The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories Part 2

[Footnote 16: With an exhibition gained when he was not yet fifteen.]

The year of this autobiographical record[17] marked the commencement of Gissing's reclamation from that worst form of literary slavery--the chain-gang. For he had been virtually chained to the desk, perpetually working, imprisoned in a London lodging, owing to the literal lack of the means of locomotion.[18] His most strenuous work, wrung from him in dismal darkness and wrestling of spirit, was now achieved. Yet it seems to me both ungrateful and unfair to say, as has frequently been done, that his subsequent work was consistently inferior. In his earlier years, like Reardon, he had destroyed whole books--books he had to sit down to when his imagination was tired and his fancy suffering from deadly fatigue. His corrections in the days of _New Grub Street_ provoked not infrequent, though anxiously deprecated, remonstrance from his publisher's reader. Now he wrote with more a.s.surance and less exhaustive care, but also with a perfected experience. A portion of his material, it is true, had been fairly used up, and he had henceforth to turn to a.n.a.lyse the sufferings of well-to-do lower middle-cla.s.s families, people who had 'neither inherited refinement nor acquired it, neither proletarian nor gentlefolk, consumed with a disease of vulgar pretentiousness, inflated with the miasma of democracy.' Of these cla.s.ses it is possible that he knew less, and consequently lacked the sureness of touch and the fresh draughtsmanship which comes from ample knowledge, and that he had, consequently, to have increasing resort to books and to invention, to hypothesis and theory.[19]

On the other hand, his power of satirical writing was continually expanding and developing, and some of his very best prose is contained in four of these later books: _In the Year of Jubilee_ (1894), _Charles d.i.c.kens_ (1898), _By the Ionian Sea_ (1901), and _The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft_ (1903); not far below any of which must be rated four others, _The Odd Women_ (1893), _Eve's Ransom_ (1895), _The Whirlpool_ (1897), and _Will Warburton_ (1905), to which may be added the two collections of short stories.

[Footnote 17: Followed in 1897 by _The Whirlpool_ (see p. xvi), and in 1899 and 1903 by two books containing a like infusion of autobiographical experience, _The Crown of Life_, technically admirable in chosen pa.s.sages, but sadly lacking in the freshness of first-hand, and _The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft_, one of the rightest and ripest of all his productions.]

[Footnote 18: 'I hardly knew what it was to travel by omnibus. I have walked London streets for twelve and fifteen hours together without even a thought of saving my legs or my time, by paying for waftage. Being poor as poor can be, there were certain things I had to renounce, and this was one of them.'--_Ryecroft_. For earlier scenes see _Monthly Review_, xvi., and _Owens College Union Mag_., Jan. 1904, pp. 80-81.]

[Footnote 19: 'He knew the narrowly religious, the mental barrenness of the poor dissenters, the people of the slums that he observed so carefully, and many of those on the borders of the Bohemia of which he at least was an initiate, and he was soaked and stained, as he might himself have said, with the dull drabs of the lower middle cla.s.s that he hated. But of those above he knew little.... He did not know the upper middle cla.s.ses, which are as difficult every whit as those beneath them, and take as much time and labour and experience and observation to learn.'--'The Exile of George Gissing,' _Albany_, Christmas 1904. In later life he lost sympathy with the 'nether world.' Asked to write a magazine article on a typical 'workman's budget,' he wrote that he no longer took an interest in the 'condition of the poor question.']

Few, if any, of Gissing's books exhibit more mental vigour than _In the Year of Jubilee_. This is shown less, it may be, in his attempted solution of the marriage problem (is marriage a failure?) by means of the suggestion that middle cla.s.s married people should imitate the rich and see as little of each other as possible, than in the terse and amusing characterisations and the powerfully thought-out descriptions. The precision which his pen had acquired is well ill.u.s.trated by the following description, not unworthy of Thomas Hardy, of a new neighbourhood.

