Esther Waters Revisited

Esther Waters. — By George Moore

Although conversation of the kind is seldom very fruitful, while young writers gather together it would be hard to find a topic more suited to their enthusiasm than ‘Who are, when all is said and done, our best writers to-day, and why do we think so?’ Present-day literature consists almost entirely of poetry and the novel, and when it is the latter which has been under discussion; when there has been a furious rage of condemning, admiring, prophesying, upholding; when all is over and the participants have distributed to their satisfaction the laurel and the bay, it is not uncommon to hear, from a corner, an American or a French voice upraised: ‘But what about Mr. George Moore?’ Of course; how strange! How difficult it is to explain how so distinguished a figure in modern letters comes to be forgotten 1 And even when we recall him to memory do we not see him dim, pale, shadowy, vanishing round this corner, disappearing behind that door, almost in the rôle of expert private detective to his novels rather than author…. This, too, in spite of his detachment and candour, taking into account the delighted retracing, retracking himself down, so to say, for which he is famous. We have no other writer who is so fond of talking of his art. So endless is his patience, so sustained his enthusiasm, we page 234 have the feeling that he cannot refrain from confiding in the stupid public, simply because he cannot keep silent. And yet—there is the strange fact. While we are engaged in reading Mr. George Moore's novels he is ‘there,’ but once they are put back on the shelves he has softly and silently vanished away until he is heard of again.

The publication of a new edition of ‘Esther Waters’ provides an opportunity for seeking to understand this curious small problem. It is generally agreed that this novel is the best he has written, and the author himself has expressed his delight in it—‘the book that among all other books I should have cared most to write, and to have written it so much better than I ever dreamed it could be written.’ ‘Esther Waters’ is, on the face of it, a model novel. Having read it carefully and slowly—we defy anyone to race along or skip—from cover to cover, we are left feeling that there is not a page, paragraph, sentence, word, that is not right, the only possible page, paragraph, sentence, word. The more we look into it, the more minute our examination, the deeper grows our amazement at the amount of sheer labour that has gone to its execution. Nothing from: ‘She stood on the platform watching the receding train,’ until the last pale sentence, the last quiet closing chord is taken for granted. How is it possible for Mr. George Moore to have gained such precise knowledge of the servants' life in Esther's first place unless he disguised himself as a kitchen-maid and plunged his hands into the cauliflower water? There is not a detail of the kitchen and pantry life at Woodview that escapes his observation; the description of the bedroom shared by Esther and the housemaid Margaret is as complete as though the author were preparing us for some sordid crime to be committed there. And this intensely scrupulous method, this dispassionate examination is continued without a break in the even flow of the narrative. Turn to the page of the heroine's seduction:

The wheat stacks were thatching, and in the rickyard, page 235 in the carpenter's shop, and in the warm valleys, listening to the sheep-bells tinkling, they often lay together talking of love and marriage till one evening, putting his pipe aside, William threw his arm round her, whispering she was his wife.

‘Putting his pipe aside’! Could anything express a nicer control, a cooler view of the emotional situation? It is only equalled by: ‘Soon after thoughts betook themselves on their painful way, and the stars were shining when he followed her across the down, beseeching her to listen.’ It comes to this. There is not, in retrospect, one single page which is not packed as tightly as it can hold with whatever can be recorded. When we follow Esther to London here is the crown of the book. It is the London of that particular time preserved whole, a true ‘London of the water's edge’—a London of theatres, music-halls, wine-shops, public-houses. And it is the scene of the struggle of Esther Waters to be a good woman and to bring up her child against fearful odds. The life of a general servant—how sordid, how vulgar, how ignoble! What a trapesing up and down stairs and a turning-out of ugly rooms! Mr. Moore spares us none of it, and when her ‘luck changes,’ and, married to the man who seduced her, Esther has a home of her own, it is the centre of a low-class gambling lot. Could all this be more faithfully described than the author has described it? Could it possibly be more complete, more probable? The technique is so even, it is as though a violinist were to play the whole concerto in one stroke of the bow.

And yet we would say without hesitation that ‘Esther Waters’ is not a great novel, and never could be a great novel, because it has not, from first to last, the faintest stirring of the breath of life. It is as dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage. In a word it has no emotion. Here is a world of objects accurately recorded, here are states of mind set down, and here, above all, is that good Esther whose faith in her Lord is never shaken, whose page 236 love for her child is never overpowered—and who cares?

In the last year Jackie had taken much and given nothing. But when she opened Mrs. Lewis's door he came running to her, calling her Mummie; and the immediate preference he showed for her, climbing on her knees instead of Mrs. Lewis's, was a fresh sowing of love in the mother's heart.

Do we not feel that to be the detective rather than the author writing? It is an arid, sterile statement. Or this:

But when they came to the smooth wide … roads … she put him down, and he would run along ahead, crying, ‘Turn for a walk, Mummie, turn along,’ and his little feet went so quickly beneath his frock that it seemed as if he were on wheels. She followed, often forced to break into a run, tremulous lest he should fall….

The image of the little feet on wheels is impossibly flat and cold, and ‘tremulous’ is never the word for Esther—‘trembling’ or ‘all of a tremble’—the other word reveals nothing. What it comes to is that we believe that emotion is essential to a work of art; it is that which makes a work of art a unity. Without emotion writing is dead; it becomes a record instead of a revelation, for the sense of revelation comes from that emotional reaction which the artist felt and was impelled to communicate. To contemplate the object, to let it make its own impression—which is Mr. Moore's way in ‘Esther Waters’—is not enough. There must be an initial emotion felt by the writer, and all that he sees is saturated in that emotional quality. It alone can give incidence and sequence, character and background, a close and intimate unity. Let the reader turn to the scene where Sarah gets drunk because her horse has lost. It is a fearful scene, and so closely described that we might be at her elbow. But now Sarah speaks, now Esther, now William, and all is as cold and toneless as if it were being read out of that page 237 detective's notebook again. It is supremely good evidence; nothing is added, nothing is taken away, but we forget it as soon as it is read for we have been given nothing to remember. Fact succeeds fact, and with the reflection that Esther and her husband ‘fell asleep, happy in each other's love, seeming to find new bonds of union in pity for their friend's misfortune,’ the scene closes. Is that all? No wonder we forget Mr. George Moore. To praise such work as highly as he does is to insult his readers' intelligence.