The House of Cobwebs | Page 3

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 ￡250 he got for New Grub Street. ￡200, we believe, was advanced on _The Nether World,_ but this proved anything but a prosperous speculation from the publisher's point of view, and ￡150 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 _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