The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories. George Gissing
a perfectly fair portrait of an ambitious publicist or journalist of the day—destined by determination, skill, energy, and social ambition to become an editor of a successful journal or review, and to lead the life of central London. Possessing a keen and active mind, expression on paper is his handle; he has no love of letters as letters at all. But his outlook upon the situation is just enough. Reardon has barely any outlook at all. He is a man with a delicate but shallow vein of literary capacity, who never did more than tremble upon the verge of success, and hardly, if at all, went beyond promise. He was unlucky in marrying Amy, a rather heartless woman, whose ambition was far in excess of her insight, for economic position Reardon had none. He writes books to please a small group. The books fail to please. Jasper in the main is right—there is only a precarious place for any creative litterateur between the genius and the swarm of ephemera or journalists. A man writes either to please the hour or to produce something to last, relatively a long time, several generations—what we call 'permanent.' The intermediate position is necessarily insecure. It is not really wanted. What is lost by society when one of these mediocre masterpieces is overlooked? A sensation, a single ray in a sunset, missed by a small literary coterie! The circle is perhaps eclectic. It may seem hard that good work is overwhelmed in the cataract of production, while relatively bad, garish work is rewarded. But so it must be. 'The growing flood of literature swamps every thing but works of primary genius.' Good taste is valuable, especially when it takes the form of good criticism. The best critics of contemporary books (and these are by no means identical with the best critics of the past and its work) are those who settle intuitively upon the writing that is going to appeal more largely to a future generation, when the attraction of novelty and topicality has subsided. The same work is done by great men. They anticipate lines of action; philosophers generally follow (Machiavelli's theories the practice of Louis XI., Nietzsche's that of Napoleon I.). The critic recognises the tentative steps of genius in letters. The work of fine delicacy and reserve, the work that follows, lacking the real originality, is liable to neglect, and may become the victim of ill-luck, unfair influence, or other extraneous factors. Yet on the whole, so numerous are the publics of to-day, there never, perhaps, was a time when supreme genius or even supreme talent was so sure of recognition. Those who rail against these conditions, as Gissing seems here to have done, are actuated consciously or unconsciously by a personal or sectional disappointment. It is akin to the crocodile lament of the publisher that good modern literature is neglected by the public, or the impressionist's lament about the great unpaid greatness of the great unknown—the exclusively literary view of literary rewards. Literature must be governed by over-mastering impulse or directed at profit.
But New Grub Street is rich in memorable characters and situations to an extent unusual in Gissing; Biffen in his garret—a piece of genre almost worthy of Dickens; Reardon the sterile plotter, listening in despair to the neighbouring workhouse clock of St. Mary-le-bone; the matutinal interview between Alfred Yule and the threadbare surgeon, a vignette worthy of Smollett. Alfred Yule, the worn-out veteran, whose literary ideals are those of the eighteenth century, is a most extraordinary study of an arriéré—certainly one of the most crusted and individual personalities Gissing ever portrayed. He never wrote with such a virile pen: phrase after phrase bites and snaps with a singular crispness and energy; material used before is now brought to a finer literary issue. It is by far the most tenacious of Gissing's novels. It shows that on the more conventional lines of fictitious intrigue, acting as cement, and in the interplay of emphasised characters, Gissing could, if he liked, excel. (It recalls Anatole France's Le Lys Rouge, showing that he, too, the scholar and intellectual par excellence, could an he would produce patterns in plain and fancy adultery with the best.) Whelpdale's adventures in Troy, U.S.A., where he lived for five days on pea-nuts, are evidently semi-autobiographical. It is in his narrative that we first made the acquaintance of the American phrase now so familiar about literary productions going off like hot cakes. The reminiscences of Athens are typical of a lifelong obsession—to find an outlet later on in Veranilda. On literary réclame, he says much that is true—if not the whole truth, in the apophthegm for instance, 'You have to become famous before you can secure the attention which would give fame.' Biffen, it is true, is a somewhat fantastic figure of an idealist, but Gissing cherished this grotesque exfoliation from a headline by Dickens—and later in his career we shall find him reproducing one of Biffen's ideals with a singular fidelity.
