GEORGE MOORE
351
equal detestation, and I think I am guilty of no paradox if I say that her style is the outcome of the moral conflict in which she found herself involved, for the thought to defend herself was never out of her mind. But relieved of her load of sin by Christianity or by Paganism (a subtlety which we cannot discuss here, our discussion being confined to discovering the source of her style) she might have written—well, it's impossible to say how she might have written, but certainly more delightfully than she has written.
Freeman: You would distinguish between a moral man and a moralist, and I think you are right. And I would add that the moralist is seldom happy.
Moore: If she had been a happy woman her happiness would have crept into her writings, for what is in the mind finds its way on to the page, an almost needless amplification of your criticism that the moralist is seldom happy. Indeed, an essay might be written by some philosopher, poet, painter, and critic, who would discern in Velasquez an icy spirit who saw no more in his fellows than subjects for portraits or pictures. The critic of whom I am thinking would cry, on turning from Velasquez to Rubens: A happy man! His paintings tell the tale. He meditated no doctrine, and to be free accepted Catholicism outwardly, thereby getting his freedom to wander among nymphs and satyrs without receiving reproofs from Spain. Among modern writers your enemy Stevenson—
Freeman: My enemy? No. If, as some people think, I have criticized Stevenson harshly it is because he seems to be taking a place in public estimation higher than he deserves, getting a great deal that was due to Pater. Moreover, the happiness that he expressed seems to me a very superficial kind of happiness, cudgelling a little donkey in the Cevennes!
Moore: At once you bring in a morality which casts a gloom upon the radiant pages of Travels With a Donkey.
Freeman: He did not keep religion out of his writings; he remained a sour Protestant. He could not visit the monks without commenting, and adversely, on the mode of life they chose to adopt, and in the Inland Voyage he is also ready to advance the claims of Protestantism against those of Rome; and in his essay on Villon he never ceases to thank God that he was not himself like Villon. No; I think you would have done better
