The Private Life of Henry Maitland was published by Eveleigh Nash in 1912. Roberts revised it for a second edition, published by Nash & Grayson in 1923. A new edition, using the latter text, with notes by Morchand Bishop, was published by The Richards Press in 1958. Roberts died in 1942.

In The Private Life, for motives which are not entirely clear but presumably included the wish to forestall criticism for revealing hitherto little-known facts about Gissing’s life, Roberts took the peculiar step of concealing the identities of people, places and book titles behind pseudonyms. He even changed the titles of his own books. Most of these pseudonyms are obvious to a student of Gissing, and in this text (based on the second edition) I have replaced them with the correct names. In a few cases I have used the more tentative identifications provided by Bishop in his edition. Some place names, and personages' names, may remain disguised  and are being investigated. I have not attempted to correct any of Roberts' errors of fact, so this text cannot be fully relied upon as an accurate record of Gissing's life. I am working on a better edition. PM.

This book was dictated by J. H. mostly in my presence, and I consider it well worth publishing. No doubt Henry Maitland is not famous, though since his death a great deal has been written of him. Much of it, outside of literary criticism, has been futile, false, and uninstructed. But J. H. really knew the man, and here is what he said of him. We shall be told, no doubt, that we have used Maitland's memory for our own ends. Let that be as it may; when there is no proof of guilt, there may well be none of innocence. The fact remains that Henry Maitland's life was worth doing, even in the abbreviated and censored form in which it now appears. The man was not eminent, only because he was not popular and did not live long enough. One gets to eminence nowadays by longevity, self-praise, or bad work. While Maitland starved, X or Y or Z might wallow in a million sixpences. In this almost childishly simple account of a man's life there is the essence of a literary epoch. Here is a writing man put down, crudely it may be, but with a certain power. There is no book quite like it in the English tongue, and the critic may take what advantage he will of that opening for his wit. At any rate we have a portrait emerging which is real. Henry Maitland stands on his feet, and on his living feet. He is not a British statue done in the best mortuary manner. There is far too little sincere biography in English. We are a mealy-mouthed race, hypocrites by the grave and the monument. Ten words of natural eulogy, and another ten of curious and sympathetic comment, may be better than tons of marble built up by a hired liar with his tongue in his cheek. In the whole book, which cannot be published now, there are things worth waiting for. I have cut and retrenched with pain, for I wanted to risk the whole, but no writer or editor is his own master in England. I am content to have omitted some truth if I have permitted nothing false. The reader who can say truly, "I should not have liked to meet Henry Maitland," is a fool or a fanatic, or more probably both. Neither of those who are primarily responsible for this little book is answerable to such. We do not desire his praise, or even his mere allowance. All who are interested in the art of letters and those who practise in the High Court of Literature, will perceive what we had in our minds. Here is life, not a story or a constructed diary, and the art with which it is done is a secondary matter. If Henry Maitland bleeds and howls, so did Philoctetes, and the outcry of Henry Maitland is most pertinent to our lives. For all life, even at its best, is tragic; and there is much in Maitland's which is dramatically common to our world as we see it and live in it. If we have lessened him at times from the point of view of a hireling in biographic praise, we have set him down life size all the same; and as we ask for no praise, we care for no blame. Here is the man.

The full manuscript, which may possibly be published after some years, is, in the meantime, placed in safe custody.

MORLEY ROBERTS 

PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION (1923)

This book has been gone over mainly from the literary point of view as, owing to illness when it was first issued, none of the slips and repetitions which inevitably occur during rapid dictation was corrected in the proofs. Two or three notes have been added as well as an appendix upon some new matter which came from Chicago. A few paragraphs which now seem unnecessary have been removed, but the book remains substantially what it was, still as rough, perhaps, as a hasty sketch in clay, but not without life and rude vigour, although it may show the modeller's very finger marks and therefore lack finish, as it must necessarily lack finality.

MORLEY ROBERTS 

CHAPTER 1

It is never an easy thing to write the life, or even such a sketch as I propose to make, of a friend whom one knew well, and in George Gissing's case it is uncommonly difficult. The usual biographer is content with writing panegyric, and as he must depend for his material, and even sometimes for his eventual remuneration, on the relatives of his subject, he is from the start in a hopeless position, except, it may be, as regards the public side of the life in question. But in the case of a man of letters the personal element is the only real and valuable one, or so it seems to me, and even if I were totally ignorant of Gissing's work I think it would yet be possible for me to do a lifelike sketch of him. I believe, moreover, that it is my duty to do it, although it may be painful to those connected with him. Yet soon after his death many came and asked me to write his biography. It was an understood thing that of all his friends I knew him best, and was certainly the chief authority on his career from the Owens College days up to his final break with his second wife. But in 1904 there were many obstacles to my doing this work. His two sons were young. His sisters and his mother were still alive. I say nothing of the wife herself, then being taken care of, or of a third lady of whom I must speak presently. Several people came to me with proposals about a book on George Gissing. One of the partners of a big publishing house made me a definite offer for it on behalf of his firm. On the other hand one of his executors, Miss Collet, a most kindly and amiable and very able woman employed in a great accountant's office in the city, who had done very much for George Gissing in his later life, begged me not to do the book, or if I did it to hold it over until her responsibilities as executrix and trustee for the sons were at an end. But it is now nearly nine years since he died, and I feel that if I do not put down at once what I knew of him it never will be written, and something will be lost, something which has perhaps a little value, even though not so great as those could wish who knew and loved George Gissing.

There is no doubt that many people will accuse me of desiring to use his memory for my own advantage. "My withers are unwrung." Those who speak in this way must have little knowledge of the poor profit to be derived from writing such a book, and the proportion of that profit to the labour employed in it. On three separate occasions I spoke to Gissing about writing his biography, and it was an understood thing between us that if he died before me I was to write his life and tell the whole and absolute truth about him. This he gave me the most definite permission to do. I believe he felt that it might in some ways be of service to humanity for such a book to be written. Only the other day, when I wrote to Miss Collet concerning the biography, she answered me: " If I seem lacking in cordiality in this matter do not attribute it to any want of sympathy with you. I am not attempting to dissuade you. George Gissing was sent into hell for the purpose of saving souls; perhaps it is a necessary thing that his story should be written by all sorts of people from their different points of view." Once I proposed to him to use his character and career as the chief figure in a long story. He wrote to me, "By all means. Why not?" Had I not the letter in which he said this I should myself almost doubt my own recollection, but it is certain that he knew the value of his own experience, and felt that he might perhaps by his example save some from suffering as he suffered.

No doubt very much that I say of him will not be true to others. To myself at any rate it is true. We know very little of each other, and after all it is perhaps in biography that one is most acutely conscious of the truth in the pragmatic view of truth. Those things are true in George Gissing's life and character which fit in wholly with all my experience of him and make a coherent and likely theory. I used to think I knew him very well, and yet when I remember and reflect it seems to me that I know exceedingly little about him. And yet again, I am certain that of the two people in the world with whom I was best acquainted he was one. We go through life believing that we know many, but if we sit down and attempt to draw them we find here and there unrelated facts and many vague incoherencies. We are in a fog about our very dear friend whom but yesterday we were ready to judge and criticise with an air of final knowledge. There is something humiliating in this, and yet how should we, who know so little of ourselves, know even those we love? To my mind, with all his weaknesses, which I shall not extenuate, Gissing was a noble and notable character, and if anything I should write may endure but a little while it is because there is really something of him in my words. I am far more concerned to write about George Gissing for those who loved him than for those who loved him not, and I shall be much better pleased if what I do about him takes the shape of an impression rather than of anything like an ordinary biography. Every important and unimportant political fool who dies nowadays is buried under obituary notices and a mausoleum in two volumes - a mausoleum which is, as a rule, about as high a work of art as the angels on tombstones in an early Victorian cemetery. But Gissing, I think, deserves, if not a better, a more sympathetic tribute.

When I left Bedford Grammar School my father, being in the Civil Service, was sent to Manchester as Surveyor of Taxes, and his family soon followed him. I continued my own education at Owens College, which was then beginning to earn a high reputation as an educational centre. Some months before I met Gissing personally I knew his reputation was that of an extraordinary young scholar. Even as a boy of sixteen he swept everything before him. There was nobody in the place who could touch him at classical learning, and everybody prophesied the very greatest future for the boy. I met him first in a little hotel, not very far from the College, where some of us young fellows used to go in the intervals of lectures to play a game of billiards. I remember quite well seeing him sit on a little table swinging his legs, and to this day I can remember somewhat of the impression he made upon me. He was curiously bright, with a very mobile face. He had abundant masses of brown hair combed backwards over his head, grey-blue eyes, a very sympathetic mouth, an extraordinarily well-shaped chin - although perhaps both mouth and chin were a little weak - and a great capacity for talking and laughing.

Henceforth he and I became very firm friends at the College, although we belonged to two entirely different sets. I was supposed to be an extraordinarily rowdy person, and was always getting into trouble both with the authorities and with my fellows, and he was a man who loathed anything like rowdiness, could not fight if he tried, objected even then to the Empire, hatedpatriotism, and thought about nothing but ancient Greece and Rome, or so it would appear to those who knew him at that time.

I learnt then a little of his early history. Even when he was but a boy of ten or eleven he was recognised as a creature of most brilliant promise. He always believed that he owed most, and perhaps everything, to his father, who must have been a very remarkable man. Henry never spoke about him in later life without emotion and affection. I have often thought since that Gissing felt that most of his disasters sprang from the premature death of his father, whom he loved so tenderly. Indeed the elder man must have been a remarkable figure, a gentle, courtly, and most kindly man, himself born in exile and placed in alien circumstances. Gissing often used to speak, with a catch in his voice, of the way his father read to him. I do not remember what books he read, but they were the classic authors of England; Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Tennyson. Some seem to imagine that the father had what is called a well-stocked library. This was not true, but he had many good books and taught his son to love them. Among these there was one great volume of Hogarth's drawings which came into George Gissing's personal possession, only, I think, when he was finally domiciled in a London flat, where he and I often looked at it. It is curious that even as a boy Hogarth had a fascination for him. He sometimes copied these drawings, for as a child he had no little skill as a draughtsman. What appealed to him in later days in Hogarth was the power of the man's satire, his painful bitterness, which can be equalled only by the ironies of Swift in another medium. Although personally I admire Hogarth I could never look at him with anything like pleasure or, indeed, without acute discomfort. I remember that Gissing in later years said in his book about Charles Dickens: " With these faces who would spend hours of leisure? Hogarth copied in the strict sense of the word. He gives us life and we cannot bear it."

