The House of Cobwebs | Page 3

energy of their temperaments was capable of fusing
the most intractable material, and that in the end they would produce
their great, downright effect. Their spirits rose and fell, but the case was
desperate, copy had to be despatched for the current serial. Good and

bad had to 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