GEORGE MOORE
347
Freeman: Her name was Marian Evans, and she came from Warwickshire.
Moore: From the middle of England, like Shakespeare. Balzac, too, came from the middle of France.
Freeman: Her father was land agent to Mr Francis Newdigate, a Warwickshire squire.
Moore: And she was sent to school. But to what school?
Freeman: That I can't tell you, but without doubt to some school in the neighbourhood, perhaps in Warwick. Do you know it?
Moore: Yes. In my boyhood it was a lovely old English town full of gardens and gables, and associated with the Middle Ages—Warwick Castle, with a bad picture of a man in a cave shown to travelling folk, the very town in which there would be a fine, large, handsome school for young ladies. Birmingham is over the border, but not more than twenty miles away, and she may have been educated in Birmingham.
Freeman: Be that as it may, she remained at school till her mother's death, and was then recalled home to look after her father's house; and the change, I have always heard, was welcomed by her, for even in her teens she resented direction in her studies. And at Arbury Farm she applied herself to the French and Italian languages, and I think music was a hobby of hers.
Moore: I shouldn't have suspected music from her writing. But Nature is ever capricious. Tell me more.
Freeman: At Arbury Farm she refused to go to church and nearly quarrelled with her father, and afterwards she began to write for the Westminster Review.
Moore: I am beginning to understand. And after the publication of two or three articles the Editor wrote asking her to call at the office when she came to London; and in London she made the acquaintance of John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, the inevitable Harriet Martineau, and the desirable George Henry. Can you give me the date when she left Arbury Farm?
Freeman: I will inquire the matter out in the library.
Moore: No matter. She came up to London to participate in the discovery that pleasure was a mistake, almost a vulgarity, and that life would be better without it; for in the 'fifties, and still more in the 'sixties, the philosophers thought they had at last found Nature out. And the arts, determined not to lag behind, became serious; the eighteenth century was spoken of as the