Gissing's family came, I think, from Worcester, but something led the elder Gissing to Wakefield and there he came in contact with a chemist called Hick, whose business he presently bought. Perhaps the elder Gissing was not a wholly happy man. He was very gentle, but not a person of marked religious feeling. Indeed I think the attitude of the family at that time was one of free thought. From everything that George said of his father it always seemed to me that the man had been an alien in the cold Yorkshire town where his son was born. And Gissing knew that had his father lived he would never have been thrown alone into the great city of Manchester, "Lord of himself, that heritage of woe." Not all women comprehend the dangers that their sons may meet in such surroundings, and those who had charge of George Gissing's future never understood or recognised them in his youth. But his father would have known. In one chapter of the The Whirlpool there is very much of Gissing. It is a curiously wrought picture of a father and his son in which he himself played alternately the part of father and child. I knew his anxieties for his own children, and on reading that chapter one sees them renewed. But in it there was much that was not himself. It was drawn rather from what he believed his father had felt. In The Whirlpool  the little boy spends an hour alone with his father just before bedtime, and he calls it "A golden hour, sacred to memories of the world's own childhood."

Gissing went to school in Wakefield and this school has been called a kind of "Dotheboys Hall," which of course is absolutely ridiculous. It was not, in fact, a boarding-school at all, but a day school. The man who ran it was called Harrison.  Gissing said he was an uneducated man, or at any rate uneducated from his point of view in later years, yet he was a person of very remarkable character, and, taking it all round, did very good work. A man named Christopher started this school and sold it to Harrison, who had, I believe, some kind of a degree obtained at Durham. The boys who attended it were good middle class and lower middle class, some the sons of professional men, some the offspring of the richer tradesmen. Upon the whole it was a remarkably good school for that time. Many of the boys actually left the Grammar School at Wakefield to attend it. George Gissing always owned that Harrison took great pains with his scholars, and affirmed that many owed him much. As I said, the general religious air of Gissing's  home at that time was not orthodox. I believe the feminine members of the family attended a Unitarian Church, but the father did not go to church at all. One example of this religious attitude of his home came out when Harrison called on his boys to repeat the collect of the day and Gissing replied abruptly that they did not do that kind of thing at home. Whereupon Harrison promptly set him to learn it, saying sternly that it would do him no harm.

For the most part in those early days the elder Gissing and his son spent Sunday afternoon in the garden belonging to their Wakefield house. Oddly enough this garden was not attached to the dwelling but was a kind of allotment. It has been photographically reproduced by George Gissing in the seventh chapter of the first volume of A Life's Morning.  Very often George Gissing's father read to him in that garden.

One of Gissing's schoolfellows at Harrison's school was the son of the man from whom his father had bought the druggist's business. The elder Hick was a friend of Barry Sullivan, and theatrically mad. He started plays in which George always took some part, though not the prominent part which has been attributed to him by some people. Nevertheless he was always interested in plays and had a very dramatic way of reading anything that was capable of dramatic interpretation. He always loved the sound of words, and even when first at Manchester he took down a German book and read some of it aloud to the younger Hick who did not know German and said so. Whereupon Gissing shook his fist at him and said : " But Hick, listen, listen, listen - doesn't it sound fine?" This endured through all his life. At school he used to read Oliver Wendell Holmes aloud to some of the other boys. This was when he was thirteen. Even then he always laid stress on beautiful words and loved their rhythm.

His father being a poor man, there would have been little opportunity for George Gissing to go to Manchester and to its great college if he had not obtained some scholarship. This became even more imperative when his father died. He did obtain this scholarship when he was somewhere about sixteen, and immediately afterwards was sent over to Manchester quite alone and put into lodgings there. At his school in Wakefield he had taken every possible prize, and I think it was two exhibitions from the London University which enabled him to go to Manchester. The college was a curious institution, one of the earliest endeavours to create a kind of university centre in a great provincial city. We certainly had a very wonderful staff there, especially on the scientific side. Among the men of science at the college were Sir Henry Roscoe; Schorlemmer, the great chemist; Dittmar, also a chemist, and Balfour Stewart, the physicist. On the classical side were Professor Greenwood and Professor Augustus Wilkins, who were not by any means so notable as their scientific colleagues. The eminence of our scientific professors did not matter very much, perhaps, from George Gissing's point of view, for from the day of his birth to the day of his death, he took no interest whatever in science and loathed all forms of speculative thought with a peculiar and almost amusing horror. Mathematics he detested, and if in later years I ever attempted to touch upon metaphysical questions he used to shut up, to use an American phrase, just like a clam. But on the classical side he was much more than merely successful. He took every prize open to him. In his book Born in Exile there is a picture of a youth on prize day going up to receive prize after prize, and I know that this chapter contains much of what he himself must have felt when I saw him retire to a modest back bench loaded with books bound in calf and tooled in gold.

Of course a college of this description, which was not, properly speaking, a university, could only be regarded, for a boy of his culture, as a stepping-stone to one of the older universities, probably Cambridge, since most of my own friends who did go to the university went there from Manchester. I do not think there was a professor or lecturer or a single student in the college who did not anticipate for George Gissing one of the brightest futures, so far as success at the university could make it so. It is possible that I alone out of those who regarded him with admiration and affection had some doubt of this, and that was not because I disagreed as a boy with any of the estimates that had been formed of him, but simply because for some reason or another he chose me as a confidant. Many years afterwards he said to me with painful bitterness : "It was a cruel and most undesirable thing that I, at the age of sixteen, should have been turned loose in a big city, compelled to live alone in lodgings, with nobody interested in me but those at the college. I see now that one of my sisters should certainly have been sent with me to Manchester."

One day he showed me a photograph. It was that of a young girl, aged perhaps seventeen - he at the time being very little more - with her hair down her back. She was not beautiful, but had a certain prettiness, the mere prettiness of youth, and she was undoubtedly not a lady. After some interrogation on my part he told me that she was a young prostitute whom he knew, and it will not be exaggerating my own feelings to say that I recognised instinctively and at once that if his relations with her were not put an end to some kind of disaster was in front of him. It was not that I knew very much about life, for what could a boy of less than eighteen really know about it? - but I had some kind of instinctive sense in me and was perfectly aware, even then, that George Gissing had about as little of it as anybody I had ever met up to that time, or anybody I could ever expect to meet. It may seem strange to some that even at that time I had no rigid moral views, and extremely little religion, although I thought about it sufficiently to become deliberately a Unitarian, refusing to be confirmed in the English Church, very much to the rage of the parish clergyman, and with the result of much friction with my father. Yet I had some wisdom and did my best to get Gissing to give up this girl. He would not do so, and the thing went on, so far as I am aware, for the best part of a year. He did all he could, apparently, to get Marianne Helen (Nell) Harrison to leave the streets. He even bought a sewing machine and gave it her with this view. That was another sample of his early idealism.

This was in 1876, and the younger Hick, who was three years older than Gissing, had then just qualified as a doctor. He was an assistant at Darwen and one day went over to Manchester to see George, who told him what he had told me about this Nell Harrison. He even went so far as to say that he was going to marry her. Dr. Hick, being older, and knowing a little of life through his own profession, did not approve of this and objected strongly. Afterwards he regretted a thousand times that he had not written direct to Gissing's people to tell them of what was going on. Yet, although he was the older man, he was not so much older as to have got rid of the boyish loyalty of one youth to another, and he did not do what he knew he ought to have done. It is only fair to say he was still very young. He found out later that Gissing had even sold his father's watch to help this girl. This affair was also known to a young accountant who came from Wakefield, but with whom I was not acquainted, and also to another man at the college who is now in the Government Service. So far as I remember the accountant was not a good influence, but his other friend did what he could to get Gissing to break off this very undesirable relationship, with no more success than myself

I have never understood how it was that he got into such frightful financial difficulties. I can only imagine that Nell must have had, in one way or another, the greater portion of the income he got from the scholarships he held. I do know that his affection for her seemed at this time to be very sincere. And out of that affection there grew up, very naturally, a horror in his sensitive mind for the life this poor child was leading. He haunted the streets which she haunted, and sometimes saw her with other men. I suppose even then she must have been frightfully extravagant, and perhaps given to drink, but considering what his income was he should have been able to give her a pound a week if necessary, and yet have sufficient to live on without great difficulty. Nevertheless he did get into difficulties, and never even spoke to me about them. I was quite aware, in a dim kind of way, that he was in trouble and looked very ill, but he did not give me his fullest confidence, although one day he told me, as he had told Hick, that he proposed to marry her. I was only a boy, but I was absolutely enraged at the notion and used every possible means to prevent him from committing such an absurd act of folly. When we met I discussed it with him. I suppose I wrote him a dozen letters begging that he would do no such foolish thing. He would wrong himself, and could do the girl no possible good. My instincts told me even then that, instead of being raised, she would pull him down. These letters of mine were afterwards discovered in his rooms when the tragedy had happened.

During that time in 1876, we students at Owens College were much disturbed by a series of thefts in the common room,, and from a locker room in which we kept our books and papers and our overcoats. Books disappeared unaccountably and so did coats. Money was taken from the pockets of coats, and nobody knew who was to blame for it. Naturally enough we suspected a porter or one of the lower staff, but we were wrong. Without our knowledge the college authorities set a detective to discover the offender. One day I went into the common room, and standing in front of the fire found a man, a young fellow about my age, called Taylor, with whom I frequently played chess - he was afterwards president of the Chess Club at Oxford - and he said to me: "Have you heard the news?" " What news?" I asked. " Your friend, George Gissing, has been stealing those things that we have lost," said he. And when he said so I very nearly struck him, for it seemed a gross and incredible slander. But unfortunately it was true, and at that very moment Gissing was in gaol. A detective had hidden himself in the small room leading out of the bigger room where the lockers were and had caught him in the act. It was a very ghastly business and certainly the first great shock I ever got in my life. I think it was the same for everybody who knew the boy. The whole college was in a most extraordinary ferment, and all the Manchester people who took any real interest in the institution.