'Great elms, the pride of generations pa.s.sed away, fell before the speculative axe, or were left standing in mournful isolation to please a speculative architect; bits of wayside hedge still shivered in fog and wind, amid h.o.a.rdings variegated with placards and scaffoldings black against the sky. The very earth had lost its wholesome odour; trampled into mire, fouled with builders' refuse and the noisome drift from adjacent streets, it sent forth, under the sooty rain, a smell of corruption, of all the town's uncleanliness. On this rising locality had been bestowed the t.i.tle of "Park." Mrs. Morgan was decided in her choice of a dwelling here by the euphonious address, Merton Avenue, Something-or-other Park.'

Zola's wonderful skill in the animation of crowds has often been commented upon, but it is more than doubtful if he ever achieved anything superior to Gissing's marvellous incarnation of the jubilee night mob in chapter seven.

More formidable, as ill.u.s.trating the venom which the author's whole nature had secreted against a perfectly recognisable type of modern woman, is the acrid description of Ada, Beatrice, and f.a.n.n.y French.

'They spoke a peculiar tongue, the product of sham education and a mock refinement grafted upon a stock of robust vulgarity. One and all would have been moved to indignant surprise if accused of ignorance or defective breeding. Ada had frequented an "establishment for young ladies" up to the close of her seventeenth year: the other two had pursued culture at a still more pretentious inst.i.tute until they were eighteen. All could "play the piano"; all declared--and believed--that they "knew French." Beatrice had "done" Political Economy; f.a.n.n.y had "been through" Inorganic Chemistry and Botany. The truth was, of course, that their minds, characters, propensities, had remained absolutely proof against such educational influence as had been brought to bear upon them. That they used a finer accent than their servants, signified only that they had grown up amid falsities, and were enabled, by the help of money, to dwell above-stairs, instead of with their spiritual kindred below.'

The evils of indiscriminate education and the follies of our grotesque examination system were one of Gissing's favourite topics of denunciation in later years, as evidenced in this characteristic pa.s.sage in his later manner in this same book:--

'She talked only of the "exam," of her chances in this or that "paper," of the likelihood that this or that question would be "set."

Her brain was becoming a mere receptacle for dates and definitions, vocabularies and rules syntactic, for thrice-boiled essence of history, ragged sc.r.a.ps of science, quotations at fifth hand, and all the heterogeneous rubbish of a "crammer's" shop. When away from her books, she carried sc.r.a.ps of paper, with jottings to be committed to memory. Beside her plate at meals lay formulae and tabulations. She went to bed with a manual, and got up with a compendium.'

The conclusion of this book and its predecessor, _The Odd Women_,[20] marks the conclusion of these elaborated problem studies. The inferno of London poverty, social a.n.a.lysis and autobiographical reminiscence, had now alike been pretty extensively drawn upon by Gissing. With different degrees of success he had succeeded in providing every one of his theses with something in the nature of a jack-in-the-box plot which the public loved and he despised. There remained to him three alternatives: to experiment beyond the limits of the novel; to essay a lighter vein of fiction; or thirdly, to repeat himself and refashion old material within its limits.

Necessity left him very little option. He adopted all three alternatives.

His best success in the third department was achieved in _Eve's Ransom_ (1895). Burrowing back into a projection of himself in relation with a not impossible she, Gissing here creates a false, fair, and fleeting beauty of a very palpable charm. A growing sense of her power to fascinate steadily raises Eve's standard of the minimum of luxury to which she is ent.i.tled.

And in the course of this evolution, in the vain attempt to win beauty by grat.i.tude and humility, the timid Hilliard, who seeks to propitiate his charmer by ransoming her from a base liaison and supporting her in luxury for a season in Paris, is thrown off like an old glove when a richer _parti_ declares himself. The subtlety of the portraiture and the economy of the author's sympathy for his hero impart a subacid flavour of peculiar delicacy to the book, which would occupy a high place in the repertoire of any lesser artist. It well exhibits the conflict between an exaggerated contempt for, and an extreme susceptibility to, the charm of women which has cried havoc and let loose the dogs of strife upon so many able men. In _The Whirlpool_ of 1897, in which he shows us a number of human floats spinning round the vortex of social London,[21] Gissing brings a melodramatic plot of a kind disused since the days of _Demos_ to bear upon the exhausting lives and illusive pleasures of the rich and cultured middle cla.s.s. There is some admirable writing in the book, and symptoms of a change of tone (the old inclination to whine, for instance, is scarcely perceptible) suggestive of a new era in the work of the novelist--relatively mature in many respects as he now manifestly was.

