SNAP SHOTS

...But the George Moore of Mike Fletcher (that little-read tragedy of introspection), A Mummer's Wife, A Drama in Muslin and Celibates, while never pleasant, had at least a refreshing frankness in dealing with sex, unsentimentalized by personal intrusion...

...And it will no doubt be questioned amid the wide controversies this compelling novel is bound to excite...

...To Moore there are two personalities combined in his conception of Jesus: the one who gradually grows to utter violent commands and the other who preaches the Sermon on the Mount...

...So although, at first, The Brook Kerith (Macmillan) may seem a departure because of its religious theme, yet it is in line with his general subjects...

...He becomes a shepherd and the years roll by...

...Yet there is nothing ironical in Moore's handling of these scenes...

...Though He starts toward Jerusalem He gives it up and retires into the hills, from where, it is intimated, He later went to preach in India —an did legend...

...Considering Him as one of the great men of the ages how will He react when He discovers the myth of His resurrection made an essential part of religion 1 It is this radical proposition the author sets himself to solve in the major part of his long story...

...Moore treats this in the same detail with which he has so frequently pictured conventual life...

...Perhaps this is inevitable, since it deals with Jesus...

...In telling this story I am but doing the work of God...

...The reason for this becomes apparent later, when he meets Jesus, who having been baptized by John, has left His flock to foretell the end of the world...

...It is then that He admits to Himself that He committed a great sin against God in believing He was the Messiah...

...The legend that Jesus did not die upon the cross, but was revived by Joseph, is not new in itself: it has done service in several stories, notably one by Frank Harris...

...Seldom does heresy go so panoplied.—The Bookman...

...Little emphasis is placed upon the crucifixion itself, since Moore is concerned with what he feels is a deeper tragedy...

...In fact nothing he has written has such sustained beauty and dignity...

...Never does He tell His story, for He seems only to be interested in the external life of the community...

...John's teaching took possession of me * * * His teaching was true when he was a teacher, but when I became his disciple his teaching became false...

...In this respect The Brook Kerith will take its place beside the very best in contemporary fiction...

...it turned me from my natural self and into such great harshness of mind that in Nazareth when my mother came with my brothers and sisters to the Synagogue, I said, woman, I have no need of thee, and when Joseph of Arimathea returned to me after a long attendance by his father's bedside, I told him he must learn to hate his father and mother if he would become worthy to follow me...

...One may question his taste—and Moore has frequently merited that censure...

...But in the time I am telling I was so exalted by the many miracles which I had performed by the power of God or the power of a demon, I know not which, that I encouraged my disciples to speak of me as the son of David, though I knew myself to be the son of Joseph, the carpenter...

...It is only fair to any author, however, that he has a right to select his theme...

...And thus He voluntarily leaves Paul to spread the doctrine which He Himself has repudiated...

...The meeting with Jesus is thus twenty years after the Crucifixion...

...In his new novel, hoAvever, with the exception of one or two characteristic passages, sex is eliminated as a, source of complication...

...Though the early chapters deal with Joseph of Arimathea, they are craftily conceived to arouse an interest in Jesus...

...Vet no historical novel can be judged too rigidly...

...He is bewildered...

...Not once does he descend to the vulgar sensationalism with which his radical juxtaposition of ideas and characters might have been treated...

...Fiction demands its own license and in this instance theologians, who differ so widely among themselves, will join together in finding flaws...

...especially since they embody two subjects most frequently correlated in his works: sex and religion...

...Possibly age, too, may have nicely decorated his past with a studied consciousness lacking in that early collection of careless contradictions so fascinatingly revealed in The Confessions of a Young Man...

...for, as one character remarks, "all religion is founded on a lie...

...Moore accepts the legend that Jesus was an Essene, a communal group of Jews who practiced poverty, and it is to their cenoby by the Brook Kerith that He goes after His recovery...

...Naturally Paul considers Him a madman...

...His limpid style flows with a quiet persistency...

...But it will be seen from the hasty summary of the novel, that its whole development, its revolutionary basic idea, will shock and offend those capable of feeling irreverence...

...Like Bernard Shaw in his introduction to Androcles and the Lion, Moore feels that the changing point came when Jesus began to believe and admit that He was the Messiah, prophesied in the Book of Daniel...

...The externals of religion, with their appeal to sensation, have always interested him, and one finds this best expressed in Sister Theresa, written while under the influence of Huysman...

...Here Jesus learns of Joseph's death, and one senses a growing inner tragedy...

...But my passion was so great in those days that I did not see that my teaching was not less than blasphemy against God, for God has created the world for us to live in it, and He has put love of parents into our hearts because He wishes us to love our parents, and if he has put into the heart of man love of woman, and into the heart of woman love of man, it is because He wishes both to enjoy that love...

...And, in thinking over his long literary activity, no one can fail to recall the impression made by Evelyn Innes and The Lake...

...Here the method of the historical novelist is utilized: local colour, scenery, bits of customs are pictured to evoke the period...

...Jesus asks...

...Much time is taken to suggest the social relations and the strong family ties which Joseph has in common with all the other Jewish families...

...Yet in the last analysis he must be measured by his aim and treatment...

...This is revealed shortly after Jesus sees a thief upon a cross...

...no man strays very far from the work that God has decreed for him...

...But the censorship of religious prejudice will not mar the fact of his remarkable literary achievement...

...And who are the Christians...

...There is no doubt that the manner in which the author of Memoirs of My Dead Life licked his chops over alleged conquests has prejudiced many of those who had acknowledged the power of Esther Waters...

...That Moore may have been guilty of selecting facts to prove a theory is the weak place in his armour...

...Later Paul, escaping from his enemies for preaching Christianity, flees to the Brook Kerith and is sheltered by the Essenes...

...then he consigned George Moore to the latter class...

...Here occurs a most vivid stretch of writing, in which Paul narrates the story of his wanderings...

...In my teaching I wandered beyond our doctrines and taught that this world is but a mock, a sham, a disgrace, and that naught was of avail but repentance...

...No one ever doubted his artistry even in his personal maunderings, which have so often made his sincerity a matter of question...

...He sees now what his "sin" has done and He resolves to go to Jerusalem and tell the truth...

...and those in which Joseph takes Him from the tomb and nurses Him back to health, with the aid of Esora, are the most tender and moving in the book...

...Paul has a peculiar fascination to the author, who skilfully makes the writer of the Epistles reveal his own character, so uncompromising as to the end and yet so compromising as to the means...

...This resolution is, of course, but another way of subtly attacking Pauline Christianity...

...And the subtly suggested motive which led Him into Jerusalem to His crucifixion was pride...

...And throughout the pages which follow Jesus is slowly forced to see that He will never be able to convince people of the truth of His story and that He must ever remain an outcast from His people...