Professor Greenwood, who was then the head of the college, sent for me and asked me what I knew of the matter. This was because the police had found in Gissing's room letters from me which referred to Nell Harrison. I told the professor with the utmost frankness everything I knew, and maintained that I had done my utmost to get him to break with her, a statement all my letters supported. I have often imagined a certain suspicion, in the minds of some of those who are given to suspicion, that I had myself been leading the same kind of life as George Gissing. This was certainly not true; but one or two of those who did not like me - and there are always some - even threw out hints that I knew Gissing had been taking these things. Yet after my very painful interview with Professor Greenwood, who was a very delightful and kindly personality - though certainly not so strong a man as the head of such a place should be - I saw that he gave me every credit for what I had tried to do. Among my own friends at the college was a young fellow, Edward Wolff, the son of the Rev. Mr. Wolff, the Unitarian minister at the chapel in Broad Street. Edward was afterwards fifth wrangler of his year at Cambridge. He induced his father to interest himself in George Gissing's future. Mr. Wolff and several other men of some eminence in the city did what they could for him. They got together a little money and on his release sent him away to America. He was met on coming out of prison by Dr. Hick's father, who also helped him in every possible way.

It seemed to me then that I had probably seen the last of Gissing, and the turn my own career took shortly afterwards rendered this even more likely. In the middle of 1876 I had a very serious disagreement with my father, who was a man of great ability but very violent temper, and left home. On September 23 of that year I sailed for Australia and remained there, working mostly in the bush, for the best part of three years. During all that time I heard little of George Gissing, though I have some dim remembrance of a letter from him telling me that he was in America. It was in 1879 that I shipped before the mast at Melbourne in a Blackwall barque and came back to England as a seaman.
 

CHAPTER TWO

A psychologist or a romancer might comment on the matter of the last chapter till the sun went down, but the world perhaps would not be much further advanced. It is better for the man's apology or condemnation to come out of the drama that followed. This is where Life mocks at Art. The tragic climax and catastrophe are in the first act, and the remainder is a long and bitter commentary. Gissing and I seldom discussed his early life. Practically we never spoke of Manchester though we often enough touched on ancient things by implication. His whole life, as I saw it and shall relate it, is but a development of the nature which made his disaster possible.

So I come back to my own return from Australia. I had gone out there as a boy, and came back a man, for I had had a man's experiences; work, adventure, travel. hunger, and thirst. All this hardened a somewhat neurotic temperament, at any rate for the time, till life in a city, and the humaner world of books removed the temper which one gets when plunged in the baths of the ocean. During some months I worked for a position in the Civil Service and thought very little of Gissing, for he was lost. Yet as I got back into the classics he recurred to me at times, and I wrote about him to my own friends in Manchester. They sent me vague reports of him in the United States, and then at last there came word that he was once more in England; possibly, and even probably, in London. Soon afterwards I found in the Athenaeum an advertisement of a book entitled Workers in the Dawn by George Gissing. As soon as I saw it I went straightway to the firm that published it, and being ignorant of the ways of publishers, demanded Gissing's address, which was promptly and very properly refused - for all they ,knew I might have been a creditor. They promised, however, to send on a letter to him, and I wrote at once, receiving an answer the very next day. He appointed as our meeting-place the smoking-room of the Horse Shoe Hotel at the bottom of Tottenham Court Road. It was probably one of the most curious meetings that had ever taken place in such a locality. We met late at night in the crowded smoking-room, and I found him very much his old self, for he was still a handsome and intelligent boy, though somewhat worn and haggard considering his years. He told me, chuckling, that I looked like a soldier, which was no doubt the result of some years on horseback - possibly I walked with a cavalry stride. We sat and drank coffee, and had whiskey, and smoked, until we were turned out of the hotel at half-past twelve. It was perhaps owing to the fact that I was ever the greater talker that he learnt more of my life in Australia than I learnt of his in the United States. He was, in fact, somewhat reserved about his adventures there. And yet, little by little, I learnt a great deal - it was always with him a case of little by little. At no time did he possess any great fluency or power of words when speaking of his own life.

It seems that friends had given him some letters to writers and others in New York, and he made the acquaintance there of many whose names I forget. I recollect only the name of Lloyd Garrison, the poet. Gissing told me that once Lloyd Garrison got him to go home with him about two o'clock in the morning to hear a sonnet on which Garrison had been working, as he affirmed almost with tears, for three whole months. As Gissing said, the result hardly justified the toil. Among his new friends were some of artistic and literary tendencies who had made a little club, where it was de rigueur at certain times to produce something in the form of a poem. Gissing showed me the set of verses with which he had paid his literary footing; they were amusing, but of no great importance. So long as Gissing's money lasted in New York he had not an unpleasant time. It was only when he had exhausted his means and had to earn a living by using his wits that he found himself in great difficulties, which were certainly not to be mitigated by the production of verse. But Gissing never pretended to write poetry, though he sometimes tried. I still have a few of his poems in my possession, one of them a set of love verses which he had put into a book but omitted on my most fervent recommendation. I believe, however, that there is still in existence much of his verse, if he did not destroy it in later years when circumstances, his wanderings and his poverty, made it inconvenient to preserve comparatively worthless papers. And yet, if he did not do so, it might now be of no small interest to men of letters.

When his means were almost exhausted he went to Boston, and from there drifted to Chicago. With a very few additions and alterations, the account given in New Grub Street would contain the essence of Gissing's own adventures in America. It is, however, written in a very light style, and is more or less tinged with humour. This humour is purely literary, for he felt very little of it when he was telling me the story. He certainly lived during two days, for instance, upon peanuts, and he did it in a town called Troy. I never gathered what actually drove him to Chicago: it was, perhaps, the general idea one gets in America that by going west one goes to the land of chances, but it certainly was not the place for George Gissing. As he relates in New Grub Street, he reached it with less than five dollars in his pocket, and with a courage at which he himself marvelled, paid four and a half dollars for a week's board and lodging, which made him secure for the moment. This boarding-house he once orr twice described to me. It was an unclean place somewhere on Wabash Avenue, and was occupied very largely by small actors and hangers-on at the Chicago theatres. The food was poor, the service was worse, and there was only one common room in which they ate and lived. It was at this time, when he had taken a look round Chicago and found it very like Hell or Glasgow, which, indeed, it is, that he determined to attack the editor of the Chicago Tribune. The description he gives of this scene in New Grub Street is not wholly accurate. I remember he said that he walked to and fro for hours outside the office of the paper before he took what remained of his courage in both hands. rushed into the elevator, and was carried to an upper storey. He asked for work, and the accessible and genial editor demanded, in return, what experience he had had of journalism. He said, with desperate boldness, "None whatever," and the editor, not at all unkindly, asked him what he thought he could do for them. He replied, "There is one thing wanting in your paper. "What is that ? " asked the editor. "Fiction," said Gissing, "I should like to write you some." The editor considered the matter, and said that he had no objection to using a story provided it was good; it would serve for one of the weekly supplements, because these American papers at the end of the week have amazing supplements, full of all conceivable sorts of matter, "litter," good, bad, and indifferent. Gissing asked if he might try him with a story of English life, and got permission to do so.

He went away and walked up and down the lake shore for hours in the bitter wind, trying to think out a story, and at last discovered one. On his way home he bought a pen, ink, and paper, which they did not supply at the boarding-house. As it was impossible to write in his bedroom where there was, of course, no fire, and no proper heating, it being so poor a place, he was compelled to write on the table of the common room with a dozen other men there, talking, smoking, and no doubt quarrelling. He wrote this story in a couple of days, and it was long enough to fill several columns of the paper. To his intense relief it was accepted by the editor after a day or two's waiting, and he got eighteen dollars according to New Grub Street, though I believe as a matter of fact it was less in reality. He stayed for some time in Chicago working for the Tribune, but at last found that he could write no more. I believe the editor himself suggested that the stories were perhaps not quite what he wanted. The one that I saw I only remember vaguely. It was, however, a sort of psychological love-story placed in London, written without much distinction.

The account Whelpdale gives in New Grub Street of his visit to Troy is also fairly representative of Gissing's experiences. It was there that he lived for two or three days on peanuts, now and then buying five cents' worth in the street at some Italian peanut stand. In New Grub Street he calls them loathsome, and no doubt they soon do become disagreeable. A few are rather pleasing, more than a few are objectionable; and when anybody tries a whole diet of them for a day or two there is no doubt "loathsome" would be the proper word. After that he worked a few days for a photographer, and then, I think, for a plumber, but of this I remember very little. It is quite certain that he never earned enough money in America to enable him to return to England, but who lent it to him I have no idea. To have been twenty-four hours with no more than a handful of peanuts in his pocket was no doubt unpleasant, but, as I told him, it seemed very little to me. On one occasion in Australia I had been rather more than four and a half days without food when caught in a flood. Nevertheless this starvation was for him one of the initiation ceremonies into the mysteries of literature, and he was always accustomed to say, "How can such an one write? He never starved."

Still, to have been hard up in Chicago was a very great experience, as every one knows who knows that roaring city of the plains. Since that time I got to know Chicago well, and was there "dead broke." Thus I can imagine the state that he must have been in, and how desperate he must have become, to get out of his difficulties in the way he describes. The endeavour to obtain work in a hustling country like the United States is ever a desperate proceeding for a nervous and sensitive man, and what it must have been to George Gissing to do what he did with the editor of the ChicagoTribune can only be imagined by those who knew him. In many ways he was the most modest and the shyest man who ever lived, and yet he actually told this editor: "I have come to point out to you there is a serious lack in your paper." To those who knew Gissing this must seem as surprising as it did to myself, and in later years he sometimes thought of that incident with inexpressible joy at his own courage. Of course the oddest thing about the whole affair is that up to that moment he had never written fiction at all, and only did so because he was driven to desperation. As will be seen when I come later to discuss his qualifications as a writer this is a curious comment on much of his bigger work. To me it seems that he should never have written fiction at all, although he did it so admirably. I think it would be very interesting if some American student of Gissing would turn over the files of the Tribune in the year 1877 and disinter the work he did there. This is practically all I ever learnt about his life on the other side of the Atlantic. I was, indeed, more anxious to discover how he lived in London, and in what circumstances. I asked him as delicately as possible about his domestic circumstances, and he then told me that he was married, and that his wife was with him in London.

