Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
CELIBATES
BY
GEORGE MOORE
Author of
"Spring Days," "A Mummer's Wife" Etc.
With Introduction By
TEMPLE SCOTT
NEW YORK1915
COPYRIGHT, 1895,BY MACMILLAN AND CO.
COPYRIGHT, 1915,BY BRENTANO'S.
INTRODUCTION.
Looking back over the twenty years since "Celibates" was firstpublished I find that the George Moore of the earlier year is theGeorge Moore of to-day. The novelist of 1895 and the novelist of 1915are one and the same person. Each is really interested in himself;each is more concerned with how the world and its humanity appear tohim than how they appear to the casual observer or how they may be inthemselves. The writer is always expressing himself through the factsand personalities which have stirred his imagination to creativeeffort. George Moore has never been a reporter or a philosopher; hehas always been an artist.
Now to say that the author of "Celibates" is always expressing himselfdoes not at all mean that he is recording merely his privatesensations, emotions, and moods. Egoist as he is, George Moore couldnot write his autobiography. He tried to do this lately in "Ave,""Vale," and "Salve," and failed—failed captivatingly. He is alwaysmost himself when he is dealing with what is not himself—with skiesand hills and ocean and gardens and men and women. Moore is anaturalist in the finest sense of that word. He deals with nature asthe artist must deal with it if nature is to be understood andenjoyed. For Moore's relationship with nature, and especially withhuman nature, is of that rare kind which is the experience of the veryfew—of those fine spirits endowed with the highest sympathy—asympathy which is not a feeling with or for others but an actual unionwith others, a union which brings suffering as well as enjoyment. Thisis the artist's burden of sorrow and it is also his privilege. It isbecause of it that every true work of art has in it also something ofa religious influence—a binding power which unites the separatedonlookers in an experience of a common emotion. If the artist have notthis peculiar sympathy he can have no vision and will never be acreator; he will never show us or tell us the new and strangemysteries of life which nature is continually unfolding. The artist'smission is to reveal to us the visions he alone has been vouchsafed tosee, and to reveal them so that the revelation is a creation. The menand women he is introducing to us must be as real and as living to usas they are to him. That is what George Moore has done in "Celibates"and that is why I say he is an artist.
"Celibates" consists of three stories—two of women and one of a man.Mildred Lawson and John Norton are celibates by nature. Agnes Lahensis a celibate from environment and circumstance. Each of the three isutterly different from the other, and yet all are alike in that theyare the products of a modern civilization. Mildred and John arewithout that compulsive force which is known as the sexual passion. Ifthey have it at all, it has been diluted by tradition and so-calledculture into a mere sensation. Agnes's passion is an arrested one, sothat what there is of it is easily diverted into an expression ofreligious aspiration.
Mildred Lawson would be called a born flirt. She is pretty, charming,and talented; but she is cold, unresponsive, selfish, and futile. Sheis also eminently respectable aft