Book Review: The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft by George Gissing

• Title: The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft
• Author: George Robert Gissing
• Published: London: Phoenix House Ltd., 1953 (First published 1903). Forward by Cecil Chisholm.  Pages-220.

Preamble

There are books that help me understand who I am, this book is one of those.  Now I cannot identify exactly with the character of Henry Ryecroft, but, there are moments of truth that encapsulate certain aspects of myself that Gissing clarified.  Gissing portrays Ryecroft as a humble, contemplative, and very mature Englishman of fifty-three.  He himself was only forty-three when he wrote this story and he never lived to be the age of his character, Ryecroft.  I am convinced that Gissing did not just happen to stumble on the portrayal of Ryecroft, he has a very well-defined sense of human character.  This must have come from many hours of contemplative thought and self-reflection.  The character is very humble, knows what he enjoys, recognizes his age, and has on overall very mature look on life.  Here is a man who can stop and smell the roses, one who can appreciate what he has done in his youth, and yet knows those days are gone, and accepts it.  He does not pine away on the loss of many years, although he sometimes looks upon it and wonders at the observation that the time has flown by.  In that regard, Gissing waxes philosophical and anthropological in his observations.  Some might perceive Gissing’s level of acceptance as pessimism, but I do not interpret it that way.  I like how Gissing uses four seasons, starting with spring and ending with winter, to portray a man who could still have a couple of decades of life left but recognizes in his soul that he has reached that end.  His great works are over, he is in retirement.  This gives him a special perspective.  It is a time for him to look over his life, peruse it, and see it for what it really was.  He is very honest.  One must not confuse this as a biography of Gissing, no, it is not that.  It must of course portray aspects of his life, it would be absurd to think it wouldn’t.  But, Gissing takes the opportunity to present the character of Ryecroft so that he explores different ideologies and present them to the reader.  Gissing sends a message of the importance of the individual.  Our uniqueness as a human being.  That it is important to separate ourselves somewhat from the masses and have our own identity.  He is not envious; he is charitable, but not prodigal; he is not a partier or a social butterfly; but rather, he is content and recognizes that these things would only irritate him and distract him.

About the Author

George Robert Gissing, a novelist, was born November 22, 1857 in Wakefield, England and died, of consumption, December 28, 1903 in Saint-Jean de Luz, France.[1] [2]  His father was a druggist who died when Gissing was only twelve years old, leaving him in relative poverty for the remainder of his life until he could establish himself with an education earned by winning scholarships due to his precocious nature and as a struggling writer and tutor who eventually became semi-popular late in life as a tragic fiction writer.[3]  He did not attend a university, but this did not stop him from mastering several languages and being extremely well-read.[4] He had two unsuccessful marriages, and his final relationship was with a French woman whom he was living with when he died.[5]  He was friends with H. G. Wells, whom he made at least one trip to Rome with, and whom described Gissing as “a highly respected, but never very popular or prosperous writer.”[6] [7] The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft was completed in “one inspired spell of seven weeks at St. Honore les Bains, in central France.” [8]

My Perspective

Gissing presents the character Ryecroft to educate us about his views on writing, publishing, books in general, his philosophy, and his political views.  For this essay, I will give a collection of excerpts that I felt were noteworthy.  I will then elaborate on my decision in an attempt to inform the reader why I felt these issues were important.  We start with an advice to writers.

And why should any man who writes, even if he writes things immortal, nurse anger at the worlds neglect?  Who asked him to publish?  Who promised him a hearing?  Who has broken faith with him?  If my shoemaker turn me out an excellent pair of boots, and I, in some mood of cantankerous unreason, throw them back upon his hands, the man has just cause of complaint.  But your poem, your novel, who bargained with you for it?  If it is honest journeywork yet lacks purchasers, at most you may call yourself a hapless tradesman.  If it come from on high, with what decency do you fret and fume because it is not paid for in heavy cash?  For the work of man’s mind there is one test, and one alone, the judgment of generations yet unborn.  If you have written a great book, the world to come will know of it.  But you don’t care for post-humous glory.  You want to enjoy fame in a comfortable armchair.  Ah, that is quite another thing.  Have the courage of your desire.  Admit yourself a merchant, and protest to gods and men that the merchandise you offer is of better quality than much which sells for a high price.  You may be right, and indeed it is hard upon you that Fashion does not turn to your stall.[9]

Harsh words.  The key issue here is does a frustrated and angry writer, who feels he has been ignored by the world, does he have a right to feel offended?  The world itself does not have a contract with the writer.  If the writer is inspired, feels they are a harbinger, or prophet, who offers enlightenment, warning, or some other higher truth, they need not concern themselves over whether or not they have achieved fame, because they have been called to offer this message, and if it is to be acknowledged it shall.  Their part was to write, time will tell if the message is heard.  However, if they are looking for personal gain, then have the pluck to admit it, sell your wares, proclaim them like any vendor would, sell them as the goods that they are.  You have produced a product and now you wish to have it consumed so that you can make a profit.  So, one should not be angry at the world if it chooses not to buy your product, you must convince it that yours is a better buy than something else that catches its eye for the moment.