Further progress in one of two directions seemed indicated: the first leading towards the career of a successful society novelist 'of circulating fame, spirally crescent,' the second towards the frame of mind that created _Ryecroft_. The second fortunately prevailed. In the meantime, in accordance with a supreme law of his being, his spirit craved that refreshment which Gissing found in revisiting Italy. 'I want,' he cried, 'to see the ruins of Rome: I want to see the Tiber, the c.l.i.tumnus, the Aufidus, the Alban Hills, Lake Trasimenus! It is strange how these old times have taken hold of me. The mere names in Roman history make my blood warm.' Of him the saying of Michelet was perpetually true: 'J'ai pa.s.se a cote du monde, et j'ai pris l'histoire pour la vie.' His guide-books in Italy, through which he journeyed in 1897 (_en prince_ as compared with his former visit, now that his revenue had risen steadily to between three and four hundred a year), were Gibbon, his _semper eadem_, Lenormant (_la Grande-Grece_), and Ca.s.siodorus, of whose epistles, the foundation of the material of _Veranilda_, he now began to make a special study. The dirt, the poverty, the rancid oil, and the inequable climate of Calabria must have been a trial and something of a disappointment to him. But physical discomfort and even sickness was whelmed by the old and overmastering enthusiasm, which combined with his hatred of modernity and consumed Gissing as by fire. The sensuous and the emotional sides of his experience are blended with the most subtle artistry in his _By the Ionian Sea_, a short volume of impressions, unsurpa.s.sable in its kind, from which we cannot refrain two characteristic extracts:--

[Footnote 20: _The Odd Women_ (1893, new edition, 1894) is a rather sordid and depressing survey of the life-histories of certain orphaned daughters of a typical Gissing doctor--grave, benign, amiably diffident, terribly afraid of life. 'From the contact of coa.r.s.e actualities his nature shrank.'

After his death one daughter, a fancy-goods shop a.s.sistant (no wages), is carried off by consumption; a second drowns herself in a bath at a charitable inst.i.tution; another takes to drink; and the portraits of the survivors, their petty, incurable maladies, their utter uselessness, their round shoulders and 'very short legs,' pimples, and scraggy necks--are as implacable and unsparing as a Maupa.s.sant could wish. From the deplorable insight with which he describes the nerveless, underfed, compulsory optimism of these poor in spirit and poor in hope Gissing might almost have been an 'odd woman' himself. In this book and _The Paying Guest_ (1895) he seemed to take a savage delight in depicting the small, stiff, isolated, costly, unsatisfied pretentiousness and plentiful lack of imagination which cripples suburbia so cruelly.--See _Sat.u.r.day Review_, 13 Apr. 1896; and see also _ib_., 19 Jan. 1895.]

[Footnote 21: The whirlpool in which people just nod or shout to each other as they spin round and round. The heroine tries to escape, but is drawn back again and again, and nearly submerges her whole environment by her wild clutches. Satire is lavished upon misdirected education (28), the s.l.u.ttishness of London landladies, self-adoring Art on a pedestal (256), the delegation of children to underlings, sham religiosity (229), the pampered conscience of a diffident student, and the _mensonge_ of modern woman (300), typified by the ruddled cast-off of Redgrave, who plays first, in her shrivelled paint, as procuress, and then, in her naked hideousness, as blackmailer.]

