The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories by George Gissing
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George Gissing >> The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories
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23 THE HOUSE OF COBWEBS
AND OTHER STORIES
BY
GEORGE GISSING
1906
TO WHICH IS PREFIXED
THE WORK OF GEORGE GISSING
AN INTRODUCTORY SURVEY
BY THOMAS SECCOMBE
CONTENTS
THE WORK OF GEORGE GISSING
A CHRONOLOGICAL RECORD
THE HOUSE OF COBWEBS
A CAPITALIST
CHRISTOPHERSON
HUMPLEBEE
THE SCRUPULOUS FATHER
A POOR GENTLEMAN
MISS RODNEY'S LEISURE
A CHARMING FAMILY
A DAUGHTER OF THE LODGE
THE RIDING-WHIP
FATE AND THE APOTHECARY
TOPHAM'S CHANCE
A LODGER IN MAZE POND
THE SALT OF THE EARTH
THE PIG AND WHISTLE
THE WORK OF GEORGE GISSING
AN INTRODUCTORY SURVEY
'Les gens tout a fait heureux, forts et bien portants, sont-ils
prepares comme il faut pour comprendre, penetrer, exprimer la vie,
notre vie si tourmentee 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:--
'Thus, Night, oft see me in thy pale career...
Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings,
And the night-raven sings.'
[Footnote 1: The same kind of limitations would have to be postulated in
estimating the brothers De Goncourt, who, falling short of the first
magnitude, have yet a fully recognised position upon the stellar atlas.]
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--
'Whither Albano's scarce divided waves
Shine from a sister valley;--and afar
The Tiber winds, and the broad ocean laves
The Latian coast where sprang the Epic War.'
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.
[Footnote 2: Three vols. 8vo, 1880 (Remington). It was noticed at some
length in the _Athenoeum_ of June 12th, in which the author's philosophic
outlook is condemned as a dangerous compound of Schopenhauer, Comte, and
Shelley. It is somewhat doubtful if he ever made more for a book than the
L250 he got for _New Grub Street_. L200, we believe, was advanced on _The
Nether World,_ but this proved anything but a prosperous speculation from
the publisher's point of view, and L150 was refused for _Born in Exile_.]
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 _declasses_ 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.'
[Footnote 3: Three vols., 1884, dedicated to M.C.R. In one volume
'revised,' 1895 (preface dated October 1895).]
[Footnote 4: Who but Gissing could describe a heroine as exhibiting in her
countenance 'habitual nourishment on good and plenteous food'?]
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 a 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.
[Footnote 5: _Isabel Clarendon_. By George Gissing. In two volumes, 1886
(Chapman and Hall). In reviewing this work the _Academy_ expressed
astonishment at the mature style of the writer--of whom it admitted it had
not yet come across the name.]
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).
[Footnote 6: Of Gissing's early impressions, the best connected account, I
think, is to be gleaned from the concluding chapters of _The Whirlpool_;
but this may be reinforced (and to some extent corrected, or, here and
there cancelled) by passages in _Burn in Exile_ (vol. i.) and in
_Ryecroft_. The material there supplied is confirmatory in the best sense
of the detail contributed by Mr. Wells to the cancelled preface of
_Veranilda_, touching the 'schoolboy, obsessed by a consuming passion for
learning, at the Quaker's boarding-school at Alderley. He had come thither
from Wakefield at the age of thirteen--after the death of his father, who
was, in a double sense, the cardinal formative influence in his life. The
tones of his father's voice, his father's gestures, never departed from
him; when he read aloud, particularly if it was poetry he read, his father
returned in him. He could draw in those days with great skill and
vigour--it will seem significant to many that he was particularly
fascinated by Hogarth's work, and that he copied and imitated it; and his
father's well-stocked library, and his father's encouragement, had
quickened his imagination and given it its enduring bias for literary
activity.' Like Defoe, Smollett, Sterne, Borrow, Dickens, Eliot, 'G.C.' is,
half involuntarily, almost unconsciously autobiographic.]
'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]
[Footnote 7: See a deeply interesting paper on Dickens by 'G.G.' in the New
York _Critic_, Jan. 1902. Much of this is avowed autobiography.]
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 Printanieres._ 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:--
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