Some good advice for starting the day can be found in this next quote.  “I have not yet looked at the newspaper.  Generally, I leave it till I come back tired from my walk; it amuses me then to see what the noisy world is doing, what new self-torments men have discovered, what new forms of vain toil, what new occasions of peril and of strife.  I grudge to give the first freshness of the morning mind to things so sad and foolish.”[10]  How often have I started my day looking at the news online, or some social media site.  How fast did the time go by, what little did I actually learn, and what emotions were imprinted upon my day by the memes, ads, political angst, and psychological maneuvering that some algorithm has allotted for my personal view.

The next excerpt explains the concern of someone who is reliant on the public for their livelihood.  This could also apply to musicians, actors, and many others.  The fear of being a “has been.”

The fact of the matter was, of course, that I served not one master, but a whole crowd of them.  If my writing failed to please editor, publisher, public, where was my daily bread?  The greater my success, the more numerous my employers.  I was the slave of the multitude.  By heaven’s grace I had succeeded in pleasing (that is to say, in making myself a source of profit to certain persons who represented this vague throng; for the time, they were gracious to me; but what justified me in the faith that I should hold the ground I had gained?  Could the position of any toiling man be more precarious than mine?  I tremble now as I think of it, tremble as I should in watching someone who walked carelessly on the edge of an abyss.  I marvel at the recollection that for a good score of years this pen and a scrap of paper clothed and fed me and my household, kept me in physical comfort, held at bay all those hostile forces of the world ranged against one who has no resource save in his own right hand.[11]

Gissing uses the phrases “edge of an abyss,” and “holding at bay” the “hostile forces,” these are words of one who has struggled to survive.  It reminds me of someone who has pulled himself up from the rushing torrents of a raging river and looks back, gasping, exhausted, and in gracious amazement that he was able to survive the terrifying ordeal.

In the following two paragraphs, we are presented with a philosophical rebirth.  This awakening is prompted by a physical change of locale from the city of London to the countryside.  It refreshed his soul and gave him “a new lease on life.”  To help the reader understand that this was not just a temporary transition, he explains his new love of the plants and flowers, how he is now aware of their presence and wants to know more about them.  When we love something, we want to know more about it, so it is with this.  He found inside himself a love of the natural world which was brought about because of his appreciation for its beauty.  This changed him and helped him become less self-centered, and more open to usefulness of aesthetic beauty and how it can heal the soul.

Those years of London had obscured all my earlier life; I was like a man town-born and bred, who scarce knows anything but street vistas.  The light, the air, had for me something of the supernatural – affected me, indeed, only less than at a later time did the atmosphere of Italy.  It was glorious spring weather; a few white clouds floated amid the blue, and the earth had an intoxicating fragrance.  Then first did I know myself for a sun-worshipper.  How had I lived so long without asking whether there was a sun in the heavens or not?  Under that radiant firmament, I could have thrown myself upon my knees in adoration.  As I walked, I found myself avoiding every strip of shadow; were it but that of a birch trunk, I felt as if it robbed me of the day’s delight.  I went bare-headed, that the golden beams might shed upon me their unstinted blessing.  That day I must have walked some thirty miles, yet I knew not fatigue. Could I but have once more the strength which then supported me!

I had stepped into a new life. Between the man I had been and that which I now became there was a very notable difference.  In a single day I had matured astonishingly; which means, no doubt, that I suddenly entered into conscious enjoyment of powers and sensibilities which had been developing unknown to me.  To instance only one point: till then I had cared very little about plants and flowers, but now I found myself eagerly interested in every blossom, in every growth of the wayside.  As I walked I gathered a quantity of plants, promising myself to buy a book on the morrow and identify them all.  Nor was it a passing humour; never since have I lost my pleasure in the flowers of the field, and my desire to know them all.  My ignorance at the time of which I speak seems to me now very shameful; but I was merely in the case of ordinary people, whether living in town or country.  How many could give the familiar name of half a dozen plants plucked at random from beneath the hedge at springtime?  To me the flowers became symbolical of a great release, a wonderful awakening.  My eyes had all at once been opened; till then I had walked in darkness, yet knew it not.  Well do I remember the rambles of that springtide.  I had a lodging in one of those outer streets in Exeter which savour more of country than of town, and every morning I set forth to make discoveries.  The weather could not have been more kindly; I felt the influences of a climate I had never known; there was a balm in the air which soothed no less than it exhilarated me.  Now inland, now seaward, I followed the windings of the Exe.  One day I wandered in rich, warm valleys, by orchards bursting in bloom, from farmhouse to farmhouse, each more beautiful than the other, and from hamlet to hamlet bowered amid dark evergreens; the next, I was on pine-clad heights, gazing over moorland brown with last year’s heather, feeling upon my face a wind form the white-flecked Channel.  So intense was my delight in the beautiful world about me that I forgot even myself; I enjoyed without retrospect or forecast; I, the egoist in grain, forgot to scrutinize my own emotions, or to trouble my happiness by comparison with others’ happier fortune.  It was a helpful time; it gave me a new lease on life, and taught me – in so far as I was teachable – how to make use of it.[12]

