The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories

THE WORK OF GEORGE GISSING

AN INTRODUCTORY SURVEY

'Les gens tout à fait heureux, forts et bien portants, sont-ils préparés comme il faut pour comprendre, pénétrer, exprimer la vie, notre vie si tourmentée et si courte?'

MAUPASSANT.

In England during the sixties and seventies of last century the world of books was dominated by one Gargantuan type of fiction. The terms book and novel became almost synonymous in houses which were not Puritan, yet where books and reading, in the era of few and unfree libraries, were strictly circumscribed. George Gissing was no exception to this rule. The English novel was at the summit of its reputation during his boyish days. As a lad of eight or nine he remembered the parts of Our Mutual Friend coming to the house, and could recall the smile of welcome with which they were infallibly received. In the dining-room at home was a handsomely framed picture which he regarded with an almost idolatrous veneration. It was an engraved portrait of Charles Dickens. Some of the best work of George Eliot, Reade, and Trollope was yet to make its appearance; Meredith and Hardy were still the treasured possession of the few; the reigning models during the period of Gissing's adolescence were probably Dickens and Trollope, and the numerous satellites of these great stars, prominent among them Wilkie Collins, William Black, and Besant and Rice.

Of the cluster of novelists who emerged from this school of ideas, the two who will attract most attention in the future were clouded and obscured for the greater period of their working lives. Unobserved, they received, and made their own preparations for utilising, the legacy of the mid-Victorian novel—moral thesis, plot, underplot, set characters, descriptive machinery, landscape colouring, copious phraseology, Herculean proportions, and the rest of the cumbrous and grandiose paraphernalia of Chuzzlewit, Pendennis, and Middlemarch. But they received the legacy in a totally different spirit. Mark Rutherford, after a very brief experiment, put all these elaborate properties and conventions reverently aside. Cleverer and more docile, George Gissing for the most part accepted them; he put his slender frame into the ponderous collar of the author of the Mill on the Floss, and nearly collapsed in wind and limb in the heart-breaking attempt to adjust himself to such an heroic type of harness.

The distinctive qualities of Gissing at the time of his setting forth were a scholarly style, rather fastidious and academic in its restraint, and the personal discontent, slightly morbid, of a self-conscious student who finds himself in the position of a sensitive woman in a crowd. His attitude through life was that of a man who, having set out on his career with the understanding that a second-class ticket is to be provided, allows himself to be unceremoniously hustled into the rough and tumble of a noisy third. Circumstances made him revolt against an anonymous start in life for a refined and educated man under such conditions. They also made him prolific. He shrank from the restraints and humiliations to which the poor and shabbily dressed private tutor is exposed—revealed to us with a persuasive terseness in the pages of The Unclassed, New Grub Street, Ryecroft, and the story of Topham's Chance. Writing fiction in a garret for a sum sufficient to keep body and soul together for the six months following payment was at any rate better than this. The result was a long series of highly finished novels, written in a style and from a point of view which will always render them dear to the studious and the book-centred. Upon the larger external rings of the book-reading multitude it is not probable that Gissing will ever succeed in impressing himself. There is an absence of transcendental quality about his work, a failure in humour, a remoteness from actual life, a deficiency in awe and mystery, a shortcoming in emotional power, finally, a lack of the dramatic faculty, not indeed indispensable to a novelist, but almost indispensable as an ingredient in great novels of this particular genre.1 In temperament and vitality he is palpably inferior to the masters (Dickens, Thackeray, Hugo, Balzac) whom he reverenced with such a cordial admiration and envy. A 'low vitality' may account for what has been referred to as the 'nervous exhaustion' of his style. It were useless to pretend that Gissing belongs of right to the 'first series' of English Men of Letters. But if debarred by his limitations from a resounding or popular success, he will remain exceptionally dear to the heart of the recluse, who thinks that the scholar does well to cherish a grievance against the vulgar world beyond the cloister; and dearer still, perhaps, to a certain number of enthusiasts who began reading George Gissing as a college night-course; who closed Thyrza and Demos as dawn was breaking through the elms in some Oxford quadrangle, and who have pursued his work patiently ever since in a somewhat toilsome and broken ascent, secure always of suave writing and conscientious workmanship, of an individual prose cadence and a genuine vein of Penseroso:—

