Denzil Quarrier (1892) and The Town Traveller (1898) this was one of the books which Gissing sometimes went the length of asking the admirers of his earlier romances 'not to read.' With its prefatory note, indeed, its cheap illustrations, and its rather mechanical intrigue, it seems as far removed from such a book as A Life's Morning as it is possible for a novel by the same author to be. It was in the South of France, in the neighbourhood of Biarritz, amid scenes such as that described in the thirty-seventh chapter of Will Warburton, or still further south, that he wrote the greater part of his last three books, the novel just mentioned, which is probably his best essay in the lighter ironical vein to which his later years inclined23, Veranilda, a romance of the time of Theodoric the Goth, written in solemn fulfilment of a vow of his youth, and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, which to my mind remains a legacy for Time to take account of as the faithful tribute of one of the truest artists of the generation he served.
In Veranilda (1904) are combined conscientious workmanship, a pure style of finest quality, and archaeology, for all I know to the contrary, worthy of Becker or Boni. Sir Walter himself could never in reason have dared to aspire to such a fortunate conjuncture of talent, grace, and historic accuracy. He possessed only that profound knowledge of human nature, that moulding humour and quick sense of dialogue, that live, human, and local interest in matters antiquarian, that statesmanlike insight into the pith and marrow of the historic past, which makes one of Scott's historical novels what it is—the envy of artists, the delight of young and old, the despair of formal historians. Veranilda is without a doubt a splendid piece of work; Gissing wrote it with every bit of the care that his old friend Biffen expended upon Mr. Bailey, grocer. He worked slowly, patiently, affectionately, scrupulously. Each sentence was as good as he could make it, harmonious to the ear, with words of precious meaning skilfully set; and he believed in it with the illusion so indispensable to an artist's wellbeing and continuance in good work. It represented for him what Salammbô did to Flaubert. But he could not allow himself six years to write a book as Flaubert did. Salammbô, after all, was a magnificent failure, and Veranilda,—well, it must be confessed, sadly but surely, that Veranilda was a failure too. Far otherwise was it with Ryecroft, which represents, as it were, the summa of Gissing's habitual meditation, aesthetic feeling and sombre emotional experience. Not that it is a pessimistic work,—quite the contrary, it represents the mellowing influences, the increase of faith in simple, unsophisticated English girlhood and womanhood, in domestic pursuits, in innocent children, in rural homeliness and honest Wessex landscape, which began to operate about 1896, and is seen so unmistakably in the closing scenes of The Whirlpool. Three chief strains are subtly interblended in the composition. First that of a nature book, full of air, foliage and landscape—that English landscape art of Linnell and De Wint and Foster, for which he repeatedly expresses such a passionate tendre,24 refreshed by 'blasts from the channel, with raining scud and spume of mist breaking upon the hills' in which he seems to crystallise the very essence of a Western winter. Secondly, a paean half of praise and half of regret for the vanishing England, passing so rapidly even as he writes into 'a new England which tries so hard to be unlike the old.' A deeper and richer note of thankfulness, mixed as it must be with anxiety, for the good old ways of English life (as lamented by Mr. Poorgrass and Mark Clark25), old English simplicity, and old English fare—the fine prodigality of the English platter, has never been raised. God grant that the leaven may work! And thirdly there is a deeply brooding strain of saddening yet softened autobiographical reminiscence, over which is thrown a light veil of literary appreciation and topical comment. Here is a typical cadenza, rising to a swell at one point (suggestive for the moment of Raleigh's famous apostrophe), and then most gently falling, in a manner not wholly unworthy, I venture to think, of Webster and Sir Thomas Browne, of both of which authors there is internal evidence that Gissing made some study.