It is very curious that I never met his first wife. I had seen her photograph, and on several occasions was in the next room to her. On those occasions she was usually unfit to be seen, because she was intoxicated. When we renewed our acquaintance in the Horse Shoe Tavern he was living in mean apartments in one of the back streets off Tottenham Court Road not very far from the hotel and, indeed, not far from a cellar that he once occupied in a neighbouring street. Little by little, as I met him again and again, I began to get some hold upon his actual life. Gradually he became more confidential, and I gathered from him that the habits of his wife were perpetually compelling him to move from one house to another. From what he told me, sometimes hopefully, and more often in desperation, it seems that this poor creature made vain and violent efforts to reform, generally after some long debauch. And of this I am very sure, that no man on earth could have made more desperate efforts to help her than he did. But the fact remains that they were turned out of one lodging after another, for even the poorest places, it seems, could hardly stand a woman of her character in the house. I fear it was not only that she drank but that at intervals she deserted him and went back, for the sake of more drink and for the sake of money with which he was unable to supply her, to her old melancholy trade. And yet she returned again with tears, and he took her in, doing his best for her. It was six months after our first meeting in Tottenham Court Road that he asked me to go and spend an evening with him. Naturally enough I then expected to make Mrs. Gissing's acquaintance, but on my arrival he showed some disturbance of mind and told me that she was ill and would be unable to see me. The house they lived in then was not very far from Mornington Crescent. It was certainly in some dull neighbourhood not half a mile away. The street was, I think, a cul-de-sac. It was full of children of the lower orders playing in the roadway. It being Saturday night, their fathers and mothers sat upon the doorsteps, or quarrelled, or talked in the road. The front room in which he received me was both mean and dirty. The servant who took me upstairs was a poor foul slut, and I do not think the room had been properly cleaned or dusted for a very long time. The, whole of the furniture in it was certainly not worth seven and sixpence from the point of view of the ordinary furniture dealer. There were signs in it that it had been occupied by a woman, and one without the common elements of decency and cleanliness. Under a miserable and broken sofa lay a pair of dirty feminine boots. And yet on one set of poor shelves there were, still shining with gold, the prizes Gissing had won at Owens College, and the painfully acquired later stock of books that he loved so much.

As I came in by arrangement after my own dinner, we simply sat and smoked and drank a little whiskey. Twice in the course of an hour our conversation was interrupted by the servant knocking at the door and beckoning to Gissing to come out. In the next room I then heard voices, sometimes raised, sometimes pleading. When Gissing returned the first time he said to me, "I am very sorry to have to leave you for a few minutes. My wife is really unwell." But I knew by now the disease from which she suffered. Twice or thrice I was within an ace of getting up and saying, "Don't you think I'd better go, old chap?" And then he was called out again. He came back at last in a state of obvious misery and perturbation, and said, "My dear man, my wife is so ill that I think I must ask you to go." I shook hands with him in silence and went, for I understood. A little afterwards he told me that that very afternoon his wife had gone out, and obtaining drink in some way had brought it home with her, and that she was then almost insane with alcohol. This was the kind of life that George Gissing, perhaps a great man of letters, lived for years. Comfortable people talk of his pessimism, and his greyness of outlook, and never understand. The man really was a hedonist, he loved things beautiful - beautiful and orderly. He rejoiced in every form of Art, in books and in music, and in all the finer inheritance of the past. But this was the life he lived, and the life he seemed to be doomed to live from the very first.

When a weak man has a powerful sense of duty he is hard to handle by those who have some wisdom. I had done my best to induce him to give up this woman in the early days, long before he married her, when he was but a foolish boy. Now once more I did my best to get him to leave her, but cannot pretend for an instant that anything I said or did would have had any grave effect if it had not been that the poor woman was herself doomed to be her own destroyer. Her outbreaks became more frequent, her departures from his miserable roof more prolonged. The windy gaslight of the slums appealed to her, and the money that she earned therein; and finally when it seemed that she would return no more he changed his rooms and, through the landlady of the wretched house at which he found she was staying, arranged to pay her ten shillings a week. As I know, he often made less than ten shillings a week, and sometimes found himself starving that she might have so much more to spend in drink.

This went on for years. It was still going on in 1884 when I left England again and went out to Texas. I had failed to make a successful attack upon the English Civil Service, and the hateful work done afterwards caused my health to break down. I was in America for three years, and during that time wrote fully and with a certain regularity to Gissing. When I came back and was writing The Western Avernus, he returned me the letters he had received from me. Among them were some, frequently dealing with literary subjects, addressed from Texas, Minnesota, Iowa, the Rocky Mountains, British Columbia, Oregon, and California. In his letters to me he never referred to Nell, but I gathered that his life was very hard, and understood, without his saying it, that he was still supporting her. I found that this was so when I returned to England in 1887. At that time, by dint of hard laborious work, which included a great deal of teaching, he was making for the first time something of a living. He occupied a respectable but very dismal flat somewhere at the back of Madame Tussaud's, in a place at that time called "Cornwall Residences." It was afterwards renamed "Cornwall Mansions," and I well remember Gissing's frightful and really superfluous scorn of the snobbery which spoke in such a change of name. As I said, we corresponded during the whole of the time I was in America. It is, from any point of view, a very great disaster that in some way, which I cannot account for, I have lost all his letters written to me previous to 1894. Our prolonged, and practically uninterrupted correspondence began in 1884, so I have actually lost the letters of ten whole years. They were interesting from many points of view. Much to my surprise, while I was in America, they came to me, not dated in the ordinary way, but according to the Comtist Calendar. I wrote to him for an explanation, because up to that time I had never heard of it. In his answering letter he told me that he had become a Positivist. This was doubtless owing to the fact that he had come accidentally under the influence of some well-known Positivists.

It seems that in desperation at his utter failure to make a real living at literature he had taken again to a tutor's work, which in a way was where he began. In his marriage certificate he called himself a teacher of languages. But he loathed teaching save in those rare instances where he had an intelligent and enthusiastic pupil. At the time that I came back to England he was teaching Frederic Harrison's sons. Without a doubt Frederic Harrison was extremely kind to George Gissing and perhaps to some little extent appreciated him, in spite of the preface he wrote in later years to the posthumous Veranilda. Gissing was not only tutor to Frederic Harrison's sons, but was also received at his house as a guest. He met there many men of a certain literary eminence; Cotter Morison, for instance, of whom he sometimes spoke to me, especially of his once characterising a social chatterer as a cloaca maxima of small talk. He also met Edward Clodd, with whom he remained on terms of friendship to the last, often visiting him in his house at Aldeburgh, which is known to many men of letters. I think the fact that Edward Clodd was not only a man of letters but also, oddly enough, the secretary of a great business, appealed in some way to Gissing's sense of humour. He liked Clodd amazingly, and it was through him, if I remember rightly, that he became socially acquainted with George Meredith, whom, however, he had met in a business way when Meredith was reading for a firm of publishers at a salary of two hundred a year.

Nevertheless, in spite of his making money by some tutorial work, Gissing was still as poor as a rat in a cellar, and the absurd antinomy between the society he frequented at times and his real position made him sometimes shout with laughter which was not always really humorous. It was during this period of his life that a lady asked him at an "at-home" what his experience was in the management of butlers. According to what he told me he replied seriously that he always strictly refrained from having anything to do with men-servants, as he much preferred a smart-looking young maid. It was during this period that he did some work with a man employed, I think, at the London Skin Hospital. This poor fellow, it seemed, possessed ambition and desired to rise in life. He wanted to pass the London matriculation examination and thus become, as he imagined, somebody of importance. Naturally enough, being but a clerk, he lacked time for work, and the arrangement come to between him and Gissing was that his teacher should go to his lodgings at seven o'clock in the morning and give him his lesson in bed before breakfast. As this was just before the time that Gissing worked for Frederic Harrison, he was too poor, so he said, to pay bus fares from the slum in which he lived, and consequently he had to rise at six o'clock in the morning, walk for a whole hour to his pupil's lodgings, and then was very frequently met with the message that Mr. So-and-so felt much too tired that morning to receive him. It is a curious comment on the authority of The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft which many cling to as undoubtedly authentic, that he mentions this incident as if he did not mind it. As a matter of fact he was furiously wroth with this man for not rising to receive him, and used to go away in a state of almost ungovernable rage, as he told me many and many a time.

After my return from America we began to meet regularly once a week on Sunday afternoons, for I had now commenced my own initiation into the mystery of letters, and had become an author. By Gissing's advice. and, if I may say so, almost by his inspiration - most certainly his encouragement - I wrote The Western Avernus, and, having actually printed a book, felt that there was still another bond between me and Gissing. I used to turn up regularly at 7K Cornwall Residences at three o'clock on Sundays. From then till seven we talked of our work, of Latin and of Greek, of French, and of everything on earth that touched on literature. Long before seven Gissing used to apply himself very seriously to the subject of dinner. As he could not afford two fires he usually cooked his pot on the fire of the sitting-room. This pot of his was a great institution. It reminds me sometimes of the gypsies' pot in which they put everything that comes to hand. Gissing's idea of cooking was fatness and a certain amount of gross abundance. He would put into this pot potatoes, carrots, turnips, portions of meat, perhaps a steak, or on great days a whole rabbit, all of which he himself had bought, and carried home with his own hands. We used to watch the pot boiling, and perhaps about seven or half-past he would investigate its contents with a long two-pronged iron fork, and finally decide much to our joy and contentment that the contents were edible. After our meal, for which I was usually ready, as I was myself practically starving much of this time, we removed the debris, washed up in company, and resumed our literary conversation, which sometimes lasted until ten or eleven. By that time Gissing usually turned me out, although my own day was not necessarily done for several hours.

Those were great talks, but they were nearly always about ancient times, and of the Greeks and Romans, so far as we strayed from English literature. It may seem odd, and it is odd until it is explained, that he took very little interest in the Renaissance. There is still in existence a letter of his to Edward Clodd saying how much he regretted that he took no interest in it. That letter was, I think, dated from Siena, a city of the Renaissance. The truth of the matter is that he was himself essentially a creature of the Renaissance, a pure Humanist. For this very reason he displayed no particular pleasure in that period. He was interested in the time in which the men of the Renaissance revelled after the rediscovery and new birth of learning. He would have been at his best if he had been born when that time was in flower. The fathers of the Renaissance rediscovered Rome and Athens, and so did he. No one can persuade me that if this had been his fate his name would not now have been as sacred to all who love literature as those of Petrarch and his glorious fellows. As a matter of fact it was this very quality of his which gave him such a lofty and lordly contempt for the obscurantist theologian. In my mind I can see him treating, with that irony which was ever his favourite weapon, some relic of the dark ages of the schools. In those hours that we spent together it was wonderful to hear him talk of Greece even before he knew it, for he saw it as it had been, or as his mind made him think it had been, not with the modern Greek - who is perhaps not a Greek at all - shouting in the market-place. I think that he had a historical imagination of a very high order, even though he undoubtedly failed when endeavouring to use it. That was because he used it in the wrong medium. But when he saw the Acropolis in his mind he saw it before the Turks had stabled their horses in the Parthenon, and before the English, worse vandals than the Turks, had brought away to the biting smoke of London the marbles of Pheidias. Even as a boy he loved the roar and fume of Rome, although he had not yet seen it and could only imagine it. He saw in Italy the land of Dante and Boccaccio, a land still peopled in the south towards Sicily with such folks as these and Horace and Theocritus had known. My own education had been wrought out in strange rough places in the new lands. It was a fresh education for me to come back to London and sit with Gissing on these marvellous Sunday afternoons and evenings when he wondered if the time would ever come for him to see Italy and Greece in all reality. It was for the little touches of realism, the little pictures in the Odes, that he loved Horace, and loved still more his Virgil; and, even more, Theocritus and Moschus, for Theocritus wrote things which were ancient and yet modern, full of the truth of humanity. Like all the men of the Renaissance he turned his eyes wistfully to the immemorial past, renewed in the magical alembic of his own mind.