Gissing uses the terminology of such words as obscuring, shadows, walking in darkness, ignorance, and shame; these are then followed by adoration, blessing, maturing, discovering, awakening, and happiness; and though it may appear as a sudden change, he is quick to remind us that this had been developing for some time but just finally came to fruition.  But how had this developed?  Did every person who walked out of the city of London that day into the countryside have an epiphany?  No, I think not.  So why did this happen, what was building up and developing inside him, where did this come from?  What was his character like?  In the next paragraph, we see what Ryecroft values, books, and not just the book as a book, but the message inside where he will suffer the loss of a good meal in order consume the words contained therein.

Sacrifice – in no drawing-room sense of the word.  Dozens of my books were purchased with money which ought to have been spent upon what are called the necessities of life.  Many a time I have stood before a stall, or a bookseller’s window, torn by conflict of intellectual desire and bodily need.  At the very hour of dinner, when my stomach clamoured for food, I have been stopped by sight of a volume so long coveted, and marked at so advantageous a price, that I could not let it go; yet to buy it meant pangs of famine.  My Heyne’s Tibullus was grasped at such a moment.  It lay on the stall of the old book-shop in Goodge Street – a stall where now and then one found an excellent thing among quantities of rubbish.  Sixpence was the price – sixpence!  At that time I used to eat my midday meal (of course, my dinner) at a coffee-shop in Oxford Street, one of the real old coffee-shops, such as now, I suppose, can hardly be found.  Sixpence was all I had – yes, all I had in the world; it would purchase a plate of meat and vegetables.  But I did not dare to hope that the Tibullus would wait until the morrow, when a certain small sum fell due to me.  I paced the pavement, fingering the coppers in my pocket, eyeing the stall, two appetites at combat within me.  The book was bought and I went home with it, and as I made a dinner of bread and butter I gloated over the pages.[13]

He had two competing appetites, one for food, and one for knowledge.  He was willing to suffer for those books.  I believe this knowledge allowed him to eventually be able to see and acknowledge the world around him.  He was a true philosopher, a seeker of wisdom.  “In those days money represented nothing to me, nothing I cared to think about, but the acquisition of books.  There were books of which I had passionate need, books more necessary to me than bodily nourishment.  I could see them, of course, at the British Museum, but that was not at all the same thing as having and holding them, my own property, on my own shelf.”[14]  He also understood and respected the idea of personal property.  He had a passionate desire to read these books, to have them close to him, to be able to peruse them when he wanted.  And he would go to great lengths to acquire them.  What follows is an explanation of how he even physically exerted himself to attain a collection of books.

Sometimes I added the labour of a porter to my fasting endured for the sake of books.  At the little shop near Portland Road Station I came upon a first edition of Gibbon, the price an absurdity – I think it was a shilling a volume.  To possess those clean-paged quartos I would have sold my coat.  As it happened, I had not money enough with me, but sufficient at home.  I was living at Islington.  Having spoken with the bookseller, I walked home, took the cash, walked back again, and – carried the tomes from the west end of Euston Road to a street in Islington far beyond the Angel.  I did it in two journeys – this being the only time in my life when I thought of Gibbon in avoirdupois.  Twice – three times, reckoning the walk for the money – did I descend Euston Road and climb Pentonville on that occasion.  Of the season and the weather I have no recollection; my joy in the purchase I had made drove out every other thought.  Except, indeed, of the weight.  I had infinite energy, but not much muscular strength, and the end of the last journey saw me upon a chair, perspiring, flaccid, aching – exultant![15]

He is pretty serious about his books, I am the same way.  I also am a prodigious reader and suffer from the fate of forgetting much of what I have read.

And so on, and so on.  To the end I shall be reading – and forgetting.  Ah, that’s the worst of it!  Had I at command all the knowledge I have at any time possessed, I might call myself a learned man.  Nothing surely is so bad for the memory as long-enduring worry, agitation, fear.  I cannot preserve more than a few fragments of what I read, yet read I shall, persistently, rejoicingly.  Would I gather erudition for a future life?  Indeed, it no longer troubles me that I forget.  I have the happiness of the passing moment, and what more can mortal ask?[16]

If I could only remember ten-percent of that which I have read, but alas, it is not so.  I am reminded that John Stuart Mill would read the same book dozens of times and Montaigne mentioned he would put notes in his books so when he picked them up he could find out if he read them before or not, because he had forgotten.  Some few souls have been blessed, or cursed, with an excellent memory, but I am not one of them.

This next part is a long argument.  One would think that because more books are printed, more titles available, on so many diverse subjects, that we therefore must be a better educated and a more improved society… or perhaps not?  Gissing tends to think not, and I agree with him, even today, over a hundred years later.

