GEORGE MOORE
349
Moore: Why should we assume that?
Freeman: I have told you that her father was much distressed by her refusal to go to church—
Moore: Had I been her father, I should have said: Marian, I will allow you to omit church if in return you will choose some other name than George Eliot.
Freeman: What name would you have suggested to her?
Moore: Oliver Brunskill.
Freeman: There's not much beauty in that name.
Moore: We mustn't seek beauty in names—character. Do you think my writings would have been the same if I had adopted Annie Grey as my pseudonym? George Henry Lewes, her guide and bugle-call (it was he who first suggested that she should turn her hand to fiction) should have said, when they were debating the pseudonym necessary for Scenes from Clerical Life: I do not urge you, Marian, to choose Annie Grey—indeed, I urge you not to choose it; and we can imagine Marian answering: But why, dear George, are you averse from the name George Eliot? It is so uncompromising.
Freeman: And what answer would you set down for George Henry Lewes?
Moore: A name too faintly genteel for you, Marian. The phrase might have risen up in his mind as genteel as an omnibus, but he would not have spoken it, and continued: Hardly a man's name, hardly a woman's, without any sex on it. The word sex would have frightened Marian, and she would have said that the name was chosen, before she knew him, as a suitable name to go on the title page of a translation of Strauss' Life of Jesus. But why continue it? George Henry would have interposed. Scenes from Clerical Life, by Marian Evans. To which Marian would have answered drily: I have to consider my father.
Freeman: I do not know if the translation was made at Arbury Farm or when she went to London.
Moore: It can't be helped. In London she adopted the morality of her circle: morality without God, a fantastic theory if ever there was one. Even with God's help men and women stray into the primrose path; how then can we expect them to remain in the strait and narrow way if there be no promise of reward or punishment? An altogether impracticable morality, as is
