The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part III: 1897-1903 [3] 9781848931763

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PARTS OF THE EDITION

THE HEROIC LIFE OF GEORGE GISSING, PART III: 1897-1903

The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part I: 1857- 1888 The Heroic Life of George Gissing. Part II: 1888-1897

BY

The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part III: 1897- 1903

Pierre Coustillas

PICKERING & CHATTO 2012

Published by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited 21 Bloomsbury Wtiy, London WCJA 2TH

CONTENTS

2252 Ridge Road, Brookfield, Vermont 05036-9704, USA www.pickeringchatto.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission of the publisher. © Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Ltd 2012 © Pierre Coustillas 2012 To the best of the Publisher's knowledge every effort has been made to contact relevant copyright holders and to clear any relevant copyright issues. Any omissions that come to their attention will be remedied in future editions. BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Coustillas, Pierre. The heroic life of George Gissing. Part III, 1897-1903. 1. Gissing, George, 1857 -1903. 2. Authors, English - 19th century Biography. I. Tide 823.8-dc22 ISBN-13: 978 1848931 756 8:978 1848931763

8 This publication is printed on acid-free paper that conforms to the American National Standard for the Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited e MPG Books Group Printed and bound in the [}; OF

GLAS GO\/\/ LIBRARY

V. Port after Stormy Seas 1 Third Italian Journey: Siena and Calabria (September 1897-December 1897) 2 From Rome to Surrey: Uncertainties Abounding (December 1897-June 1898) 3 'The Crown of Life' (June 1898-May 1899) 4 The Ideal Put to the Test (May 1899-May 1900) 5 'Married' Life in Paris (May 1900-May 1901 ) 6 The Invalid (June 1901-June 1902) 7 Swan Song (July 1902-December 1903)

35 67 111 149 181 219

VI. Epilogue 8 Assessment and Controversy ( 1904-6) 9 Gissing's Afterlife: A Century On (1906-2003) Bibliography Notes Index

263 293 323 325 361

1 THIRD ITALIAN JOURNEY: SIENA AND CALABRIA (SEPTEMBER 1897-DECEMBER 1897)

'Dear Icaly ! The sound of thy soft name Soothes me with balm of Memory and Hope.' Robert Underwood Johnson, 'The Italian Rhapsody'

I. Gissing left for Italy on Wednesday 22 September and reached Siena via Basie, Milan and Florence. On the steamer he chanced upon the artist Amedee Forestier, whom he had met at the Omar Khayyam dinner in July 1895 and whose work he had often seen in the Illustrated London News. The illustrator was going fo r his annual holiday to his native Burgundy. At Gi.ischenen snow gleamed on the summits and the Italian language once more rang in G issing's ears : 'Venti cinque minuti di fermata' [twenty-five minutes' stop], a railwayman shouted. Trains were slow and stopovers frequent . His attention during the journey was fixed on a Russian family, especially 'a little boy of four or five, with a face of pronounced Kalmuck type' whose 'inexhaustible strength and good humour fo r 11 hours' journey' impressed him. At Milan on Thursday he put up at the Hotel Roma in the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, 'very good and cheap'. Leaving next morning at 10.25 he arrived at Florence at 6 p.m. and found that he could not reach Siena the same night, so he went to the H otel di Milano, which was said by his Baedeker to be patronized by the English and which he found 'very good'. Travelling for some unknown reason via Empoli, he arrived in Siena in a baking heat, the like of which he had never experienced except in America. The Hotel Scala offered him a temporary home. Obviously the old city still clung to the Middle Ages. Next day, a Sunday, he went to S. Domenico, and saw the head of St Catherine, to whose name the fame of the city is attached. Catherine's head was being shown for the benefit of a pilgrimage. The diary entry and some of his letters record his impressions:

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The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part Ill

Third Italian j ourney

Bought a horrid photograph . In spite of triviality of surroundings. an impressive scene. A priest, in front of the shrine, perpetually holding up beads, and bundles of uncertain content, for rhe saint's bless ing - the making form of cross with the object.

hanging. I thought of you when I was among rhe great snowy mounrains of Switzerland, with waterfalls roaring everywhere - waterfalls ren times rhe height of Mill Gill

The past, preserved between rhe ancient walls of the town, had a tremendous fascination for him: 'Catherine's father was a dyer, and to this day the whole street has a smell of dyeing and that kind of thing - after 500 years! Nothing seems to change here.' In the same long letter to his mother, dated 27 September, he gave a wealth of derails about his immediate environment, the local way of life, the splendidly abundant food at meals, the whole being so pleasantly exotic to his senses. 'And what do you think I pay for all this - board and lodging? Not quite £4 a month!' Doubtless he wished to reassure his relatives, his mother and sisters as well as his brother and Katie, who all had very imperfect notions about what life abroad could mean in terms of expenses, that this journey on the Continent was in no way a rash and costly adventure, but he also wished to reassure himself. His Baedeker gave him a list of 'well spoken of' pensions, 'much patronised by English visitors', and he chose the last named, described as 'unpretending', which was situated at no. 18 Via delle Belle Arri, almost opposite the museum of that name, where a collection of 700 pictures, mainly works of the older Sienese school, were preserved. The pensione Gabbrielli was kept by two elderly women, Carlotta and her sister-in-law Georgina, who of course only spoke their mother tongue, bur this perfectly suited Gissing as he was anxious to recover his past fluency in the language. From his two windows on the third floor he had a wonderful view of the Cathedral, built on the neighbouring hill; a tinkling of bells was wafted up to him as goats went by below. The long-horned white oxen drawing carts along the steep, winding streets reminded him of Homer and Virgil, two of his revered ancient authors. As on his earlier journeys to Italy he admired the people for their courteous and dignified manners. Of the barefooted friars he was content to note the strange presence. Thinking of his relatives, whose curiosity he tried to rouse, though with little enough effect, he wished his impressions could be shared; he in particular wished that his sisters could 'come some day, if I can possibly make £100 for which I have no use - not at all an impossible thing ... Well, well', he pleaded emotionally, 'it is a beautiful country, beautiful beyond all possibility of describing it to those who have not been here.' With Walter he was no less appealingly communicative, secretly hoping that his own love ofltaly might be transmitted to his son. On the same day, 27 September, he attuned his enthusiasm to the child's age and culture: How I wish you could be here, ro see all the wonderful sights, and to talk about them with me ... Near my window is a great fig tree, covered with ripe figs . The grapes are nearly all gathered, but in the train I passed many vin eyards where great bunches were

3

a waterfall they had seen together a few weeks before in Wensleydale. Italy was in his eyes a land of pleasant contrasts. He noticed that the pilgrims of St Catherine were mainly women and children, whose credulity easily beat that of men. Early on a picturesque but most un-English notice caught his eye on street doors: 'II pozzo nero si vuota in questa none', that is 'the black pit to be emptied to-night'. Compared with life in England, life in Italy was vastly more colourful, and more readily than in Britain, the past of the country could be read in the image it offered to foreign eyes. The town of Siena, with a population of abou t 25,000 in Gissing's day, had gone through ups and downs in the course of its blood-stained history, and he could not help seeing it from a historical angle. 'This old city has grown through the ages, till it is become as one building, covering in extraordinary agglomeration hill and valley; one thinks the removal of one house would cause everything to fall.' 1 Work claimed his whole attention. On the 28th he made a beginning at the first chapter of his critical study of Dickens's works and asked a carpenter to make for him a little wooden slant or sloping desk on which to write, at a cost of eight pence. Two days later actual composition, which had been carefully prepared since his stay at Budleigh Salterron, began - with distinct pleasure. He tied himself down to a regular daily schedule, sitting at his desk three hours in the morning and another three or four in the afternoon. On Sundays only did he let his pen rest. Of course he would just as well have devoted a book to Thackeray or Tennyson, but right to the end he felt quite confident in rhe quality of his work.2 He rook very little time off for sightseeing. Before the carpenter had carried out his order, he went to see the celebrated fountain of Fontebranda at the foot of the hill of Sa.n Domenico. On 10 October he walked to the local cemetery. Two weeks later he discovered on the Porta Camollia an inscription redolent of former rivalries between towns in the peninsula, notably of the wars with Florence, and savoured it enough to transcribe it in his diary: 'Cor magis tibi Sena pandit' [Siena gives you a warmer welcome). At first he was the only boarder but two more soon arrived whose society cheered him up at meal times and in the evening. One of them was a young American, Brian Boru Dunne, whose extraordinary recollections of Gissing as he knew him in Siena, then in Rome, reveal him from an angle from which apparently no one else was privileged to see him at any rime: 'I look upon Gissing as one of the most cheerful, luxury-loving, witty people I have ever mer.' And the wealth of anecdotes reported by Dunne with verve show how unaware he was that his w1deniable nai'vete was for Gissing a rich source of amusement. Dunne, as appears in his memoirs, was at his oddest when being (unconsciously) teased.

4

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part Ill

Third Italian journey

A nineteen-year-old youth when he rented a room at the Gabbrielli pensione, he must have intrigued Gissing from the first, as there was little he wished to leave unsaid about himself and his family. His spontaneous behaviour must have been encouraged by Gissing's genial response to anything he said. And he did have a picturesque lot to relate, especially to an intelligent listener. 'He has been rambling in Europe for two years', the diary reads. The charming, zither-playing, Irish-American youth belonged to a family of zealous Catholic advocates, not to say activists, who numbered influential friends in the Vatican. Dunne's father had been made Knight of the Order of St Gregory in 187 6, a Commander in the Order two years later and a Papal Count in 1881. In those days when Roman Catholics liked to believe that the Pope, currently Leo XIII, was infallible, the Dunne family had allies in the Italian clergy and in the Continental (especially Belgian) aristocracy, but young Brian, in Gissing's presence anyway, did not pose as a propagandist, rather as an aspiring journalist. He had been for some time a student at the so-called College des Princes in Bruges and was rather proud of his foreign social connections, realities which Gissing could only regard with a smiling indifference. Fortunately, the young man had plenty of opportunities to fathom his own cultural deficiencies, some of which delighted his companion. One day, for instance, Gissing was asked whether he had read Vanity Fair and, the reply being positive, was sent hilarious by the next - incredulous - question: 'A lot of it?' One gift appreciated by posterity Brian unquestionably had, that of observing the writer's doings, of noticing his witty responses to his own speech, to the manners and way of life of the Italians with whom they were in touch daily. The rich notes he has left us, as well as the unfinished articles he wrote on the English traveller whose disciple he claimed to be, offer a vision of Gissing at work and at leisure which constitutes an irreplaceable biographical source. Only a careful reading of With Gissing in ltaly, 3 which shows the two men in scores of circumstances together in Siena, then in Rome, can convey with adequate vividness their experiences in the autumn and winter of 1897. Of all the men who approached Gissing from his Yorkshire childhood to his agony in the French Pyrenees Brian Boru Dunne was his most alert memorialist. The other fellow boarder whose company is associated with the pensione was a medical student known only by his surname, Cappelli, a lively young man who had been doing his year's military service locally and whom Gissing, perhaps typically, first mentioned in his diary on 16 October, the day when he appeared in civilian clothes, a welcome release which his American and English companions helped him to celebrate with a bottle of Marsala. 'A good and nice fellow', Gissing noted with pleasure, a feeling confirmed by the prese nt he made him of a copy of The Emancipated on their parting day. Together with Dunne, Cappelli and Gissingwirnessed a gloomy event the proximity of which the lodgers had in no way suspected on their arrival. On 17 October their landlord, Signor Enrico

