Supremacy in English Letters

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 394, 30 June 1928, Page 22

Supremacy in English Letters

George Moore’s Work will Live for All Time PLAYS WHICH ARE BETTER THAN SHAW An English writer, Charles Morgan, claims that George Moore, author and playwright, is among the greatest of England’s literary men. “Anything which Moore writes,” he says, “is entitled, by his own supremacy in English leters, to be spoken of leisurely and at ease.” "I have spoken of Mr. Moore’s ‘supremacy in English letters’ and I hear at once a thousand voices crying the names of other writers who are supposed to be his rivals,” says Mr. Morgan. “Some one will of course say: 'What of Shaw?’ and another: ‘What of Kipling?’ “Shaw will serve as an example. Xo one will deny his influence on the thought of his time and on the technique of the theatre. No one, thonj^i

preferring, as I do, his prefaces to his plays, will deny to him the pratae that is due to argumentative parajfix brilliantly employed. He is, and has always been, a superb journalist of the day after to-morrow, some of whose work will long endure as historical evidence of the movement of popular thought in his age. Everlasting Magic But when the world, advancing a generation or two beyond him, has outgrown his teaching, when it is no longer in need of the stimulus of his boldness, when the circumstances that he has challenged are no longer the circumstances of those who hold his books in their hands, how much of his writing will survive because its thought is for all time or because its form lends to it an everlasting magic, independent of fashion, from which the mind of man shall not escape? For whatever reasons Shaw’s work may survive, little of it can endure as a contribution to purely imaginative letters. He has fired many a trail; he has had his reward in many an explosion of opinion. To-day the noise of those explosions is in the ears of all the world and Shaw stands as a figure in Europe amid a blaze of controversy. But the blaze will die and the explosions, though they will not be forgotten, will cease to be felt. The time will come when he and all men who are writing prose to-day will be judged by the form of their prose and by that part of their thought immanent in its form. Form alone is not enough, but nothing in literature lives except through form. There were better pamphleteers than Milton, but it is Milton who lives. There were writers of more substance than Addison and Steele, but their essays have survived even their anonymity. There were men who influenced their generation more than Sir Thomas Browne, but the “Religio Medici” has outlived their influence. So it will be with Mr. Moore. As a story-teller and as an artist

in prose he has no rival. His work is strongest when it has least contemporary flavour. He owes nothing, and has never owed anything—except perhaps, the vogue of “Esther Waters,” which is far from being his masterpiece—to fluctuations in popular taste, and, having borrowed nothing from this source in the past, will have no debt to it in the future. “Heloise and Abelard” is unmatched as a pageant of language and as an imaginative recreation of a period remote from ours; beside it “St. Joan” is an ephemeral pamphlet, and the gaudy emphasis of Feuchtwanger a string of theatrical beads. “The Lake” has a delicacy of perception and an evenness of texture that ensure its permanence; one remembers it as one remembers a long, solitary day beneath the open, sky, retracing the intricate movements of its thought, but retracing them always without weariness, for the min-d of its reader, like the mind of a traveller in the open, is continually refreshed by the breezes of various imagining and continuously sustained by the tranquil splendour of style. And whoever will see how Mr. Moore has preserved, has enriched and has enlightened the highest tradition of English prose may turn to his version of “Daphnis and Chloe,” a pastoral so beautiful that the sun of Mitylene seems to shine in it and so lucid that the telling ha 3 almost the quality of a song.