The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories. George Gissing
say to you. Now what do you think of this, Mary?"
Lydia still held up the coat, and at length persuaded the old man to don it. The effect upon his appearance was remarkable; conscious of it, he held himself more upright and stumped to the little square of looking-glass to try and regard himself. Here he furtively brushed a hand over his eyes.
"I'm ready, Mary, my dear; I'm ready! It's no good saying anything to girls like these. Good-bye, Lyddy; good-bye, Thyrza. May you have a happy Christmas, children! This isn't the first as you've made a happy one for me."'—(p. 117.)
The anonymously published Demos (1886) can hardly be described as a typical product of George Gissing's mind and art. In it he subdued himself rather to the level of such popular producers as Besant and Rice, and went out of his way to procure melodramatic suspense, an ingredient far from congenial to his normal artistic temper. But the end justified the means. The novel found favour in the eyes of the author of The Lost Sir Massingberd, and Gissing for the first time in his life found himself the possessor of a full purse, with fifty 'jingling, tingling, golden, minted quid' in it. Its possession brought with it the realisation of a paramount desire, the desire for Greece and Italy which had become for him, as it had once been with Goethe, a scarce endurable suffering. The sickness of longing had wellnigh given way to despair, when 'there came into my hands a sum of money (such a poor little sum) for a book I had written. It was early autumn. I chanced to hear some one speak of Naples—and only death would have held me back.'10
The main plot of Demos is concerned with Richard Mutimer, a young socialist whose vital force, both mental and physical, is well above the average, corrupted by accession to a fortune, marrying a refined wife, losing his money in consequence of the discovery of an unsuspected will, and dragging his wife down with him,—down to la misère in its most brutal and humiliating shape. Happy endings and the Gissing of this period are so ill-assorted, that the 'reconciliations' at the close of both this novel and the next are to be regarded with considerable suspicion. The 'gentlefolk' in the book are the merest marionettes, but there are descriptive passages of first-rate vigour, and the voice of wisdom is heard from the lips of an early Greek choregus in the figure of an old parson called Mr. Wyvern. As the mouthpiece of his creator's pet hobbies parson Wyvern rolls out long homilies conceived in the spirit of Emerson's 'compensation,' and denounces the cruelty of educating the poor and making no after-provision for their intellectual needs with a sombre enthusiasm and a periodicity of style almost worthy of Dr. Johnson.11
After Demos, Gissing returned in 1888 to the more sentimental and idealistic palette which he had employed for Thyrza. Renewed recollections of Tibullus and of Theocritus may have served to give his work a more idyllic tinge. But there were much nearer sources of inspiration for A Life's Morning. There must be many novels inspired by a youthful enthusiasm for Richard Feverel, and this I should take to be one of them. Apart from the idyllic purity of its tone, and its sincere idolatry of youthful love, the caressing grace of the language which describes the spiritualised beauty of Emily Hood and the exquisite charm of her slender hands, and the silvery radiance imparted to the whole scene of the proposal in the summer-house (in chapter iii., 'Lyrical'), give to this most unequal and imperfect book a certain crepuscular fascination of its own. Passages in it, certainly, are not undeserving that fine description of a style si tendre qu'il pousse le bonheur à pleurer. Emily's father, Mr. Hood, is an essentially pathetic figure, almost grotesquely true to life. 'I should like to see London before I die,' he says to his daughter. 'Somehow I have never managed to get so far…. There's one thing that I wish especially to see, and that is Holborn Viaduct. It must be a wonderful piece of engineering; I remember thinking it out at the time it was constructed. Of course you have seen it?' The vulgar but not wholly inhuman Cartwright interior, where the parlour is resolved into a perpetual matrimonial committee, would seem to be the outcome of genuine observation. Dagworthy is obviously padded with the author's substitute for melodrama, while the rich and cultivated Mr. Athel is palpably imitated from Meredith. The following tirade (spoken by the young man to his mistress) is Gissing pure. 