The House of Cobwebs | Page 4

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
garments which permit them to attend a garden party or an evening "at
home" without attracting unpleasant notice. Many biographical
sketches have I read during the last decade, making personal
introduction of young Mr. This or young Miss That, whose book

was--as the sweet language of the day will have it--"booming"; but
never one in which there was a hint of stern struggles, of the pinched
stomach and frozen fingers.'
[Footnote 3: Three vols., 1884, dedicated to M.C.R. In one volume
'revised,' 1895 (preface dated October 1895).]
[Footnote 4: Who but Gissing could describe a heroine as exhibiting in
her countenance 'habitual nourishment on good and plenteous food'?]
In his later years it was customary for him to inquire of a new author
'Has he starved'? He need have been under no apprehension. There is
still a God's plenty of attics in Grub Street, tenanted by genuine artists,
idealists and poets, amply sufficient to justify the lamentable
conclusion of old Anthony à Wood in his life of George Peele. 'For so
it is and always hath been, that most poets die poor, and consequently
obscurely, and a hard matter it is to trace them to their graves.' Amid all
these miseries, Gissing upheld his ideal. During 1886-7 he began really
to write and the first great advance is shown in Isabel Clarendon.[5]
No book, perhaps, that he ever wrote is so rich as this in
autobiographical indices. In the melancholy Kingcote we get more than
a passing phase or a momentary glimpse at one side of the young
author. A long succession of Kingcote's traits are obvious
self-revelations. At the beginning he symbolically prefers the old road
with the crumbling sign-post, to the new. Kingcote is a literary
sensitive. The most ordinary transaction with uneducated ('that is
uncivilised') people made him uncomfortable. Mean and hateful people
by their suggestions made life hideous. He lacks the courage of the
ordinary man. Though under thirty he is abashed by youth. He is
sentimental and hungry for feminine sympathy, yet he realises that the
woman who may with safety be taken in marriage by a poor man, given
to intellectual pursuits, is extremely difficult of discovery.
Consequently he lives in solitude; he is tyrannised by moods,
dominated by temperament. His intellect is in abeyance. He shuns the
present--the historical past seems alone to concern him. Yet he abjures
his own past. The ghost of his former self affected him with horror.
Identity even he denies. 'How can one be responsible for the thoughts
and acts of the being who bore his name years ago?' He has no
consciousness of his youth--no sympathy with children. In him is to be
discerned 'his father's intellectual and emotional qualities, together with

a certain stiffness of moral attitude derived from his mother.' He reveals
already a wonderful palate for pure literary flavour. His prejudices are
intense, their character being determined by the refinement and
idealism of his nature. All this is profoundly significant, knowing as we
do that this was produced when Gissing's worldly prosperity was at its
nadir. He was living at the time, like his own Harold Biffen, in absolute
solitude, a frequenter of pawnbroker's shops and a stern connoisseur of
pure dripping, pease pudding ('magnificent pennyworths at a shop in
Cleveland Street, of a very rich quality indeed'), faggots and saveloys.
The stamp of affluence in those days was the possession of a basin. The
rich man thus secured the gravy which the poor man, who relied on a
paper wrapper for his pease pudding, had to give away. The image
recurred to his mind when, in later days, he discussed champagne
vintages with his publisher, or was consulted as to the management of
butlers by the wife of a popular prelate. With what a sincere
recollection of this time he enjoins his readers (after Dr. Johnson) to
abstain from Poverty. 'Poverty is the great secluder.' 'London is a
wilderness abounding in anchorites.' Gissing was sustained amid all
these miseries by two passionate idealisms, one of the intellect, the
other of the emotions. The first was ancient Greece and Rome--and he
incarnated this passion in the picturesque figure of Julian Casti (in
_The Unclassed_), toiling hard to purchase a Gibbon, savouring its
grand epic roll, converting its driest detail into poetry by means of his
enthusiasm, and selecting Stilicho as a hero of drama or romance (a
premonition here of _Veranilda_). The second or heart's idol was
Charles Dickens--Dickens as writer, Dickens as the hero of a