'At Cotrone the tone of the dining-room was decidedly morose. One man--he seemed to be a sort of clerk--came only to quarrel. I am convinced that he ordered things which he knew that the people could not cook, just for the sake of reviling their handiwork when it was presented. Therewith he spent incredibly small sums; after growling and remonstrating and eating for more than an hour, his bill would amount to seventy or eighty centesimi, wine included. Every day he threatened to withdraw his custom; every day he sent for the landlady, pointed out to her how vilely he was treated, and asked how she could expect him to recommend the Concordia to his acquaintances. On one occasion I saw him push away a plate of something, plant his elbows on the table, and hide his face in his hands; thus he sat for ten minutes, an image of indignant misery, and when at length his countenance was again visible, it showed traces of tears.'--(pp.

102-3.)

The unconscious paganism that lingered in tradition, the half-obscured names of the sites celebrated in cla.s.sic story, and the spectacle of the white oxen drawing the rustic carts of Virgil's time--these things roused in him such an echo as _Chevy Chase_ roused in the n.o.ble Sidney, and made him shout with joy. A pensive vein of contemporary reflection enriches the book with pa.s.sages such as this:--

'All the faults of the Italian people are whelmed in forgiveness as soon as their music sounds under the Italian sky. One remembers all they have suffered, all they have achieved in spite of wrong. Brute races have flung themselves, one after another, upon this sweet and glorious land; conquest and slavery, from age to age, have been the people's lot. Tread where one will, the soil has been drenched with blood. An immemorial woe sounds even through the lilting notes of Italian gaiety. It is a country, wearied and regretful, looking ever backward to the things of old.'--(p. 130.)

The _Ionian Sea_ did not make its appearance until 1901, but while he was actually in Italy, at Siena, he wrote the greater part of one of his very finest performances; the study of _Charles d.i.c.kens_, of which he corrected the proofs 'at a little town in Calabria.' It is an insufficient tribute to Gissing to say that his study of d.i.c.kens is by far the best extant. I have even heard it maintained that it is better in its way than any single volume in the 'Man of Letters'; and Mr. Chesterton, who speaks from ample knowledge on this point, speaks of the best of all d.i.c.kens's critics, 'a man of genius, Mr. George Gissing.' While fully and frankly recognising the master's defects in view of the artistic conscience of a later generation, the writer recognises to the full those transcendent qualities which place him next to Sir Walter Scott as the second greatest figure in a century of great fiction. In defiance of the terrible, and to some critics d.a.m.ning, fact that d.i.c.kens entirely changed the plan of _Martin Chuzzlewit_ in deference to the popular criticism expressed by the sudden fall in the circulation of that serial, he shows in what a fundamental sense the author was 'a literary artist if ever there was one,' and he triumphantly refutes the rash daub of unapplied criticism represented by the parrot cry of 'caricature' as levelled against d.i.c.kens's humorous portraits. Among the many notable features of this veritable _chef-d'oeuvre_ of under 250 pages is the sense it conveys of the superb gusto of d.i.c.kens's actual living and breathing and being, the vindication achieved of two ordinarily rather maligned novels, _The Old Curiosity Shop_ and _Little Dorrit_, and the insight shown into d.i.c.kens's portraiture of women, more particularly those of the shrill-voiced and nagging or whining variety, the 'better halves' of Weller, Varden, Snagsby and Joe Gargery, not to speak of the Miggs, the Gummidge, and the M'Stinger. Like Mr. Swinburne and other true men, he regards Mrs. Gamp as representing the quintessence of literary art wielded by genius. Try (he urges with a fine curiosity) 'to imagine Sarah Gamp as a young girl'! But it is unfair to separate a phrase from a context in which every syllable is precious, reasonable, thrice distilled and sweet to the palate as Hybla honey.[22]

[Footnote 22: A revised edition (the date of d.i.c.kens's birth is wrongly given in the first) was issued in 1902, with topographical ill.u.s.trations by F.G. Kitton. Gissing's introduction to _Nickleby_ for the Rochester edition appeared in 1900, and his abridgement of Forster's _Life_ (an excellent piece of work) in 1903 [1902]. The first collection of short stories, twenty-nine in number, ent.i.tled _Human Odds and Ends_, was published in 1898. It is justly described by the writer of the most interesting 'Recollections of George Gissing' in the _Gentleman's Magazine,_ February 1906, as 'that very remarkable collection.']

