, although I must protest against the overloading of page after page with elaborate psychologizing. Moore has deserted the brutal simplicities of his earlier manner for a Bourget-like shoveling of psychical details upon your wearied brain. The story becomes hazy, the main figure nebulous. At every step in the last half of the book I detect Joris Karl, Huysmans and his "En Route" Evelyn Innes becomes a feminine Durtal, sick of life, afraid of God. There is too much padding in the shape of discussions about early Church music—more Huysmans! Huysmans' practice of cataloguing is very monotonous. I am sorry that Moore copies him so closely.
27Yet it is the best thing in the way of a literary performance that George Moore has accomplished. The style is still decomposed—he is not a stylist—but it is more melodious, more flexible, smoother and more felicitous. One can see that he knows his Pater. As a whole his prose lacks in rhythmical variety. The one grave defect of the book—the grave defect of all of this writer's books—is the undertone of insincerity. You feel that he uses the convent, its nuns and their religious aspirations for "copy." The music talk is also "copy," and contains some gems of criticism. The acting of Wagner singers, with its attempt at sculptural attitudes, is condemned, and there are some novel "readings" suggested for Elizabeth and Isolde.
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31Mr. Moore has used to advantage his knowledge of the London musical set. Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch has evidently sat for a portrait of Evelyn's father. Mr. Dolmetsch, you must know, is a player on the harpsichord and spinet, and Shaw, Runciman and others have liberally boomed him. But who is Evelyn Innes? That is a dangerous question. Possibly she is a composite of Melba, Calvé, Eames and Nordica. Oddly enough she gets a tiara, presented to her by the subscribers of the opera at New York! Of couse this points to Nordica, but Nordica could never read music at sight—you remember the one thousand piano rehearsals for "Tristan"—and so that clue is misleading. Perhaps the author may enlighten the musical world some day. Lady Gremalkin is certainly intended for Lady De Grey.
33Sir Owen Asher—is he one side of George Moore himself?—is well painted in the beginning, but the colors soon fade. He is a bore with his agnosticism, his vanity and his lack of backbone. He treated Evelyn too delicately. A lusty reproof is what the young woman most needed. Her churchly, sentimental vaporings would then have been dissipated, and she might have thrown a clock at her admirer's head. Such things have been known to happen in the life of a prima donna.
35Sir Owen starts a Wagnerian Review: Could Mr. Moore have meant the Earl of Dysart? There must be some mistake.
37Ulick Dean is said to be drawn from Robert Hichens, the author of "Flames," who is also a musical critic. The personal description is not unlike. There is a manager with a toothache, who is almost funny, and there is a rehearsal of "Tannhäuser," in which the question of "cuts" comes up. Wagnerian "cuts" are very apropos just now in London. Here is a sentence that rather gives away Mr. Moore's knowledge of music:
39"According to Mr. Innes, Bach was the last composer who had distinguished between A sharp and B flat. The very principle of Wagner's music is the identification of the two notes."
41Why? In the name of the chromatic fantasia, why? This will never do, never do, Mr. Author.
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45I confess I am rather tired of convent scenes. The best I ever read in latter day novels is in Mathilde Serao's "Fantasy." Mrs. Craigie in her last lamentable failure, "The School for Saints," "does" a convent and now Moore. The Roman Catholic problem, too, is being overdone. Mrs. Humphrey Ward in her new polemical pamphlet, which she calls a novel, "Helbeck of Bannisdale," indulges in numerous speculations of the sort. George Moore loves the rich trappings and the pomp of ceremonial in the church. But its iteration is an artistic mistake. Indeed his book goes off into midair in the last half. The first is fascinating. The discussion of the various schools of singing is valuable, and while at no place does he exhibit the marvelous virtuosity displayed by D'Annunzio in his exposition of "Tristan and Isolde," there are nevertheless many jeweled pages of descriptive writing. The book is permeated with all manners of pessimism from Omar to Nietzsche, and life is discussed from the viewpoints of the ascetic and the epicurean.
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49Now mark me, parents and guardians of tender minds, "Evelyn Innes" is not a book for the young. It is for men and women, musical men and women. That it will have the vogue of "Esther Waters" I doubt. Its subject is too exotic, the treatment too deliberate. Mr. Moore is an artist; his silence of three years has been fruitful. His vision is juster and he is a better workman; his sense of form is matured, although his faults of construction are easily detected. He has caught the right atmosphere; he is still master of moods, and he has attempted and nearly succeeded in spilling out the soul of a singer for our inspection; the soul of the selfish, ambitious prima donna, for there is no denying that Evelyn, despite her tender conscience, was selfish and a fascinating creature, mastered by every passing whim, and a woman utterly incapable of developing mentally without masculine assistance. Mr. Moore, then, has given us the type of the opera singer, and I forgive him pages of solemn gaited writing. I expect to get in every mail bushels of indignant letters from singers repudiating Moore's conception of woman on the operatic stage. Alas! that it should be as he writes. But it is. He says some things that go very deep, and there are exquisite touches. His attack on "Parsifal" sounds as if bodily taken from Nietzsche, but his remark about a woman having twenty after the first admirer hits the situation as if with a bludgeon.
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53A portrait of George Moore lies before me. It appeared in his "Confessions of a Young Man." It represents a God-forsaken looking young fellow, with narrow shoulders attired in white. The figure is limp, is almost spineless. It suggests damp, hot palms of jelly-like consistency. The forehead is high and intellectual. It broadens at the temples, where the organs of causation are located. The hair is evidently light colored and the moustaches drooping. The mouth is weak and sensual, the chin irresolute. The expression of the face is concentrated in the eyes. The eyebrows are lifted with a world-weary look, the eyes light and sad and fixed
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