Success Intoxicates

"It seems strange to me that ... I should suddenly become one of the idols of the English public merely by writing one short play. Congratulations are pouring in upon me now, but they find me only a very weak old man, barely able to stand."

The twinkling-eyed, cherubic-countenanced old Irishman who grumbled thus, last week, is George Moore, 75, litterateur, epicure, and naughty-man-of-letters. Few smart, well-read folk do not know his Confessions of a Young Man; his great trilogy Ave, Salve, Vale; and his more recent elusively rich and moving Heloise and Abelard (1921). The trouble with these works is, however, that they appeal merely to a small group, select and perhaps elect. Not until last week did George Moore know the crude, earthy, tangible joy of having written a play which London proceeded to applaud, not merely from the lordly stalls but from the common, vociferating gallery.

The play is The Making of an Immortal. Edward of Wales attended its premiere last week. He seemed diverted by a drama which unfolds upon the stage the theory that that erudite Elizabethan, Francis Bacon (Baron Verulam, Viscount St. Albans), was the real author of plays now attributed to William Shakespeare. The stalls were atwitter between the acts, as nice points of Baconiana and Shakespeariana were weighed. But while the curtain was up the gallery roared approval of a mannish, imperious Queen Elizabeth and of a Will Shakespeare who seemed but a lout of an actor and most timid and unwilling to lend his name to the immortal works of lordly Francis Bacon.

On the morning following the premiere almost every dramatic critic in London said nice things about aged George Moore's play, called it "brilliant," "shrewdly humorous," "enriched with prose of unusual beauty."

Friends clipped the reviews, carried them to a nursing home where lay Dramatist Moore, and piled the printed praise upon his lap. Dazed at first, he murmured, "My cup of bliss is full." Later the intoxication of success caused his Irish spirits to mount until he not only boasted of becoming "an idol of the English public" but added blatantly:

"I came to England 40 years ago like a troubadour, to revolutionize English letters. I have been boycotted and spurned. I say now that this generation is the most sterile of any there has been in the way of literature. Not one of my living contemporaries is worth talking about. . . . Conrad's work will be dead in a year. Anyone could write the stuff he wrote about barges floating in green-blue hazes. . . . Thomas Hardy couldn't write two lines of correct English and . . . had no insight into human nature."

Having vented this spleen George Moore lapsed back into his easy chair, grew pensive, and finally reconsidered. Said he, as the intoxication of his play's success wore off, "Of course what I said did not apply to admittedly outstanding writers of today . . . Kipling for instance."