Nevertheless, great as these hours were that we spent together, they were sometimes deeply melancholy, and he had nothing to console him for the miseries that were ever in the background. It was upon one of these Sundays, I think early in January 1888, that I found him in a peculiarly melancholy and desperate condition. No doubt he was overworked, for he was always overworked; but he said that he could stand it no longer, he must get out of London for a few days or so. For some reason, which I cannot for the world understand, he decided to go to Eastbourne, and begged me to go with him. Why he should have selected, in Christmas weather and an east wind, what is possibly the coldest town in England in such conditions, I cannot say, but I remember that the journey down to the sea was mercilessly cold. Of course we went third class, and the carriages were totally unheated. We were both of us practically in extreme poverty. I was living in a single room in Chelsea, for which I paid four shillings a week, and for many months my total weekly expenses were something under twelve shillings. At that particular moment he was doing extremely badly, and the ten shillings that he paid regularly to his wife frequently left him with insufficient to live upon. I can hardly understand how it was that he determined to spend even the little extra money needed for such a journey. When we reached Eastbourne we walked down to the sea front with our bags in our hands, and then, going into a poor back street, selected rooms. It was, perhaps, due to what he and I often called "the native malignity of matter," and his extreme ill luck in the matter of landladies which pursued him for ever throughout his life in lodgings, that the particular landlady of the house in which we took refuge was more than commonly incapable. The dwelling itself was miserably draughty and cold, and wretchedly furnished. The cast wind which blows over the flat marshes between Eastbourne and the Downs entered the house at every crack, and there were many of them. The first night we were in the town it snowed very heavily, and in our shabby little sitting-room we shivered in spite of the starved fire. We sat there with our overcoats on and did our best to be cheerful. Heaven alone knows what we talked of, but most likely, and very possibly, it may have been Greek metres, always his great passion. Yet neither of us was in good case. We both had trouble enough on our shoulders. I remember that he spoke very little of his wife, for I would not let him do so, although I knew she was most tremendously on his mind, and was, in fact, what had driven him for the moment out of London. Of course, he had a very natural desire that she might die and have done with life, with the life which must have been a torment to herself as it was a perpetual torture and a running sore to him. At the same time the poor fellow felt that he had no right to wish that she would die, but I could see the thought in his eyes, and heaven knows that I wished it fervently for him.

The next morning we went for a long walk across the Downs to the little village of East Dean. It was blowing a whole gale from the north-cast, and it was quite impossible to go near the steep cliffs. The snow was in places two feet deep, and a sunk road across the Downs was level with the turf. I think now that none but madmen would have gone out on such a day. Doubtless we were mad enough; at any rate we were writers, and by all traditions had the right to be mad. But when we once got started we meant going through it at all events. I did not remember many colder days, in spite of my travels, but we persevered, and at last came to the little village and there took refuge in the public-house and drank beer. Gissing, with his extraordinary mixture of fine taste and something which was almost grossness in regard to food, loved all malt liquors - I think partly because he felt some strange charm in their being historically English drinks. The walk back to Eastbourne tried us both hard, for neither of us had been well fed for months, and the wind and snow in our faces made walking heavy and difficult. Nevertheless Gissing was now almost boisterously cheerful, as he often was outwardly when he had most reason to be the opposite. While he walked back the chief topic of conversation was the very excellent nature of the pudding which he had instructed our landlady to prepare against a hungry return.

He was always peculiarly fond of rich, succulent dishes. A fritto misto for instance, made him shout for joy, though he never met with one until he went to Italy. With what inimitable fervour of the gastronomic mind would he declare these preferences Dr. johnson said that in a haggis there was much "fine, confused feeding," and Gissing undoubtedly agreed with him, as he always said when he quoted the passage. In many of his books there are examples of his curious feeling with regard to food. They are especially frequent in New Grub Street; as, for instance, when one character says: "Better dripping this than I've had for a long time . . . Now, with a little pepper and salt, this bread and dripping is as appetising a food as I know. I often make a dinner of it." To which the other replies: "I have done the same myself before now. Do you ever buy pease-pudding ?" and to this the Irishman's reply was enthusiastic. "I should think so! I get magnificent pennyworths at a shop in Cleveland Street, of a very rich quality indeed. Excellent faggots they have there, too. I'll give you a supper of them one night before you go." I had often heard of this particular place in Cleveland Street, and of one shop where they sold beef, kept by a man whose pride was that he had been carving behind the counter for thirty years without a holiday.

And now we were hurrying back to Eastbourne, Gissing said, not because it was cold; not because the north-cast wind blew; not because we were exposed to the very bitterest weather we remembered; but because of an exceedingly rich compound known as an apple pudding. He and the wind worked me up to an almost equal expression of ardour, and thus we came back back to our poverty-stricken den in good spirits. But, alas, the dinner that day was actually disastrous. The meat was grossly overdone, the vegetables were badly cooked, the beer was thin and flat. We were in dismay, but still we said to each other hopefully that there was the pudding to come. It was brought on and looked very fine, and Gissing cut into it with great joy and gave me a generous helping. I know that I tasted it eagerly, but to my tongue there was an alien flavour about it. I looked up and said to Gissing, "It is very curious, but this pudding seems to me to taste of kerosene." Gissing laughed, but when his turn came to try he laughed no longer, for the pudding actually did taste of lamp oil. It appeared, on plaintive and bitter inquiry, that our unfortunate landlady after making it had put it under the shelf on which she kept her lamp gear. We subsided on melancholy and mouldy cheese. This disappointment, however childish it may appear to the better fed, was to George Gissing something really serious. Those who have read  The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, without falling into the error of thinking that the talk about food in that melancholy book was only his fun, will understand that it was a very serious matter with Gissing. It took all his philosophy and a very great deal of mine to survive the tragedy, and to go on talking as we did of new words and the riches of philology. And as we talked the wind roared down our street in a vicious frenzy. It was a monstrously bad time to have come to Eastbourne, and we had no compensations.

It was the next night that the great news came. In spite of the dreariest weather we had spent most of the day in the open air. After our dinner, which this time was more of a success, or at any rate less of a tragic failure, we were sitting hugging the fire to keep warm when a telegram was brought in for him. He read it in silence and handed it over to me with the very strangest look upon his face that I had ever seen. It was unsigned, and came from London. The message was: "Your wife is dead." There was nothing on earth more desirable for him than that she might die, the poor wretch truly being like a destructive wind, for she had torn his heart, scorched his very soul, and destroyed him at the beginning of his life. All irreparable disasters came from her, and through her. Had it not been for her he might then have held, or have begun to hope for, a great position at one of the universities. And now a voice out of the unknown cried that she was dead.

He said to me, with a shaking voice and shaking hands, "I cannot believe it - I cannot believe it." He was as white as paper; for it meant so much - not only freedom from the disaster and shame and misery that drained his life-blood, but it would mean a cessation of money payments at a time when every shilling was very hard to win. And yet this was when he was comparatively well known, for it was two years after the publication of Demos. And still, though his books ran into many editions, for some inexplicable reason, which I yet hope to explain, he sold them one after another for fifty pounds. And I knew how he worked; how hard, how remorselessly. I knew who the chief character was in New Grub Street before New Grub Street was written. I knew with what inexpressible anguish of soul he laboured, with what dumb rage against destiny. And now here was something like freedom at last, if only this were true.

The message came so late at night that there was no possibility of telegraphing to London to verify it even if he had been sure that he could get to the original sender. It was also much too late to go up to town. We sat silently for hours, and I knew that he was going back over the burning marl of the past. Sometimes he did speak, asking once and again if it could be true, and I saw that while he was still uncertain he was bitter and pitiless. Yet if only she were really dead . . .

We went up to town together in the morning. In the train he told me that, while he was still uncertain, he could not possibly visit the place she lived in, so he begged me to go there straight and bring him word as to the truth of this report. I was to explore the desperate slum in the New Cut in which she had exhausted the last dreadful years of her life, and upon leaving him I went there at once. With Gissing's full permission I described something of the milieu in Maurice Quain. On reaching the New Cut I dived into an inner slum from an outer one, and at last found myself in a kitchen which was only about eight or nine feet square. It was, of course, exceedingly dirty. The person in charge of it was a cheerful red-headed girl of about eighteen years of age. On learning the cause of my visit she went out and brought in her mother, and I soon verified the fact that Nell Gissing was dead. She had died the first bitter night we spent at Eastbourne, and was found next morning without any blankets, and with no covering for her emaciated body but a damp and draggled gown.

Presently the neighbours came in to see the gentleman who was interested in this woman's death. They talked eagerly of the funeral, for, as Gissing knew only too well, a funeral, to these people, is one of their great irregular but recurring festivals. At Gissing's desire I gave them carte blanche up to a certain sum, and I think they felt that, as the agent of the husband, I behaved very well. Of course they knew all about the poor girl who lay dead upstairs, and although they were honest enough people in their way, and though the red-headed girl to whom I first talked worked hard in a factory making hooks and eyes, as she told me, they seemed to have no moral feelings whatever about her very obvious profession. I myself did not see the dead woman. I was not then acquainted with death, save among strangers. I could not bring myself to look upon her. Although death is so dreadful always, the surroundings of death may make things worse. But still, she was dead, and I hastened back to Gissing to tell him so. It was a terrible and painful relief to him; and when he was sure she was gone, he grieved for her, grieved for what she might have been, and for what she was. He remembered now that at intervals she used to send him heart- breaking messages asking to be forgiven, messages that even his unwisdom at last could not listen to. But he said very little. So far as the expression of his emotions went he often had very great self-control. It is a pity that his self-control so rarely extended itself to acts. But now he was free. Those who have forged their own chains, and lived in a hell of their own dreadful making, can understand what this is and what it means. But he did go down to the pit in which she died, and when I saw him a day or two later he was strangely quiet, even for him. He said to me, "My dear chap, she had kept my photograph, and a very little engraving of the Madonna di San Sisto, all these years of horrible degradation." He spoke in the almost inaudible tone that was characteristic of him, especially at that time. We arranged the funeral together, and she was buried. If only all the misery that she had caused him could have been buried with her, it would have been well. She died of what I may call, euphemistically, specific laryngitis. Once he told me a dreadful story about her in hospital. One of the doctors at St. Thomas's had questioned her, and after her answers sent for Gissing, and speaking to him on the information given him by the wife, was very bitter. George, even as he told me of this years after, shook with rage and indignation. He had not been able to defend himself without exposing his wife's career.
 