'Picture a woman of middle age, wrapped at all times in dirty rags (not to be called clothing), obese, grimy, with dishevelled black hair, and hands so scarred, so deformed by labour and neglect, as to be scarcely human. She had the darkest and fiercest eyes I ever saw. Between her and her mistress went on an unceasing quarrel; they quarrelled in my room, in the corridor, and, as I knew by their shrill voices, in places remote; yet I am sure they did not dislike each other, and probably neither of them ever thought of parting. Unexpectedly, one evening, this woman entered, stood by the bedside, and began to talk with such fierce energy, with such flashing of her black eyes, and such distortion of her features, that I could only suppose that she was attacking me for the trouble I caused her. A minute or two passed before I could even hit the drift of her furious speech; she was always the most difficult of the natives to understand, and in rage she became quite unintelligible. Little by little, by dint of questioning, I got at what she meant. There had been guai, worse than usual; the mistress had reviled her unendurably for some fault or other, and was it not hard that she should be used like this after having tanto, tanto lavorato! In fact, she was appealing for my sympathy, not abusing me at all. When she went on to say that she was alone in the world, that all her kith and kin were freddi morti (stone dead), a pathos in her aspect and her words took hold upon me; it was much as if some heavy-laden beast of burden had suddenly found tongue and protested in the rude beginnings of articulate utterance against its hard lot. If only we could have learnt in intimate detail the life of this domestic serf14! How interesting and how sordidly picturesque against the background of romantic landscape, of scenic history! I looked long into her sallow, wrinkled face, trying to imagine the thoughts that ruled its expression. In some measure my efforts at kindly speech succeeded, and her "Ah, Cristo!" as she turned to go away, was not without a touch of solace.'
In 1892 Gissing was already beginning to try and discard his down look, his lugubrious self-pity, his lamentable cadence. He found some alleviation from self-torment in David Copperfield, and he determined to borrow a feather from 'the master's' pinion—in other words, to place an autobiographical novel to his credit. The result was Born in Exile (1892), one of the last of the three-volume novels,—by no means one of the worst. A Hedonist of academic type, repelled by a vulgar intonation, Gissing himself is manifestly the man in exile. Travel, fair women and college life, the Savile club, and Great Malvern or the Cornish coast, music in Paris or Vienna—this of course was the natural milieu for such a man. Instead of which our poor scholar (with Homer and Shakespeare and Pausanias piled upon his one small deal table) had to encounter the life of the shabby recluse in London lodgings—synonymous for him, as passage after passage in his books recounts, with incompetence and vulgarity in every form, at best 'an ailing lachrymose slut incapable of effort,' more often sheer foulness and dishonesty, 'by lying, slandering, quarrelling, by drunkenness, by brutal vice, by all abominations that distinguish the lodging-letter of the metropolis.' No book exhibits more naïvely the extravagant value which Gissing put upon the mere externals of refinement. The following scathing vignette of his unrefined younger brother by the hero, Godfrey Peak, shows the ferocity with which this feeling could manifest itself against a human being who lacked the elements of scholastic learning (the brother in question had failed to give the date of the Norman Conquest):—
'He saw much company and all of low intellectual order; he had purchased a bicycle and regarded it as a source of distinction, or means of displaying himself before shopkeepers' daughters; he believed himself a moderate tenor and sang verses of sentimental imbecility; he took in several weekly papers of unpromising title for the chief purpose of deciphering cryptograms, in which pursuit he had singular success. Add to these characteristics a penchant for cheap jewellery, and Oliver Peak stands confessed.'
The story of the book is revealed in Peak's laconic ambition, 'A plebeian, I aim at marrying a lady.' It is a little curious, some may think, that this motive so skilfully used by so many novelists to whose work Gissing's
Here is a more fully prepared expression of the very essence of Biffen's artistic ideal.—