Henceforth Gissing spent an increasing portion of his time abroad, and it was from St. Honore en Morvan, for instance, that he dated the preface of _Our Friend the Charlatan_ in 1901. As with _Denzil Quarrier_ (1892) and _The Town Traveller_ (1898) this was one of the books which Gissing sometimes went the length of asking the admirers of his earlier romances 'not to read.' With its prefatory note, indeed, its cheap ill.u.s.trations, and its rather mechanical intrigue, it seems as far removed from such a book as _A Life's Morning_ as it is possible for a novel by the same author to be. It was in the South of France, in the neighbourhood of Biarritz, amid scenes such as that described in the thirty-seventh chapter of _Will Warburton_, or still further south, that he wrote the greater part of his last three books, the novel just mentioned, which is probably his best essay in the lighter ironical vein to which his later years inclined,[23]

_Veranilda_, a romance of the time of Theodoric the Goth, written in solemn fulfilment of a vow of his youth, and _The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft_, which to my mind remains a legacy for Time to take account of as the faithful tribute of one of the truest artists of the generation he served.

[Footnote 23: It also contains one of the most beautiful descriptions ever penned of the visit of a tired town-dweller to a modest rural home, with all its suggestion of trim gardening, fresh country scents, indigenous food, and homely simplicity.--_Will Warburton_, chap. ix.]

In _Veranilda_ (1904) are combined conscientious workmanship, a pure style of finest quality, and archaeology, for all I know to the contrary, worthy of Becker or Boni. Sir Walter himself could never in reason have dared to aspire to such a fortunate conjuncture of talent, grace, and historic accuracy. He possessed only that profound knowledge of human nature, that moulding humour and quick sense of dialogue, that live, human, and local interest in matters antiquarian, that statesmanlike insight into the pith and marrow of the historic past, which makes one of Scott's historical novels what it is--the envy of artists, the delight of young and old, the despair of formal historians. _Veranilda_ is without a doubt a splendid piece of work; Gissing wrote it with every bit of the care that his old friend Biffen expended upon _Mr. Bailey, grocer_. He worked slowly, patiently, affectionately, scrupulously. Each sentence was as good as he could make it, harmonious to the ear, with words of precious meaning skilfully set; and he believed in it with the illusion so indispensable to an artist's wellbeing and continuance in good work. It represented for him what _Salammbo_ did to Flaubert. But he could not allow himself six years to write a book as Flaubert did. _Salammbo_, after all, was a magnificent failure, and _Veranilda_,--well, it must be confessed, sadly but surely, that _Veranilda_ was a failure too. Far otherwise was it with _Ryecroft_, which represents, as it were, the _summa_ of Gissing's habitual meditation, aesthetic feeling and sombre emotional experience. Not that it is a pessimistic work,--quite the contrary, it represents the mellowing influences, the increase of faith in simple, unsophisticated English girlhood and womanhood, in domestic pursuits, in innocent children, in rural homeliness and honest Wess.e.x landscape, which began to operate about 1896, and is seen so unmistakably in the closing scenes of _The Whirlpool_.

Three chief strains are subtly interblended in the composition. First that of a nature book, full of air, foliage and landscape--that English landscape art of Linnell and De Wint and Foster, for which he repeatedly expresses such a pa.s.sionate tendre,[24] refreshed by 'blasts from the channel, with raining scud and spume of mist breaking upon the hills' in which he seems to crystallise the very essence of a Western winter.

