The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories

'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 has affinity, from Rousseau and Stendhal (Rouge et Noire) to Cherbuliez (Secret du Précepteur) and Bourget (Le Disciple), had not already attracted him, but the explanation is perhaps in part indicated in a finely written story towards the close of this present volume.15 The white, maidenish and silk-haired fairness of Sidwell, and Peak's irresistible passion for the type of beauty suggested, is revealed to us with all Gissing's wonderful skill in shadowing forth feminine types of lovelihood. Suggestive too of his oncoming passion for Devonshire and Western England are strains of exquisite landscape music scattered at random through these pages. More significant still, however, is the developing faculty for personal satire, pointing to a vastly riper human experience. Peak was uncertain, says the author, with that faint ironical touch which became almost habitual to him, 'as to the limits of modern latitudinarianism until he met Chilvers,' the sleek, clerical advocate of 'Less St. Paul and more Darwin, less of Luther and more of Herbert Spencer':—

'The discovery of such fantastic liberality in a man whom he could not but dislike and contemn gave him no pleasure, but at least it disposed him to amusement rather than antagonism. Chilvers's pronunciation and phraseology were distinguished by such original affectation that it was impossible not to find entertainment in listening to him. Though his voice was naturally shrill and piping, he managed to speak in head notes which had a ring of robust utterance. The sound of his words was intended to correspond with their virile warmth of meaning. In the same way he had cultivated a habit of the muscles which conveyed an impression that he was devoted to athletic sports. His arms occasionally swung as if brandishing dumb-bells, his chest now and then spread itself to the uttermost, and his head was often thrown back in an attitude suggesting self-defence.'

Of Gissing's first year or so at Owens, after leaving Lindow Grove School at Alderley,16 we get a few hints in these pages. Like his 'lonely cerebrate' hero, Gissing himself, at school and college, 'worked insanely.' Walked much alone, shunned companionship rather than sought it, worked as he walked, and was marked down as a 'pot-hunter.' He 'worked while he ate, he cut down his sleep, and for him the penalty came, not in a palpable, definable illness, but in an abrupt, incongruous reaction and collapse.' With rage he looked back on these insensate years of study which had weakened him just when he should have been carefully fortifying his constitution.

The year of this autobiographical record17 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 assurance 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 analyse the sufferings of well-to-do lower middle-class 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 classes 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 Dickens (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.

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 class 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 illustrated by the following description, not unworthy of Thomas Hardy, of a new neighbourhood.

'Great elms, the pride of generations passed 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 hoardings 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 title 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 illustrating 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 Fanny 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 institute until they were eighteen. All could "play the piano"; all declared—and believed—that they "knew French." Beatrice had "done" Political Economy; Fanny 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 passage 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 scraps of science, quotations at fifth hand, and all the heterogeneous rubbish of a "crammer's" shop. When away from her books, she carried scraps 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 analysis 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 entitled. And in the course of this evolution, in the vain attempt to win beauty by gratitude 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 class. 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 Clitumnus, 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 passé à côté 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-Grèce), and Cassiodorus, 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, unsurpassable in its kind, from which we cannot refrain two characteristic extracts:—

'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 classic 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 noble Sidney, and made him shout with joy. A pensive vein of contemporary reflection enriches the book with passages 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 Dickens, 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 Dickens 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 Dickens'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 damning, fact that Dickens 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 Dickens'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 Dickens'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 Dickens'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

Henceforth Gissing spent an increasing portion of his time abroad, and it was from St. Honorè 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 illustrations, 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 inclined23, 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.

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 Salammbô did to Flaubert. But he could not allow himself six years to write a book as Flaubert did. Salammbô, 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 Wessex 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 passionate 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, passing 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. Poorgrass and Mark Clark25), old English simplicity, and old English fare—the fine prodigality of the English platter, has never been raised. God 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.