PAINTING AND WRITING IN MOORE’S CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN, LEWIS SEYMOUR AND SOME WOMEN, AND A DRAMA IN MUSLIN

Abstract

Artistic creation was for George Moore a major concern, an issue he obsessively addressed in his own writings, whether in essays, in autobiographies, or in novels. A Modern Lover was published in 1883, five years Confessions of a Young Man, and then in 1917 it was revised and published with a new title, Lewis Seymour and Some Women. Both Lewis Seymour and Some Women and Confessions of a Young Man relate the origins of a young painter's career but they differ in so far as Lewis Seymour, to a certain extent, fulfils his aspirations and even becomes a member of the Royal Academy, whereas the narrator of the autobiographical Confessions of a Young Man, despite desperate attempts to become a painter, fails and finally turns to writing. The two sister arts, painting and writing, were the two poles of Moore's artistic career and it is their relationships which will be outlined here, through a study of Moore's portrait of the artist as a young man, then through an analysis of the various ways that images surface in words in Lewis Seymour and Some Women and in A Drama in Muslin.A portrait of the artist as a young manBoth Lewis Seymour and Some Women and Confessions of a Young Man return to origins. Paradoxically, both begin with death and then unfold a process of rebirth and recreation in a very Nietzschean way. It is the death of the father, narrated in the first pages, that marks the origins not only of the text but also of a new course in life. I sense here the hint of Oedipus revisited: Lewis Seymour's father - a mad scientist spending his life shut in his laboratory in the basement of his house, carrying out mysterious and forbidden experiments - dies in an explosion. It is only in relation to the sense of freedom experienced by the narrator of Confessions of a Young Man that Moore's father's death is mentioned:My father's death freed me, and I sprang like a loosened bough to the light. His death gave me power to create myself - that is to say, to create a complete and absolute self out of the partial self which was all that the restraint of home had permitted; this future self, this ideal George Moore, beckoned me, lured like a ghost; and, as I followed the funeral, the question, Would I sacrifice this ghostly self, if by doing so I should bring my father back? presented itself without intermissionFiliation being broken, the possibility of self-creation - to which the father-figure was an obstacle - arises and insistently presents itself to the mind of the would-be artist, so insistently that it becomes an imperative: before me the crystal lake, the distant mountains, the swaying woods, said but one word, and that word was - self; not the self that was then mine, but the self on whose creation I was enthusiastically determined.1The Irish landscape, the place of origins itself, paradoxically lures the narrator away from his own roots: the prelude to his self-creation and rebirth is exile. A forerunner of Joyce, Moore presents exile as a prerequisite of the artistic enterprise but he introduces it at the outset of his autobiographical text, whereas it is only in the conclusion that Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man opens onto exile. For Moore, exile initiates an artistic quest that itself may be viewed as a process of self-creation. Going to Paris means becoming both a man and an artist; it means recreation and re-creation in the intertwining of art and love, both in the experiences of the narrator of Confessions of a Young Man and of Lewis Seymour. However, Confessions of a Young Man, in the words of Moore, is more concerned with art than with the relaxations of the artist2 and is hence a story of genesis, of symbolical death and rebirth as the young man is striving heart and soul to identify himself with his environment, to shake himself free from race and language and to recreate himself as it were in the womb of a new nationality, assuming its ideals, its morals, and its modes of thought. …