Were one to look at the literary journals only, and thereafter judge of the time, it would be easy to persuade oneself that civilization had indeed made great and solid progress, and that the world stood at a very hopeful stage of enlightenment.  Week after week, I glance over these pages of crowded advertisement; I see a great many publishing-houses, zealously active in putting forth every kind of book, new and old; I see names innumerable of workers in every branch of literature.  Much that is announced declares itself at once of merely ephemeral import, or even of no import at all; but what masses of print which invite the attention of thoughtful or studious folk!  To the multitude is offered a long succession of classic authors, in beautiful form, at a minimum cost; never were such treasures so cheaply and so gracefully set before all who can prize them.  For the wealthy, there are volumes magnificent; lordly editions; works of art whereon have been lavished care and skill and expense incalculable.  Here is exhibited the learning of the whole world and of all the ages; be a man’s study what it will, in these columns, at one time or another he shall find that which appeals to him.  Here are labours of the erudite, exercised on every subject that falls within learning’s scope.  Science brings forth its newest discoveries in earth and heaven; it speaks to the philosopher in his solitude, and to the crowd in the market-place.  Curious pursuits of the mind at leisure are represented in publications numberless; trifles and oddities of intellectual savour, gatherings from every by-way of human interest.  For other moods there are the fabulists; to tell the truth, they commonly hold the place of honour in these varied lists.  Who shall count them?  Who shall calculate their readers?  Builders of verse are many; yet the observer will note that contemporary poets have but an inconspicuous standing in this index of the public taste.  Travel, on the other hand, is largely represented; the general appetite for information about lands remote would appear to be only less keen than for the adventures of romance.

With these pages before one’s eyes, must one not needs believe that things of the mind are a prime concern of our day?  Who are the purchasers of these volumes ever pouring from the press?  How is it possible for so great a commerce to flourish save as a consequence of national eagerness in this intellectual domain?  Surely one must take for granted that throughout the land, in town and country, private libraries are growing apace; that by the people at large a great deal of time is devoted to reading; that literary ambition is one of the commonest spurs to effort.

It is the truth.  All this may be said of contemporary England.  But is it enough to set one’s mind at ease regarding the outlook of our civilization?  Two things must be remembered.  However considerable this literary traffic regarded by itself, it is relatively of small extent.  And, in the second place, literary activity is by no means an invariable proof of that mental attitude which marks the truly civilized man.

Lay aside the ‘literary organ,’ which appears once a week, and take up the newspaper, which comes forth every day, morning and evening.  Here you get the true proportion of things.  Read your daily news-sheet – that which costs threepence, or that which costs a halfpenny – and muse upon the impression it leaves.  It may be that a few books are ‘noticed’; granting that the ‘notice’ is in any way noticeable, compare the space it occupies with that devoted to the material interests of life: you have a gauge of the real importance of intellectual endeavor to the public at large.  No, the public which reads, in any sense of the word worth considering, is very, very small; the public which would feel no lack if all book-printing ceased to-morrow, is enormous.  These announcements of learned works which strike one as so encouraging, are addressed, as a matter of fact, to a few thousand persons, scattered all over the English-speaking world.  Many of the most valuable books slowly achieve the sale of a few hundred copies.  Gather from all the ends of the British Empire the men and women who purchase grave literature as a matter of course, who habitually seek it in public libraries, in short, who regard it as a necessity of life, and I am much mistaken if they could not comfortably assemble in the Albert Hall.

But even granting this, is it not an obvious fact that our age tends to the civilized habit of mind, as displayed in a love for intellectual things?  Was there ever a time which saw the literature of knowledge and of the emotions so widely distributed?  Does not the minority of the truly intelligent exercise a vast and profound influence?  Does it not in truth lead the way, however slowly and irregularly the multitude may follow?

I should like to believe it.  When gloomy evidence is thrust upon me, I often say to myself; Think of the frequency of the reasonable man; think of him everywhere laboring to spread the light; how is it possible that such efforts should be overborne by forces of blind brutality, now that the human race has got so far?  Yes, yes; but this mortal whom I caress as reasonable, as enlightened and enlightening, this author, investigator, lecturer, or studious gentleman, to whose coat-tails I cling, does he always represent justice and peace, sweetness of manners, purity of life – all the things which make for true civilization?  Here is a fallacy of bookish thought.  Experience offers proof on every hand that vigorous mental life may be but one side of a personality, of which the other is moral barbarism.  A man may be a fine archaeologist, and yet have no sympathy with human ideals.  The historian, the biographer, even the poet, may be a money-market gambler, a social toady, a clamorous Chauvinist, or an unscrupulous wire-puller.[17]  As for ‘leaders of science’, what optimist will dare to proclaim them on the side of the gentle virtues?  And if one must needs think in this way of those who stand forth, professed instructors and inspirers, what of those who merely listen?  The reading-public – oh, the reading-public!  Hardly will a prudent statistician venture to declare that one in every score of those who actually read sterling books do so with comprehension of their author.  These dainty series of noble and delightful works, which have so seemingly wide an acceptance, think you they vouch for true appreciation in all who buy them?  Remember those who purchase to follow the fashion, to impose upon their neighbor, or even to flatter themselves; think of those who wish to make cheap presents, and those who are merely pleased by the outer aspect of a volume.  Above all, bear in mind that busy throng whose zeal is according neither to knowledge nor to conviction, the host of the half-educated, characteristic and peril of our time.  They, indeed, purchase and purchase largely.  Heaven forbid that I should not recognize the few among them whose bent of brain and of conscience justifies their fervor; to such – the ten in ten-thousand – be all aid and brotherly solace!  But the glib many, the perky mis-pronouncers of titles and of authors’ names, the twanging murderers of rhythm, the maulers of the uncut edge at sixpence extra, the ready-reckoners of bibliopolic discount – am I to see in these a witness of my hope for the century to come?

