The House of Cobwebs | Page 7

touch you, and therein the secret of hidden London will be half revealed. The life of men who toil without hope, yet with the hunger of an unshaped desire; of women in whom the sweetness of their sex is perishing under labour and misery; the laugh, the song of the girl who strives to enjoy her year or two of youthful vigour, knowing the darkness of the years to come; the careless defiance of the youth who feels his blood and revolts against the lot which would tame it; all that is purely human in these darkened multitudes speaks to you as you listen. It is the half-conscious striving of a nature which knows not what it would attain, which deforms a true thought by gross expression, which clutches at the beautiful and soils it with foul hands.
The children were dirty and ragged, several of them barefooted, nearly all bare-headed, but they danced with noisy merriment. One there was, a little girl, on crutches; incapable of taking a partner, she stumped round and round, circling upon the pavement, till giddiness came upon her and she had to fall back and lean against the wall, laughing aloud at her weakness. Gilbert stepped up to her, and put a penny into her hand; then, before she had recovered from her surprise, passed onwards.'--(p. 111.)
This superb piece of imaginative prose, of which Shorthouse himself might have been proud,[9] is recalled by an answering note in Ryecroft, in which he says, 'I owe many a page to the street-organs.'
And, where the pathos has to be distilled from dialogue, I doubt if the author of Jack himself could have written anything more restrainedly touching or in a finer taste than this:--
[Footnote 9: I am thinking, in particular, of the old vielle-player's conversation in chap. xxiii. of _John Inglesant_; of the exquisite passage on old dance music--its inexpressible pathos--in chap. xxv.]
'Laughing with kindly mirth, the old man drew on his woollen gloves and took up his hat and the violin-bag. Then he offered to say good-bye.
"But you're forgetting your top-coat, grandad," said Lydia.
"I didn't come in it, my dear."
"What's that, then? I'm sure we don't wear such things."
She pointed to a chair, on which Thyrza had just artfully spread the gift. Mr. Boddy looked in a puzzled way; had he really come in his coat and forgotten it? He drew nearer.
"That's no coat o' mine, Lyddy," he said.
Thyrza broke into a laugh.
"Why, whose is it, then?" she exclaimed. "Don't play tricks, grandad; put it on at once!"
"Now come, come; you're keeping Mary waiting," said Lydia, catching up the coat and holding it ready.
Then Mr. Boddy understood. He looked from Lydia to Thyrza with dimmed eyes.
"I've a good mind never to speak to either of you again," he said in a tremulous voice. "As if you hadn't need enough of your money! Lyddy, Lyddy! And you're as had, Thyrza, a grownup woman like you; you ought to teach your sister better. Why, there; it's no good; I don't know what to say to you. Now what do you think of this, Mary?"
Lydia still held up the coat, and at length persuaded the old man to don it. The effect upon his appearance was remarkable; conscious of it, he held himself more upright and stumped to the little square of looking-glass to try and regard himself. Here he furtively brushed a hand over his eyes.
"I'm ready, Mary, my dear; I'm ready! It's no good saying anything to girls like these. Good-bye, Lyddy; good-bye, Thyrza. May you have a happy Christmas, children! This isn't the first as you've made a happy one for me."'--(p. 117.)
The anonymously published Demos (1886) can hardly be described as a typical product of George Gissing's mind and art. In it he subdued himself rather to the level of such popular producers as Besant and Rice, and went out of his way to procure melodramatic suspense, an ingredient far from congenial to his normal artistic temper. But the end justified the means. The novel found favour in the eyes of the author of The Lost Sir Massingberd, and Gissing for the first time in his life found himself the possessor of a full purse, with fifty 'jingling, tingling, golden, minted quid' in it. Its possession brought with it the realisation of a paramount desire, the desire for Greece and Italy which had become for him, as it had once been with Goethe, a scarce endurable suffering. The sickness of longing had wellnigh given way to despair, when 'there came into my hands a sum of money (such a poor little sum) for a book I had written. It was early autumn. I chanced to hear some one speak of Naples--and only death would have held me back.'[10]
[Footnote 10: See Emancipated, chaps. iv.-xii.; New Grub Street,