Gabbrielli, who had lain paralyzed for many months, died amid the heartbreaking cries of his wife. At Cappelli's suggestion the three men put their names among those subscribing to a wreath offered by the friend s of the family ('Dagli Amici'), 'an immense wreath of beautiful flowers, at least six feet in circwnference'. Cappelli and Gissing were also vicarious witnesses of a shooting se sion of small birds such as thrushes and finches, 'la caccia', which was related with great disgust in the diary entry for 20 October. Cappelli enlightened his foreign friend about other shady aspects of Italian society, notably the increasing power of clericalism. In Siena, he said, priests were rich and influential; they obliged shopkeepers to shut up on Sunday; as for the financial functioning of universities, it also left much to be desired. The condition of the Gabbrielli family, once rich, troubled Gissing, now that the landlord's death had compelled his relatives to remove to less comfortable premises at 8 Via Franciosa. The letter to Benz of 29 October echoes the sombre sides of Italian life, now that Dunne had left for Rome: 'To be sure, I have had some new insight into Italian private life, and so far it was good; but I found it hard to get on with my work.' As he approached the end of his stay in Siena he more and more strongly realised how difficult life was for many Italians. The removal of the Gabbrielli family to Via Franciosa abruptly opened his eyes to the dullness and misery of the people around him. The fate of the family man-servant, Poldo, moved him: 'Very faithful and affectionate, and will never leave them.' So did that of Georgina's mother, of whom he caught sight as he happened to pass the open door of a bedroom. There lay the poor woman in a bed. His comment was heartrending: 'What comfortless live ! A few years of youth, and then misery in a corner.' He himself was reminded by the ups and downs of hi s health of the frailty of life. His cough could at times become very bad. On 6 October he had noticed an unmistakable stain of blood on his handkerchief. He complained about occasional diarrhoea and liver troubles and fow1d that he had been losing weight since the spring. All thi wa a budget of news which hardly harmonizes with the accounts of himself he gave to his brother and younger sister that his health seemed vastly improved. His resignation at the sight of hwnan affiiction would at times prevail more easily than in England. On the day poor Signor Gabbrielli was carried to his last resting-place he commented dejectedly in his diary: 'A relief, after all, to think that the poor fellow is no more.' A superstitious person, he thought, might well have fled from Italy forthwith; he now merely wished to 'get as soon as possible into Magna Gr discuss contraception in the presence or absence of her husband and in such rac y terms that the husband felt bound to punctuate her extraordinary discourse with meaningful coughing fits, which Gissing took to imitating. Lambart numbered many aristocratic friends who, Gissing is reported by Dunne to have said, were 'as common as blackbirds among his acquaintances'. His wife 'gushed like an open faucet' and her visitor feigned to be shocked, being in fact tickled pink,

From Rome to Surrey

43

as he was again when, so as to get Dunne out of his way, he asked him to go to the Vittorio Emanuele Library and check whether the Greeks and Romans used to wear drawers, a request which the young man took seriously! On another occasion Mrs Lambart had the audacity to mention Oscar Wilde (then in prison), a name never uttered in London polite society and which her conventional husband would not have pronounced. Before long, however, amusement gave way to boredom. When he dined with the Lambarts on 26 December he was introduced to another guest, Frank Hurd, who acted, if such a verb can be used, as Roman correspondent of the Morning Post, and whom he dismissed summarily from his thoughts in his diary: 'Detestable type; effeminate in speech; boyish in manner; age cannot be more than 25, I think. He hardly knows any Italian - is taking lessons. What a correspondent for a London paper! ' On Herbert Swinton-Hunter, another dilettante whose talents had been praise d by Sturmer, Gissing had less to say. After a visit from the man on 8 January he briefly summed up his impressions in his diary: 'No idea what he is, but he seems to live luxuriously, and has an Italian secretary, a pleasant fellow: Severino. A letter to Sturmer of I February reads like a barely concealed desire to have done with Swinton-Hunter and his circle, and the diary entry for the 15th reflects his anger at having wasted his time in a thoroughly unprofitable encounter. 'A terrible affair. Some score of English women, mosdy married to Italians; common and foolish folk. Of course had to talk imbecilities, and was heartily glad to get away'. It is no wonder he took ample time to return the invitation. Gissing's patience with such people was at an end, but courtesy compelled him ro lie to Sturmer: 'I like Swinton-Hunter very much . I do not pretend to understand him ... If yo u can help me to comprehend his soul, pray do.' But Gissing did not really care. He found it more profitable culturally to en large his knowledge of Italian life, past and present. Hardly had he settled wi th the Umiltii couple when he undertook to visit districts of the capital that he had not seen on former occasions. Thus on 19 December he walked all the way from the Piazza Navona with its stalls of Christmas toys to the Campo dei F1on, where he saw the statue of the philosopher Giordano Bruno, who after many so-called heretics and criminals had been put to death in February 1600 an d only recently commemorated (in 1889) on the site of the stake. He went on to the Theatre of Marcellus, the Portico of Octavia and the Isola Tiberina. Concerned with the past even more than with the present he noted that the east branch of the Tiber, that which flowed under the Pons Fabricius, built in 62 BC was now completely dried and soon to be filled up. Two days later he walked in the afternoon to the Porta Maggiore and saw the tomb of Eurysaces, the famous baker, discovered sixty years before, with some of the reliefs representing grinding, baking and other processes of his trade. As he passed from one curiosity to the next, occasions for amusement, some of them listed in Dunne's

The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part III

From Rome to Surrey

List of Topics to be dealt with in his Recollections of Gissing, were not lacking. For instance, when he called at the consulate prior to obtaining a signed form needed at the Biblioteca Vittorio Emanuele, he found that the consul, Franz, had not yet made time to shave, and he had to locate Squillace for him on the map. Next day he read on the door of the church of Gesu, the principal church of the Jesuits, a printed notice informing the public that spitting on the floo r and alms-giving inside the buJding were prohibited. 'Characteristic!' he drily commented in his diary. On Christmas Day he was titillated 'to see women and little children with a bit of handkerchief on their heads - obeying the law that they must be covered in church', and to watch 'the great mixed crowd, talking about every sort of affair, with here and there a person kneeling in the midst, or someone conning a mass-book'. His landlord and landlady's hospitality he found a little oppressive on Christmas Day and New Year's Day: 'Obliged to eat a great deal too much of very badly cooked food', his stomach complained, but how could he have decently complained to these 'good vulgar folk' who so obviously meant well? His tone was equally blast when he went to St Peter's, in the Pope's chapel, in the afternoon to see what sight was offered there; and his judgement

many occasions in Dunne's company what a gifted debunker of vapidities, Italian in particular, he was. Had they known each other longer, one feels that he could have educated h is companion out of his most nonsensical beliefs and converted him to a more detached view of life. Conversely, Dunne's presence was for the careworn quadragenarian the equivalent of a cure of rejuvenation somewhat reminiscent of some jocular stories about him in his Lindow Grove days. Perhaps the most delightful anecdotes are those in which, when mildly criticizing Gissing for his supposedly amusing anglomania, Dunne reveals his own incapacity to understand his mentor and to view himself as others view him. The complexity of his many-tiered memoirs would doubtless have rejoiced Gissing, stressing as they do implicitly the abysmal difference there was between this yo uthful American, still immature in some respects, and, for instance, rhe writer's unenlightened relatives in Yorkshire. Seen from another angle, Dunne's memoirs have biographical value for both men in that they show them at a time when peace, despite the growth of German militarism, still prevailed in western and central Europe and when Gissing was, as it were, between two wives . Although far from home, he continued to follow current events with great attention thanks to the Roman daily La Tribuna, which he read in libraries. Thus he heard with regret of the death of one of his favourite French novelists, Alphonse Daudet, with whose works he had recently compared those of Dickens, noting resemblances between their attitudes to the people, their enjoyment of the virtues and happiness of simple domestic life, and their humour. He now noted simJarities in the circumstances of their death. Journalistic allusions to the Triple Alliance and to the aggressive foreign policy of Germany he would unsparingly pillory. Witness this entry in Dunne's Recollections which is charac teristic of his dry wit at the expense of the German Kaiser: ' Ir seems', Dunne remembered,

44

was tinctured with pity: Next to me, in the chapel, stood a poor sister of some order, wearing a hideous white bonnet: her ugly face and red nose, and her lips muttering piously. H ope she feels some inward pride, or solace at all events.

Tue anecdote mainly told by Dunne about the young American's desperate but finally successful efforts to get Gissing a ticket for the Pope's mass on 1 January _ the fiftieth anniversary of Leo's first mass - makes rich comic reading. Gissing's excuse for not going, whether valid or not, is in harmony with all the anecdotes that fill Dunne's book: 'Well', he said, 'I would like to see the old duffer, but I am ill.' Unquestionably some aspects of his life in Rome bordered on the farcical . He continued to view with amused eyes the conduct of some Italians in restaurants and that of audiences in music halls, the operatic airs of Swiss guards, the candour of Italian husbands whose wives were pregnant, the incapacity of the average foreigner to order a meal in the local language, the almost invariably grotesque behaviour of German tourists, and Dunne shared his jocularity in such circumstances. But young Brian, who had been spiritually nourished on Roman Catholic principles, never realized either in Rome in 1898 or decades later when he wrote up his recollections that he himself, during the many hours they spent together, was a rich source of unconscious drollery. Surely only a young American in those days, when asking the novelist whether he had read Vanity Fair, could have added, as related in the previous chapter, 'a lot of it?' Preposterous boyish questions of that kind were sure to make Gissing roar with laughter. Ecclesiastical absurdities and mummeries delighted Gissing, who showed on

45

Empero r \Villiam was out in a row boat in some bay or ocean, and a great passenger liner nearly ran him down. Nearly 'sp urlos gesenkt' [sunk without a trace]. After srudying the picrure [in a paper that Dunne showed him] Gissing commented: 'I wonder what inspired rhe passenger boar's captain to change his course? \Vil! there be an invesrigarion?" 12

IV. As rime passed Gissing grew rather tired of having to meet English people of doubtful interest like Swinton-Hunter and the Lambarrs; he also wearied of his daily contacts with the Umilta couple. So when Wells, at the end of January, mentioned a possible visit of his wife and himself in the next month, he decided to take advantage of the arrival of his friends and get away from the Via del Boschetto. On 14 February he transferred to Hotel Alibert and had time

46

The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part 1fI

to sample its amenities before the Wellses joined him on 8 March. Now familiar with the city and speaking Italian quite fluently, he accompanied them to every spot that tourists usually make for in and around Rome : St Peter:s, the Colosseum, the Forum, the Medici Gardens. They also went to Tivoli, with its beautiful waterfalls and the Temple of Vesta, where the sacred fire was kept alight by the Vestal Virgins, and everywhere Gissing proved an enthusiastic cicerone. With the Wellses' arrival a new phase of Gissing's Roman sojourn began. He had had by then new experiences. By 7 February, with a ticket given him b~ Dunne, he had gone to the Vatican for a Requiem Mass in the Sistine Chapd. P10 Nono, as the Italians called him, had died twenty years before and no occas10n was lost to celebrate one more commemoration. Gissing was bored stiff and said so in his diary. Leo XIII, the dead Pope's successor, wore his mitre and a great assembly of ambassadors attended the ceremony, which had begun a solid hour late. 'We', the diary reads, 'the undistinguished crowd, were penned at back of chapel _ of course standing, - under the gallery used by women.' He was glad to get away at 12 o'clock, noting there had been much taking off and putting on of the mitre. Near him had stood Lambart and the journalist Frank Hurd who, he heard a week later, had just been adopted by Lord Ronald Gower. (The information reached him from Mrs Lambart, without racy comment, but Gissingwould seem to have suspected some unsavoury affair!) A few days later he witnessed a dramatic scene which, in retrospect, was to strike him as an eerie coincidence. While passing the Boos pensione at no. 6 Via Mazzarino he saw a little crowd round something which proved to be a dying man on the pavement, an old grey-bearded man who had thrown himself out of a window. Intrigued, he found in the press next day that the body he had seen was that of a German baron named von Loeper, of whom he would hear more the following year. The sight and the newspaper report, as will be seen in September 1899, must have haunted him durably, most certainly unlike yet another mass, for which Lambart gave him a ticket. This time it happened that the Vatican wished to celebrate the completion of the twentieth year of Leo XIII's popedom. In an age when public ceremonies of some interest were comparatively infrequent, many Italian traditionalists would not gladly miss a publ'.c appearance of the markedly ageing pope, and as early as 8 a.m . a crowd of believers and gapers had assembled at St Peter's. But once more the Pontiff was an hour late_; so after he had caught a peep of him riding in his chair above the heads of the faithful, Gissing did not wait for the mass and is not known to have attended another of his own free will. Nothing new was to be expected. Novelty came from the publication of his book, Charles Dickens, A Critical Study, which put him in touch with new readers, for instance, Mrs Laffan, the wife of the President of Cheltenham College, one of the earliest persons who responded to his assessment of Dickens's works, a study which, as was