I am told that their semi-education will be integrated.  We are in a transition stage, between the bad old time when only a few had academic privileges, and that happy future which will see all men liberally instructed.  Unfortunately for this argument, education is a thing of which only the few are capable; teach as you will, only a small percentage will profit by your most zealous energy.  On an ungenerous soil it is vain to look for rich crops.  Your average mortal will be your average mortal still; and if he grows conscious of power, if he becomes vocal and self-assertive, if he gets into his hands all the material resources of the country, why, you have a state of things such as at present looms menacingly before every Englishman blessed – or cursed – with an unpopular spirit.[18]

Yes, there may be an enormous amount of literature being printed, however, is more of the actual public really reading?  And just because we have increased “literary activity” it does not necessarily imply that we are better people, that we have become more civilized.  What percentage of advertisements are actually based on books or literary works compared to perhaps fifty-years ago, one-hundred-years, or even two-hundred-years ago?  With our new approaches to advertising, would a non-literary reader even be subjected to an advertisement for literary works today, or would only someone who has visited book sites, expressed an interest in books, see this advertising.  I have met people that are proud of the fact that they have never had to read a book after college.  How can one be so proud of their ignorance?  What did we teach them in school that made them abhor reading books?  This is truly disgraceful to society as a whole.  But even with that, you may argue that people still buy plenty of books.  But why are they buying them.  Do they collect them, is it a fad, is it to say they have it, give it as a gift?  Why do people claim they have read classical works they have never read?  Why do they brag about cliff notes and how they got by without ever having read the book?  We live in a society where we feel we can just watch the movie, or a You Tube presentation about the literary work and we know all about it.  Or how many say, I have read excerpts of it.  Bits and pieces, and from that they judge the whole.  Granted I can try a piece of cake and not have to eat the whole cake to understand how it tastes, but literary books do not have the same homogenous consistency that a cake has.  One cannot just read an abstract and understand the argument.  That is the teaser, the test to see if the work is relevant, not the work itself.  And even if we can finally agree that some are truly reading and digesting the really great and pertinent works that are available, who is to say that this is truly making a better society.  Education alone will not make a better society.  I have gone on a rant.  To return to the work, the next piece talks of memory.  I tend to think Gissing waxes philosophical in this section.

As a rule, it is better to re-visit only in imagination the places which have greatly charmed us, or which, in the retrospect, seem to have done so.  Seemed to have charmed us, I say; for the memory we form, after a certain lapse of time, of places where we lingered, often bears but a faint resemblance to the impression received at the time; what in truth may have been very moderate enjoyment, or enjoyment greatly disturbed by inner or outer circumstances, shows in the distance as a keen delight, or as deep, still happiness.  On the other hand, if memory creates no illusion, and the name of a certain place is associated with one of the golden moments of life, it were rash to hope that another visit would repeat the experience of a bygone day.  For it was not merely the sights that one beheld which were the cause of joy and peace; however lovely the spot, however gracious the sky, these things external would not have availed, but for contributory movements of mind and heart and blood, the essentials of the man as then he was.  Whilst I was reading this afternoon my thoughts strayed, and I found myself recalling a hillside in Suffolk, where, after a long walk, I rested drowsily on midsummer day twenty years ago.  A great longing seized me; I was tempted to set off at once, and find again that spot under the high elm trees, where, as I smoked a delicious pipe, I heard about me the crack, crack, crack of broom-pods bursting in the glorious heat of the noontide sun.  Had I acted upon the impulse, what chance was there of my enjoying such another hour as that which my memory cherished?  No, no; it is not the place that I remember; it is the time of life, the circumstances, the mood, which at that moment fell so happily together.  Can I dream that a pipe smoked on that same hillside, under the same glowing sky, would taste as it then did, or bring me the same solace?  Would the turf be so soft beneath me?  Would the great elm-branches temper so delightfully the noontide rays beating upon them?  And, when the hour of rest was over, should I spring to my feet as then I did, eager to put forth my strength again?  No, no; what I remember is just one moment of my earlier life, linked by accident with that picture of the Suffolk landscape.  The place no longer exists; it never existed save for me.  For it is the mind which creates the world about us, and even though we stand side by side in the same meadow, my eyes will never see what is beheld by yours, my heart will never stir to the emotions with which yours is touched.[19]

This is deep.  Our most cherished memories are something personal and unique.  They cannot be recreated, they exist as that moment in time.  We recollect them, and the memory brings forth an image, feeling, smell, taste, that we savor and relish.  Gissing gives an example of how events in everyday life can trigger our memories of literary scenes.