Secondly, a paean half of praise and half of regret for the vanishing England, pa.s.sing so rapidly even as he writes into 'a new England which tries so hard to be unlike the old.' A deeper and richer note of thankfulness, mixed as it must be with anxiety, for the good old ways of English life (as lamented by Mr. Poorgra.s.s and Mark Clark[25]), old English simplicity, and old English fare--the fine prodigality of the English platter, has never been raised. G.o.d grant that the leaven may work! And thirdly there is a deeply brooding strain of saddening yet softened autobiographical reminiscence, over which is thrown a light veil of literary appreciation and topical comment. Here is a typical _cadenza_, rising to a swell at one point (suggestive for the moment of Raleigh's famous apostrophe), and then most gently falling, in a manner not wholly unworthy, I venture to think, of Webster and Sir Thomas Browne, of both of which authors there is internal evidence that Gissing made some study.

[Footnote 24: 'I love and honour even the least of English landscape painters.'--_Ryecroft_.]

[Footnote 25: 'But what with the parsons and clerks and school-people and serious tea-parties, the merry old ways of good life have gone to the dogs--upon my carca.s.s, they have!'--_Far from the Madding Crowd_.]

'I always turn out of my way to walk through a country churchyard; these rural resting-places are as attractive to me as a town cemetery is repugnant. I read the names upon the stones and find a deep solace in thinking that for all these the fret and the fear of life are over.

There comes to me no touch of sadness; whether it be a little child or an aged man, I have the same sense of happy accomplishment; the end having come, and with it the eternal peace, what matter if it came late or soon? There is no such gratulation as _Hic jacet_. There is no such dignity as that of death. In the path trodden by the n.o.blest of mankind these have followed; that which of all who live is the utmost thing demanded, these have achieved. I cannot sorrow for them, but the thought of their vanished life moves me to a brotherly tenderness. The dead amid this leafy silence seem to whisper encouragement to him whose fate yet lingers: As we are, so shalt thou be; and behold our quiet!'--(p. 183.)

And in this deeply moving and beautiful pa.s.sage we get a foretaste, it may be, of the euthanasia, following a brief summer of St. Martin, for which the scarred and troublous portions of Gissing's earlier life had served as a preparation. Some there are, no doubt, to whom it will seem no extravagance in closing these private pages to use the author's own words, of a more potent Enchanter: 'As I close the book, love and reverence possess me.'

Whatever the critics may determine as to the merit of the stories in the present volume, there can be no question as to the interest they derive from their connection with what had gone before. Thus _Topham's Chance_ is manifestly the outcome of material pondered as early as 1884. _The Lodger in Maze Pond_ develops in a most suggestive fashion certain problems discussed in 1894. Miss Rodney is a re-incarnation of Rhoda Nunn and Constance Bride. _Christopherson_ is a delicious expansion of a mood indicated in _Ryecroft_ (Spring xii.), and _A Capitalist_ indicates the growing interest in the business side of practical life, the dawn of which is seen in _The Town Traveller_ and in the discussion of d.i.c.kens's potentialities as a capitalist. The very artichokes in _The House of Cobwebs_ (which, like the kindly hand that raised them, alas! fell a victim to the first frost of the season) are suggestive of a charming pa.s.sage detailing the retired author's experience as a gardener. What Dr. Furnivall might call the 'backward reach' of every one of these stories will render their perusal delightful to those cultivated readers of Gissing, of whom there are by no means a few, to whom every fragment of his suave and delicate workmanship 'repressed yet full of power, vivid though sombre in colouring,' has a technical interest and charm. Nor will they search in vain for Gissing's incorrigible mannerisms, his haunting insistence upon the note of 'Dort wo du nicht bist ist das Gluck,' his tricks of the brush in portraiture, his characteristic epithets, the _dusking_ twilight, the _decently ign.o.ble_ penury, the _not ign.o.ble_ ambition, the _not wholly base_ riot of the senses in early manhood. In my own opinion we have here in _The Scrupulous Father_, and to a less degree, perhaps, in the first and last of these stories, and in _A Poor Gentleman_ and _Christopherson_, perfectly characteristic and quite admirable specimens of Gissing's own genre, and later, unstudied, but always finished prose style.