From Rome to Surrey

47

soon acknowledged by critics, put all previous discussions of the novelist in the shade. Simultaneously, various political events engaged his attention in a way which helps one to define some of his ethical and philosophical values. The latest development of the Dreyfus affair in France led him to write one of the most significant entries in his diary on 24 February: 'News that Zola - whose trial for libelling the generals in the Dreyfus affair ended yesterday - has been sentenced to a year's imprisonment and 3000 francs fine . So far as I understand the matter France seems sunk in infamy'. Not the whole of France, however, and it was t~ take a decade for this scandalous miscarriage of justice to be redressed. Never did Gissing make himself guilty of anti-semitic feeling and his view of the whole affair was the correct one. Like most of his compatriots and many enlightened French people he rightly saw Zola as a martyr. 13 Just as military music was no music worthy of the name, military justice was nothing bur a gross parody of justice. Current Italian affairs gave him an opportunity to see things again from the same standpoint. The government had never been in his good graces and its action against some socialist demonstrators made him indignant. On 4 March, the day of the fifteenth anniversary of the Italian Constitution, the sight of a few socialists who, afi:er trying to get up a meeting, were being carried off to a police station, struck him as ridiculous: 'Poor, starved little wretches, each one walking between two guardie, with two carabinieri behind him! ' He watched with sadness the public funeral of the socialist deputy Felice Cavallotti, killed in a duel ourside the Porta Maggiore, and viewed approvingly an address pasted about the walls by Cavallotti's friends denouncing the duel as a relic of the Middle Ages. The shouts he reported, 'Abbasso ii duello!' accorded with those he had heard from his bed of sickness in Cotrone: 'Ab basso o' sindaco !' He was very pessimistic about the immediate prospects of the country: 'The Italian nation is being crushed by poverty, swamped in the ignobleness of modern life with none of its compensating luxuries: he had told Bertz on 13 January. As for the past, he was again reminded of it by the statue of Giordano Bruno - 'oh, what a terrible, and what a hateful thing, history is - from one side!' -and after reading Pietro Gianno ne's Storia civile del regno di Napoli, which Roman Catholic authorities had ordered to be burnt soon after its publication in the eighteenth century, while its author was made to spend the last twelve years of his life in jail! The problems and difficulties of the present were as absorbing as the multifarious atrocities and inanities of past ages. In the from rank of them were the relationships with his wife. Through the autumn, even if the arrangement suggested by Miss Orme - taking Edith and her younger child in her home as boarders - was fraught with possible unpleasant developments, the solution which guaranteed Gissing's relative peace worked fairly satisfactorily, but unbearable news began to reach him in late December. The diary for the 27 th reads in part: 'A lot of letters. One from Miss Orme, giving bad account of state

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part Ill

From Rome to Surrey

. f om that vicious idiot.' Obviously Edith's letter of 7 ot things. Infin~te worry r d ame from an irresponsible woman. On the 30th December previously quote c. h hat he would withdraw Alfred from her h. .fe warnmg er t Gissing wrote to is wt . ' her malice on all around her. For weeks Miss Orme care if she went on ven~tg f he outbreaks of temper she had to put up with. A continued to send deta1_ s o ~liza Orme to Clara Collet offers a picture of the letter of 29 December trom ·u · b bl . at a nme . w h e n the situation was stt JUSt eara e: unbalanced wife

to London at the end of March to supervise operations, but did not see his sister-in-law when she settled in the new home with Alfred. Gissing had feared a disturbance, also that his books and personal papers might suffer during the sharing out of the furniture, and he was relieved when he heard that everything had gone off without a hitch. He had by then read and signed the separation agreement, and even raised to twenty-five shillings the weekly allowance Brewster had fixed at £1 on Miss Orme's advice. Whether Edith would agree to a separation which could not but suit her as well as her husband remained to be seen. Her determination to harm him by every means in her power was not to be ignored.

48

. e of her relatives have invited her to their Xmas parShe is a disappointed child as non h b n very bad But her appetite is excellent . her temper as ee · . ties and 111 consequence b . 11 right She has cut him off from all commumcaI . dae the oy IS a . 1 f and as ar as can JU " b I think she will soon grow tired of this. I have on y fi d anything bad for the child. I don't worry tion with us or the servants Iuth "·i G' 111 . vhen ave eare written to lv r. 1ss g' f b t anythina likely to hurt the baby I think he . .hh d downs o course u " I h1111 wit er ups an d d laughs over her extraordinary conduct but ought to know. \Yfe have ha some g~o cannot laugh at all w h en I t h'111k ofh1m.

. . . called 'blunt severity' and told Edith that she must live G1ssmg med what he d b t the effect of his threats and orders was never 'how and where' he di~~~ ~ r~ached such a pitch that he contemplated going more than temporary. g 'b1'!1't1'es onto the shoulders of people whose 'I h'ft my respons1 home. cannot s I . h lp me' he explained to Wells on 6 January. The ' 1 t- l · h · desire to e on y au t ts t eir d' ed with Miss Orme, was that unfurnished rooms solution to the problem, iscuss should be let for Edith and the child. d class she cannot live - their proximity simply maddens \Yfith people of the educate . her good-will I foresee that it will be necessary to . · f effort to wm · · her, 111 spite o every h . ll be i'n the care of a drunkard or a lunatic, as take the chi'Id away; he mi·g t JUSt as we of this furious and hateful woman.

14

l' d what a mischievous and rancorous creature she had Miss Or1:1e had now re~ '.~eher eyes the most urgent move was not the husband's brought mto her house, I fa separation order and she persuaded Gissing to return, but the obtainmenbt o d Her solicitor, S. P. Brewster, of 11 New Inn, k the matter up from a roa . Ed· h . ta e draw u a separation agreement. But it ' m a rage, Strand, was employed to . p d declare that her husband had deserted b fi a magistrate an d threatene to go e ore . n both Miss Orme and Gissing pre.1 S h dl aggressive woma , his fam1 y. uc a ma ~ .l In late March Miss Orme got rid of Edith dieted, would finish up an aJ =her an unfurnished four-roomed fl.at at 90 with his agreement, ~ r~~ Miss Orme's former nurse Mrs \Vatts, who lived Mansfield Road, Lon on, . Ed'th As the rent was fifteen shillings a week, . h h keep an eye on t . m t e ouse, was to . dded a fair allowance to his wife, would be h fi G' ssing even once a d t e expense or t d' Miss Orme's. In a state of great agitation, he arrange less than her full boar ~-th'15 5rored furniture to Mansfield Road. Algernon went for the transfer of part o

N.

t

49

v. \Vith the exception of his matrimonial worries, of which he was not to see the end, his Roman sojourn was punctuated by as many satisfactions as annoyances. A steady flow of correspondence reached him, some of which brought him evidence that his reputation was making steady headway. On New Year's Day he heard from one John Stainer ofFolkestone, who had told him in December that in the year of his birth, forty years before, he had been assistant to his father, a strange revival of past days which must have left him in two minds about those remote days when men like Samuel Bruce and Matthew Bussey Hick, who were still his own friends, were those of T. \V. Gissing. Equally surprising was the arrival six days later of a letter from one Margaret Bernard, the eldest daughter of Thomas Dehany Bernard, the Chancellor of Wells Cathedral, who praised his work. His reply has remained one of the finest examples of the appreciative letters to admirers that have been preserved, a reply in which he expressed his gratitude to his intelligent reader. He had celebrated the city of Wells, 'one of the loveliest in England: in his short story 'The Fate of Humphrey Snell' a few years before and renewed his homage in The Private Papers ofHenry Ryecroft (Summer II). Then on 7 February, with E. L. Allhusen, by now in Australia for health reasons, he exchanged some dolorous words of sympathy, urging his correspondent to seek consolation in his intellectual interests, geology among others, in which he himself had been absorbed at the time he wrote Born in Exile. Temporarily he was too depressed to offer anyone genuine comfort. 'Desperate', he truthfully admitted, 'is the case of the man who loses his faith in intellectual work.' The tone of his letter to Miss Collet of 10 February was not different. He had grown into a habit of blaming his present poor condition on the climate of the place where he lived: 'I am too ill and miserable to write more. It is bitterly cold here. - This winter has been a monstrous mistake. In England I should have done better for health and everything else. - The solitude is terrible.' And abruptly he pathetically confessed:

50

The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part III l been anything bur solitary? As no doubt you understand quire well, lh Ii.ft . b But w h en h ave . h h led to my insane marriage seven years ago. ave y runes een on 1t was t at t at A R • p k l h . f fr enzy fr om sheer loneline ss. When I had my at near egent s ar • 0 t edpomt . to walk about the room really crying with misery because l had had use somenmes no one to speak co for days and days.

d d bank holidays Rome offered many opportunities for walks. As On Sun! . aysdan Bertz on 13 January he looked upon these outings as holidays: ' he exp ame to · he Ca:lian and che Aventine. These parts of Rome, in their utter quiec1am exp lonngt h 0 h A · leasantly with che roar of modern life elsew ere. n t e vennne ness. contrast ver YP d l l"k h h h i; v buildings · most of che land is cultivate ... t e to go tot e c urc chere are very e' • h G h G I" d · which stands on che site of the house w ere regory t e rear tve M f h 0 f S G regono. ·b Of rse [ am searching out all the oldest churches in Rome. ost o t em as a oy. cou fi h S . . d · d all che year round, except on the esta - t e amt s ay. are close

11.s allayed his solitude enriching the while his topographical These cu l tura 1wall\. ' . . _ knowledge of the ancient city, past and present. . tion of Charles Dickens A Cnt1cal Study JUSt when he was enJOY bl Th e pu 1ca ' d h · . h l h and greater comfort at the Hotel Alibert di muc to revive mg better eat d 1 1 d . h h" . · · C 11 s who felt that Gissing was but mo erate y p ease wit is his spmts. o e • . a. d · ngratiate himself with him by forwarding numerous press-cutTh f d errorts, tne ro 1 . 1· db Durrant's Agency of 57 Holborn Via uct. e appearance o h 1 f h nngs supp ie Y ~en well timed. Dickens's reputation at t e c ose o t e century t h e b oo k h ad b . . . 11 1 · [ · 1 his novels being thoroughly despised in 1nte ectua ore es as was at its owest, 1 ·tdl 'or the uncultured. Now, favourable ro the man and on y m1 Y . read mg matter l' . . . 1 D " k. . l f h" k the volume in the V 1cronan Era Sen es helped top ace 1c cnt1ca o is wor ' . f · h · · h · f · perspective and gave cause for sans acnon to t ose cnt1cs w o . b k li ens 10 a airer . d h" well as those who did not. 15 Like The Whirlpool, the oo e ca d mire 1m as l d d . . 1 16 . d 1 l ding reviews but also full-length artic es an even e 1tona s. ite not on y ea ' d . . l d ·1· t·k .h [everly dispatched press copies to mo est provmoa a1 1es 1 e . h 1 · _ The pu bl is er c 1 ourier and the Glasuow Evening News, w ose g owmg com t h e M anch es ter C o 0 · d d n any readers to purchase a book costing only half a crown. n ments in uce 1 . H · c· ·ng remained on his guard; before it was out, he wrote to · one point iss1 . .. d d 'If ny one tells you that it shows a gross inability to un erstan HD: Skturmer: huna1ourist suspend your 1·udgement. I am quite prepared for that 1c ens as a ' . . reviewers •ts These as it was, with one predictable except1on, sentence from t h e · ' · df . lJ under the pseudonymous initials of 0. 0., abstame rom any Ro b ertson N 1co . ·t Ch · l h h 19 William Archer gave the lead in the Dairy romc e w en e b" sue h remar k . di G" sing had turned out to be the right man to han ea su 1ect so asserte d t h at is l . d .h d disconcerting. 20 On the whole the vo ume was rev1ewe wit 1 comp ex an so f h b k h' h h d urtesy: for instance the structure o t e oo , w 1c was per aps . . d 21 h h f a1rness an co . bl f om a strictly formal standpoint, was duly quesnone ; t e rat er quest1ona e r