How the mood for a book sometimes rushes upon one, either one knows not why, or in consequence, perhaps, of some most trifling suggestion.  Yesterday I was walking at dusk.  I came to an old farmhouse; at the garden gate a vehicle stood waiting, and I saw it was our doctor’s gig.  Having passed, I turned to look back.  There was a faint afterglow in the sky beyond the chimneys; a light twinkled at one of the upper windows.  I said to myself ‘Tristram Shandy’, and hurried home to plunge into a book which I had not opened for I dare say twenty years.

Not long ago, I awoke one morning and suddenly thought of the Correspondence between Goethe and Schiller; and so impatient did I become to open the book that I got up an hour earlier than usual.  A book worth rising for; much better worth than old Burton, who pulled Johnson out of bed.  A book which helps one to forget the idle or venomous chatter going on everywhere about us, and bids us cherish hope for a world ‘which has such people in’t’.

These volumes I had at hand; I could reach them down from my shelves at the moment when I hungered for them.  But it often happens that the book which comes into my mind could only be procured with trouble and delay; I breathe regretfully and put aside the thought.  Ah! the books that one will never read again.  They gave delight, perchance something more; they left a perfume in the memory; but life has passed them by forever.  I have but to muse, and one after another they rise before me.  Books gentle and quieting; books noble and inspiring; books that well merit to be pored over, not once but many a time.  Yet never again shall I hold them in my hand; the years fly too quickly, and are too few.  Perhaps when I lie waiting for the end, some of those lost books will come into my wandering thoughts, and I shall remember them as friends to whom I owed a kindness – friends passed upon the way.  What regret in that last farewell![20]

This is also an example of some of the pessimism that is attributed to Gissing.  One could also claim that he is just being realistic as I have repeated from some unknown source, “So many books, so little time!”  This reminds me of this next part where Ryecroft lists the “things I hope to know.”  I too have made lists similar to this, that I perhaps may never accomplish.  Does that mean the lists were done in vain, I do not think so.  I feel that it is important to shoot high, if I miss the mark, well then at least I have tried.  But to not even aim, that is a much greater loss.

I have been dull to-day, haunted by the thought of how much there is that I would fain know, and how little I can hope to learn.  The scope of knowledge has become so vast.  I put aside nearly all physical investigation; to me it is naught, or only, at moments, a matter of idle curiosity.  This would seem to be a considerable clearing of the field; but it leaves what is practically the infinite.  To run over a list of only my favorite subjects, those to which, all my life long, I have more or less applied myself, studies which hold in my mind the place of hobbies; is to open vistas of intellectual despair.  In an old notebook I jotted down such a list – ‘things I hope to know, and to know well’.  I was then four-and-twenty.  Reading it with eyes of fifty-four, I must needs laugh.  There appear such modest items as ‘The history of the Christian Church up to the Reformation’ – ‘all Greek poetry’ – ‘The field of Medieval Romance’ – ‘German literature from Lessing to Heine’ – ‘Dante!’  Not one of these shall I ever ‘know and know well’; not any one of them.  Yet here I am buying books which lead me into endless paths of new temptation.  What have I to do with Egypt?  Yet I have been beguiled by Flinders Petrie and by Maspéro.  How can I pretend to meddle with the ancient geography of Asia Minor?  Yet here I have bought Prof. Ramsay’s astonishing book and have even read with a sort of troubled enjoyment a good many pages of it; troubled, because I have but to reflect a moment, and I see that all this kind of thing is mere futile effort of the intellect when the time for serious intellectual effort is over.[21]

Every time I go to the bookstore I leave with new books and a new resolution that this time I will read them all.  I do not consider myself a collector of books, but rather a collector of knowledge.  I plan to either read or reference the books I own.  They are like good friends that I can take off the shelf and converse with once again.

I am now left to present the political side of the book.  Ryecroft pronounces, “And to think that at one time I called myself a socialist, communist, anything you like of the revolutionary kind!  Not for long, to be sure, and I suspect that there was always something in me that scoffed when my lips uttered such things.  Why, no man living has a more profound sense of property than I; no man ever lived, who was, in every fiber, more vehemently an individualist.”[22]  It is true that he strongly believes in the individual over the masses.  But this is not because he thinks less of those that fate has perhaps destined to be in a different social rank than his own.  He protests this vehemently.

Right or wrong, this is my temper.  But he who should argue from it that I am intolerant of all persons belonging to a lower social rank than my own would go far astray.  Nothing is more rooted in my mind than the vast distinction between the individual and the class.  Take a man by himself, and there is generally some reason to be found in him, some disposition for good; mass him with his fellows in the social organism, and ten to one he becomes a blatant creature, without a thought of his own, ready for any evil to which contagion prompts him.  It is because nations tend to stupidity and baseness that mankind moves so slowly; it is because individuals have a capacity for better things that it moves at all.[23]

This is where Gissing sees the evil, it is in the masses as a mean and assimilated conglomeration of people.  A true democracy devalues the individual.  He is greatly concerned at the beginning of the twentieth century what this democracy will bring to the English people.