'Think of the sunny spaces in the world's history, in each of which one could linger for ever. Athens at her fairest, Rome at her grandest, the glorious savagery of Merovingian Courts, the kingdom of Frederick II., the Moors in Spain, the magic of Renaissance Italy—to become a citizen of any one age means a lifetime of endeavour. It is easy to fill one's head with names and years, but that only sharpens my hunger.' In one form or another it recurs in practically every novel.12 Certain of the later portions of this book, especially the chapter entitled 'Her Path in Shadow' are delineated through a kind of mystical haze, suggestive of some of the work of Puvis de Chavannes. The concluding chapters, taken as a whole, indicate with tolerable accuracy Gissing's affinities as a writer, and the pedigree of the type of novel by which he is best known. It derives from Xavier de Maistre and St. Pierre to La Nouvelle Héloïse,—nay, might one not almost say from the pays du tendre of La Princesse de Clèves itself. Semi-sentimental theories as to the relations of the sexes, the dangers of indiscriminate education, the corruptions of wretchedness and poverty in large towns, the neglect of literature and classical learning, and the grievances of scholarly refinement in a world in which Greek iambic and Latin hexameter count for nothing,—such form the staple of his theses and tirades! His approximation at times to the confines of French realistic art is of the most accidental or incidental kind. For Gissing is at heart, in his bones as the vulgar say, a thorough moralist and sentimentalist, an honest, true-born, downright ineradicable Englishman. Intellectually his own life was, and continued to the last to be, romantic to an extent that few lives are. Pessimistic he may at times appear, but this is almost entirely on the surface. For he was never in the least blasé or ennuyé. He had the pathetic treasure of the humble and downcast and unkindly entreated—unquenchable hope. He has no objectivity. His point of view is almost entirely personal. It is not the lacrimae rerum, but the lacrimae dierum suorum, that makes his pages often so forlorn. His laments are all uttered by the waters of Babylon in a strange land. His nostalgia in the land of exile, estranged from every refinement, was greatly enhanced by the fact that he could not get on with ordinary men, but exhibited almost to the last a practical incapacity, a curious inability to do the sane and secure thing. As Mr. Wells puts it:—
'It is not that he was a careless man, he was a most careful one; it is not that he was a morally lax man, he was almost morbidly the reverse. Neither was he morose or eccentric in his motives or bearing; he was genial, conversational, and well-meaning. But he had some sort of blindness towards his fellow-men, so that he never entirely grasped the spirit of everyday life, so that he, who was so copiously intelligent in the things of the study, misunderstood, blundered, was nervously diffident, and wilful and spasmodic in common affairs, in employment and buying and selling, and the normal conflicts of intercourse. He did not know what would offend, and he did not know what would please. He irritated others and thwarted himself. He had no social nerve.'
Does not Gissing himself sum it up admirably, upon the lips of Mr. Widdowson in The Odd Women: 'Life has always been full of worrying problems for me. I can't take things in the simple way that comes natural to other men.' 'Not as other men are': more intellectual than most, fully as responsive to kind and genial instincts, yet bound at every turn to pinch and screw—an involuntary ascetic. Such is the essential burden of Gissing's long-drawn lament. Only accidentally can it be described as his mission to preach 'the desolation of modern life,' or in the gracious phrase of De Goncourt, fouiller les entrailles de la vie. Of the confident, self-supporting realism of Esther Waters, for instance, how little is there in any of his work, even in that most gloomily photographic portion of it which we are now to describe?
During the next four years, 1889-1892, Gissing produced four novels, and three of these perhaps are his best efforts in prose fiction. The Nether World of 1889 is certainly in some respects his strongest work, la letra con sangre, in which the ruddy drops of anguish remembered in a state of comparative tranquillity are most powerfully expressed. The Emancipated, of 1890, is with equal certainty, a réchauffé and the least successful of various attempts to give utterance to his enthusiasm for the valor antica—'the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.'
See
An impressive specimen of his eloquence was cited by me in an article in the
Sometimes, however, as in