GEORGE MOORE
343
the novels that had come down to us from Defoe one after the other, to compare them to our poetry and to find them deficient in seriousness. This I could not do in an essay; the constant change of subject would have been impossible, or was impossible to me. Of course, I might never have thought of the dialogue if I had not known Landor; and perhaps Landor would not have thought of the dialogue if he had not read Plato.
Freeman: Who is your interlocutor in the present instance?
Moore: You are, as the manuscript on the table tells: "Maid: Mr Freeman, sir. Freeman: I am afraid I am interrupting—"
Freeman: So you have begun the conversation?
Moore: Yes; I have sketched some pages.
Freeman: Pray read them to me.
Moore: The sheets on the table are only a beginning. I am at the stage of feeling my way into the subject, and the conversation may have already taken a wrong turn.
Freeman: So we discuss George Eliot together?
Moore: George Eliot and Thomas Hardy are contrasted, or will be, in the dialogue that I am meditating.
Freeman: They are contrasted in the Confessions, and very violently.
Moore: Has it come to be held as a crime to do else than to voice public opinion? To strike up with the little boy going down the street whistling gleefully in defiance of time and tune?
Freeman: Public opinion changes slowly, but it changes. Lord Byron and George Eliot are examples of how public opinion sees black where it once saw white, and to find an example in our own time we have only to remember Tennyson. No doubt public opinion will change regarding Thomas Hardy, but I doubt the wisdom of treating the public like a whistling boy—
Moore: Ordering his breeches to be taken down and you to hoist him? Of course, if you don't like the subject I shall abandon it at once; but will you tell me why?
Freeman: It seems to me that I have already given a reason. But if you want another, here it is. You have just told me that you are willing always to lay aside a book to talk, a thing which you are doing now, forgetful that George Eliot is a voluminous writer, and of the length of Middlemarch, which I think you will find difficult to finish before the winter. And then there is Romola, another long book.