CHAPTER THREE

There are many methods of writing biography. Each has its advantages, even the chronological compilation. But chronology is no strong point of mine, and in this sketch I shall lay but little stress on dates. There is great advantage in describing things as they impress themselves on the writer. A portrait gains in coherency and completeness by temporary omissions more than it can ever gain by the empty endeavour to handle each period fully. In this last chapter I might have endeavoured to describe Gissing at work, or to speak of his ambitions, or even to criticise what he had already done, or to give my own views of what he meant to achieve. There is authority for every method, and most authorities are bad, save Boswell ­ and few would pine for Boswell's qualities at the price of his failings. Yet one gets help from him everywhere, little as it may show. Only the other day I came across a passage in the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides which has some value. Reporting Johnson, he writes: "Talking of biography, he said he did not think the life of any literary man in England had been well written. Besides the common incidents of life it should tell us his studies, his mode of living, the means by which he attained to excellence, and his opinion of his own works." Such I shall endeavour to do. Nevertheless Johnson was wrong. Good work had then been done in biography by Walton, whose Lives, by the way, Gissing loved; and Johnson himself was not far from great excellence when he described his friend Savage in Lives of the Poets in spite of his want of colloquial ease. There came in then the value of friendship and actual personal knowledge, as it did in Boswell's Life. I can only hope that my own deep acquaintance with Gissing will compensate for my want of skill in the art of writing lives, for which novel-writing is but a poor training. Yet the deeper one's knowledge the better it is to simplify as one goes, taking things by themselves, going forwards or backwards as may seem best, without care of tradition, especially where tradition is mostly bad. We do not now write biography in England as Romain Rolland wrote that of Beethoven. Seldom are we grieved for our heroes, or rejoice with them. Photography, or the photographic portrait, is more in request than an impression. However, let me resume in my own way, having to be content with that, and caring little for opinion, that fluctuant critic.

Long as our friendship existed it is perhaps curious that we never called each other. except on very rare. occasions, by anything but our surnames. This, I think, is due to the fact that we had been at Owens College together. It is, I imagine, the same thing with most schoolboys. Provided there is no nickname given, men who have been chums at school seem to prefer the surname by which they knew their friends in the early days. I have often noticed there is a certain savage tendency on the part of boys to suppress their Christian names, their own peculiar mark. And sometimes I have wondered whether this is not in some obscure way a survival of the savage custom of many tribes in which nobody is ever mentioned by his right name, because in that name there inheres mysteriously the very essence of his being and inheritance, the knowledge of which by others may expose him to some occult danger.

I said above that from the time I first met Gissing after my return from Australia, until I went away again to Texas, I was working in the War Office and the India Office as a writer at tenpence an hour. The pay was exiguous, and my prospects worth nothing. Yet when I came back from America and found him domiciled at 7K Cornwall Residences, my economic basis in life became even more exiguous, whatever hope might have said of my literary future. I was even poorer than Guising. He lived in a flat and had at least two rooms and a kitchen. Yet it was a horrible place of extraordinary gloom, and its back windows overlooked the roaring steam engines of the Metropolitan Railway. No doubt my own apartment, when I took to living by myself, was superior in cheerfulness to 7K. Shortly after my return to England, I hired a single room in Chelsea, put in a few sticks of furniture given to me by my people, and began housekeeping on my own account on all I could make and the temporary ten shillings a week allowed me by my father, who at that time, for all his native respect for literature, regarded the practice of it with small hope and much suspicion. I know that it greatly amused Gissing to hear of his views on the subject of the self­revelations in The Western Avernus, which dealt with my life in Western America. After reading that book he did not speak to me for three days, and told my younger brother, "These are pretty revelations about your brother having been a common loafer." At this Gissing roared, but he roared none the less when he understood that three columns of laudation in one of the reviews entirely changed my father's view of that particular book.

I should not trouble to say anything about my own particular surroundings if it were not that in a sense they also became Gissing's, although I went more frequently to him than he came to me. Nevertheless he was quite familiar with my one room and often had meals there which I cooked for him. Of course at that time, from one point of view, I was but a literary beginner and aspirant, while Gissing was a rising and respected man, who certainly might be poor, and was poor, but still he had published Demos and other books, his name was well-known, and his prospects, from the literary, if not from the financial point of view, seemed very good. I was the author of one book, the result of three years' bitter hard experience, written in twenty­six days as a tour de force, and though I had ambition I seemed to have nothing more to write about. From my own point of view Gissing was, of course, very successful. His flat with more rooms than one in it was a mansion, and he was certainly making something like a hundred a year. Still, I think that when he came down to me and found me comparatively independent, he rather envied me. At any rate I had not to keep an errant wife on money made with infinite difficulty. He came to see me in Chelsea in my very early days, and took great joy in my conditions. For one thing I had no attendance with this room. I was supposed to look after it for myself in every way. This, he assured me, made my estate the more gracious, as anyone can understand who remembers all that he has said about landladies and lodginghouse servants and charwomen. He chuckled over the list of things I bought : a fender and fire­irons, a coal­scuttle, a dust­bin, and blacking brushes. He found me one day shaving by the aid of my own dim reflection in the glass of an etching which I had brought from home, because I had no looking­glass and no money to spare for one. We frequently went together over the question of finance. Incidentally I found his own habit of buying cooked meat peculiarly extravagant. There is still a book among my papers in which I kept accounts for my first three months in Chelsea to see how one could live on ten shillings a week, which Gissing assured me was preposterous riches, even if I managed to make no more.

Naturally enough, seeing that we had been friends for so long, and seeing that he had encouraged me so greatly to write my first book, he took a vast interest in all my proceedings, and was very " joyous," as he would have said, to observe that I could not afford sheets but slept in the blankets which I had carried all over America. I seek no sympathy on this point, for after all it was not a matter of my being unable to afford linen; it is impossible for the average comfortable citizen to understand how disagreeable sheets become after some thousands of nights spent camping in mere wool, even of the cheapest. It took me years to learn to resign myself to cold linen, or even more sympathetic cotton, when I became a respectable householder.

In the neighbourhood where I then lived there is a great artistic colony, and as I already knew one or two artists, I soon became acquainted with all the others. Many of them were no richer than myself, and as Bohemia and the belief that there was still a Bohemia formed one of Gissing's greatest joys, he was always delighted to hear of any of our remarkable shifts to live. It is an odd thing to reflect that A. D. M'Cormick, Frank Wynne, Albert Croft, three other artists whose names I now forget and I once had a glorious supper of fried fish served in a newspaper on the floor of an empty studio. The only thing missing on that particular occasion was Gissing's presence, but, of course, the trouble was that Gissing would seldom associate with anybody whom he did not know already, and I could rarely get him to make the acquaintance of my own friends. Yet such experiences as we were sometimes reduced to more than proved to him that his dear Bohemia existed, though later in his life, as one sees in Henry Ryecroft, he often seemed to doubt whether it was still extant. On this point I used to console him, saying that where any two artists butt their foolish heads against the economic system, there is Bohemia; Bohemia, in fact, is living on a course of high ideals, whatever the world says of them. At this hour there are writers learning their business on a little oatmeal, as George Meredith did, or destroying their digestions, as I did mine and George Gissing's, on canned corned beef. Even now, perhaps, some writers and artists are making their one big meal a day on fried fish.

One Sunday I missed going to Gissing's, because he was then out of town visiting his family, but I had a tale for him on his return. It seems that I had been writing, and had got so disgusted with the result that I could not possibly stay in my room, so determined to go round to my friend Mack. No sooner had I made up my mind on this subject than there was a knock at the door, and presently in came Mack himself. I said promptly, " It is no good your coming here, for I was just going round to you." Whereupon he replied, It is no good your coming to me because I have no coal, no coke, and nobody will give me any more because I owe for so much already." I replied that I was not going to stay in my room in any case, and affirmed that I would rather be in his studio in the cold than where I was. Whereupon he suddenly discovered that my scuttle was actually full of coal, and proposed to take it round to the studio. This seemed a really brilliant idea, and after much discussion of ways and means my inventive faculty produced an old portmanteau and several newspapers, and after wrapping up lumps of coal in separate pieces of paper we packed the portmanteau with coal and carried it round to the studio in Manresa Road. This appeared to Gissing so characteristic of an artist's life that it seemed pure Murger.

In one matter Gissing and I were at that time much alike. From most points of view there can hardly have been two more different men, for he was essentially of the study and the cloister, while I was far more naturally a man of the open air. Nevertheless, when it came to journalism we were both of the same mind. While I was away from England and he was teaching Frederic Harrison's sons, Harrison introduced him to John Morley, then editing the Pall Mall Gazette, who offered, no doubt seriously, to use as much matter as possible if Gissing would supply him with something in journalistic form. Apparently he found it too much against his natural grain to do this work, and I was now in the same predicament. It is true that I had something of a natural journalistic flair which he lacked, but my nose for a likely article was rendered entirely useless to me by the fact that I never could write anything until I had thought about it for several days, by which time it was stale, and much too late from the newspaper point of view. However, Gissing occasionally did a little odd journalism, for I remember being with him before I went to America, when he received the proofs of an article from the St. James's Gazette, and picking up Henry Ryecroft one may read: "I thought of this as I sat yesterday watching a noble sunset, which brought back to my memory sunsets of a London autumn, thirty years ago. It happened that, on one such evening, I was by the river at Chelsea, with nothing to do except to feel that I was hungry, and to reflect that, before morning, I should be hungrier still. I loitered upon Battersea Bridge ­ the old picturesque wooden bridge, and there the western sky took hold upon me. Half an hour later I was speeding home. I sat down, wrote a description of what I had seen, and straightway sent it to an evening paper, which, to my astonishment, published the thing next day ­ 'On Battersea Bridge.'" I have never seen that article since I saw the proof of it, but there was something so characteristic in it that I think it would be worth some one's while to hunt up the files of the St. James's Gazette in order to find it. For while he was leaning over the bridge, enjoying the sunset, there was also a workman looking at it. The river was at a low stage, at least three­quarters­ebb, and on each side of it there were great patches of shining mud, in which the glorious western sky was reflected, turning the ooze into a mass of most wonderful colour. Gissing said to me, "Of course I was pleased to see somebody else, especially a poor fellow like that, enjoying the beauty of the sunset. But presently my companion edged a little closer to me, and seeing my eyes directed towards the mud which showed such heavenly colouring, he remarked to me, with an air of the deepest interest, 'Throws up an 'eap of mud, don't she?'"

