The House of Cobwebs | Page 5

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