George Moore, The Lake (London: Heinemann 1905)

‘England was after all only an island like Ireland - a little larger, but an island - and he though he would like a continent to roam in. The French cathedrals were more beautiful than the English, nd it would be pleasant to wander in the French country in happy-go-lucky fashion resting when one was tired, walking when it pleased one, taking an interest in whatever might strike one’s fancy [5]

This lake was beautiful, but he was tired of its low gray shores; he was tired of those mountains, melancholy as Irish melodies, and as beautiful [6]

No doubt there is a moment in everyone’s life when something happens to turn him into the road which he is destined to follo; for all that it would be superficial to think that the fate of one’s life is dependent upon accident. The accident that turns one into the road is only the means that Providence takes to procure the working out of certain ends [8]

Very wonderful is life’s coming and going, but however rapidly life passes, there is always time for wrong-doing; and only time for repentence is short [32]

Kilronan Abbey - ‘Father Gogarty wondered if God were reserving the bright destiny for Ireland which He had withheld a thousand years ago, and he looked out for the abbey that Roderick O’Connor, King of Conaught, had built in the twelfth century’ [70]

‘Father Moran held his peace for a little while, and then he began talking about the penal times, telling how religion in Ireland was another form of love of country, and that, if Catholics were intolerant of every form of heresy, it was because they instinctively felt that the questioning of dogma would mean some slight subsidence from the idea of nationality that held the people together. Like the ancient Jews, the Irish believed that the faith of their forefathers could bring them into their ultimate inheritance; this was why a proselytiser was hated so intensely.
 “More opinions,” Father Oliver said to himself. “I wonder he can’t admire that ash-tree, and be interested in the story, which is quaint and interesting [75], without trying to draw a historical parallel between the Irish and the Jews. Anyway, thinking is better than drinking,” and he jumped on his car. The last thing he heard was Moran’s voice saying, “He who betrays his religion betrays his country.”’ [75-76]

‘[...] the town dwindled very quickly; slated roofs gave way to thatched cottages, and of the same miserable kind that used to provoke his antipathy when he was a boy.
 This sinful dislike of poverty he had overcome in early manhood. A high religious enthusiasm had enabled him to overcome it, but his instinctive dislike of the lowly life - intellectual lowliness as well as physical - gathered within these cottages, seemed to have returned again. And perforce he asked himself if he were wanting in natural compassion, if all that he had of goodness in him were a debt he owed to the Church. Maybe it was in patience rather than in compassion that he was lacking; and pursuing this idea, he remembered the hopes he entertained when he railed off a strip of ground in front of Bridget Cleary’s house. They were that his example might inspire others. Eliza was perhaps more patient, and he began to wonder if she had any definite aim in view, and if the spectacle of the convent, with its show of nuns walking under the trees in the afternoon, would eventually awaken some desire of refinement in the people, if the money their farms now yielded would produce some sort of improvement in their cottages, the removal of those dreadfully heavy smells, and a longing for colour that would find expression in the planting of flowers.
 They gave their money willingly enough for the adornment of their chapel, for stained glass, incense, candles, and for music, and were it not for the services [87] of the church he didn’t know into what barbarism the people mightn’t have fallen [...] There is nothing more entirely natural or charming in the life of man than his love of flowers: it preceded his love of music; no doubt an appreciation of something better in the way of art than a jig played on the pipes would follow close on the purification of the home.’ (pp.86-87); Episode, Father Gogarty cures Father Moran of alcoholism in a sort of sympathetic miracle; On JEWS, ‘Father Moran held his peace for a little while, and then began talking about the penal times, and how religion in Ireland was antoher form of love of country [...] Like the ancient Jews, the Irish believed that the faith of their forefathers could bring them into their ultimate inheritance; this was why the proselytizer was hated so intensely.’ ‘So long as one does not despair, so long as one doesn’t look upon life bitterly, things work out fairly well in the end’ Marbhan’s poem [158]

So a taste for learning and a sensual temperment might exist inthe same person and concurrently [185]

“There are times, Gogary, when one’s doesn’t want to think, when one’s afraid, aren’t there? - when one wants to forget that one’s alive. You’ve had that feeling, Gogarty. We all have it” [196]

But as all roads are said to lead to Rome, so do man’s thoughts lead to the woman that lives in his heart; and as Father Oliver stumbled to his feet [...] he began to think he must tell Rose of the miracle that ad just happened [...]

[On SOUL], It seemed to him that somebody had lost her soul. He must seek it. It was his duty. Being a priest, he must go forth and find the soul, and bring it back to God. And then he remembered no more until he found himself suddenly in the midst of a great wood [...] Every now and again a large leaf floated down, and each interested him till it reached the wet earth [201]

He was looking for her soul, for her lost soul; and something had told him he would find the sould he was seeking in the wood. ...She had descended from the trees into his arms, white and cold [...] she had descended into his arms, and this time he would have lifted the veil and looked into her face, but she seemed to forbid him to recognise her under penalty of loss. His desire overcame him [...; 201-02]

You want to see people living, not for the next world, but for this, and there is no place where people enjoy life as much as in Italy. Not only the men, but the women enjoy themselves, even the very poorest [208]

In the fields along the hjillside one finds lavender and rosemary and myrtle and sweet-bay growing wild -every sort of sweet-scented thing [209]

You have struck the right note - the wistful Irish note - and if you can write a book in that strain I am sure it will meet with great success’ [Rose’s praise of Fr. Gogarty’s account of Marbhan the Hermit. Great as the pain of loss undoubtedly was it seemed to him that he could bear that pain with greater fortitude if there had not been added the possibly greater pain of finding her unworthy [213]