Yet by the larger, or, at any rate, the intermediate public, it is a fact that Gissing has never been quite fairly estimated. He loses immensely if you estimate him either by a single book, as is commonly done, or by his work as a whole, in the perspective of which, owing to the lack of critical instruction, one or two books of rather inferior quality have obtruded themselves unduly. This brief survey of the Gissing country is designed to enable the reader to judge the novelist by eight or nine of his best books. If we can select these aright, we feel sure that he will end by placing the work of George Gissing upon a considerably higher level than he has hitherto done.

The time has not yet come to write the history of his career—fuliginous in not a few of its earlier phases, gathering serenity towards its close,—finding a soul of goodness in things evil. This only pretends to be a chronological and, quite incidentally, a critical survey of George Gissing's chief works. And comparatively short as his working life proved to be—hampered for ten years by the sternest poverty, and for nearly ten more by the sad, illusive optimism of the poitrinaire—the task of the mere surveyor is no light or perfunctory one. Artistic as his temperament undoubtedly was, and conscientious as his writing appears down to its minutest detail, Gissing yet managed to turn out rather more than a novel per annum. The desire to excel acted as a spur which conquered his congenital inclination to dreamy historical reverie. The reward which he propounded to himself remained steadfast from boyhood; it was a kind of Childe Harold pilgrimage to the lands of antique story—

Twenty-six years have elapsed since the appearance of his first book in 1880, and in that time just twenty-six books have been issued bearing his signature. His industry was worthy of an Anthony Trollope, and cost his employers barely a tithe of the amount claimed by the writer of The Last Chronicle of Barset. He was not much over twenty-two when his first novel appeared.2 It was entitled Workers in the Dawn, and is distinguished by the fact that the author writes himself George Robert Gissing; afterwards he saw fit to follow the example of George Robert Borrow, and in all subsequent productions assumes the style of 'George Gissing.' The book begins in this fashion: 'Walk with me, reader, into Whitecross Street. It is Saturday night'; and it is what it here seems, a decidedly crude and immature performance. Gissing was encumbered at every step by the giant's robe of mid-Victorian fiction. Intellectual giants, Dickens and Thackeray, were equally gigantic spendthrifts. They worked in a state of fervid heat above a glowing furnace, into which they flung lavish masses of unshaped metal, caring little for immediate effect or minute dexterity of stroke, but knowing full well that the emotional energy of their temperaments was capable of fusing the most intractable material, and that in the end they would produce their great, downright effect. Their spirits rose and fell, but the case was desperate, copy had to be despatched for the current serial. Good and bad had to make up the tale against time, and revelling in the very exuberance and excess of their humour, the novelists invariably triumphed.

