United States or São Tomé and Príncipe ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


"What's that to you?" snapped the other. "I'll sell you this bathtub for a quarter. Take it home to them. They probably need it." "You get out of here!" cried the angry official. "You'd be surprised," said Gissing, "how children thrive when they're bathed regularly. Believe me, I know."

On this promenade I yesterday observed, slow-pacing beside the waves, a meditative priest, who gave me some details regarding the ruined church of which Gissing speaks.

Furnivall might call the 'backward reach' of every one of these stories will render their perusal delightful to those cultivated readers of Gissing, of whom there are by no means a few, to whom every fragment of his suave and delicate workmanship 'repressed yet full of power, vivid though sombre in colouring, has a technical interest and charm.

He asked the elevator attendant to direct him to the offices of the firm. On the seventh floor, down a quiet corridor behind the bedroom suites, a rosewood fence barred his way. A secretary faced him inquiringly. "I wish to see Mr. Beagle." "Mr. Beagle senior or Mr. Beagle junior?" Youth cleaves to youth, said Gissing to himself. "Mr. Beagle junior," he stated firmly. "Have you an appointment?"

It is the East of Suez of literature, "where there ain't no Ten Commandments, and a man may raise a thirst." The real Bohemia, as Jules Valdes showed in "Refractaires," is a world of misery and discontent. Still more sordid is the English Bohemia expounded by Mr. Gissing in "New Grub Street." Mr. Robert Buchanan indeed writes as if there had been a Murgerian Bohemia in England in his young days.

Cleverer and more docile, George Gissing for the most part accepted them; he put his slender frame into the ponderous collar of the author of the Mill on the Floss, and nearly collapsed in wind and limb in the heart-breaking attempt to adjust himself to such an heroic type of harness.

'Thus, Night, oft see me in thy pale career... Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings, And the night-raven sings. Yet by the larger, or, at any rate, the intermediate public, it is a fact that Gissing has never been quite fairly estimated.

I mean, for example, Gissing, a real extremist, who, it is now admitted, saw a clear and undiscovered beauty in forms of existence which hitherto no artist had deigned seriously to examine. And I mean Huysmans, a case even more extreme. Possibly no works have been more abused for ugliness than Huysman's novel En Ménage and his book of descriptive essays De Tout.

In England during the sixties and seventies of last century the world of books was dominated by one Gargantuan type of fiction. The terms book and novel became almost synonymous in houses which were not Puritan, yet where books and reading, in the era of few and unfree libraries, were strictly circumscribed. George Gissing was no exception to this rule.

Stars, creeds, cosmologies, promptly receded into remote perspective and had to shift for themselves. It was true that Gissing had somewhat avoided her lately, for he feared her fascination. He wished nothing else to interfere with his search for what he had not yet found.