The House of Cobwebs | Page 8

chap, xxvii.; Ryecroft, Autumn xix.; the short, not superior, novel called Sleeping Fires, 1895, chap. i. 'An encounter on the Kerameikos'; The Albany, Christmas 1904, p. 27; and Monthly Review, vol. xvi. 'He went straight by sea to the land of his dreams--Italy. It was still happily before the enterprise of touring agencies had fobbed the idea of Italian travel of its last vestiges of magic. He spent as much time as he could afford about the Bay of Naples, and then came on with a rejoicing heart to Rome--Rome, whose topography had been with him since boyhood, beside whose stately history the confused tumult of the contemporary newspapers seemed to him no more than a noisy, unmeaning persecution of the mind. Afterwards he went to Athens.']
The main plot of Demos is concerned with Richard Mutimer, a young socialist whose vital force, both mental and physical, is well above the average, corrupted by accession to a fortune, marrying a refined wife, losing his money in consequence of the discovery of an unsuspected will, and dragging his wife down with him,--down to _la misère_ in its most brutal and humiliating shape. Happy endings and the Gissing of this period are so ill-assorted, that the 'reconciliations' at the close of both this novel and the next are to be regarded with considerable suspicion. The 'gentlefolk' in the book are the merest marionettes, but there are descriptive passages of first-rate vigour, and the voice of wisdom is heard from the lips of an early Greek choregus in the figure of an old parson called Mr. Wyvern. As the mouthpiece of his creator's pet hobbies parson Wyvern rolls out long homilies conceived in the spirit of Emerson's 'compensation,' and denounces the cruelty of educating the poor and making no after-provision for their intellectual needs with a sombre enthusiasm and a periodicity of style almost worthy of Dr. Johnson.[11]
[Footnote 11: An impressive specimen of his eloquence was cited by me in an article in the Daily Mail Year Book (1906, p. 2). A riper study of a somewhat similar character is given in old Mr. Lashmar in Our Friend the Charlatan. (See his sermon on the blasphemy which would have us pretend that our civilisation obeys the spirit of Christianity, in chap, xviii.). For a criticism of Demos and Thyrza in juxtaposition with Besant's Children of Gibeon, see Miss Sichel on 'Philanthropic Novelists' (_Murray's Magazine_, iii. 506-518). Gissing saw deeper than to 'cease his music on a merry chord.']
After Demos, Gissing returned in 1888 to the more sentimental and idealistic palette which he had employed for Thyrza. Renewed recollections of Tibullus and of Theocritus may have served to give his work a more idyllic tinge. But there were much nearer sources of inspiration for _A Life's Morning_. There must be many novels inspired by a youthful enthusiasm for Richard Feverel, and this I should take to be one of them. Apart from the idyllic purity of its tone, and its sincere idolatry of youthful love, the caressing grace of the language which describes the spiritualised beauty of Emily Hood and the exquisite charm of her slender hands, and the silvery radiance imparted to the whole scene of the proposal in the summer-house (in chapter iii., 'Lyrical'), give to this most unequal and imperfect book a certain crepuscular fascination of its own. Passages in it, certainly, are not undeserving that fine description of a style _si tendre qu'il pousse le bonheur à pleurer_. Emily's father, Mr. Hood, is an essentially pathetic figure, almost grotesquely true to life. 'I should like to see London before I die,' he says to his daughter. 'Somehow I have never managed to get so far.... There's one thing that I wish especially to see, and that is Holborn Viaduct. It must be a wonderful piece of engineering; I remember thinking it out at the time it was constructed. Of course you have seen it?' The vulgar but not wholly inhuman Cartwright interior, where the parlour is resolved into a perpetual matrimonial committee, would seem to be the outcome of genuine observation. Dagworthy is obviously padded with the author's substitute for melodrama, while the rich and cultivated Mr. Athel is palpably imitated from Meredith. The following tirade (spoken by the young man to his mistress) is Gissing pure. 'Think of the sunny spaces in the world's history, in each of which one could linger for ever. Athens at her fairest, Rome at her grandest, the glorious savagery of Merovingian Courts, the kingdom of Frederick II., the Moors in Spain, the magic of Renaissance Italy--to become a citizen of any one age means a lifetime of endeavour. It is easy to fill one's head with names and years, but that only sharpens my hunger.' In one form or another it recurs in practically