But a few words remain to be said, and these, in part at any rate, in recapitulation. In the old race, of which d.i.c.kens and Thackeray were representative, a successful determination to rise upon the broad back of popularity coincided with a growing conviction that the evil in the world was steadily diminishing. Like healthy schoolboys who have worked their way up to the sixth form, they imagined that the bullying of which they had had to complain was become pretty much a thing of the past. In Gissing the misery inherent in the sharp contrasts of modern life was a far more deeply ingrained conviction. He cared little for the remedial aspect of the question. His idea was to a.n.a.lyse this misery as an artist and to express it to the world.

One of the most impressive elements in the resulting novels is the witness they bear to prolonged and intense suffering, the suffering of a proud, reserved, and over-sensitive mind brought into constant contact with the coa.r.s.e and brutal facts of life. The creator of Mr. Biffen suffers all the torture of the fastidious, the delicately honourable, the scrupulously high-minded in daily contact with persons of blunt feelings, low ideals, and base instincts. 'Human cattle, the herd that feed and breed, with them it was well; but the few born to a desire for ever unattainable, the gentle spirits who from their prisoning circ.u.mstance looked up and afar, how the heart ached to think of them!' The natural bent of Gissing's talent was towards poetry and cla.s.sical antiquity. His mind had considerable natural affinity with that of Tennyson.[26] He was pa.s.sionately fond of old literature, of the study of metre and of historical reverie. The subtle curiosities of Anatole France are just of the kind that would have appealed irresistibly to him. His delight in psychological complexity and feats of style are not seldom reminiscent of Paul Bourget. His life would have gained immeasurably by a transference to less pinched and pitiful surroundings: but it is more than doubtful whether his work would have done so.

[Footnote 26: In a young lady's alb.u.m I unexpectedly came across the line from _Maud_, 'Be mine a philosopher's life in the quiet woodland ways,'

with the signature, following the quotation marks, 'George Gissing.' The borrowed aspiration was transparently sincere. 'Tennyson he worshipped'

(see _Odd Women_, chap. i.). The contemporary novelist he liked most was Alphonse Daudet.]

The compulsion of the twin monsters Bread and Cheese forced him to write novels the scene of which was laid in the one milieu he had thoroughly observed, that of either utterly hideous or shabby genteel squalor in London. He gradually obtained a rare mastery in the delineation of his unlovely _mise en scene_. He gradually created a small public who read eagerly everything that came from his pen, despite his economy of material (even of ideas), and despite the repet.i.tion to which a natural tendency was increased by compulsory over-production. In all his best books we have evidence of the savage and ironical delight with which he depicted to the shadow of a hair the sordid and vulgar elements by which he had been so cruelly depressed. The aesthetic observer who wanted material for a picture of the blank desolation and ugliness of modern city life could find no better substratum than in the works of George Gissing. Many of his descriptions of typical London scenes in Lambeth Walk, Clerkenwell, or Judd Street, for instance, are the work of a detached, remorseless, photographic artist realising that ugly sordidness of daily life to which the ordinary observer becomes in the course of time as completely habituated as he does to the smoke-laden air. To a cognate sentiment of revolt I attribute that excessive deference to scholarship and refinement which leads him in so many novels to treat these desirable attributes as if they were ends and objects of life in themselves. It has also misled him but too often into depicting a world of suicides, ignoring or overlooking a secret hobby, or pa.s.sion, or chimaera which is the one thing that renders existence endurable to so many of the waifs and strays of life. He takes existence sadly--too sadly, it may well be; but his drabs and greys provide an atmosphere that is almost inseparable to some of us from our gaunt London streets. In Farringdon Road, for example, I look up instinctively to the expressionless upper windows where Mr. Luckworth Crewe spreads his baits for intending advertisers. A tram ride through Clerkenwell and its leagues of dreary, inhospitable brickwork will take you through the heart of a region where Clem Peckover, Pennyloaf Candy, and Totty Nancarrow are multiplied rather than varied since they were first depicted by George Gissing. As for the British Museum, it is peopled to this day by characters from _New Grub Street_.

