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GEORGE MOORE AND JOHN FREEMAN
Moore: A book that I read at a time when I considered seriously the claims of Lord Leighton to be a great painter.
Freeman: He supplied the illustrations.
Moore: And a better choice of an illustrator could not have been made. Both were workers in wax. Daniel Deronda I have never opened, and I shudder at the name of Felix Holt, a very leaden book that I stopped in the middle of long, long ago. You are quite right; I shall not be able to read all George Eliot. But that is not a reason why I should abandon my subject. I have read George Eliot, and if I send the book on the table back to the library at once, I shall be able to speak to you out of my memories of her, which will be more agreeable than to read Felix Holt and ask you to dinner to argue about a defunct literature in which neither of us is in the least interested. So true is this that I am beginning already to regret having opened the book on the table; that first paragraph has biased my mind. You were going to ask me?
Freeman: It was certainly in my mind to ask you if your memories of George Eliot are sufficient for the dialogue you propose to write.
Moore: You have come from her writings later than I have. Be my examiner.
Freeman: Tell me about Silas Marner.
Moore: Silas Marner is about an old man, a miser, who discovers a foundling at his door, boy or girl, I have forgotten which. He must have heard the child cry and risen from his bed, for he found the child by the light of a lantern. I am sure of that; I remember the lantern. Or am I inventing?
Freeman: I see that you still keep some faint memory of the story.
Moore: I can speak more precisely of some of the others.
Freeman: Of Middlemarch?
Moore: Of Middlemarch I remember the delight with which I read each volume, and there were six or eight in the edition that I came upon in my grandfather's library when I was twelve or thirteen, mayhap fourteen. You may have caught sight of the portrait of an old gentleman on the wall of the lobby as you came up stairs—my grandfather, the historian who in his preface to his history of the French Revolution (I give the preface in Ave) speaks with delightful resignation and humility of his failure to obtain recognition. Compelled by a presentiment
