The House of Cobwebs | Page 8

and Italy which had
become for him, as it had once been with Goethe, a scarce endurable
suffering. The sickness of longing had wellnigh given way to despair,
when 'there came into my hands a sum of money (such a poor little sum)
for a book I had written. It was early autumn. I chanced to hear some
one speak of Naples--and only death would have held me back.'[10]
[Footnote 10: See Emancipated, chaps. iv.-xii.; New Grub Street, chap,
xxvii.; Ryecroft, Autumn xix.; the short, not superior, novel called
Sleeping Fires, 1895, chap. i. 'An encounter on the Kerameikos'; The
Albany, Christmas 1904, p. 27; and Monthly Review, vol. xvi. 'He went
straight by sea to the land of his dreams--Italy. It was still happily
before the enterprise of touring agencies had fobbed the idea of Italian
travel of its last vestiges of magic. He spent as much time as he could
afford about the Bay of Naples, and then came on with a rejoicing heart
to Rome--Rome, whose topography had been with him since boyhood,
beside whose stately history the confused tumult of the contemporary
newspapers seemed to him no more than a noisy, unmeaning
persecution of the mind. Afterwards he went to Athens.']
The main plot of Demos is concerned with Richard Mutimer, a young
socialist whose vital force, both mental and physical, is well above the

average, corrupted by accession to a fortune, marrying a refined wife,
losing his money in consequence of the discovery of an unsuspected
will, and dragging his wife down with him,--down to _la misère_ in its
most brutal and humiliating shape. Happy endings and the Gissing of
this period are so ill-assorted, that the 'reconciliations' at the close of
both this novel and the next are to be regarded with considerable
suspicion. The 'gentlefolk' in the book are the merest marionettes, but
there are descriptive passages of first-rate vigour, and the voice of
wisdom is heard from the lips of an early Greek choregus in the figure
of an old parson called Mr. Wyvern. As the mouthpiece of his creator's
pet hobbies parson Wyvern rolls out long homilies conceived in the
spirit of Emerson's 'compensation,' and denounces the cruelty of
educating the poor and making no after-provision for their intellectual
needs with a sombre enthusiasm and a periodicity of style almost
worthy of Dr. Johnson.[11]
[Footnote 11: An impressive specimen of his eloquence was cited by
me in an article in the Daily Mail Year Book (1906, p. 2). A riper study
of a somewhat similar character is given in old Mr. Lashmar in Our
Friend the Charlatan. (See his sermon on the blasphemy which would
have us pretend that our civilisation obeys the spirit of Christianity, in
chap, xviii.). For a criticism of Demos and Thyrza in juxtaposition with
Besant's Children of Gibeon, see Miss Sichel on 'Philanthropic
Novelists' (_Murray's Magazine_, iii. 506-518). Gissing saw deeper
than to 'cease his music on a merry chord.']
After Demos, Gissing returned in 1888 to the more sentimental and
idealistic palette which he had employed for Thyrza. Renewed
recollections of Tibullus and of Theocritus may have served to give his
work a more idyllic tinge. But there were much nearer sources of
inspiration for _A Life's Morning_. There must be many novels
inspired by a youthful enthusiasm for Richard Feverel, and this I
should take to be one of them. Apart from the idyllic purity of its tone,
and its sincere idolatry of youthful love, the caressing grace of the
language which describes the spiritualised beauty of Emily Hood and
the exquisite charm of her slender hands, and the silvery radiance
imparted to the whole scene of the proposal in the summer-house (in
chapter iii., 'Lyrical'), give to this most unequal and imperfect book a
certain crepuscular fascination of its own. Passages in it, certainly, are

not undeserving that fine description of a style _si tendre qu'il pousse le
bonheur à pleurer_. Emily's father, Mr. Hood, is an essentially pathetic
figure, almost grotesquely true to life. 'I should like to see London
before I die,' he says to his daughter. 'Somehow I have never managed
to get so far.... There's one thing that I wish especially to see, and that is
Holborn Viaduct. It must be a wonderful piece of engineering; I
remember thinking it out at the time it was constructed. Of course you
have seen it?' The vulgar but not wholly inhuman Cartwright interior,
where the parlour is resolved into a perpetual matrimonial committee,
would seem to be the outcome of genuine observation. Dagworthy is
obviously padded with the author's substitute for melodrama, while the
rich and cultivated Mr. Athel is palpably imitated from Meredith. The
following tirade (spoken by the young man to his mistress) is Gissing
pure. 'Think of the sunny spaces