There may be a perceptible lack of virility, a fluctuating vagueness of outline about the characterisation of some of his men. In his treatment of crowds, in his description of a mob, personified as 'some huge beast purring to itself in stupid contentment,' he can have few rivals. In tracing the influence of women over his heroes he evinces no common subtlety; it is here probably that he is at his best. The _odor di femmina_, to use a phrase of Don Giovanni's, is a marked characteristic of his books. Of the kisses--

'by hopeless fancy feigned On lips that are for others'--

there are indeed many to be discovered hidden away between these pages. And the beautiful verse has a fine parallel in the prose of one of Gissing's later novels. 'Some girl, of delicate instinct, of purpose sweet and pure, wasting her unloved life in toil and want and indignity; some man, whose youth and courage strove against a mean environment, whose eyes grew haggard in the vain search for a companion promised in his dreams; they lived, these two, parted perchance only by the wall of neighbour houses, yet all huge London was between them, and their hands would never touch.'

The dream of fair women which occupies the mood of Piers Otway in the opening pa.s.sage of the same novel, was evidently no remotely conceived fancy. Its realisation, in ideal love, represents the author's _Crown of Life_. The wise man who said that Beautiful Woman[27] was a heaven to the eye, a h.e.l.l to the soul, and a purgatory to the purse of man, could hardly find a more copious field of ill.u.s.tration than in the fiction of George Gissing.

[Footnote 27: With unconscious recollection, it may be, of Pope's notable phrase in regard to Shakespeare, he speaks in his last novel of woman appearing at times as 'a force of Nature rather than an individual being'

(_Will Warburton_, p. 275).]

Gissing was a sedulous artist; some of his books, it is true, are very hurried productions, finished in haste for the market with no great amount either of inspiration or artistic confidence about them. But little slovenly work will be found bearing his name, for he was a thoroughly trained writer; a suave and seductive workmanship had become a second nature to him, and there was always a flavour of scholarly, subacid and quasi-ironical modernity about his style. There is little doubt that his quality as a stylist was better adapted to the studies of modern London life, on its seamier side, which he had observed at first hand, than to stories of the conventional dramatic structure which he too often felt himself bound to adopt. In these his failure to grapple with a big objective, or to rise to some prosperous situation, is often painfully marked. A master of explanation and description rather than of animated narrative or sparkling dialogue, he lacked the wit and humour, the brilliance and energy of a consummate style which might have enabled him to compete with the great scenic masters in fiction, or with craftsmen such as Hardy or Stevenson, or with incomparable wits and conversationalists such as Meredith. It is true, again, that his London-street novels lack certain artistic elements of beauty (though here and there occur glints of rainy or sunset townscape in a half-tone, consummately handled and eminently impressive); and his intense sincerity cannot wholly atone for this loss.

Where, however, a quiet refinement and delicacy of style is needed as in those sane and suggestive, atmospheric, critical or introspective studies, such as _By the Ionian Sea_, the unrivalled presentment of _Charles d.i.c.kens_, and that gentle masterpiece of softened autobiography, _The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft_ (its resignation and autumnal calm, its finer note of wistfulness and wide human compa.s.sion, fully deserve comparison with the priceless work of Silvio Pellico) in which he indulged himself during the last and increasingly prosperous years of his life, then Gissing's style is discovered to be a charmed instrument. That he will _sup late_, our Gissing, we are quite content to believe. But that a place is reserved for him, of that at any rate we are reasonably confident. The three books just named, in conjunction with his short stories and his _New Grub Street_ (not to mention _Thyrza_ or _The Nether World_), will suffice to ensure him a devout and admiring group of followers for a very long time to come; they accentuate profoundly the feeling of vivid regret and almost personal loss which not a few of his more a.s.siduous readers experienced upon the sad news of his premature death at St. Jean de Luz on the 28th December 1903, at the early age of forty-six.

ACTON,

_February_ 1906.