To the Ercles vein of these Titans of fiction, Gissing was a complete stranger. To the pale and fastidious recluse and anchorite, their tone of genial remonstrance with the world and its ways was totally alien. He knew nothing of the world to start with beyond the den of the student. His second book, as he himself described it in the preface to a second edition, was the work of a very young man who dealt in a romantic spirit with the gloomier facts of life. Its title, The Unclassed,3 excited a little curiosity, but the author was careful to explain that he had not in view the déclassés but rather those persons who live in a limbo external to society, and refuse the statistic badge. The central figure Osmond Waymark is of course Gissing himself. Like his creator, raving at intervals under the vile restraints of Philistine surroundings and with no money for dissipation, Osmond gives up teaching to pursue the literary vocation. A girl named Ida Starr idealises him, and is helped thereby to a purer life. In the four years' interval between this somewhat hurried work and his still earlier attempt the young author seems to have gone through a bewildering change of employments. We hear of a clerkship in Liverpool, a searing experience in America (described with but little deviation in New Grub Street), a gas-fitting episode in Boston, private tutorships, and cramming engagements in 'the poisonous air of working London.' Internal evidence alone is quite sufficient to indicate that the man out of whose brain such bitter experiences of the educated poor were wrung had learnt in suffering what he taught—in his novels. His start in literature was made under conditions that might have appalled the bravest, and for years his steps were dogged by hunger and many-shaped hardships. He lived in cellars and garrets. 'Many a time,' he writes, 'seated in just such a garret (as that in the frontispiece to Little Dorrit) I saw the sunshine flood the table in front of me, and the thought of that book rose up before me.' He ate his meals in places that would have offered a way-wearied tramp occasion for criticism. 'His breakfast consisted often of a slice of bread and a drink of water. Four and sixpence a week paid for his lodging. A meal that cost more than sixpence was a feast.' Once he tells us with a thrill of reminiscent ecstasy how he found sixpence in the street! The ordinary comforts of modern life were unattainable luxuries. Once when a newly posted notice in the lavatory at the British Museum warned readers that the basins were to be used (in official phrase) 'for casual ablutions only,' he was abashed at the thought of his own complete dependence upon the facilities of the place. Justly might the author call this a tragi-comical incident. Often in happier times he had brooding memories of the familiar old horrors—the foggy and gas-lit labyrinth of Soho—shop windows containing puddings and pies kept hot by steam rising through perforated metal—a young novelist of 'two-and-twenty or thereabouts' standing before the display, raging with hunger, unable to purchase even one pennyworth of food. And this is no fancy picture,4 but a true story of what Gissing had sufficient elasticity of humour to call 'a pretty stern apprenticeship.' The sense of it enables us to understand to the full that semi-ironical and bitter, yet not wholly unamused passage, in Ryecroft:—

'Is there at this moment any boy of twenty, fairly educated, but without means, without help, with nothing but the glow in his brain and steadfast courage in his heart, who sits in a London garret and writes for dear life? There must be, I suppose; yet all that I have read and heard of late years about young writers, shows them in a very different aspect. No garretteers, these novelists and journalists awaiting their promotion. They eat—and entertain their critics—at fashionable restaurants, they are seen in expensive seats at the theatre; they inhabit handsome flats—photographed for an illustrated paper on the first excuse. At the worst, they belong to a reputable club, and have garments which permit them to attend a garden party or an evening "at home" without attracting unpleasant notice. Many biographical sketches have I read during the last decade, making personal introduction of young Mr. This or young Miss That, whose book was—as the sweet language of the day will have it—"booming"; but never one in which there was a hint of stern struggles, of the pinched stomach and frozen fingers.'

