The House of Cobwebs | Page 6

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 down to write for hours and hours.
He is at the sea-side, his desk at a sunny bay window overlooking the
shore, and there all the morning he writes with gusto, ever and again
bursting into laughter at his own thoughts.'[7]
[Footnote 7: See a deeply interesting paper on Dickens by 'G.G.' in the
New York Critic, Jan. 1902. Much of this is avowed autobiography.]
The influence of Dickens clearly predominated when Gissing wrote his
next novel and first really notable and artistic book, Thyrza.[8] The
figure which irradiates this story is evidently designed in the school of

Dickens: it might almost be a pastel after some more highly finished
work by Daudet. But Daudet is a more relentless observer than Gissing,
and to find a parallel to this particular effect I think we must go back a
little farther to the heroic age of the grisette and the tearful Manchon de
Francine of Henri Murger. Thyrza, at any rate, is a most exquisite
picture in half-tones of grey and purple of a little Madonna of the slums;
she is in reality the _belle fleur d'un fumier_ of which he speaks in the
epigraph of the Nether World. The fumier in question is Lambeth Walk,
of which we have a Saturday night scene, worthy of the author of
_L'Assommoir_ and Le Ventre de Paris in his most perceptive mood.
In this inferno, amongst the pungent odours, musty smells and 'acrid
exhalations from the shops where fried fish and potatoes hissed in
boiling grease,' blossomed a pure white lily, as radiant amid mean
surroundings as Gemma in the poor Frankfort confectioner's shop of
Turgenev's _Eaux Printanières._ The pale and rather languid charm of
her face and figure are sufficiently portrayed without any set
description. What could be more delicate than the intimation of the
foregone 'good-night' between the sisters, or the scene of Lyddy
plaiting Thyrza's hair? The delineation of the upper middle class culture
by which this exquisite flower of maidenhood is first caressed and
transplanted, then slighted and left to wither, is not so satisfactory. Of
the upper middle class, indeed, at that time, Gissing had very few
means of observation. But this defect, common to all his early novels,
is more than compensated by the intensely pathetic figure of Gilbert
Grail, the tender-souled, book-worshipping factory hand raised for a
moment to the prospect of intellectual life and then hurled down by the
caprice of circumstance to the unrelenting round of manual toil at the
soap and candle factory. Dickens would have given a touch of the
grotesque to Grail's gentle but ungainly character; but at the end he
would infallibly have rewarded him as Tom Pinch and Dominie
Sampson were rewarded. Not so George Gissing. His sympathy is fully
as real as that of Dickens. But his fidelity to fact is greater. Of the
Christmas charity prescribed by Dickens, and of the untainted pathos to
which he too rarely attained, there is an abundance in Thyrza. But what
amazes the chronological student of Gissing's work is the magnificent
quality of some of the writing, a quality of which he had as yet given
no very definite promise. Take the following passage, for example:--

[Footnote 8: _Thyrza: A Novel_ (3 vols., 1887). In later life we are told
that Gissing affected to despise this book as 'a piece of boyish
idealism.' But he was always greatly pleased by any praise of this 'study
of two sisters, where poverty for once is rainbow-tinted by love.' My
impression is that it was written before Demos, but was longer in
finding a publisher; it had to wait until the way was prepared by its
coarser and more vigorous workfellow. A friend writes: 'I well
remember the appearance of the MS. Gissing wrote then on thin foreign
paper in a small, thin handwriting, without correction. It was before the
days of typewriting, and the MS. of a three-volume novel was so
compressed that one could literally put it in one's pocket without the
slightest inconvenience.' The name is from Byron's Elegy on Thyrza.]
'A street organ began to play in front of a public-house close by. Grail
drew near; there were children forming a dance, and he stood to watch
them.
Do you know that music of the obscure ways, to which children dance?
Not if you have only heard it ground to your ears' affliction beneath
your windows in the square. To hear it aright you