From Rome to Surrey

51

blunt vigour of the chapter on Dickens's female characters justifiably caused the raising of a few eyebrows. 22 But tribute was widely paid to the critic's objectivity and straightforward style unmarred by pedantry. There was warm approval on some particular points such as the study of Mrs Gamp, the satirical vein in Dickens and the influence of the theatre on his novels. The Manchester Guardian congratulated him on having so justly placed the author in his period, and the Inqufrer even suggested that Dickens had converted Gissing to optimism. 23 The brilliant series of reviews ended in England with an article by Andrew Lang who, in Longman's Magazine, 2.. wished that Gissingwould tackle further critical studies, for instance of Thackeray, Fielding or Scott. This was indeed an attractive choice, and Gissing appreciated all three of these former leading names in English fiction, bur he had rejected in March John Holland Rose's offer concerning Thackeray. Besides, it was self-evident that literary criticism paid poorly if compared with fiction, long or short, a point which Lang, a wealthy writer and editor widely adulated in the literary world, could afford to overlook. First and fo remost Gissing was and intended to remain essentially a novelist. Two reviews dealt with the book from the Continental angle. Cosmopolis, in the midst of much praise, wondered if in his chapter 'Comparisons' he had no t, in confronting Dickens's work with that of Balzac, Hugo, Dostoevsky and D audet, sinned by an excess of patriotism. 25 As for Henry-D. Davray, he summed up the general opinion in the Mercure de France: 'We rarely find a writer, even with Mr. Gissing's talent, to be a good critic, but it can be affirmed that his study is one of the best ever written on Dickens.' 26 This was a compliment which must have come like balm to Gissing's feelings. It was sweet because all too often his English critics had examined his works with philistines' spectacles and had been blind to his courage and originality, sweet also because he held as jejune stuff all Dickens criticism published since the novelist's death, in particular, as noted above, A. W. Ward's volume in the English Men of Letters series, of which John Mo rley, another of Gissing's betes noires, was general editor. In securing his collaboration, Rose had done Gissing a signal service. The book extended his audience, at least brought to him some Dickens readers. Beyond the usual notices, the press made numerous allusions to the book, printing long extracts, even portraits of the inspired critic. Characteristically the New Yo rk Daily Tribune, which had often published enlightened criticism of his wo rks, seized the opportunity to draw the attention of its readers to New Grub Street, of which there still existed no American edition. 27 It described the novel as one that 'pierces to the core of human beings'. Gissingwas reintroduced to the American public as a writer of 'indubitable power' whose sincerity was unquestionable and New Grub Street as a brilliant novel clearly presenting the pettiness, pretence and vulgarity of its characters. Surveys of his works continued to appear regularly across the Atlantic, notably in the Boston Evening Transcript, which fol-

'Ihe Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part III

From Rome to Sun-e_y

lowed his career with rare fidelity. 28 He henceforth served as a reference mark in discussions of current literary problems. 29 In April and May 1898 La Revue de Paris serialized Georges Art's translation of Eve's Ransom, published later in the year by Calmann-Levy, and there were further signs in the ensuing months that the French took an interest in his work. While commentators were busy writing notices, reviews and articles on Charles Dickens for their newspapers and journals, Gissing's life lost nothing of its absorbing variety. Distance from England offered no guarantee of mental peace and the world of journalism would not let itself be easily forgotten. On 26 February Mrs Lambart, an assiduous newspaper reader, showed him a cutting from the Westminster Gazette commenting on an article about him by John Northern Hilliard, recently published in the American Book Buyer. 30 The long quotation from it that he read was more than enough to set his back up: 'I am made to say things which I never did, and never could', he wrote to Sturmer on 27 February. 'The thing is an infamous forgery. It has enraged me beyond measure, and I should be still more enraged if you, or any other sensible person, thought me capable of such whining twaddle: When the Academy for 5 March reprinted long extracts from the offensive article, he lost all patience and sent to the editor, C. Lewis Hind, who was one of his admirers and wrote on several occasions about him, a virulent protest in which he denounced a number of gross factual errors about his life, work and projects, but it was Hilliard's conclusion, at once sentimental and indelicate, which angered him most: 'It is monstrous that one should be made to pule about 'one's little happiness', about 'toiling millions who never see the blue sky', about 'roil for Weib und Kind', and so on: 31 Hilliard had dilated with little if any discernment 'on certain autobiographical brevities' supplied by Gissing in 1895, filled some factual gaps arbitrarily and wrapped up his piece in a style which could only prove incompatible with his former correspondent's dignity. On another offensive article about his works, of which he kept a copy in his album of press-cuttings, he passed no comment. Entitled 'Is Pessimism Necessary?' this shallow, fallacious assessment of his recent publication attacked his pessimism, yet forecast that he would take a brighter view of things, a prediction based on a new misreading of Rolfe's opinion on the British Empire in The T'Vhirlpool. 32 The author alleged that true pessimism was a product of France and Russia, that it was more literary than actual in England, a mere imitation, more or less conscious, of Flaubert and Turgenev. Being accused, however indirectly, of posing in the manner of some Continental romantics could not leave him unruffled, but the article had appeared in an obscure London periodical, the Critic, in which literature was stifled by finance. Therefore he chose to ignore it, finding Henley's long, meandering review of Charles Dickens published on the same day, more rewarding reading. 33

The latter part of Gissing' stay in Rome was enlivened bv the arrival in the wake of the \V'ellses of E. W. Hornung and his wife togethe~ with her brother Conan Doyle. He had read nothing by these two writers and did not care for the kind of literature with which their names are associated, but he had met Doyle at the Omar Khayyam dinner at which Wells and Gissing had become acquainted, for better and for worse. It was Hornung who sought Gissing's contact and there exists a photograph of the four writers, probably taken near the Trattoria Colonna by Dunne or Mrs Hornung on 8 April, which shows them standing side by side against a drab wall, Doyle and Wells embarrassed with their own hands. Gissing noted in his diary for 12 and 13 March that Hornung suffered much from asthma and that he settled with his wife, 'a large, healthy, good-humoured woman, with wonderfully bright eyes', at 38 Via Gregoriana, in the rooms where the writer and translator Mary Howitt died. Hornung was a great talker and his friend Frederic \V'hyte has quoted his letter to him of 22 March 1898:

52

53

\V'e have seen quite a lot of Gissing and \\lells during the last fortnight ... \\:re like them both quite immensely. \\:rells is a very good little chap when you know him, humorous, modest, unaffected. As for Gissing, he is really a sweet fellow - Connie [Hornung's wife] says so and it is the only word .... He has charm and sympathy, humour too and a louder laugh than Oscar's [his son's]. That man is not wilfully a pessimist. But he is lonely - there has been some great sorrow and ill-health to~. I took him the Amdem.Y this forenoon ... and found him writing a short story ['The Ring Finger'] in his insect's hand - 1,000 words on each (quarto) page. I spoilt his morning's work but left him merry. 34

It was those days that Hornung had in mind when he wrote in 1904 with that shallow, low-brow approach to the works which has disqualified him in the eyes of posterity: The man was one of the most lovable, the work was hardly that. 111e man had abundant humour; there is little humour in the bulk of his books. He had a glorious laugh ... an appreciative sympathy, a cordial humanity, which it would be difficult to deduce • from his writings. 35

Although friends of friends are not necessarily one's friends, some English visitors were a little too prone to enlarge their circle of acquaintances in this foreign environment, and Gissing again found himself accepting a few invitations out of sheer courtesy, but he owned in his diary that he was decidedly pleased to have met some of these people, for instance a young barrister-at-law warmly recommended by Clara Collet, Edwin Lessware Price, with whom he dined ~t the Minerva in the company of two friends of his, 'brothers named Yates, the elder a liberal parson (Thompson Yates)'. His diary for that day, 28 February, expresses his keen enjoyment of these men's company: 'Remarkably pleasant evening. Like

1be Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part III

54

. . d him to dine here [at the Trattoria Colonna] next Saturday: when Pnce. Inv1.re a copy of his Charles Dickens. He then made the acquaintance of he gave hunS . ton-Hunter one Mrs Charles Smith, at the Palazzo Odescalfi' d f W!Il , a nen ·nrroduced him to a Miss Scott, 'a quiet-looking old woman 1 h' h 1·n rurn c 1• w 0 , vho was a friend of the Laffans of Cheltenham. When he saw · u·gent.' d · 1 but mte h Ho' rel de Russie, he heard with interest that she use to wnte h . rte l er agam a od's Mag11zine. On 18 March he found that an unknown journa ist for Blacki~o his card at the Hotel Alibert. This Mr Croke, a c~rresp~ndent of had lefi: hH11/ 11·i,t>I." who lived at the Minerva, wished for an mterv1ew. Next h D 'l feeg ,'' · · · · ' d t e at Y d on the man and disposed of him summarily m his diary: Foun day he calle lous interviewer, and had a stupid, annoying time; too weak to h' nscrupu h . im an u bliged to speak platitudes: If ever he came to know t at no piece refuse, and ~ n ever achieved publication, he must have been gratified and f Cokes pe h ro_m r n rhe 21st, complying with a request from Mrs Henry Norman, e relieved. O H'tel de Russie a Lady Edmund Fitzmaurice, a sister of Edward · · d at the h 0was to become Mrs Norman's second husband and a h eav1er · v1s1te Fitzgerald (who first). He acted as cicerone in a carriage and drove out beyond burden than t e ntano an ancient bridge surmounted by a medieval tower. He h p Nome , ·. t e onte db an invitation to lunch with her and two women out of the comwas rewarde YPasolini whose English was creditable, and a Signorina Rasponi ' · f h'ld ' At a , h has done a lot of admirable little drawmgs o c 1 ren. mon, C 0 unress 0 fR a w 0 avenn ' the Hornungs' he met one Mrs Mallet, who recited a text by at predecessor in sout h Ita1y, an dM rs Fo1ey, M rs H ornung's sis · ter, musical partyhis Edward Lear, who lived on a small island beyond Posillipo. All these spring· · l'b · a happy wornan were hardly compatible with pro fi table sessions m 1 rar1es, . ounters l f th time enc d him a cosmopolitan world which was part and parce o at but th ey· showe . . n ofitaly popularized by whole volumes of correspon dence of·. 'dstereotyp ~~~ . nd artists in quest of denaysement. They were constant remm E l' h ricers a r ·1 ng is w . e though they were to a northerner in exile, they must necessan y h rrracnv R f erst at a Juxury he could not afford to prolong with impunity. The ow o be seen .as a orentially interesting, pitifully commonplace or simply indiffernew arnva;~~ to be endless. A note of resignation hovers over the last Roman: c ent, threat . d' y Some of his latest acquaintances were among those he would . . his iar . 1 entnes m I. ~red William Melbourne Evans and Alfred Turner were genia . . lillh~W~ . · .. g a Y a f he same generation as the two eldest Hamson boys. Evans accom-·, young men~ t and the Wellses on 7 April when they went to Albano, a small... · d Giss1ng . d pame nv tombs of Roman soldiers danng back to the secon century town where rnd~ , overed in 1866. The diary entry could only have been written h · ·1· BC h d been isc a h njoyed himself in a picturesque landscape with many istonca by a man w o e·d Bowers which, as a botanist's son, he took pleasure in listing. . . s arn1 ' with the same friends he saw Mascagni's 'Cavalleria Rusticana associauon Two days lacer

°

From Rome to Surrey

55

and Leoncavallo's 'Pagliacci' at the Teatro Nazionale. \Vith Alfred Turner, the sculptor and gold medallist of the Royal Academy who held a travelling studentship, he also had a good time until their ways parted at Florence. Gissing's fear that he was too sofi: to achieve much would not have been justified. Meanwhile, was he not being forgotten by compilers of paragraphs in the English and American press, even if he did not greatly care for what journalists, with their tiresome inaccuracies and recurrent shallow insistence on his pessimistic views on human and more especially English nature, wrote about him? Evidence that he was not is not lacking. Of all the reviews of his recent books in their various editions in the Colonies he knew nothing. 36 But he was doubtless aware that Mudie's catalogue for 1897 overlooked none of his books; he knew that the Literary Year Book, a new yearly publication, carried an article about him with one of the photographs taken by Alfred Ellis in 1893.37 He would not have been sorry to see that the \Varsaw paper Pmwda for 11 June honoured him in a two-page article entitled 'Jerzy Gissing'. 38 More likely to interest him because of the effect on his bank account was the inordinately belated publication of his essay written in Calabria, 'At the Grave of Alaric: 39 which led Gissing to write to Massingham a little later that he had dreamt of cheques that he still awaited. More attentive to its duty proved the New York Times Book Review, when on 18 June it informed its readers that at Cosenza Gissing had enquired into the problems raised by Alaric's still undiscovered grave at the confluence of the Busento 40 and the Crati. Rather belatedly, too, the New York Bookman reprinted Gissing's letter to the editor of the Academy about John Northern Hilliard's mendacious article in the Book Buyer41 and his own work appeared in the press when two of his recent short stories, 'The Ring Finger' and 'One \Vay of Happiness: were published in May andJune. 42 Interest in him as a person occasionally assumed unpredictable forms. Old acquaintances who followed the progress of his career silently would sometimes take congenial initiatives. Thus on 12 March an admirer of his in Stockport, where a youthful escapade with Nell had led him in early 1876, requested biographical and bibliographical information for a lecture on his life and works to be given at a meeting of the local literary club. This man, a solicitor four years Gi:sing's junior, called James Bertram Oldham, had obviously collected original information about him in his Lindow Grove days, information which, according to the report published in the local newspapers, was no less obviously improved upon at question time by T. T. Sykes, whose valuable recollections, as well as those of Art~ur Bowes, rank among the most informative available on Gissing's 3 school years. q Biographical sources were less felicitously tapped by Shorter when \Xlilliam Rothenstein asked him to write a brief notice to accompany in English Portraits 11, which was about to be published, his remarkable lithograph drawing of the novelist, a major item of Gissing iconography. 44 Shorter in turn asked

