Memoirs of My Dead Life (World Classics) by George Moore

Author:George Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, novel, book, bestseller, top10, interactive media, urban romantics
Publisher: Urban Romantics
Published: 2018-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

“As soon as you knew you loved him, you resolved to see him no more?”

Doris nodded.

“You sent him away before you yielded to him?”

She nodded, and looking at me her eyes filled with tears, but which only seemed to make them still more beautiful, she told me that they had both felt that it was impossible to deceive Albert.

All love stories are alike in this; they all contain what the reviewers call “sordid details.” But if Tristan had not taken advantage of King Mark’s absence on a hunting expedition, the world would have been the poorer of a great love story; and what, after all, does King Mark’s happiness matter to us--a poor passing thing, whose life was only useful in this, that it gave us an immortal love story? And if Wagner had not loved Madame Wasendonck, and if Madame Wasendonck had not been unfaithful to her husband, we should not have had “Tristan.” Who then would, for the sake of Wasendonck’s honour, destroy the score of “Tristan”? Nor is the story of “Tristan” the only one, nor the most famous. There is also the story of Helen. If Menelaus’s wife had not been unfaithful to him, the world would have been the poorer of the greatest of all poems, the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey.” Dear me, when one thinks of it, one must admit that art owes a great deal to adultery. Children are born of the marriage, stories of the adulterous bed, and the world needs both--stories as well as children. Even my little tale would not exist if Doris had been a prudent maiden, nor would it have interested me to listen to her that day by the sea if she had naught to tell me but her unswerving love for Albert. Her story is not what the world calls a great story, and it would be absurd to pretend that if a shorthand writer had taken it down his report would compare with the stories of Isolde and Helen, but I heard it from her lips, and her tears and her beauty replaced the language of Wagner and of Homer; and so well did they do this that I am not sure that the emotion I experienced in listening to her was less than that which I have experienced before a work of art.

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