and
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, one of the rightest and ripest of all his productions.
18
'I hardly knew what it was to travel by omnibus. I have walked London streets for twelve and fifteen hours together without even a thought of saving my legs or my time, by paying for waftage. Being poor as poor can be, there were certain things I had to renounce, and this was one of them.'—Ryecroft. For earlier scenes see Monthly Review, xvi., and Owens College Union Mag., Jan. 1904, pp. 80-81.
19
'He knew the narrowly religious, the mental barrenness of the poor dissenters, the people of the slums that he observed so carefully, and many of those on the borders of the Bohemia of which he at least was an initiate, and he was soaked and stained, as he might himself have said, with the dull drabs of the lower middle class that he hated. But of those above he knew little…. He did not know the upper middle classes, which are as difficult every whit as those beneath them, and take as much time and labour and experience and observation to learn.'—'The Exile of George Gissing,' Albany, Christmas 1904. In later life he lost sympathy with the 'nether world.' Asked to write a magazine article on a typical 'workman's budget,' he wrote that he no longer took an interest in the 'condition of the poor question.'
20
The Odd Women (1893, new edition, 1894) is a rather sordid and depressing survey of the life-histories of certain orphaned daughters of a typical Gissing doctor—grave, benign, amiably diffident, terribly afraid of life. 'From the contact of coarse actualities his nature shrank.' After his death one daughter, a fancy-goods shop assistant (no wages), is carried off by consumption; a second drowns herself in a bath at a charitable institution; another takes to drink; and the portraits of the survivors, their petty, incurable maladies, their utter uselessness, their round shoulders and 'very short legs,' pimples, and scraggy necks—are as implacable and unsparing as a Maupassant could wish. From the deplorable insight with which he describes the nerveless, underfed, compulsory optimism of these poor in spirit and poor in hope Gissing might almost have been an 'odd woman' himself. In this book and The Paying Guest (1895) he seemed to take a savage delight in depicting the small, stiff, isolated, costly, unsatisfied pretentiousness and plentiful lack of imagination which cripples suburbia so cruelly.—See Saturday Review, 13 Apr. 1896; and see also ib., 19 Jan. 1895.
21
The whirlpool in which people just nod or shout to each other as they spin round and round. The heroine tries to escape, but is drawn back again and again, and nearly submerges her whole environment by her wild clutches. Satire is lavished upon misdirected education (28), the sluttishness of London landladies, self-adoring Art on a pedestal (256), the delegation of children to underlings, sham religiosity (229), the pampered conscience of a diffident student, and the mensonge of modern woman (300), typified by the ruddled cast-off of Redgrave, who plays first, in her shrivelled paint, as procuress, and then, in her naked hideousness, as blackmailer.
22
A revised edition (the date of Dickens's birth is wrongly given in the first) was issued in 1902, with topographical illustrations by F.G. Kitton. Gissing's introduction to Nickleby for the Rochester edition appeared in 1900, and his abridgement of Forster's Life (an excellent piece of work) in 1903 [1902]. The first collection of short stories, twenty-nine in number, entitled Human Odds and Ends, was published in 1898. It is justly described by the writer of the most interesting 'Recollections of George Gissing' in the Gentleman's Magazine, February 1906, as 'that very remarkable collection.'
23
It also contains one of the most beautiful descriptions ever penned of the visit of a tired town-dweller to a modest rural home, with all its suggestion of trim gardening, fresh country scents, indigenous food, and homely simplicity.—Will Warburton, chap. ix.
24
'I love and honour even the least of English landscape painters.'—Ryecroft.
25
'But what with the parsons and clerks and school-people and serious tea-parties, the merry old ways of good life have gone to the dogs—upon my carcass, they have!'—Far from the Madding Crowd.
26
In a young lady's album I unexpectedly came across the line from Maud, 'Be mine a philosopher's life in the quiet woodland ways,' with the signature, following the quotation marks, 'George Gissing.' The borrowed aspiration was transparently sincere. 'Tennyson he worshipped' (see Odd Women, chap. i.). The contemporary novelist he liked most was Alphonse Daudet.