Sometimes when Gissing came to me in Danvers Street he used to go over my accounts and discuss means of making them less. I think his chief joy in them was the feeling that some of his more respectable friends, such as Frederic Harrison, would have been horrified at my peculiarly squalid existence. In a sense it was, no doubt, squalid, and yet in another it was perhaps the greatest time in my life, and Gissing knew it. In the little book in which I kept my expenses he came across one day on which I had spent absolutely nothing. This was a great treat for him. On another day he found a penny put down as "charity." On looking up the book I see that a note still declares that this penny was given to a little girl to pay her fare in the bus. This beneficence on my part necessitated my walking all the way to Chelsea from Hyde Park Corner. Yet Gissing assured me that, compared with himself at times, I was practically a millionaire, although he owned that he had very rarely beaten my record when all expenditure on food was but three-and­sixpence. One week it actually totalled no more than one­and­elevenpence, but I have no doubt that I went out to eat with somebody else on those days - unless it was at the time my liver protested against the life I led, and gave me such an attack of gloom that I went to bed and lay there for three days without eating, firmly determined to die and have done with the literary struggle. This fast did me a great deal of good. On the fourth day I got up and rustled vigorously for a meal, and did some financing with the admirable result of producing a whole half­crown.

Whenever Gissing came I cooked his food and my own on a little grid, or in a frying­pan, over the fire in my one room. The fire cost me on an average a whole shilling a week, or perhaps a penny or two more if the coal, which I bought in the street, went up in price. This means that I ran a fire on a hundredweight of coal each week, or sixteen pounds of coal a day. Gissing, who was an expert in coal, assured me that I was extremely extravagant, and that a fire could be kept going for much less. On trying, I found out that when I was exceedingly hard up I could keep in a very little fire for several hours a day on only eight pounds of coal, but sometimes I had to let it go out, and run round to a studio to get warm by some artist's stove ­ provided always that the merchant in coke who supplied him had not refused any further credit.

At this time Gissing and I were both accustomed to work late, although he was just then beginning to labour at more reasonable times, though not to write fewer hours. I used to find getting up in the morning at a proper hour quite impossible. Probably this was due to some inherited gout, to poisonous indigestion from my own cooking, or to a continued diet of desiccated soups and "jungle" beef from Chicago. However, it seemed to Gissing that I was quite in the proper tradition of letters while I was working on a long novel, only published years afterwards, which I used to begin at ten or eleven o'clock at night, frequently finishing at six o'clock in the morning when the sparrows began to chirp outside my window.

As a result of this night­work I used to get up at four o'clock in the afternoon, sometimes even later, to make my own breakfast. Afterwards I would go out to see some of my friends in their studios, and at the time most people were thinking of going to bed I sat down to the wonderfully morbid piece of work which I believed was to bring me fame. This was a rather odd book, called The Degradation of Geoffrey Alwith. It has no claim whatever to any immortality, and from my point of view its only value lies in the fact that there is a very brief sketch of Gissing in it. He is described in these words: "Will Curgenven, writer, teacher, and general apostle of culture, as it is understood by the elect, had been hard at work for some hours on an essay on Greek metres, and was growing tired of it. His dingy subject and dingy Baker Street flat began to pall on him, and he rose to pace his narrow room." Now Will Curgenven, of course, was Gissing, and the dingy Baker Street flat was 7K. " 'Damn the nature of things,' as Porson said when he swallowed embrocation instead of whiskey!" was what I went on to put into his mouth. This, indeed, was one of Gissing's favourite exclamations. It stood with him for all the strange and blasphemous and eccentric oaths with which I then decorated my language, the result of my experiences in the back­blocks of Australia and on the Pacific Slope of America. In this book I went on to make a little fun of his great joy in Greek metres. I remember that once he turned to me with an assumed air of strange amazement and exclaimed: "Why, my dear fellow, do you know there are actually miserable men who do not know ­ who have never even heard of ­ the minuter differences between Dochmiacs and Antispasts!" That, again, reminds me of a passage in New Grub Street, which always gives me acute pleasure because it recalls Gissing so wonderfully. It is where one of the characters comes in to the hero and wants his opinion on the scansion of a particular chorus in the Oedipus Rex. Reardon lays hold of the book, thinks a bit, and begins to read the chorus aloud. Whereupon the other one cries: "Choriambics, eh? Possible, of course; but treat them as Ionics a minore with an anacrusis, and see if they don't go better." Now in this passage the speaker is really Gissing, for he involved himself in terms of pedantry with such delight that his eyes gleamed. No doubt it was an absurd thing, but Greek metres afforded so bright a refuge from the world of literary struggle and pressing financial difficulty.

"Damn the nature of things!" was Porson's oath. Now Gissing had a very peculiar admiration for Porson. Porson was a Grecian. He loved Greek. That was sufficient for Gissing. In addition to that claim on his love, it is obvious that Porson was a man of a certain Rabelaisian turn of mind. and that again was a sufficient passport to his favour. No doubt if Porson had invited Gissing to his rooms, and had then got wildly drunk, it would have greatly annoyed Gissing; but the picture of Porson shouting Greek and drinking heavily attracted him immensely. He often quoted all the little stories told of Porson, such as the very well­known one of another scholar calling on him by invitation late one evening, and finding the room in darkness and Porson on the floor. This was when his visitor called out "Porson, where are the candles, and where's the whiskey?" and Porson answered, still upon the floor, but neither forgetful of Greek nor of his native wit.

When any man of our acquaintance was alluded to with hostility, or if one animadverted on some popular person who was obviously uneducated, Gissing always vowed that he did not know Greek, and probably or certainly had never starved. His not knowing Greek, was, of course, a very great offence to Gissing, for he used to quote Porson on Hermann:

The Germans in Greek
Are sadly to seek.
Not one in five score,
But niney­nine more.
All save only Hermann,
And Hermann's a German."

I went to Strasburg, and there got drunk
With the most learned Professor Brunck.
I went to Wortz, and got more drunken
With the more learned Professor Ruhnken."

Nevertheless though aspiring to be his tutor in wines I owed him more than is possible to say in the greater matters of education. My debt to him is really very big. It was, naturally enough, through his influence that while still in my one room in Danvers Street I began to read again all the Greek tragedies.. By an odd chance I came across a clergyman's son in Chelsea who also had a certain passion for Greek. He used to come to my room and there we re­read the tragedies. My new friend never met Gissing, for Gissing rarely came to my room save on Sundays, and those days were reserved specially for him. But whenever we met, either there or at 7K, we always read or recited Greek to each other, and then entered into a discussion of the metrical value of the choruses ­ in which branch of learning I showed proper humility, for in prosody he was remarkably learned. As for me, I knew nothing of it beyond what he told me, and cared very little, personally, for the technical side of poetry. But it was not easy to resist Gissing's enthusiasm, and I succumbed to it so greatly that at last I was really interested in what appealed so to him. Heaven knows, in those days I did at least learn something of the matter.

We talked of rhythm, and of Arsis or Ictus. Pyrrhics we spoke of, and trochees and spondees were familiar on our lips. Especially did he declare that he had a passion for anapests, and when it came to actual metres, Choriambics and Galliambics were an infinite joy to him. He explained to me most seriously the differences between trimeter Iambics when they were catalectic, acatalectic, hypercatalectic. What he knew about comic tetrameter was at my service, and in a short time I knew, as I imagined, almost all that he did about Minor Ionic, Sapphic, and Alcaic verse. Once more these things are to me little more than words, and yet I never hear one of them mentioned - as one does occasionally when one comes across a characteristic enthusiast ­ but I think of George Gissing and his gravely beatific lectures to me on that vastly important subject. No doubt many people will think that such little details as these are [not] worth nothing, but I shall have failed greatly in recording Gissing if they do not seem something in the end. These trifles are, after all, touches in the portrait as I see the man, and that they all meant much to him I know very well. To get through the early days of literary poverty one must have ambition and enthusiasm of many kinds. Enthusiasm alone is nothing, and ambition by itself is too often barren, but the two together are something that the gods may fight against in vain. I know that this association with him, when I was his only friend, and he was my chief friend, was great for both of us, for he had much to endure, and I was not without my troubles. Yet we made fun together of our squalor, and rejoiced in our poverty, so long as it did not mean acute suffering; and when it did mean that, we often got something out of literature to help us to forget. On looking back, I know that many things happened that now seem to me dreadful, but then they appeared but part of the day's work.

It rarely happened that I went to him without some story of the week's events, to be told again in return something which had occurred to him. For instance, there was that story of the lady who asked him his experience with regard to the management of butlers. In return I could tell him of going out to dinner at houses where people would have been horrified to learn that I had eaten nothing that day, and possibly nothing the day before. For us to consort with the comfortably situated sometimes seemed to both of us an intolerably fine jest, which was intensified by the difference of these comfortable people from the others we knew. Here and there we came across some fatly rich person who, by accident, had once been deprived of his usual dinner. It seemed to give him a sympathetic feeling for the very poor. But, after all, though I did sometimes associate with such people, I was happier in my own room with Gissing, or in his flat, where we discussed our Aeschylus, or wrought upon metres or figures of speech ­ always a great joy to us. Upon these, too, Gissing was really quite learned. He was full of examples of brachylogy. Anacoluthon he was well acquainted with. Not even Farrar, in his Greek Syntax, or some greater man, knew more examples of chiasmus, asyndeton, or hendiadys. In these byways he generally rejoiced, and we were never satisfied unless at each meeting, wherever it might be, we discovered some new phrase, or new word, or new quotation.