For a nation of this temper, the movement towards democracy is fraught with particular dangers.  Profoundly aristocratic in his sympathies, the Englishman has always seen in the patrician class not merely a social, but a moral, superiority; the man of blue blood was to him a living representative of those potencies and virtues which made his ideal of the worthy life.  Very significant is the cordial alliance from old time between nobles and people; free, proud homage to one side answering to gallant championship on the other; both classes working together in the cause of liberty.  However great the sacrifices of the common folk for the maintenance of aristocratic power and splendor, they were gladly made; this was the Englishman’s religion, his inborn pietas; in the depths of the dullest soul moved a perception of the ethic meaning attached to lordship.  Your Lord was the privileged being endowed by descent with generous instincts, and possessed of means to show them forth in act.  A poor noble was a contradiction in terms, if such a person existed, he could only be spoken of with wondering sadness, as though he were the victim of some freak of nature.  The Lord was Honourable, Right Honourable; his acts, his words, virtually constituted the code of honour whereby the nation lived.

In a new world, beyond the ocean, there grew up a new race, a scion of England, which shaped its life without regard to the principle of hereditary lordship; and in course of time this triumphant Republic began to shake the ideals of the Motherland.  Its civilization, spite of superficial resemblances, is not English; let him who will think it superior; all one cares to say is that it has already shown in a broad picture the natural tendencies of English blood when emancipated from the old cult.  Easy to understand that some there are who see nothing but evil in the influence of that vast commonwealth.  If it has done us good, assuredly the fact is not yet demonstrable.  In old England, democracy is a thing so alien to our traditions and rooted sentiment that the line of its progress seems hitherto a mere track of ruin.  In the very word is something from which we shrink; it seems to signify nothing less than a national apostasy, a denial of the faith in which we won our glory.  The democratic Englishman is, by the laws of his own nature, in parlous case; he has lost the ideal by which he guided his rude, prodigal, domineering instincts; in place of the Right Honourable, born to noble things, he has set up the mere Plebs, born, more likely than not, for all manner of baseness.  And, amid all his show of loud self-confidence, the man is haunted with mis-giving.

The task before us is no light one.  Can we, whilst losing the class, retain the idea it embodied?  Can we English, ever so subject to the material, liberate ourselves from that old association, yet guard its meaning in the sphere of spiritual life?  Can we, with eyes which have ceased to look reverently on worn-out symbols, learn to select from among the grey-coated multitude, and place in reverence even higher him who ‘holds his patent of nobility straight from Almighty God’?  Upon that depends the future of England.  In days gone by, our very Snob bore testimony after his fashion to our scorn of meanness; he at all events imagined himself to be imitating those who were incapable of a sordid transaction, of a plebian compliance.  But the Snob, one notes, is in the way of degeneracy; he has new exemplars; he speaks a ruder language.  Him, be sure, in one form or another, we shall have always with us, and to observe his habits is to note the tenor of the time.  If he have at the back of his dim mind no living ideal which lends his foolishness a generous significance, then indeed – videant consules.[24]

Yes, let the leaders see to the protection of the state, for we are progressing not towards a better world, but a meaner one.  In my lifetime I have seen the rise of socialism in my own country.  I hear people every day proclaim how good it will be.  How do we retain the idea of the good?  We progress more and more away from the Good, True, and Beautiful.  We are told that all is relative.  To each his own to decide.  There is no objectivity.  We are so attached to our material comforts that we refuse to see the spiritual harm that is occurring all around us.  What reverence do we have for the past, for tradition, for good?  No, we scorn this, and cry out, “I gotta be me!”  The irony is that the more we claim liberty for all, the more we restrict the individual.  It is sad.  The final quotation I will give is about how work has been portrayed falsely as an evil.

That a labourer in the fields should stand very much on the level of the beast that toils with him can be neither desirable nor necessary.  He does so, as a matter of fact, and one hears that only the dullest-witted peasant will nowadays consent to the peasant life; his children, taught to read the newspaper, make what haste they can to the land of promise – where newspapers are printed.  That here is something altogether wrong it needs no evangelist to tell us; the remedy no prophet has as yet even indicated.  Husbandry has in our time been glorified in eloquence which for the most part is vain, endeavouring, as it does, to prove a falsity – that the agricultural life is, in itself, favourable to gentle emotions, to sweet thoughtfulness, and to all the human virtues.  Agriculture is one of the most exhausting forms of toil, and, in itself, by no means conducive to spiritual development; that it played a civilizing part in the history of the world is merely due to the fact that, by creating wealth, it freed a portion of mankind from the labour of the plough. Enthusiasts have tried the experiment of turning husbandman; one of them writes of his experience in notable phrase.