'I always turn out of my way to walk through a country churchyard; these rural resting-places are as attractive to me as a town cemetery is repugnant. I read the names upon the stones and find a deep solace in thinking that for all these the fret and the fear of life are over. There comes to me no touch of sadness; whether it be a little child or an aged man, I have the same sense of happy accomplishment; the end having come, and with it the eternal peace, what matter if it came late or soon? There is no such gratulation as Hic jacet. There is no such dignity as that of death. In the path trodden by the noblest of mankind these have followed; that which of all who live is the utmost thing demanded, these have achieved. I cannot sorrow for them, but the thought of their vanished life moves me to a brotherly tenderness. The dead amid this leafy silence seem to whisper encouragement to him whose fate yet lingers: As we are, so shalt thou be; and behold our quiet!'—(p. 183.)
And in this deeply moving and beautiful passage we get a foretaste, it may be, of the euthanasia, following a brief summer of St. Martin, for which the scarred and troublous portions of Gissing's earlier life had served as a preparation. Some there are, no doubt, to whom it will seem no extravagance in closing these private pages to use the author's own words, of a more potent Enchanter: 'As I close the book, love and reverence possess me.'
Whatever the critics may determine as to the merit of the stories in the present volume, there can be no question as to the interest they derive from their connection with what had gone before. Thus Topham's Chance is manifestly the outcome of material pondered as early as 1884. The Lodger in Maze Pond develops in a most suggestive fashion certain problems discussed in 1894. Miss Rodney is a re-incarnation of Rhoda Nunn and Constance Bride. Christopherson is a delicious expansion of a mood indicated in Ryecroft (Spring xii.), and A Capitalist indicates the growing interest in the business side of practical life, the dawn of which is seen in The Town Traveller and in the discussion of Dickens's potentialities as a capitalist. The very artichokes in The House of Cobwebs (which, like the kindly hand that raised them, alas! fell a victim to the first frost of the season) are suggestive of a charming passage detailing the retired author's experience as a gardener. What Dr. Furnivall might call the 'backward reach' of every one of these stories will render their perusal delightful to those cultivated readers of Gissing, of whom there are by no means a few, to whom every fragment of his suave and delicate workmanship 'repressed yet full of power, vivid though sombre in colouring,' has a technical interest and charm. Nor will they search in vain for Gissing's incorrigible mannerisms, his haunting insistence upon the note of 'Dort wo du nicht bist ist das Glück,' his tricks of the brush in portraiture, his characteristic epithets, the dusking twilight, the decently ignoble penury, the not ignoble ambition, the not wholly base riot of the senses in early manhood. In my own opinion we have here in The Scrupulous Father, and to a less degree, perhaps, in the first and last of these stories, and in A Poor Gentleman and Christopherson, perfectly characteristic and quite admirable specimens of Gissing's own genre, and later, unstudied, but always finished prose style.
But a few words remain to be said, and these, in part at any rate, in recapitulation. In the old race, of which Dickens and Thackeray were representative, a successful determination to rise upon the broad back of popularity coincided with a growing conviction that the evil in the world was steadily diminishing. Like healthy schoolboys who have worked their way up to the sixth form, they imagined that the bullying of which they had had to complain was become pretty much a thing of the past. In Gissing the misery inherent in the sharp contrasts of modern life was a far more deeply ingrained conviction. He cared little for the remedial aspect of the question. His idea was to analyse this misery as an artist and to express it to the world.
One of the most impressive elements in the resulting novels is the witness they bear to prolonged and intense suffering, the suffering of a proud, reserved, and over-sensitive mind brought into constant contact with the coarse and brutal facts of life. The creator of Mr. Biffen suffers all the torture of the fastidious, the delicately honourable, the scrupulously high-minded in daily contact with persons of blunt feelings, low ideals, and base instincts. 'Human cattle, the herd that feed and breed, with them it was well;
It also contains one of the most beautiful descriptions ever penned of the visit of a tired town-dweller to a modest rural home, with all its suggestion of trim gardening, fresh country scents, indigenous food, and homely simplicity.—
'I love and honour even the least of English landscape painters.'—
'But what with the parsons and clerks and school-people and serious tea-parties, the merry old ways of good life have gone to the dogs—upon my carcass, they have!'—