Once at 7K I quoted to him from Keats' Endymion the lines about those people who "unpen their baaing vanities to browse away the comfortable green and juicy hay from human pastures." All that evening he was denouncing various comfortable people who fed their baaing vanity on everything delightful. He declared they browsed away all that makes life worth while, and in return for my gift to him of this noble quotation he produced something rather more astounding, and perhaps not quite so quotable, out of Zola's Nana. We had been talking of realism, and of speaking the truth, of being direct, of not being mealy­mouthed; in fact, of not letting loose "baaing vanities," and suddenly he took down Nana and said, "Here Zola has put a phrase in her mouth which rejoices me exceedingly. It is a plain, straightforward, absolutely characteristic sentiment, such as we in England are not allowed to reproduce. Nana, on being remonstrated with by her lover­in­chief for her infidelities, returns him the plain and direct reply, 'Quand je vois un homme qui me plait je couche avec.'" He went on to declare that writing any novels in England was indeed a very sickening business,but he added, I really think we begin to get somewhat better in this. However, up to the last few years, it has been practically impossible to write anything more abnormal about a man's relations with women than a mere bigamy." Things have certainly altered, but he was himself one of those who helped to break down that undue sense of the value of current morality which has done so much harm to the study of life in general, and indeed to life itself. His general rage and quarrel with that current morality, for which he had not only a contempt, but a loathing which often made him speechless, comes out well in what he thought and expressed about the Harold Frederic affair. There was, as everybody knows, a second illegitimate family. While the good and orthodox made an effort to help the wife and the legal children, they did their very best to ignore the second family. However, to Gissing's great satisfaction, there were certain people, notably Mrs. Stephens, who did their very best for the other children and for the poor mother. Gissing himself subscribed, before he knew the actual position, to both families, and betrayed extraordinary rage when he learnt how that second family had been treated, and heard of the endeavours of the "unco' guid" to pretend they did not exist. But such actions and such hypocrisy are characteristic of the middle class in this country, and not in this country alone. He loathed their morals which become a system of cruelty; their greed and its concomitant selfishness: their timidity which grows brutal in defence of a position to which only chance and their rapacity have entitled them.

Apropos of his hatred of accepted morality, it is a curious thing that the only quarrel I ever had with him showed his early point of view rather oddly. Among the few men he knew there was one with whom I was a little acquainted, who had picked up a young girl in a tavern and taken her to live with him. My own acquaintance with her led to some jealousy between me and the man who was keeping her, and he wrote to Gissing complaining of me, and telling him many things which were certainly untrue. Gissing, having ruined his own life for ever and ever by his relations with a woman of this order, had naturally built up a kind of theory of these things as a justification for himself. This may seem a piece of extravagant psychology, but I have not the least doubt that it is true. Without asking my view of the affair he wrote to me angrily, and declared that I had behaved badly. He added that he wished me to understand that he considered an affair of that description as sacred as any marriage. Though he was young, and in these matters no little of a prig, I was also young, and of a hot temper. That he had not made any inquiries of me, or even asked my version of the circumstances, so angered me that I wrote back to him saying that if he spoke to me in that way I should decline to have anything more to do with him. As he was convinced, most unjustly, that his view was entirely sound, this naturally enough led to an estrangement which lasted for the best part of a year, but I am glad to remember that I myself made it up by writing to him about one of his books. This was before I went to America. It was a grief to me that we did not meet during this estrangement for any of our great talks, which, both then and afterwards, were part of my life, and no little part of it. Often when I think of him I recollect those line of Callimachus to Heraclitus in Cory's Ionica:

"They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky."

 In the last chapter I quoted from Boswell, always a favourite of Gissing's, as he is of all true men of letters. But there is yet
another quotation from the same work which might stand as a motto for this book, as it might for the final and authoritative
biograpy of Gissing which will perhaps some day be written. "He asked me whether he had mentioned, in any of the papers
of the Rambler, the description in Virgil of the entrance into Hell, with an application to the Press; 'for,' said he, 'I do not much remember them.' I told him, 'No.' Upon which he repeated it:

"Vestibulum ante ipsum primisque in faucibus Orci,
Luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae;
Pallentesque habitant Morbi, tristisque Senectus,
Et Metus, et malesuada Fames, ac turpis Egestas;
Terribiles visu formae: Letumque, Labosque."

'Now,' said he, 'almost all these apply exactly to an author; all these are the concomitants of a printing-house.'" Nevertheless, although cares, and sometimes sullen sorrows, want, and fear, still dwelt with Gissing, a little time now began for him in
which he had some peace of mind, if not happiness. That was a plant he never cultivated. One of his favourite passages
from Charlotte Bronte, whose work was in many ways a passion to him, is that in which she exclaims: "Cultivate happiness!
Happiness is not a potato," and indeed he never grew it. Still there were two periods in his life in which he had some peace,
and the first period now began. I speak of the time after the death of his first wife. The drain of ten shillings a week - which
must seem so absurdly little to many - had been far more than he could stand, and many times he had gone without the
merest necessities of life so that the poor alien in the New Cut should have money, even though he knew that she spent it at once upon drink and forgetfulness. Ten shillings a week was very much to him. For one thing it might mean a little more food and better food. It meant following up his one great hobby of buying books. Those who know The Private Papers know what
he thought of books, for in that respect this record is a true guide, even if it should be read in most respects with caution. Yet although he was happier and easier, it is curious that his most unhappy and despairing books were written during this
particular period. A Life's Morning, it is true, was done before his wife died, and some people who do not know the inner
history of the book may not regard it as a tragedy. In one sense, however,  it was one of the greatest literary tragedies of
George Gissing's life, according to his own statement to me.

At that time he was publishing books with the firm of Smith, Elder and Company, and knew James Payne who read for them.
It seems that Payne, who had naturally enough, considering his period, certain old-fashioned ideas on the subject of books
and their endings, absolutely and flatly declined to recommend his firm to publish A Life's Morning unless Gissing re-wrote
the natural tragic end of the book and made it turn out happily. I think nothing on earth, or in some hell for men of letters,
could have made Gissing more angry and wretched. If there was one thing that he clung to during the whole of his working
time, it was sincerity, and sincerity in literary work implies an absolute freedom from alien and extrinsic influence. I can well
remember what he said to me about Payne's suggestion. He abused him and the publishers; the public, England, the world,
and the very universe. He almost burst into tears as he explained to me what he had been obliged to do for the sake of the
great fifty pounds he was to get for the book. For at this time he only got fifty pounds for a long three-volume novel. He
always wrote with the greatest pain and labour, but I do not suppose he ever put anything on paper in his life which cost him
such acute mental suffering as the last three chapters which were written to James Payn's barbaric order.

After his wife's death he wrote The Nether World, The Emancipated, New Grub Street and Born in Exile. It is a curious fact,
although it was not always obvious even to himself, and is not now to anybody but me, that I stood as a model to him in
many of these books, especially, if I remember rightly, for one particular character in The Emancipated. Some of these
sketches are fairly complimentary, and many are much the reverse. The reason of this use of me was that till much later he
knew very few men intimately but myself; and when he wanted anybody in his books of a more or less robust character, and
sometimes more or less of a kind that he did not like, I, perforce, had to stand for him. He owned this to me, and once
he was not at all sure how I should take it. As a matter of fact the most life-like portrait of me ends as a villain, and, as he had touched me off to the very life in the first volume, it did make me feel a little sorer than I acknowledged. I leave the curious to
discover this particular scoundrel. It was only natural that my wild habits and customs, the relics of Australia and America,
afforded him amusement and matter for study. On one occasion they cost him, temporarily, the very large sum of three
pounds. As he said, he used to look upon me as a kind of hybrid, a very ridiculous wild man with strong literary leanings,
with an enormous amount of general and unrelated knowledge and, at the same time, as a totally unregulated or ill-regulated ruffian. This was a favourite epithet of his, for which I daresay there was something to be said. Now one Sunday it happened that I was going up to see him at 7K, and came from Chelsea with two or three books in my hand, and a pair of spectacles
on my nose. I carried an umbrella, and no doubt looked exceedingly peaceful. As a result of this a young man, who turned
out afterwards to be a professional cricketer, thought I was a very easy person to deal with, and to insult. As I came to York
Place,  which was then almost empty of passers-by, I was walking close to the railings and this fellow came up and, pushing
past rudely, stepped right in front of me. Now this was a most outrageous proceeding, because he had fifteen free feet of
pavement, and I naturally resented it. So making a little longer step than I should otherwise have done I "galled his kibe." He
turned round upon me, and using very bad language, asked me where I was going, who I thought I was, and what I proposed to do about it. I did not propose to do anything, but did it. I smote him very hard with the umbrella, knocking him down. He
remained on the pavement for a considerable time, and then only got up at the third endeavour, and promptly gave me into
custody. The policeman, who had happened to see the whole affair, explained to me, with that civility common among the
custodians of order to those classes whose dress suggests they are their masters, that he was compelled to take the
charge. I was removed to Lower Seymour Street and put in a cell for male prisoners only, where I remained fully half an
hour.

While I was in this cell a small boy of about nine was introduced and left there. I went over to him and said, "Hullo, my son,
what's brought you here?" Naturally enough he imagined that I was not a prisoner but a powerful official, and bursting into
tears he said, "Oh, Oh, please, sir, it warn't me as nicked the steak!" I consoled him to the best of my ability until I was
shortly afterwards invited down to Marlborough Street Police Court, where Mr. De Rutzen, later Sir Albert De Rutzen, was
sitting. As I had anticipated the likelihood of being fined, and had no more than a few shillings with me, I had written a letter
to Gissing, and procuring a messenger through the police, had sent it up to him. He came down promptly and sat in the court while I was being tried for this assault. After hearing the case Mr. De Rutzen decided to fine me three pounds, which Gissing
paid, with great chuckles at the incident, even though he considered his prospect of getting the money back for some
months was exceedingly vague. It was by no means the first time that he had gone to the police court for copy, which "is very pretty to observe," as Pepys said, when after the Fire of London it was discovered that as many churches as public houses
were left standing in the city. That such a man should have had to pursue his studies of actual life in the police courts and
the slums was really an outrage, another example of the native malignity of matter. For, as I have insisted, and must again
insist, he was a scholar and a dreamer. But his pressing anxieties for ever forbade him to dream, or to pursue scholarship
without interruption. He desired time to perfect his control of the English tongue, and he wanted much that no man can ever
get. It is my firm conviction that if he had possessed the smallest means he would never have thought himself completely
master of the medium in