In his later years it was customary for him to inquire of a new author 'Has he starved'? He need have been under no apprehension. There is still a God's plenty of attics in Grub Street, tenanted by genuine artists, idealists and poets, amply sufficient to justify the lamentable conclusion of old Anthony à Wood in his life of George Peele. 'For so it is and always hath been, that most poets die poor, and consequently obscurely, and a hard matter it is to trace them to their graves.' Amid all these miseries, Gissing upheld his ideal. During 1886-7 he began really to write and the first great advance is shown in Isabel Clarendon.5 No book, perhaps, that he ever wrote is so rich as this in autobiographical indices. In the melancholy Kingcote we get more than a passing phase or a momentary glimpse at one side of the young author. A long succession of Kingcote's traits are obvious self-revelations. At the beginning he symbolically prefers the old road with the crumbling sign-post, to the new. Kingcote is a literary sensitive. The most ordinary transaction with uneducated ('that is uncivilised') people made him uncomfortable. Mean and hateful people by their suggestions made life hideous. He lacks the courage of the ordinary man. Though under thirty he is abashed by youth. He is sentimental and hungry for feminine sympathy, yet he realises that the woman who may with safety be taken in marriage by a poor man, given to intellectual pursuits, is extremely difficult of discovery. Consequently he lives in solitude; he is tyrannised by moods, dominated by temperament. His intellect is in abeyance. He shuns the present—the historical past seems alone to concern him. Yet he abjures his own past. The ghost of his former self affected him with horror. Identity even he denies. 'How can one be responsible for the thoughts and acts of the being who bore his name years ago?' He has no consciousness of his youth—no sympathy with children. In him is to be discerned 'his father's intellectual and emotional qualities, together with a certain stiffness of moral attitude derived from his mother.' He reveals already a wonderful palate for pure literary flavour. His prejudices are intense, their character being determined by the refinement and idealism of his nature. All this is profoundly significant, knowing as we do that this was produced when Gissing's worldly prosperity was at its nadir. He was living at the time, like his own Harold Biffen, in absolute solitude, a frequenter of pawnbroker's shops and a stern connoisseur of pure dripping, pease pudding ('magnificent pennyworths at a shop in Cleveland Street, of a very rich quality indeed'), faggots and saveloys. The stamp of affluence in those days was the possession of a basin. The rich man thus secured the gravy which the poor man, who relied on a paper wrapper for his pease pudding, had to give away. The image recurred to his mind when, in later days, he discussed champagne vintages with his publisher, or was consulted as to the management of butlers by the wife of a popular prelate. With what a sincere recollection of this time he enjoins his readers (after Dr. Johnson) to abstain from Poverty. 'Poverty is the great secluder.' 'London is a wilderness abounding in anchorites.' Gissing was sustained amid all these miseries by two passionate idealisms, one of the intellect, the other of the emotions. The first was ancient Greece and Rome—and he incarnated this passion in the picturesque figure of Julian Casti (in The Unclassed), toiling hard to purchase a Gibbon, savouring its grand epic roll, converting its driest detail into poetry by means of his enthusiasm, and selecting Stilicho as a hero of drama or romance (a premonition here of Veranilda). The second or heart's idol was Charles Dickens—Dickens as writer, Dickens as the hero of a past England, Dickens as humorist, Dickens as leader of men, above all, Dickens as friend of the poor, the outcast, the pale little sempstress and the downtrodden Smike.

In the summer of 1870, Gissing remembered with a pious fidelity of detail the famous drawing of the 'Empty Chair' being framed and hung up 'in the school-room, at home'6 (Wakefield).

'Not without awe did I see the picture of the room which was now tenantless: I remember too, a curiosity which led me to look closely at the writing-table and the objects upon it, at the comfortable round-backed chair, at the book-shelves behind. I began to ask myself how books were written and how the men lived who wrote them. It is my last glimpse of childhood. Six months later there was an empty chair in my own home, and the tenor of my life was broken.

'Seven years after this I found myself amid the streets of London and had to find the means of keeping myself alive. What I chiefly thought of was that now at length I could go hither or thither in London's immensity seeking for the places which had been made known to me by Dickens.

'One day in the city I found myself at the entrance to Bevis Marks! I had just been making an application in reply to some advertisement—of course, fruitlessly; but what was that disappointment compared with the discovery of Bevis Marks! Here dwelt Mr. Brass and Sally and the Marchioness. Up and down the little street, this side and that, I went gazing and dreaming. No press of busy folk disturbed me; the place was quiet; it looked no doubt much the same as when Dickens knew it. I am not sure that I had any dinner that day; but, if not, I daresay I did not mind it very much.'

The broad flood under Thames bridges spoke to him in the very tones of 'the master.' He breathed Guppy's London particular, the wind was the black easter that pierced the diaphragm of Scrooge's clerk.

'We bookish people have our connotations for the life we do not live. In time I came to see London with my own eyes, but how much better when I saw it with those of Dickens!'

Tired and discouraged, badly nourished, badly housed—working under conditions little favourable to play of the fancy or intentness of the mind—then was the time, Gissing found, to take down Forster and read—read about Charles Dickens.