The blackness of the loveless death he saw in front of him turned his thoughts heavenward, and he began to think of how it would be if they were to meet on the other side. [...] But the Lord says that in heavener there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage and what would heaven be to him without Rose. No more than a union of souls, and he wanted a her body more than her soul [215]

[...] to ask for Rose’s body as well as her soul was not very orthodox [217; ...] when you think how helpless my people are, and how essential is the kindly guidance of the priest [219]

He had played the hypocrite long enough; he had spoken about her soul, but it was herself he wanted. This admission brought some relief, but he felt that the relief would only be temporary. Alas! it was surrender. It was worse than surrender – it was abandonment. He could sink no deeper. [...; 222]

“You did not know that you cared for me - you only thought of atonement” [231]

“I don’t like priests; the priest was the only thing about you I never liked” better that you should live in conventions and prejudices, with them you life would be impossible [Ellis says; 233]

They were no more than animated clay, whereas this woman seemed ot him a spirit [...] Other women think as their mothers thought, ans as their daughters will think, expressing the thoughts of countless generation [...] But this woman was never moved by impulses [...] She was a smusterious as the breadth f spring; she was springtide, and henceforth he thought of her as Primevera [236]

She just thought as she pleased, and spoke as she pleased, and he returned to the idea tht she was more than anyone else like what the primitive woman must have been [...] her beauty was part of the great agency [...] Was she Miranda, or Puck, or Ariel. Shakespeare had created many of these creatures, apparently emancipated from reality, and yet expressing a great deal of rality [...] he turned to joyous animality of woodland antiquity, feeling sure there must be some pagan myth in which a goddess came down to earth to take her joy among men, an irresponsible being obedient to no human laws [237]

He must put his confidence in Nature; he must listen to her. She would tell him. And he lay all the afternoon listening to the reeds and the ducks talking together in the lake. Very often the wood was like a harp [...] [241]

materialism is not fleshly lust but conformity to a code [236]

His perception seemd to have been indefinitely increased, an dit seemed to him as if the pat and the future had become one [...]

The moment was one of extraordinary sweetness [...] [245]

“I owe to you my liberation from prejudices and conventions” [...; 254]

the priesthood seemed to offer opportunities of realizing myself, of preserving the spirit within me [...] I might as well have been a policeman [...] Everyone must try to clin to his own soul, to cherish what is inly. And that is the only law, the only binding law I can believe in. If we are here for anything, it is surely that [255]

Moran, “It is woman that kills the faith in men”. Gogarty, “I think you’re right, woman is the danger. The Church dreads her. Woman is life” [and cf. 267, Gogarty’s cover-up]

“Love of woman means estrangement from the Church, because you have to protect her and her children.” I’ve thought a good deal on the subject, and it has come to seem to me that we are too much in the habit of thinking of the intellect and the flesh as separate things, whereas they are one thing [277]

He owed his life to these flowers’ [281]

[Flowers are the beginning of the appreciation of colour and of art. Episode, the stealing of the baby for the Protestant and Catholic baptisms [314]

‘The only thing he was sure of was that he had changed a great deal, and, he thought, for the better He seemed to himself a much more real person than he was a year ago, being now in full possession of his soul, and surely the possession of one’s soul is a great reality. By the soul he meant a special way of feeling and seeing. But the soul is more than that - it is a light; and this inner light, faint at first, had not been blown out. If he had blown it out, as many priests had done, he would not have experienced any qualms of conscience. The other priests in the diocese experienced none when they drove erring women out of their parishes, and the reason of this was that they followed a light from without, deliberately shutting out the light of the soul.
 The question interested him, and he pondered it a long while, finding himself at last forced to conclude that there is no moral law except one’s own conscience, and that the moral obligation of every man is to separate the personal conscience from the impersonal conscience. By the impersonal conscience he meant the opinions of others, traditional beliefs, and the rest; and thinking of these things he wandered round the Druid stones, and when his thoughts returned to Rose’s special case he seemed to understand that if any other priest had acted as he had acted he would have acted rightly, for in driving a sinful woman out of the parish he would be giving expression to the moral law as he understood it and as Garranard understood it. This primitive code of morals was [322] all Garranard could understand in its present civilisation, and any code is better than no code. Of course, if the priest were a transgressor himself he could not administer the law. Happily, that was a circumstance that did not arise often. So it was said; but what did he know of the souls of the priests with whom he dined, smoked pipes, and played cards? And he stopped, surprised, for it had never occurred to him that all a man knows only of his fellow is whether he be clean or dirty, short or tall, thin or stout. “Even the soul of Moran is obscure to me,” he said – “obscure as this wood” and at that moment the mystery of the wood seemed to deepen, and he stood for a long while looking through the twilight of the hazels.
 Very likely many of the priests he knew had been tempted by women: some had resisted temptation, and some had sinned and repented. There might be a priest who had sinned and lived for years in sin; even so if he didn’t leave his parish, if he didn’t become an apostate priest, faith would return to him in the end. But the apostate priest is anathema in the eyes of the Church; the doctrine always has been that a sin matters little if the sinner repent. Father Oliver suddenly saw himself years hence, still in; Garranard, administering the Sacraments, and faith returning like an incoming tide, covering the weedy shore, lapping round the high rock of doubt. [pp.322-23]

‘He was not following her, but an idea, an abstraction, an opinion; he was separating himself, and for ever, from his native land and his past life, and his quest was, alas! not her, but – He was following what? Life? Yes; but what is life? Do we find life in adventure or by our own fireside? For all he knew he might be flying from the very thing he thought he was following. (pp.332); There is a lake in every man’s heart [...] and every man must ungird himself for the crossing [333; END]