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part III

From Rome to Surrey

. . · bute to a strange publication entitled Pen and Pencil, A Sou· fp h G1ssmg to con tr 1 · f h 'P ess Bazaar' compiled and arranged by the Propnetors o unc , vemr o t e r , fi f h L d H . t o t e on on osp1h D ·1 G raphic and the Daily Chronicle for the Bene t e a1 :Y . d c . ·1 h d . 29 1898 This album in red cloth conrame 1acs1m1 e an wntten · lf d f h f · d ta! June 2 8 - ' · f the works of a number of writers, ha a ozen o t em nen s quotanons rom . ·11 b 'd · of his like Frederic Harrison, Meredith and or acquaintances . . Zangw1 , es1 ·b esd · f pictures and drawings by a vanety of arnsts. He transcn e repro d ucnons o . h . h'ld , The WhirltJool about 'parents living again m t e1r c 1 ren, two sentences firom r . d · an d as on so man Yother occasions considered the whole affair as an a vemseSh ter was not a man he could reasonably disoblige. ment - dor 'th the question of Edith's future, which he had provisionally Boun up wi · ·d d · her to the Mansfield Road flat, was that of his own res1 ence db k l solve d by sen mg I d again in England. In January he ha egun to wor ' out a p an w h en h e sett e h h · h ·d . a h ouse with his brother somewhere in t e ome counties, for sh anng , ht e 1· ea f h b' · n being doubtless partly suggested by Algernons own ousmg o 'ffico la. itan~· h had clearly appeared in George's letter to his brother of 28 d1 cu nes, w ic hil ·b · d Decem b er. H ewOu ld reserve two rooms for himself, w e conm unng d hrowar s the best part of t h e rent · In that way he would assist his brother an fat t e same . h k on the loans which became ever larger, ever more requenr as nme put a c ec db k h b' , c On 3 February he harke. . ac - tot e su JeCt, Algernons ram1·1y grew in number. . . . . as1'de possible obJecnons from his brother or Kane . b rus h mg

of going in for poultry-farming without of course giving up literature. Like the idea of entering holy orders this new project soon vanished into thin air. Bur it would be hard to dispel the suspicion that Algernon and his wife looked askance at George's suggestion - they abruptly became silent, found an excuse for declaring George's visit to Willersey inconvenient, and correspondence between the brothers ceased. From May to September each of them kept to himself.

56

. k over chis che plainer ir seems to me it would be a saving of life and The more I t h in ' db h' money cror b ot h of us · Do not fear being drawn into society. There woul e not mg of rhe. kind on my part.

·1 d list of difficulties and expenses, ruled our Evesham as too damp He comp1 e a d I d h' Jfh h and Oxford as roo unhealthy and expensive an a rea y saw 1mse ouse- umh' · l across the Channel. Bur of Wakefield he would not hear. When . mg on is arnva . . 'bl l f, · December had mentioned his nauve town as a poSSI e p ace or Cara I C o 11et m his new home, his reply had been unambiguous : · Id b 1·mpossible for me ro live ac \Vakefield in rhe summer months. \VakeIfear 1t wou e h J Id l field is a licrle rown, and given to gossip, and my presence r ere a one wou on y 45 make a sort of small scandal in the place.

c I however he realized that his scheme appealed to neither AlgerBerore h' ong, ' . . b · The turning-point can be seen m his letter of 22 Fe ruary to is K non nor ane. d( d>) I b h I to a letter in which Algernon reveale or invenre . a persona riot ehr, a rep yn end to George's hopes: 'Ifl had known of that, I should hardly I c d P an t at put a h d h · suagestion Richmond [in Yorkshire] would be excel em ror e ua~e ma edt is ulod suit particularly well ... You would have the Kings fo r canon an wo d d h' k · hb, ours.' Ir would seem that Algernon now though t or preten e to t m ne1g

y;u

57

VI. As promised to Bertz, Gissing travelled back to England via Germany, hoping, he told his friend, to stay with him three days. Although the two men had not met since 1884, nothing of importance in the career of the one had escaped the notice of the other. Benz had toiled at literary journalism and published a translation of Montesquieu's letters, a boys' story in English, The French Prisoners, in 1884, and two novels in German, Gluck und Glas in 1891, and Das Sabinergttt in 1896: he was busy writing a third one Der blinde Eros. He repeatedly thought that he had struck the right path and he kept, as ever, airing new plans of which hardly one in ten came to anything. Compared with him, Gissing seemed almost a paragon of stability, and as the years went by, he had acquired ascendancy over his friend. He would readily play the part of adviser, bur none of his admonishments and warnings had ever had much positive result. Fortunately Benz, with his allowance from his mother, no longer belonged to the world of Grub Street. Gissing was well aware of his friend's weaknesses, contradictions and even prejudices, but he looked upon them with indulgence. Perhaps only a war between Britai n and Germany would have drawn them apart, for the link forged in London when Gissing was struggling to write in the face of appalling difficulties, held as fast as ever. Their friendship had endured because it rested on the vivid remem brance of the heroic days they had lived together. Nevertheless, meeting again after a lapse of fourteen years was likely to produce some surprise for them. As the time drew near, Gissing showed reticence on certain matters, particularly as Benz wanted to introduce him to German men ofletters and to welcome him almost as a celebrity. In reply, Gissing sent him a plea for solitude: his health, whe ther physical or mental, was so shaky, his spoken German so very rusty that he would make but a pitiable impression. Face to face with Rehfeldt, a medical docto r and Benz's closest friend, who spoke no English, Gissing wrote to Berrz on 10 February, 'I should only appear a stammering idiot. Let us say nothing to anybody, but creep about in secret, like two old fogies.' The truth was that he felt very little sympathy for Benz's native country; as his correspondence with other people and his diary testify, he even positively detested some of its features, and his visit inevitably confirmed his worst apprehensions. He viewed Benz as an invaluable representative of European culture just as Benz looked on him as a

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part III

From Rome to Surrey

link with a world in which contemporary Germany, as opposed to the country it had been before its political unification, roused much hostility. ln other words, maladjustment was writ large on the two men, but their relationships never suf-

Private Papers ofHenry Ryecro.ft (Spring XIX), was strengthened by this visit to

58

fered from this awkward situation. On 12 April Gissing left Rome and the Wellses, who were going on to Naples. His route lay through Florence, Mantua, Verona and the Brenner pass, here he saw crags rising steep from the fl.at country between them. He was V: ressed by the Gotthard but found Innsbruck a disappointment. At Munich, ::ere he put up at the Bamberger Hof, he experienced much difficulty in expressing himself. The dull landscape berwe~n ~unich.and Berlin added to his incipient redium. As arranged, Berez met him in. Berlin an~ rook him to ~1s home in Potsdam. 'Find him looking very old; silvery hair, he noted weanl.y in his diary. 'Yet seems in good health.' He derived very little pleasure from his stay and observed everything with a sharply critical eye. Domestic arrangements did not meet with his approval, his bed had neither sheets nor blankets, only an enormous feather pillow under which he suffocated; and food was uneatable _the raw Westphalian ham at breakfast was to him a horror! On the first da Berez took him to see the river, then to Sans Souci which pleased him very lit~le. Typically, he noted a shocking incompatibility: 'Thorwaldsen's Chris.t a fine figure. Inscription on wall of church: Chrisms unser Frieden. The gla~ing onrrast between these things and the rampant militarism everywhere about. At ~he Sans Souci Cafe, where the two friends had some lunch he saw an inscription in the worst of Germanic bad taste: 'Trinkt, Bruder, trinkt, bis der letzte sinkt' [Drink, brothers, drink, rill the last of you drops]. He could not refrain fro~ summing up his impressions of the day slightingly: 'The sheer commonness of it all after Italy'. Everything appeared grey and mournful; he described a swan on rhe Havel as swimming cheerlessly. One feels that he would nor have been sorry to leave rhe country immediately. In Berlin, next day, he noticed the aggressive statue of William I, with lions roaring at his feet, and the Maria Kirche, built on the site where people used to be burnt. His detestation of it all was probbl all rhe more painful because he could not express it candidly to his cicerone. aThis Y time the concluding words in the diary conveyed his· depress10n: · 'T'ire d to death after it all.' Of the rwo friends' doings on the third and last day of this loomy visit, nothing is known but the 'long walk around Potsdam'. One must fma ine rhe 'old fogeys' walking up and down streets and public gardens and pos~ble roadsides. Gissing did not note anything about his friend's .activities and progress. One certainty must be stressed: at some moment, as their s~bsequ~nt correspondence implies, he unbosomed himself of some of his con1ugal mals of the last few years. At all events, it is clear that henceforth Berez knew about Edith and rhe two sons born of the unsuitable marriage. And it is crucial to add that Gissing's fierce hatred of all things military, so powerfully expressed in The

59

Germany. No less could be expected from a supporter of Dreyfus and an admirer of Zola's courage in denouncing the monstrous injustice of which Dreyfus was the victim. He could feel nothing bur fear, disgust and indignation when he saw Germany thus on the war-path. His anguished prophecies of a universal slaughter which would pale into insignificance the thousand wars of old were fed by his recollections of April 1898. He was glad to leave Potsdam on 18 April and to make for England via Cologne, Ostend and Dover. After nearly seven months abroad, he was getting a little homesick. The vulgarity of the Italian mob as well as the shocking mismanagement of public affairs in Italy had taxed his patience: 'I shall return with the resolve to live or die in England', he had written to Berrz on 8 March. Now the detestable bellicose atmosphere pervading Germany hastened his return; he arrived at Henry Hick's at New Romney a day before the appointed dare. All was well except that Algernon now declared himself too busy to receive him just yet, but Hick was able to reassure him about his health for the time being. Rather than linger at New Romney, where he quickly corrected the proofs of 'The Ring Finger' for Cosmopolis, the homeless traveller went up to London on the 20th and from the Hotel Previtali attended to many professional and personal matters which needed seeing to after his long absence. Turning to writing again was an urgent necessity. Such a spell of creative inactivity he could not remember and a home must be found without delay. To his surprise he still had £200 in the bank. He saw Bullen, Colles ('as usual very vague about things'), the Normans, Miss Collet at her home (36 Berkeley Road, Crouch End, London), Sturmer at his club, and a young woman who was beginning to play a highly significant role in his emotionally lonely life. This was one Mrs Rosalind Williams, a widow with a little boy, sister of Mrs Sidney Webb, the still little known Fabian. Chance had made their paths cross at the Hore! Alibert in Rome on 24 March, and Gissing's view of her had been distinctly unfavourable: 'Loud; bullies waiters, forces herself into our conversations.' But apparently his opinion of her had changed after a day or two, as the diary for the 26th reads in part: 'Afternoon with Mrs. Williams to Barberini and Medici Gardens.' On the 30th, the day before her departure for Venice, he had taken her to the Colosseum, where they had been greeted by a 'warm sun and blue sky for two hours' and had seen her again in the evening at the Caffe Nazio nale in a party which included the Wellses and Evans. The attractive widow had promptly written to him from Venice where she stayed at the Grand Hore!. She was eight years his junior and as Wells came to suspect, they became very much interested in each other. Her name appears in various places in Gissing's diary during the summer of 1898, but he remained extremely discreet about his relationships with her in his papers and correspondence, which reveal nothing

