In one of his fulminations against Christianity Nietzsche said that the first and only Christian died on the cross. George Moore thinks otherwise, at least he gives a novel version of the narrative in the synoptic Gospels. The Brook Kerith is a fiction dealing with the life of Christ. It is a book that will offend the faithful, and one that will not convince the heterodox. In it George Moore sets forth his ideas concerning the Christ "myth," evoking, as does Flaubert in Salammbô, a vanished land, a vanished civilisation, and in a style that is artistically beautiful. Never has he written with such sustained power, intensity and nobility of phrasing, such finely tempered, modulated prose. It is a rhythmed prose which first peeped forth in some pages of Mr. Moore's Evelyn Innes when the theme bordered on the mystical. Yet it is of an essentially Celtic character. Mysticism and Moore do not seem bedfellows. Nevertheless, Mr. Moore has been haunted from his first elaborate novel, A Drama in Muslin, by mystic and theological questions. A pagan by temperament, his soul is the soul of an Irish Roman Catholic. He can no more escape the fascinating ideas of faith and salvation than did Huysmans. (He has taken exception to this statement in an open letter.) A realist at the beginning, he has leaned of late years heavily on the side of the spirit. But like Baudelaire, Barbey d'Aurévilly, Villiers de L'Isle Adam, Paul Verlaine, and Huysmans, Mr. Moore is one of those sons of Mother Church who give anxious pause to his former coreligionists. The Brook Kerith will prove a formidable rock of offence, and it may be said that it was on the Index before it was written. And yet we find in it George Moore among the prophets.
Perhaps Mr. Moore has read the critical work of Professor Arthur Drews, The Christ Myth. It is a masterpiece of destruction. There are many books in which Jesus Christ figures. Ernest Renan's Life, written in his silky and sophisticated style, is no more admired by Christians than the cruder study by Strauss. After these the deluge, ending with the dream by the late Remy de Gourmont, Une Nuit au Luxembourg. And there is the brilliant and poetic study of Edgar Saltus, his Mary Magdalen. Anatole France has distilled into his The Revolt of the Angels some of his acid hatred of all religions, with blasphemous and obscene notes not missing. It may be remembered that M. France also wrote that pastel of irony The Procurator of Judea, in which Pontius Pilate is shown in his old age, rich, ennuied, sick. He has quite forgotten, when asked, about the Jewish agitator who fancied himself the son of God and was given over to the Temple authorities in Jerusalem and crucified. Rising from the tomb on the third day he became the Christ of the Christian dispensation, aided by the religious genius of one Paul, formerly known as Saul the Tent-maker of Tarsus. Now Mr. Moore does in a larger mould and in the grand manner what Anatole France accomplished in his miniature. The ironic method, a tragic irony, suffuses every page of The Brook Kerith, and the story of the four Gospels is twisted into something perverse, and for Christians altogether shocking. It will be called "blasphemous," but we must remember that our national Constitution makes no allowance for so-called "blasphemers"; that the mythologies of the Greeks and Romans, Jews and Christians, Mohammedans and Mormons may be criticised, yet the criticism is not inherently "blasphemous." America is no more a Christian than a Jewish nation or a nation of freethinkers. It is free to all races and religions, and thus one man's spiritual meat may be another's emetic.