'Merely as the narrative of a wonderfully active, zealous, and successful life, this book scarce has its equal; almost any reader must find it exhilarating; but to me it yielded such special sustenance as in those days I could not have found elsewhere, and lacking which I should, perhaps, have failed by the way. I am not referring to Dickens's swift triumph, to his resounding fame and high prosperity; these things are cheery to read about, especially when shown in a light so human, with the accompaniment of so much geniality and mirth. No; the pages which invigorated me are those where we see Dickens at work, alone at his writing-table, absorbed in the task of the story-teller. Constantly he makes known to Forster how his story is getting on, speaks in detail of difficulties, rejoices over spells of happy labour; and what splendid sincerity in it all! If this work of his was not worth doing, why, nothing was. A troublesome letter has arrived by the morning's post and threatens to spoil the day; but he takes a few turns up and down the room, shakes off the worry, and sits down to write for hours and hours. He is at the sea-side, his desk at a sunny bay window overlooking the shore, and there all the morning he writes with gusto, ever and again bursting into laughter at his own thoughts.'7

The influence of Dickens clearly predominated when Gissing wrote his next novel and first really notable and artistic book, Thyrza.8 The figure which irradiates this story is evidently designed in the school of Dickens: it might almost be a pastel after some more highly finished work by Daudet. But Daudet is a more relentless observer than Gissing, and to find a parallel to this particular effect I think we must go back a little farther to the heroic age of the grisette and the tearful Manchon de Francine of Henri Murger. Thyrza, at any rate, is a most exquisite picture in half-tones of grey and purple of a little Madonna of the slums; she is in reality the belle fleur d'un fumier of which he speaks in the epigraph of the Nether World. The fumier in question is Lambeth Walk, of which we have a Saturday night scene, worthy of the author of L'Assommoir and Le Ventre de Paris in his most perceptive mood. In this inferno, amongst the pungent odours, musty smells and 'acrid exhalations from the shops where fried fish and potatoes hissed in boiling grease,' blossomed a pure white lily, as radiant amid mean surroundings as Gemma in the poor Frankfort confectioner's shop of Turgenev's Eaux Printanières. The pale and rather languid charm of her face and figure are sufficiently portrayed without any set description. What could be more delicate than the intimation of the foregone 'good-night' between the sisters, or the scene of Lyddy plaiting Thyrza's hair? The delineation of the upper middle class culture by which this exquisite flower of maidenhood is first caressed and transplanted, then slighted and left to wither, is not so satisfactory. Of the upper middle class, indeed, at that time, Gissing had very few means of observation. But this defect, common to all his early novels, is more than compensated by the intensely pathetic figure of Gilbert Grail, the tender-souled, book-worshipping factory hand raised for a moment to the prospect of intellectual life and then hurled down by the caprice of circumstance to the unrelenting round of manual toil at the soap and candle factory. Dickens would have given a touch of the grotesque to Grail's gentle but ungainly character; but at the end he would infallibly have rewarded him as Tom Pinch and Dominie Sampson were rewarded. Not so George Gissing. His sympathy is fully as real as that of Dickens. But his fidelity to fact is greater. Of the Christmas charity prescribed by Dickens, and of the untainted pathos to which he too rarely attained, there is an abundance in Thyrza. But what amazes the chronological student of Gissing's work is the magnificent quality of some of the writing, a quality of which he had as yet given no very definite promise. Take the following passage, for example:—

'A street organ began to play in front of a public-house close by. Grail drew near; there were children forming a dance, and he stood to watch them.

Do you know that music of the obscure ways, to which children dance? Not if you have only heard it ground to your ears' affliction beneath your windows in the square. To hear it aright you must stand in the darkness of such a by-street as this, and for the moment be at one with those who dwell around, in the blear-eyed houses, in the dim burrows of poverty, in the unmapped haunts of the semi-human. Then you will know the significance of that vulgar clanging of melody; a pathos of which you did not dream will touch you, and therein the secret of hidden London will be half revealed. The life of men who toil without hope, yet with the hunger of an unshaped desire; of women in whom the sweetness of their sex is perishing under labour and misery; the laugh, the song of the girl who strives to enjoy her year or two of youthful vigour, knowing the darkness of the years to come; the careless defiance of the youth who feels his blood and revolts against the lot which would tame it; all that is purely human in these darkened multitudes speaks to you as you listen. It is the half-conscious striving of a nature which knows not what it would attain, which deforms a true thought by gross expression, which clutches at the beautiful and soils it with foul hands.