60

The Heroic Lift of George Gissing, Part If/

Oakle Street, London in late April, more than two temporary addresses - 152 yf h ummer All the inforand Holmwood, in Surrey, where sh.e had a cottag~ ~r s~ee :rdently. yearned for a mation available about her at the nme suggest~a~ ~ad more than one and after partner, as she candidly admitted~~~ed sh~ had had a lover, George Dobbs, the death of her husband Dysodnh ~ ia;-::r;ereGissing vanished from her life in who was to become her secon us an the summer of 1898. d on by Barbara Caine in According to the Dobbs papers as. commente .up Webb, Rosie, as she was her book Destined to be Wives: The ~1sters of Beat~:~tellectual guide. She had called by her relatives, was in quest o a m.entor:: mind of some man who was 'a great longing to understand and enter into t ·f. . f h·s' A ak (h ] ind as 1 it were a mmor o i · [her] intellec~ual surr~r ;nd;~e~· 'Iehav:rli:ie or no independent life or origilucid diagnosis tow ic s e a · l rasite and when I have no nality of my own, and am.• in ~act, a sort o~men~:.~aDecades later, in 1946, she one to cling to my mind sinks into a sort o stup . f b. o ra her's reviewed her incipient affair with Gissing in terms wot:hprs:d:;:nl ~ak~ pos. h h h leave out the more persona attennon, t oug t ey may ll d h , ge almost helpless appeal about · d. g She reca e t e stran d h f r I felt there must be some sibly too romannc rea in · the man which from the first arouse my sympathy ~ d had done they being tragedy in his life'. She liked his works,. a~ herb! us a'~t first', she :rote, somewhat amateurishly interested in sooa pro ems. . l ffi . but a few days before we parred he When Gissing confided he did not talk much to me about his persona a ai rs .

told me the story of his troubled life and unh~~p:;~:~~~~~~~st in his compan ionship all this to me sympathy with his sorrows com m I d help him be able to conso e an · and admiration for his genius ma d e me Iong to

On his return to England, he had dinner at her London lodgi~gs, andt~fter she had rented a cottage at Holmwood, they saw each other not in requen Y· h we walked among the heather and I shall never fo rget one long summer day wdeaftn h t golden afternoon and looked Hills As we returne er t a · . · turned to me and said in pinewoo d so f t h e Surrey out across the twilight spaces towards the sunsebt skdy Gists;:~ whatever has been in the . · . 'L t us always remem er, ear, his deep sonorous voice · e h £ h Ids in store for us, this perfect ast, whatever happens in the future, w ateve r ate ~ ever' I think he had said this P · · rs and mme ror · day wi th all its precious memories, is you . t· ·ch him though I could ·bt of my commg to ive w1 1 h after we had discussed t e possi ity h Ian and I was very near . ·r H h d sugaested to me some sue P not legally be h is wne. e a " h. I din my way for I don't think acceptance. One thing however and ~;,et mg on y s~eodisapproval of my family and I should much have minded the wor s op1m~n or t d went to live with him openly r I h ·f I defied the convennons an . h . b 's future and chat possibly my relations b ut I re t t at 1 (we were still in Victorian days) I m1g t rum my ;~his I could not face . family might take steps to separate him from me an

From Rome to Surr~y

61

Thus ended this stillborn liaison, but not their relationship. When Wells, later in the summer, after discussing his own matrimonial situation , remarked to her, one day he had invited her to his home at Worcester Park, that 'some woman ought to sacrifice herself for Gissing', the affair was already a thing of the past. Mrs Williams soon married again and became Mrs George Dobbs. After a few weeks she had become aware that a free union with Gissing, as he himself had suggested, was not practicable for an impressive number of material reasons and they parted as good friends do. Circumstances had been stronger than human will or intrigue.

VIL Despite the time taken by the pursuit then the unravelling of this liaison of sorts, Gissing had succeeded in resuming his literary activities since his visit to Grant Richards on 22 April. Unpredictably, the young publisher had made him an offer which, by the look of it, was providential, but was in fact so extraordinary that it was incredible. Against his forsaking all his rights on whatever he wrote in the next few years, Richards promised him a higher figure than any publisher could offer him . But supposing he let himself be tempted, how could such a project materialize ? The prospect of haggling with publishers assumed to be the most open-handed was not a reasonable proposition. Taken aback, Gissing merely said he would reflect. Next day, having seen Mrs Williams in the interval, he visited Clara Collet at her home, and they must have looked at each other with new eyes. He had noticed that since he had ceased living with his wife, her letters were becoming more friendly and he said so in a crucial letter dated 3 January 1898, which clearly indicates that their relationship was taking a fresh turn: We are now pretty old friends, and yet I find that I am only just beginning really to know you. I have always inclined to think of you as very self-reliant, rather scornful of weaker people, and especially impatient of anything like sentimental troubles. There is no harm in saying that your last two or thre e letters have pleased me just because they differed in some respects from those of a year or two ago. I used to feel that, however friendly, you regarded me with a good deal of disapprobation, and perhaps a little lurking contempt. \Veil, I know that a certain amount of contempt you must feel for me, and always will; but you are gender than of old. And rightly so. One who suffers incessantly - even though as the result of his own folly - should nor be sternly treated. The rime fo r that has gone by ... A woman mu st always more or less despise the man who, in his relations with women, has shown himselflacking in sense, lacking in self-respect, lacking in delicacy, lacking in ambi ti on. Be it so. It would [be) folly ro hope that you could ever forge t all this; I do not even wish that you should. Your place as a human being is vastly removed from mine; you stand far, far above me - so far, indeed, rhar your sympathy for my troubles must for ever be imperfect ... Have no fear but that I shall come to see you in London. The old fe tters - which had begun at

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part III

From Rome to Surrey

hn lengt h to p01s· on the wounds they made - no longer hold me. To live in utter .solitude, . becau se that poor' silly creature wished me to do so, would be mere foolis ess. JUSt

The problem, he lucidly contended, was 'how to do it without degrading oneself'.

62

. . bably would not indeed could not, think of C lara Collet as a posGislsing pro ·on Beside the ,fact that he did not feel attracted physically to her, s1b e compam · · h h about .his .past, t oug anoth er cou ld not be overlooked: she knew too much . .. placed him m a position i h 0\:.., much cannot be determined. And this exact'J . · 1 · h h' . 'bl with that of a possible self-respecnng life partner, a so wit is 1ncompat1 e · er · · h R al' d but over against this were, as the abornve arra1r wit os m . ity recovere d d 1gn ' · · h h w·u· howed, and despite his poor health, some tangible signs t at e was 11 s t another matrimonial experiment. At this stage ofb his life he 1 must rea dy ror ye h ave seen h 1·mself as a man torn between the prospects offered y severah'potenh' rial but all illicit partners, none of whom could be. viewed as approac mg is ideal. However profitable his long absence from his nanve country had been, . h d ed to be a destabilizing factor in his stormy life, and no new balance it a prov . f, dJ could be hoped for until some new emononal balance had be~n oun . ust as . d fi . ble by his unconscious belief in love at first sight, mstanced by his h e is e na 1 . d · ep hemeral relationships with such yo ung. women as Bel a Cums an successive . his nature is partly explained by his simultaneous responses to Constance A sh ' . . . C 11 hes of marriageable women like Rosalmd W 1ll1ams and Clara o et. h t e approac . . h f h' And the fragmentation of his sentient ego at the time 1.s paralleled by t at o is intellectual activities and material instability in the spnng of 1898. On 25 April Gissing joined his mother, sisters and Walter at Ilkley, but . d leer drove them back to Wakefield, where he saw Matthew Bussey mist an s d 2M d Hick and Samuel Bruce. Pressed for time, he returned to Lon on on . ay an . full attention to the burning question of findmg a home, scaymg pro turne d h is . d ·h . . 11 wit v1S1ona y aga1·n at the Hotel Previtali. Bullen would have liked to go own h G' Sussex but illness prevented him and it was only on 20 June t at 1ssh. . im mto ' 11 h' · h . 1 d to him in writing what he would have preferred to re 1m m t e mg revea e h' h b · · f m eal namely that in the battle for cash, w JC was ecommg quite course o a ' ( · hh 11 d . h h d asked Colles to dispose of The Town Traveller wh!C e ca e a h H' · f senous, e a c large a sum as could be obtained from Met uen. 1s mnate sense o f arce ) ior as h. bl' h his ideal of what the relations between an author and is pu is er ·h d d · decency an d w1s e ' to o, m b ld sh ou e pro mpted him to add: 'Now, this is what I have never . . . ·rh L and B ·it goes as you know, against the gram with me. He gave d ea1mg w1 · " ' . Bullen the unvarnished truth, dictated by sheer constramt:

~s

I mrist ma ke money - a difficult thing for an unpopular author. \Vhat' . s. more, I .must ... make it· spec d'ly i , and fo r the moment I can think of nothing but this v11e necesmy f c h 't Hencerort l is a battle for cash ' and even shillings must not be neglected. 0 course I must go hard for the magazines.

63

After Bullen, who had some good knowledge of Sussex, Gissing consulted Mrs Frederic Harrison about Midhurst but she advised Fram. On 4 May to Fram, Penshurst and Tunbridge Wells in East Sussex he went, quite unsuccessfully. Next day, on a sudden inspiration, he travelled to Dorking, where he rook rooms for a week at 24 Horsham Road, quite determined to find in the town, not a garret, as he had written to Hudson from Rome on 1SJanuary, but a house adapted to his needs. The one he selected, on 6 May, stood at 7 Clifton Terrace, a few doors away from the lodgings he had occupied in 1894. The annual lease amounted to £42, a sum he could reasonably contemplate. It took him over a week to organize his new material life, recovering his belongings from the warehouse in Brixton, buying some furniture, hanging up a few pictures, putting his books on shelves. He also corrected the typescript of The Town Tra veller ('poor rubbish: he called it) for Methuen and made the acquaintance at his lodgings of one Mr Churchill, formerly organist and music teacher, who lent him 'some queer books about Anglo-Israelism: notes from which found their way into his Jvfemorandum Book, as the thing has come to be called. He resumed his profitable contacts with the London Library and as usual was confronted with a good deal of correspondence from strangers. One of these 'very impudently' begged for assistance, another, W. D. Jones, who gave no address, sent him a ten-page typewritten letter - later destroyed - about his works which he pronounced the best he had ever had from a stranger. For a housekeeper he engaged Mrs Kate Boughton, a thirty-seven-yearold widow recommended to him by Miss Orme. She might be, he feared, too respectable, and was certainly not representative of the kind of woman who usually applied for this kind of employment. She was to live in and the wages he offered, £18 a year, were apparently accepted without any hesitation. The day after she entered upon her duties he seemed to have doubts about her personality. 'My housekeeper: he wrote in his diary on 26 May, 'dry and distasteful. Strikes the note so hateful to me - sneering at country things in comparison with London. But she cooks well, and seems fairly clean.' Never more was he to write of her in critical terms and she was to remain in his service as long as he lived at Dor king. She told Gissing she was the mother of four children (two sons, Leonard Adam, born in 1882, and Frederick Wilson, born in 1892, and two daughters, Olive Kate, born in 1884, and Winifred Olga, born in 1889), and research about her and her family has doubtless revealed more factual information than became known to him. The third child of Leonard Venden Huntington and Donna Maria Victoria Gibson, she had married in 188 1 Frederick Edward Boughton, who was Gissing's age, and who, after brilliant studies at the Birkbeck Institute, taught physics in the same establishment and became

64

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part III

· · Her Ma1·esty's Patent Office · Mrs Boughton's financial resources an Examiner in must have dwindled drastically after her husband's premature death fol~owin~ · in · 1896, and in 1900 ' by which time she was no longer in Gissing s an operanon employ, her two daughters had to be sent to the London O:phan Asylum, wh'.le her two sons migrated respectively to Canada and Australia. She was a stabilizing factor in Gissing's life, duly appreciated and conscious of the part she played in it, a fully reliable and responsible person, worthy of a more exalted sooal standing than that to which misfortune had reduced her. She had an aunt'. Mrs Charlotte McK.ibbin, living a few miles away at 33 Effingham Road, Reigate, who could assist her if need arose ... 7 As usual after a removal, Gissing grew alarmed at his installation expenses, ·mvo 1vmg · som e £70 rcor furniture and carpets·• 'Never drean1t of such an outlay of 1 course', he complained in his diary on 21 May. 'Finances getting very low;. must wor k , wor k .' In the meantime, he had met his friend George Whale again · ford dinner on the 12th at the Devonshire Club, where Clodd, Shorter, Bame an the American George Washington Cable - 'an insignificant little man', he wrote - were t h e Other t>cruests • Next day he visited Meredith, whose last letter had followed him to Italy in the autumn, and again found Barrie and Cable whom the G.O.M. had also invited! Despite this socializing, matters were gradually · h e now had in hand the agreements for the publication of The Town can 1 ·fymg: Traveller. (Prudendy he had cancelled the promise to Stokes for the fust refusal of his next novel - 'Heaven knows when the next will be!' he had groaned t~ Calles on 9 March. ).. 8 The printers of the English edition could now fall to. H is worries, however, came in relays with malignant persistence. Algernon for one, though well acquainted with his brother's embarrassed circumstances, .had JUSt borrowed £25 from him, one more step and by no means the last.' to live o~ ~t other people's expense ...9 But above all Gissing had .to guard against his wifes · · n . Wi"th th1·s in mind ' he worked out a defensive system whereby he kept intrusio his address from all but a very few friends such as Wells, Hick and Miss Orme, and made other correspondents believe that he had setded in Worcestershire. Roberts was called in to propagate the news, if necessary by supplying a paragraph to the press.so Henceforth, according to who his correspondent was, he dated his letters from Darking, Willersey or Wakefield. This system also enabled him to evade unwelcome invitations and to get down to work with a will.