‘Oh, labour is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutified.  Is it a praiseworthy matter that I have spent five golden months in providing food for cows and horses?  It is not so.’  Thus Nathaniel Hawthorne, at Brook Farm.  In the bitterness of his disillusion he went too far.  Labour may be, and very often is, an accursed and brutalizing thing, but assuredly, it is not the curse of the world; nay, it is the world’s supreme blessing.  Hawthorne had committed a folly, and he paid for it in loss of mental balance.  For him, plainly, it was no suitable task to feed cows and horse; yet many a man would perceive the nobler side of such occupation, for it signifies, of course, providing food for mankind.  The interest in this quotation lies in the fact that, all unconsciously, so intelligent a man as Hawthorne had been reduced to the mental state of our agricultural labourers in revolt against the country life.  Not only is his intelligence in abeyance, but his emotions have ceased to be a true guide.  The worst feature of the rustic mind in our day is not its ignorance or grossness, but its rebellious discontent.  Like all other evils, this is seen to be an evitable outcome of the condition of things; one understands it only too well.  The bucolic wants to ‘better’ himself.  He is sick of feeding cows and horses; he imagines that, on the pavement of London, he would walk with a manlier tread.

There is no help in visions of Arcadia; yet it is plain fact that in days gone by the peasantry found life more endurable, and yet more intelligent than our clodhoppers who still hold by the plough.  They had their folk-songs, now utterly forgotten.  They had romances and fairy lore, which their descendants could no more appreciate than an idyll of Theocritus.  Ah, but let it be remembered that they had also a home, and this is the illumining word.  If your peasant love the fields which give him bread, he will not think it hard labour in them; his toil will no longer be that of the beast, but upward-looking and touched with a light from other than the visible heavens.  No use to blink the hard and dull features of rustic experience; let them rather be insisted upon, that those who own and derive profit from the land may be constant in human care for the lives which make it fruitful.  Such care may perchance avail, in some degree, to counteract the restless tendency of the time; the dweller in a pleasant cottage is not so likely to wish to wander from it as he who shelters himself in a hovel.  Well-meaning folk talk about re-awakening love of the country by means of deliberate instruction.  Lies any hope that way?  Does it seem to promise a return of the time when the old English names of all our flowers were common on rustic lips – by which, indeed, they were first uttered?  The facts that flowers and birds are well-nigh forgotten, together with the songs and the elves, show how advanced is the process of rural degeneration.  Most likely it is foolishness to hope for the revival of any bygone social virtue.  The husbandman of the future will be, I dare say, a well-paid mechanic, of the engine-driver species; as he goes about his work he will sing the last refrain of the music-hall, and his oft-recurring holidays will be spent in the nearest great town.  For him, I fancy, there will be little attraction in ever such melodious talk about ‘common objects of the country’.  Flowers, perhaps, at all events those of tilth and pasture, will have been all but improved away.  And, as likely as not, the word Home will have only a special significance, indicating the common abode of retired labourers who are drawing old-age pensions.[25]

The lost, the tired, the disgruntled workers, are most often manipulated by those that would use them as means to an end.  False hopes and promises are what politicians fuel the fire of insurrection with to enflame the public and rouse them up.  It is like the beast tamer in Plato’s Republic, they should be careful, for experience has shown that the beast can become ungovernable.

With a deep breath, and a long sigh, I leave this for now.  However, the thoughts stirred and awakened by Gissing in this book, will stay with me as I contemplate the life ahead of me.

 

Picture Credit

http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=inu.32000000676975;view=1up;seq=216  Title: The late George Gissing whose posthumous novel “Veranilda” is just published. Creator: Elliot & Fry.  Credit Line: The Critic Vol. 46, 1905.  Accessed April 30, 2018.

[1] The New Encyclopaedia Britannica 15th Ed. Micropaedia Bk. IV, (1983) s.v. “Gissing, George Robert,” 558

[2] “Death of George Gissing,” New York Times, December 29, 1903. Accessed April 26, 2018. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1903/12/29/102033642.pdf

[3] Gissing, George, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, London: Phoenix House Ltd., 1953.  Foreword by Cecil Chisholm, in Foreword.

[4] “Death of George Gissing,”  New York Times.

[5] Encyclopaedia Britannica “Gissing, George Robert”

[6] Encyclopaedia Britannica “Gissing, George Robert”

[7] Gissing, George, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, Foreword.

[8] Ibid., 8

[9] Ibid., 26

[10] Ibid., 27

[11] Ibid., 38

[12] Ibid., 39-40

[13] Ibid., 47

[14] Ibid., 48

[15] Ibid., 49

[16] Ibid., 58

[17] “Wire-puller”: one that uses secret or underhand means to influence the acts of a person or organization.  Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged, print. s.v. “wire-puller.”

[18] Gissing, George, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, 66-70.

[19] Ibid., 94-5

[20] Ibid., 129-30

[21] Ibid., 199-200

[22] Ibid., 99-100

[23] Ibid., 54-5

[24] Ibid., 114-6

[25] Ibid., 157-9