The House of Cobwebs | Page 9

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 every novel.[12] Certain of
the later portions of this book, especially the chapter entitled 'Her Path
in Shadow' are delineated through a kind of mystical haze, suggestive
of some of the work of Puvis de Chavannes. The concluding chapters,
taken as a whole, indicate with tolerable accuracy Gissing's affinities as
a writer, and the pedigree of the type of novel by which he is best
known. It derives from Xavier de Maistre and St. Pierre to _La
Nouvelle Héloïse,_--nay, might one not almost say from the pays du
tendre of _La Princesse de Clèves_ itself. Semi-sentimental theories as
to the relations of the sexes, the dangers of indiscriminate education,
the corruptions of wretchedness and poverty in large towns, the neglect
of literature and classical learning, and the grievances of scholarly
refinement in a world in which Greek iambic and Latin hexameter
count for nothing,--such form the staple of his theses and tirades! His
approximation at times to the confines of French realistic art is of the
most accidental or incidental kind. For Gissing is at heart, in his bones
as the vulgar say, a thorough moralist and sentimentalist, an honest,
true-born, downright ineradicable Englishman. Intellectually his own

life was, and continued to the last to be, romantic to an extent that few
lives are. Pessimistic he may at times appear, but this is almost entirely
on the surface. For he was never in the least blasé or ennuyé. He had
the pathetic treasure of the humble and downcast and unkindly
entreated--unquenchable hope. He has no objectivity. His point of view
is almost entirely personal. It is not the lacrimae rerum, but the
lacrimae dierum suorum, that makes his pages often so forlorn. His
laments are all uttered by the waters of Babylon in a strange land. His
nostalgia in the land of exile, estranged from every refinement, was
greatly enhanced by the fact that he could not get on with ordinary men,
but exhibited almost to the last a practical incapacity, a curious inability
to do the sane and secure thing. As Mr. Wells puts it:--
[Footnote 12: Sometimes, however, as in The Whirlpool (1897) with a
very significant change of intonation:--'And that History which he
loved to read--what was it but the lurid record of woes unutterable!
How could he find pleasure in keeping his eyes fixed on century after
century of ever-repeated torment--war, pestilence, tyranny; the stake,
the dungeon; tortures of infinite device, cruelties inconceivable?'--(p.
326.)]
'It is not that he was a careless man, he was a most careful one; it is not
that he was a morally lax man, he was almost morbidly the reverse.
Neither was he morose or eccentric in his motives or bearing; he was
genial, conversational, and well-meaning. But he had some sort of
blindness towards his fellow-men, so that he never entirely grasped the
spirit of everyday life, so that he, who was so copiously intelligent in
the things of the study, misunderstood, blundered, was nervously
diffident, and wilful and spasmodic in common affairs, in employment
and buying and selling, and the normal conflicts of intercourse. He did
not know what would offend, and he did not know what would please.
He irritated others and thwarted himself. He had no social nerve.'
Does not Gissing himself sum it up admirably, upon the lips of Mr.
Widdowson in _The Odd Women_: 'Life has always been full of
worrying problems for me. I can't take things in the simple way that
comes natural to other men.' 'Not as other men are': more intellectual
than most, fully as responsive to kind and genial instincts, yet bound at
every turn to pinch and screw--an involuntary ascetic. Such is the
essential burden of Gissing's long-drawn lament. Only accidentally can

it be described as his mission to preach 'the desolation of modern life,'
or in the gracious phrase of De Goncourt, fouiller les entrailles de la
vie. Of the confident, self-supporting realism of Esther Waters, for
instance, how little is there in any of his work, even in that most
gloomily photographic portion of it which we are now to describe?
During the next four years, 1889-1892, Gissing produced four novels,
and three of these perhaps are his best efforts in prose fiction. The
Nether World of 1889 is certainly in some respects his strongest work,
la letra con sangre,