VIII. His artistic instability persisted. To begin with, he wrote several short stories 'At Nightfall' (24-6 May), 'The Peace-Bringer' (31 May-1 June), 'The El~i~' on the next two days51 - and he recorded in his diary on 3 June that he had hit upon a possible plot for a play. The idea of making money by a play has grown

From Rome to Surrey

65

upon me.' For a couple of days he tried to build up the four acts of 'The Golden Trust' and gave names to his characters. Then on the 6rh and 7th he broke off to write another short story, 'Fate and the Apothecary', 52 and so as to tune his mind to play-writing he read Arthur Pinero's The Weaker Sex. On 10 June he started on the dialogue and read the then popular in England woman novelist Gyp's L e. Coeur d'Aria~e, an~ soon after Le Bonheur de Ginette. But choosing a new sub1ect, ennded Clare s Engagement; then recasting 'The Golden Trust; did not solve his problem; true, he managed to finish Act I but found he could not proceed. The idea of another play which floated in his mind on 26 June was not to materialize. He had to recognize that he would never be a playwright. And all the while Miss Orme was sending him worrying news of Edith, who fi rst of all went away no one knew where, and once back behaved in such an unseemly manner ~hat her landlord threatened to throw her out. Then, hoping to unearth her elusive pr~y, she made her way to Willersey, but Algernon feigned ignorance of his brothers whereabouts. Gissing for his part pressed Brewster to obtain the separation order, but all the latter's efforts proved of no avail. Still, despite this depressing situation, his immediate professional prospects were not so very bla~k. Besides the congratulations of the press and his friends - among others Jumn McCarthy, Wells and Miss Collet - his critical study brought him an offer hardly less astonishing to him than that of Grant Richards. Methuen proposed to reissue Dickens's works as the copyright of each of them ran out: would Gissing agree to supply introductions? The illustrations would be the work of several artists, and F. G. Kitton, a well-known Dickens scholar, would 53 provide the notes. Colles obtained for Gissing ten guineas on publication fo r. each introduction of 3,000 words, to be printed straight from the manuscnpr. Th~ initial ?roject i~cluded eleven Dickens tides, so that after allowing fo r Colles s commission, G1ssmg could reckon on slightly over £100 for critical work which would not require much exertion on his part. The novels would appear at the rate of two a year. About the same time as Methuen's offer he heard from the Authors' Syndicate that Georges Art was asking his permission to translate N ew Grub Street, and he referred him to Smith, Elder, who had acquired the novel with all rights ll1 1890. Only his reputation was likely to benefit from one more French transla:ion, but his interest grew when a second similar request reached him, this time fro m a Frenchwoman who promised to come over to England especially to discuss the subject with him. It now mattered that Georges Art's project and that of the new correspondent should not collide, but it turned out, as is established by a letter from Smith, Elder to the Authors' Syndicate, that the translator of E ve's R ansom had been forestalled by his compatriot and that the accusation of absolute disloyalty he later hurled at Gissing was totally unfounded. The next day, emboldened by these tokens of interest in his work abroad, Gissing made

66

The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part III

his terms known to Grant Richards. The publisher had in fact made two separate offers. 'One of them was', Gissing reminded him, 'that you should simply have the refusal of each of my books, on the understanding that you offered better terms than were elsewhere obtainable'. 54 This proposition he turned down, arguing that such a solution would increase the number of his professional transactions whereas his greatest desire was to reduce them to a minimum. Richards's other offer had been

3 'THE CROWN OF LIFE' (JUNE 1898-MAY 1899)

that I should state to you a definite sum per annum for which I would concede to you every right in the books I produce during the next five years, - copyright at the end of that time to revert to me.

Boldly (and somewhat unreasonably, as his yearly earnings had never reached and were never to reach that sum) Gissing asked for £1,000 for all the fiction he would write, making it clear that he would have a free choice of his subjects and that he wrote three types of stories: novels of about 150,000 words, others of some 80,000 (he could have mentioned The Whirlpool and The Town Traveller as examples of each kind), and short stories of3,000 to 10,000 words. The question was how many manuscripts of each sort Richards would claim in return for the annual £1,000. In turn the publisher promised to think it over and Gissing owned in his diary that there was little chance of a favourable reply. For several months things remained at a standstill. What was to be his next main work? The month of June gave no reply to this serious question. No subject seems to have forced itself on him at the time, except that of a historical novel. There were signs, still unclear, that the problem of inspiration could again be connected with that of his relations with women; The weight of his solitude sometimes lay heavily upon him. Besides those already mentioned, his activities were markedly heterogeneous for a man who imperatively had to face expenses in so many directions. Only some major event in his life could trigger a new spell of artistic momentum. Chance, as the letter from the potential French translator of New Grub Street could not yet suggest, was to be his best ally.

'Laisse-toi done aimer! Car !'amour, c'est la vie, C 'est tout ce qu •on regrette et tout ce qu'on en vie Quand on voit sa jeunesse au couchant decliner. Sans lui rien n'est complet, sans lui rien ne rayonne. La beaute c'est le front, l'amour c'est la couronne. Laisse-toi couronner !' Victor Hugo , Les Chants du crr!pusmle, 'Hier, la nuit d'ete'

I. The Frenchwoman who wished to translate New Grub Street was Edith Fl .· l"k l h h eury, rt was very 1 e Y.t roug Georges Art's translations in the Revue Bleue that she had b~come a_cqu.amted with Gissing's work. Then aged twenty-nine, fairly tall and slim, ~ark-haired and dark-eyed, she was destined to play in the novelist's life as promment a part as Helen Harrison and Edith Underwood, though it proved alm~st inconceivably diffe~ent .one. Morley Roberts in 1he Private Lift ofHen:; A~mtland and 1:f · ~·Wells m hrs Experiment in Autobiography have lefi: accounts of her, each prejudiced and misinformed in its own way, which the moment has come to correct and complete. She was born on 21November1868 at Nevers, in Central France, the elder child ofEdouardAuguste Fleury (1832-99), the former treasu~er and head cashier of the Docks and Warehouses Company at Marseille, and of Anna Senly (1839-19~0), the daughter of a barrister practising at Nevers an~ whose .r~mote ancestors, t~le~ce manufacturers, had come from Italy to Nevers m the srxteemh century. G1ss111gwas telling the plain truth when he wrote to Rob.err~ that Gabrielle Marie Edith Fleury, to give her full name, had 'all sorts of sem1-anstocratic relatives'. Some names with their ancien regime flavour which t_he advent of the Republic had made slightly pretentious or preposterous speak for t~emselves. They were n:ainly on the maternal side. In the earliest generations Ga~nelle could have mennoned the Perinets des Perrieres, who had shortened their ~ame to Perinet once the Republic had triumphd over monarchy, and the Garrners des Garets, who had also chosen to do away with patronymic redundan-

-67-

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The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part III

cies. Gabrielle Garnier had married Georges Dufaud, the founder in the 1820s of nationally famous ironworks at Fourchambault, a few miles away from Nevers. It was from her sister, Amelie Garnier, that Gabrielle's mother descended. Amelie had married Claude Dagonnin, a tax-collector, and their daughter Ernestine, a barrister, Jacques-Donatien Senly, whose two sons 'Uncles' Ernest and Rene, Anna's brothers, became known to Gissing when Gabrielle, rook him to see her relatives in Nevers. Ernest Senly, whose home was on the Place ducale, was head clerk at the Nevers Tribunal Civil, while Rene was a Doctor of Laws and a barrister. Like their relatives in bygone generations, they were local worthies, living very comfortably with their families in a gilded world in which social standing and relations had pride of place. A good many of the Fleurys' connections stood on higher or more prestigious rungs of the social ladder than theirs. Among the aristocrats proper were the Count and Countess de la Bedoyere and the Count and Countess de Las Cases, die-hard traditionalists in the fields of politics and religion, typical figures in a country which had had its fill of grandees, but where republicanism was still, institutionally at least, somewhat raw and shaky. The family uee of the Fleurys and related families bristle with names, French and English, which in those days meant capacity, power and intellect. The famous Martin family numbered among its most distinguished members Pierre Martin, the civil engineer and industrialist who in 1865 invented the steel manufacturing process that still bears his name, and Gustave Zede, who in 1887 drafted the plans of the first French submarine. The Saglio family was no less prestigious in its own way. On the one hand Alfred Saglio was the manager of the large foundry at Fourchambault and he had had a chateau built at Tazieres, close to the chateau du Chasnay where Gissing was to reside shortly, but more meaningful to him was the name of Edmond Saglio, Alfred's brother, whose Dictionnaire des antiquites grecques et romaines, a reference book for all students of classical antiquity he had often consulted, and whom he doubtless knew to be Director of the Musee de Cluny in Paris. On the other hand, Gabrielle could also claim kinship with several British families through the Dufauds in post-Napoleonic days. Louise Dufaud, Georges's third child, had married George Crawshay, a wanton member of a wealthy family of Iron Kings of Cyfartha, Wales, and one of their sons, Walter, had married back into the Dufaud family - Walter Crawshay's second daughter Louisa, in turn marrying an English officer whom Gissing was to meet at the chateau du Chasnay. Doubtless he did not hear about these connections in the early days of his intimate relationships with the young woman whom, from mid-1898 onwards, he regarded as his redeemer and who did so much to restore his dignity in his own eyes. But after a few months, even simply weeks of correspondence with her, he certainly realized that, if no divorce from Edith was possible and they opted for an illegal union, 'a terrific scandal' might arise round her, for she belonged

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to the stiff-lipped bourgeoisie. Her childhood had been spent in Marseille, and she had received what was commonly viewed at the time as a good education for a girl of her social origin. She had passed the brevet eiementaire and the brevet superieur, an examination later to be superseded by the baccaLaureat bur, as was considered normal, had no university degree. The family had moved to Paris on her father 's retirement in 1892 and she had taken full advantage of her presence in the French capital to improve her culture, reading English and German books in the original. She had a deep interest in art and literature and was often seen in Parisian literary drawing rooms, seeking contact with cultural figures of the period and asking for autographs, of which she eventually owned a valuable collection, some of them supplied by Gissing and through him by Edward Clodd, who numbered many friends and correspondents among the scientis: s and literati of the day. Not all members of her family looked benignly on her frequenting Parisian salons unchaperoned, but her journeys to England in this crucial year 1898 would seem to indicate both independence of mind and broad-mindedness on her parents'. Intellectual work appealed to her; she was very fond of reading and writing, spoke English fluently if not always idiomatically and grammatically. Wells's first impressions of her are a faithful reflection of her personality in her late twenties: 'a woman of the intellectual bourgeoisie, with neat black hair and a trim black dress, [whose] voice was carefully musical, [who ] was well read, slightly voluble and over explicit by our English standards, and consciously refined and intelligent'.' Of another asset of hers there is solid evidence; her capacities as a pianist were attested by Gissing and her own papers in the biographer's possession. Among these is a big book in which she conscientiously recorded the music lessons she took from 1884 to 1892 from Theodore Thurner, a well-known teacher in Marseille, then from 1892 to 1913 in Paris from two pianists of international repute, Francis Plante and Elie Miriam Delaborde, as well as various notes from Thurner showing his regard for his p upil. Other handwritten books have been preserved, in which she transcribed original autographs in her possession and quotations from French and foreign authors, and where she wrote down her impressions from a number of stays, mainly in the French and Swiss Alps, in the early 1890s. She was fond of mount_aineering and especially enjoyed climbing in Switzerland, where the Fleurys had fr iends whom Gissingwas to meet in the following year. Her travel notes contain passages which attest to her keen appreciation of the praise she was given for her skill by acquaintances and professional guides. By the time she entered into correspondence with Gissing she could boast many contacts with well-known men and women in the literary world. In the fo refront of them was the now half-forgotten poet Rene Sully-Prudhomme, who had made a name for himself with collections of verse published in the 1860s and 1870s and still so much valued nationally and internationally at the turn of

