'He saw much company and all of low intellectual order; he had purchased a bicycle and regarded it as a source of distinction, or means of displaying himself before shopkeepers' daughters; he believed himself a moderate tenor and sang verses of sentimental imbecility; he took in several weekly papers of unpromising title for the chief purpose of deciphering cryptograms, in which pursuit he had singular success. Add to these characteristics a penchant for cheap jewellery, and Oliver Peak stands confessed.'
The story of the book is revealed in Peak's laconic ambition, 'A plebeian, I aim at marrying a lady.' It is a little curious, some may think, that this motive so skilfully used by so many novelists to whose work Gissing's has affinity, from Rousseau and Stendhal (Rouge et Noire) to Cherbuliez (Secret du Précepteur) and Bourget (Le Disciple), had not already attracted him, but the explanation is perhaps in part indicated in a finely written story towards the close of this present volume.[15] The white, maidenish and silk-haired fairness of Sidwell, and Peak's irresistible passion for the type of beauty suggested, is revealed to us with all Gissing's wonderful skill in shadowing forth feminine types of lovelihood. Suggestive too of his oncoming passion for Devonshire and Western England are strains of exquisite landscape music scattered at random through these pages. More significant still, however, is the developing faculty for personal satire, pointing to a vastly riper human experience. Peak was uncertain, says the author, with that faint ironical touch which became almost habitual to him, 'as to the limits of modern latitudinarianism until he met Chilvers,' the sleek, clerical advocate of 'Less St. Paul and more Darwin, less of Luther and more of Herbert Spencer':—
'The discovery of such fantastic liberality in a man whom he could not but dislike and contemn gave him no pleasure, but at least it disposed him to amusement rather than antagonism. Chilvers's pronunciation and phraseology were distinguished by such original affectation that it was impossible not to find entertainment in listening to him. Though his voice was naturally shrill and piping, he managed to speak in head notes which had a ring of robust utterance. The sound of his words was intended to correspond with their virile warmth of meaning. In the same way he had cultivated a habit of the muscles which conveyed an impression that he was devoted to athletic sports. His arms occasionally swung as if brandishing dumb-bells, his chest now and then spread itself to the uttermost, and his head was often thrown back in an attitude suggesting self-defence.'
[Footnote 15: See page 260.]
Of Gissing's first year or so at Owens, after leaving Lindow Grove School at Alderley,[16] we get a few hints in these pages. Like his 'lonely cerebrate' hero, Gissing himself, at school and college, 'worked insanely.' Walked much alone, shunned companionship rather than sought it, worked as he walked, and was marked down as a 'pot-hunter.' He 'worked while he ate, he cut down his sleep, and for him the penalty came, not in a palpable, definable illness, but in an abrupt, incongruous reaction and collapse.' With rage he looked back on these insensate years of study which had weakened him just when he should have been carefully fortifying his constitution.
[Footnote 16: With an exhibition gained when he was not yet fifteen.]
The year of this autobiographical record[17] marked the commencement of Gissing's reclamation from that worst form of literary slavery—the chain-gang. For he had been virtually chained to the desk, perpetually working, imprisoned in a London lodging, owing to the literal lack of the means of locomotion.[18] His most strenuous work, wrung from him in dismal darkness and wrestling of spirit, was now achieved. Yet it seems to me both ungrateful and unfair to say, as has frequently been done, that his subsequent work was consistently inferior. In his earlier years, like Reardon, he had destroyed whole books—books he had to sit down to when his imagination was tired and his fancy suffering from deadly fatigue. His corrections in the days of New Grub Street provoked not infrequent, though anxiously deprecated, remonstrance from his publisher's reader. Now he wrote with more assurance and less exhaustive care, but also with a perfected experience. A portion of his material, it is true, had been fairly used up, and he had henceforth to turn to analyse the sufferings of well-to-do lower middle-class families, people who had 'neither inherited refinement nor acquired it, neither proletarian nor gentlefolk, consumed with a disease of vulgar pretentiousness, inflated with the miasma of democracy.' Of these classes it is possible that he knew less, and consequently lacked the sureness of touch and the fresh draughtsmanship which comes from ample knowledge, and that he had, consequently, to have increasing resort to books and to invention, to hypothesis and theory.[19] On the other hand, his power of satirical writing was continually expanding and developing, and some of his very best prose is contained in four of these later books: In the Year of Jubilee (1894), Charles Dickens (1898), By the Ionian Sea (1901), and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903); not far below any of which must be rated four others, The Odd Women (1893), Eve's Ransom (1895), The Whirlpool (1897), and Will Warburton (1905), to which may be added the two collections of short stories.
[Footnote 17: Followed in 1897 by The Whirlpool (see p. xvi), and in 1899 and 1903 by two books containing a like infusion of autobiographical experience, The Crown of Life, technically admirable in chosen passages, but sadly lacking in the freshness of first-hand, and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, one of the rightest and ripest of all his productions.]
[Footnote 18: 'I hardly knew what it was to travel by omnibus. I have walked London streets for twelve and fifteen hours together without even a thought of saving my legs or my time, by paying for waftage. Being poor as poor can be, there were certain things I had to renounce, and this was one of them.'—Ryecroft. For earlier scenes see Monthly Review, xvi., and Owens College Union Mag., Jan. 1904, pp. 80-81.]
[Footnote 19: 'He knew the narrowly religious, the mental barrenness of the poor dissenters, the people of the slums that he observed so carefully, and many of those on the borders of the Bohemia of which he at least was an initiate, and he was soaked and stained, as he might himself have said, with the dull drabs of the lower middle class that he hated. But of those above he knew little…. He did not know the upper middle classes, which are as difficult every whit as those beneath them, and take as much time and labour and experience and observation to learn.'—'The Exile of George Gissing,' Albany, Christmas 1904. In later life he lost sympathy with the 'nether world.' Asked to write a magazine article on a typical 'workman's budget,' he wrote that he no longer took an interest in the 'condition of the poor question.']