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Updated: August 9, 2024
It was in the South of France, in the neighbourhood of Biarritz, amid scenes such as that described in the thirty-seventh chapter of Will Warburton, or still further south, that he wrote the greater part of his last three books, the novel just mentioned, which is probably his best essay in the lighter ironical vein to which his later years inclined, Veranilda, a romance of the time of Theodoric the Goth, written in solemn fulfilment of a vow of his youth, and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, which to my mind remains a legacy for Time to take account of as the faithful tribute of one of the truest artists of the generation he served.
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 , Charles Dickens , By the Ionian Sea , and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft ; not far below any of which must be rated four others, The Odd Women , Eve's Ransom , The Whirlpool , and Will Warburton , to which may be added the two collections of short stories.
But he joined little in the talk, and exercised rather a sobering effect upon us. Once or twice he spoke out. Mention was made of Gissing's Papers of Henry Ryecroft, and Father Payne asked him if he had read it. "Oh no, I couldn't read it, of course," said Gladwin; "I looked into it, and had to put it away. I felt as if I had opened a letter addressed to someone else by mistake!"
Salammbô, after all, was a magnificent failure, and Veranilda, well, it must be confessed, sadly but surely, that Veranilda was a failure too. Far otherwise was it with Ryecroft, which represents, as it were, the summa of Gissing's habitual meditation, aesthetic feeling and sombre emotional experience.
He shrank from the restraints and humiliations to which the poor and shabbily dressed private tutor is exposed revealed to us with a persuasive terseness in the pages of The Unclassed, New Grub Street, Ryecroft, and the story of Topham's Chance. Writing fiction in a garret for a sum sufficient to keep body and soul together for the six months following payment was at any rate better than this.
This superb piece of imaginative prose, of which Shorthouse himself might have been proud, is recalled by an answering note in Ryecroft, in which he says, 'I owe many a page to the street-organs. And, where the pathos has to be distilled from dialogue, I doubt if the author of Jack himself could have written anything more restrainedly touching or in a finer taste than this:
The conclusion of this book and its predecessor, The Odd Women, marks the conclusion of these elaborated problem studies. The inferno of London poverty, social analysis and autobiographical reminiscence, had now alike been pretty extensively drawn upon by Gissing. With different degrees of success he had succeeded in providing every one of his theses with something in the nature of a jack-in-the-box plot which the public loved and he despised. There remained to him three alternatives: to experiment beyond the limits of the novel; to essay a lighter vein of fiction; or thirdly, to repeat himself and refashion old material within its limits. Necessity left him very little option. He adopted all three alternatives. His best success in the third department was achieved in Eve's Ransom . Burrowing back into a projection of himself in relation with a not impossible she, Gissing here creates a false, fair, and fleeting beauty of a very palpable charm. A growing sense of her power to fascinate steadily raises Eve's standard of the minimum of luxury to which she is entitled. And in the course of this evolution, in the vain attempt to win beauty by gratitude and humility, the timid Hilliard, who seeks to propitiate his charmer by ransoming her from a base liaison and supporting her in luxury for a season in Paris, is thrown off like an old glove when a richer parti declares himself. The subtlety of the portraiture and the economy of the author's sympathy for his hero impart a subacid flavour of peculiar delicacy to the book, which would occupy a high place in the repertoire of any lesser artist. It well exhibits the conflict between an exaggerated contempt for, and an extreme susceptibility to, the charm of women which has cried havoc and let loose the dogs of strife upon so many able men. In The Whirlpool of 1897, in which he shows us a number of human floats spinning round the vortex of social London, Gissing brings a melodramatic plot of a kind disused since the days of Demos to bear upon the exhausting lives and illusive pleasures of the rich and cultured middle class. There is some admirable writing in the book, and symptoms of a change of tone (the old inclination to whine, for instance, is scarcely perceptible) suggestive of a new era in the work of the novelist relatively mature in many respects as he now manifestly was. Further progress in one of two directions seemed indicated: the first leading towards the career of a successful society novelist 'of circulating fame, spirally crescent, the second towards the frame of mind that created Ryecroft. The second fortunately prevailed. In the meantime, in accordance with a supreme law of his being, his spirit craved that refreshment which Gissing found in revisiting Italy. 'I want, he cried, 'to see the ruins of Rome: I want to see the Tiber, the Clitumnus, the Aufidus, the Alban Hills, Lake Trasimenus! It is strange how these old times have taken hold of me. The mere names in Roman history make my blood warm. Of him the saying of Michelet was perpetually true: 'J'ai passé
Is it I, Henry Ryecroft, who, after a night of untroubled rest, rise unhurriedly, dress with the deliberation of an oldish man, and go downstairs happy in the thought that I can sit reading, quietly reading, all day long? Is it I, Henry Ryecroft, the harassed toiler of so many a long year? I dare not think of those I have left behind me, there in the ink-stained world.
In his novels he depicted the environment and struggles of the lower and lower middle classes with a somewhat pessimistic and depressing realism, although his last work, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, seemed to usher in the dawn of a somewhat brighter outlook.
The resentment that welled up in the man who told the story of Henry Ryecroft obtains the mastery, and I feel one in spirit with that lonely analyst of disillusions.
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