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The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part III

the century that in 1901 he was awarded the first Nobel Prize for literature. The circumstances of their meeting are obscure, but they may have met at a gathering of a literary and artistic association called Conference La Bruyere, to which both Edmond Saglio and the poet belonged. He had given her philosophy lessons and the elderly bachelor had fallen in love with his still callow pupil. An engagement had followed and he had written ten poems about her in 1890, which are still unpublished. Entitled 'Portrait de ma fille adoptive Edith Fleury: Dix Sonnets', they now strike us as clever literary exercises, not overladen with thought, and still less with emotions. In March 1891 he had ~ad two beautiful albums made for her with her initials on the covers and filled with autograph letters, notes, and signatures of famous people starting from the days of Louis XV. However, Sully-Prudhomme, whose real name was Prudhomme, a name which, since the publication of Henri Monnier's play Grandeur et Decadence de M Joseph Prudhomme had become the archetype of the silly, selt:satisfied bourgeois of the period, was almost thirty years her senior and the prospective marriage had seemed so objectionable to the ageing poet's family that he renounced the prospect of this ill-advised union. Among her friends she counted other .literary figures such as Mme Hermine Lardin de Musser, sister of the Romantic poet, who was nearly eighty, and her daughter Alice; the widow of the German poet Georg Herwegh, author of Gedichte eines Lebenden, whose anti-militarism and enforced exile could not fail to win Gissing's sympathy; the writer Romain Rolland and his sister, Madeleine Rolland, who translated Thomas Hardy and was soon to become a correspondent of Clara Collet's; Aurora Rumelin von SacherMasoch, first wife of the widely read Austrian novelist, to whom she was known as Wanda, the name of one of his heroines; Frederic Mistral, the Provern;al poet, whom she had met at Aix-en-Provence in 1890; the writer and scholar Agnes Marv Frances Robinson, who wrote in English and in French, at the time the wife,of the French oriental scholar James Darmesteter, later, after his death, that of Emile Duclaux, the director of the Institur Pasteur in Paris; and the poet and novelist Andre Theuriet, whom she had visited at Talloires also in 1890. She doubtless refrained from mentioning such a number of celebrities, past or present; nor was the list of her distinguished familiars limited to the twin worlds of literature and art. Among her intimates was Claudine Funck-Brentano, the daughter of the well-known Luxemburg physician and philosopher Theop.hile Funck-Brentano and his wife Sophie, a family which had opted far republican France against despotic Germany in 1870. lf Gabrielle Fleury and, very likely to a lesser extent, her parents moved easily in this sophisticated intelligentsia of the turn of the century, nursing the while no inferiority complex, they were definitely not among the more well-off. Money questions mattered to them in a retrospectively demonstrable fashion. Mme Fleury kept a notebook which is a precious if tiresome index to her person-

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ality. She noted in it a wealth of miscellaneous material information about the expenses in daily life, the tariffs in hotels and restaurants when away from home, addresses which might be some day of use, the whole, one suspects, with a view t_o saving money, of which she did not have much to spare. Pinching and saving, for self-evident reasons, was in her nature, which in some respects had affinities with petit-bourgeois mentality. Yet the Fleurys were unquestionably more liberal when it came to matters of human conduct than in material dealings with their social equals or inferiors. If they belonged to a class in which mutual visiting was an obvious substitute for work, all the unpublished documents in hand about the Fleury family show that they were far more often guests than hosts. Their wealthier relatives who had country estates in the Nievre, the Eustaches of the Chasnay and the Saglios of nearby Tazieres, would welcome them for weeks, if not months, on end in their well-kept homes with a large staff of servants to attend them. In the shooting season (for the Nievre is a good game country) they would meet kinsfolk they never saw in Paris, for in their Passy flat they could not receive large parties, and their few visitors stayed but briefly. In this self-conscious world, obtaining assurances as to the capacities of one's offspring was a temptation. Just as Thomas Waller Gissing had consulted a phrenologist about his eldest son, M. and Mme Fleury sought the opinion of a graphologist about their daughter in October 1887, at which time she was barely nineteen. The analyst acknowledged her feeling of social and intellectual sup~­ riority, her anxiety to be noticed and admired. He pronounced her good and kind, not in the least prone to jealousy, on condition, he added ominously, that her 'rivals' should not overshadow her. He was impressed by her potential enthusiasm for any task she might undertake, but hinted at her obstinacy, the seamy side of her self-assurance, and defined her nature as extrovert, impressionable, ~eady to trust her fellow creatures though occasionally to become suspicious, fond of order, nearness and clarity. A second graphologist, identified as one M. Condamine, undertook a similar task in 1893 and his report or an abstract of it supplies complementary remarks. Gabrielle was not incorrectly said in it to be endowed with a superior intelligence, a great deal of energy and an iron will attended by a proneness to high-handed attitudes. Selfishness and coquetry were none of her attributes. Her goodness and devotion, her passionate nature, her sensitiveness, scorn of the commonplace and love of independence were emphasized. \Vhat aspects among these were noticed or merely sensed by Gissing when he met her - at the Wellses' for propriety's sake - on 6 July 1898 cannot be determined with any certainty. '.A sweet and intelligent creature, this Mlle Fleury: he added nostalgically in his diary after a second meeting, three weeks after the first and in his own Dorking home. Emotionally starved, Gissing was dazzled with this female presence which chance brought before him with the flavour of Continental recognition. The professional novelist he had been since his return

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'The Crown ofLiji:'

· had 1·magined such situations with irrepressible masochism in £rom A menca , h h

his writings, notably in New Grub Street, where Reardon is rapt to t ~ se:~nt , heaven' on seeing Amy surrender to his love, then in 'The Schoolmasters V1s10n, with its picture of the .sententious, moral-fed pedagogue gravely distur~e~ .by t~e visit of a pupil's dashing, bicycling mother'. And. n~w actual lite showe tm ~ e aterialization of his dreams and artistic imagmmgs. He was confronted with m ontaneous evidence that his works were not unappreciated in ~ranee. Because :e of his dearest wishes had been to have an intelligent the Channel, he looked upon the new developments, beyond all .cons1de~anons :f mone , as a form of indirect revenge upon the crowds of English Ph~.nse~s w o s urn:d his books because they rejected the shallow philosophy ?fhfe :, o ular fiction. The French had been pioneers in the fight for the wr~ter s f:e:d:m of expression, and it was gratifying to receive tokens of horn a country whose intellectual activity he much valued. Understan a y, is satisfaction was all the greater as the novel selected for translation was New Grub Street, his best-known, if not his best, novel.

aud1en~e acr~ss

d1ff~se~

;e~yec~.

IL Th e early sum mer Of 1898 was a time of great disturbances and hnew experiences ' in to in Gissing's life. His remark to his sister Ellen on 14 July that e wa.s try ~ h work, but amid many troubles' reads like a compendium of euphemisms .w. ic needs elucidation. He had to be present on too many fronts. :ne ne~ot~an~ns 'th Grant Richards went on without much hope on either side, an mv1tatton w1 l Thackeray before the An coats Brotherhood in Manchester had to to ecture on , d' · b l' d be declined and the doctor's diagnosis on his present con mon to e tstene to gloomily: 'a little decided phthisis of right lung, a good deal .of emphyse:a; and a little eczema on the arm'. His conclusion - 'nice state of things altoget er ot echoed to his correspondents. The first week of]uly was spe~t at ~he was n invitation at \Vorcester Park. It was t h ~n t h at Wi~ lls taught him withd Wellses' ommendable patience the art of bicycling on a hired machme. The tumbles. an are recorded by Gissing with stenographic brevity and by Wells with a combination of humour and gross inaccuracy:

~ruises

· It was curious to see t h'is weJI-built Viking • blowing and funking as he hopped d fi behind d his machine. 'Get on to your ironmongery', said I. He mounted, ~vab~l~ .a ew y.ar s, and fell off shrieking with laughter! 'Ironmongery!' he ~aspe~. o,h. ndmg on ironmongery!' and lay in the grass at the roadside, helpless with mirth."

The truth, still amusing, is that Gissing learnt riding quickly, and was soon s~e11 c •din ·o ously along Surrey and Sussex lanes, visiting his friends and a~quamt­ and his self-styled cousins, Edith and Alys Lister, the volatile Rosy

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Williams and others. While staying with the Wellses he went with them to Merton Abbey, near Wimbledon, to a party at G. W Steevens's, the war correspondent who was to die at Ladysmith, and met Richmond Ritchie, John Collier and his wife, let alone C. Lewis Hind, editor of the Academy, who wrote eloquently about him, Jane Harrison, the lecturer on Greek Art, and noted what an extraordinary woman lvfrs Steevens was, with her 'coal-heaver's voice'. When he got back to Darking, he felt very much at ease on his machine and soon assured Wells that he could 'ride perfectly with one hand, waving the other wildly, or even extracting things from pocket'. 3 He proudly wrote in his diary that he could descend hills with feet on rests. Mid-July saw him making cuts in the copy of his novel that Gabrielle was to use for the translation and, after thinking out the plot of his new novel, to be entitled 1he Crown ofLije, made a beginning of it. But it is characteristic that the title had been recorded in his diary only four days after their meeting at \Vorcester Park, although, despite his prompt turning to composition, he did not seem to be quite ready, as a succession of events soon proved. For one thing, perhaps paradoxically, Gabrielle's visit on 26 July, when she stayed with him from' 11.28 to 8.35: a statement he underlined in his diary with posterity in mind, prompted a fresh train of meditations which did not harmonize with the resumption of novel writing. The long afternoon they spent together proved a landmark in his troubled life. He heard that both Le Temps and the journal des Debats, major French dailies, wished to publish her translation of New Grub Street; he gave her several of his books, notably the American edition of 1he J.Vhirlpool, and she returned the compliment with a photograph of Mme Alphonse Daudet. She also told him about her friendship with Mme de Musser and Mme Sacher-Masoch (who after Gissing's death did her best to damage her reputation in infamous letters to Bertz). He was relieved to hear that she had supplanted Georges Art and won Smith, Eider's consent, her application being anterior to his, an argument which did not pacify the Frenchman despite Gissing's unquestionable innocence. His letter of next day to his visitor read like a declaration of love: You are travelling at full speed, away from England. I, sitting here in my quiet room, try to work; but it is not easy afi:er such a day as yesterday. I see you too plainly; I hear your voice every moment. Perhaps it is well that I cannot see you again just now. Your character is too sympathetic, and I should wish to have you near me always. But indeed you have done me good. Here in England, literature is generally judged by its commercial results, and I, in consequence, am little respected. You have a different tradition. It delighted me to perceive your devotion to the ideals of art. Frenchmen have very ofi:en profited by the inspiration of intelligent friends; Englishmen, as a rule, have to work in mental solitude.

Each disclosed to the other the main features of his or her personal situation, and Gissing made no mystery of his disastrous marriage and now, in this impor-

'Jhe Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part III

''Jhe Crown f!fLije'

tant letter, candidly admitted a major frustration of his. 'Shall I ever hear you play? I love music passionately. If I could hear a little music every day, what good it would do me!' Already their sentiments for each other were attuned, and Gabrielle was later to confess to her cousin Denise Le Mallier that she had immediately felt drawn towards him. Indeed, from late July onwards Gissing's own letters tell clearly of the tender feeling she already harboured for him:

sorely tried husband heard from Watts, Edith's former landlord, that when her furniture was removed to her new lodgings she maliciously destroyed the front garden amid much uproar. Miss Orme for her part was gratified with 'an insulting and threatening postcard addressed to "Bad Eliza Orme"', making it known that she demanded a house of her own, both children, and legal separation, an outrageous pretension which preceded the event that her husband had dreaded since his return from the