The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories Part 1

The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories.

by George Gissing, et al.

THE WORK OF GEORGE GISSING

AN INTRODUCTORY SURVEY

'Les gens tout a fait heureux, forts et bien portants, sont-ils prepares comme il faut pour comprendre, penetrer, exprimer la vie, notre vie si tourmentee et si courte?'

MAUPa.s.sANT.

In England during the sixties and seventies of last century the world of books was dominated by one Gargantuan type of fiction. The terms book and novel became almost synonymous in houses which were not Puritan, yet where books and reading, in the era of few and unfree libraries, were strictly circ.u.mscribed. George Gissing was no exception to this rule. The English novel was at the summit of its reputation during his boyish days. As a lad of eight or nine he remembered the parts of _Our Mutual Friend_ coming to the house, and could recall the smile of welcome with which they were infallibly received. In the dining-room at home was a handsomely framed picture which he regarded with an almost idolatrous veneration. It was an engraved portrait of Charles d.i.c.kens. Some of the best work of George Eliot, Reade, and Trollope was yet to make its appearance; Meredith and Hardy were still the treasured possession of the few; the reigning models during the period of Gissing's adolescence were probably d.i.c.kens and Trollope, and the numerous satellites of these great stars, prominent among them Wilkie Collins, William Black, and Besant and Rice.

Of the cl.u.s.ter of novelists who emerged from this school of ideas, the two who will attract most attention in the future were clouded and obscured for the greater period of their working lives. Un.o.bserved, they received, and made their own preparations for utilising, the legacy of the mid-Victorian novel--moral thesis, plot, underplot, set characters, descriptive machinery, landscape colouring, copious phraseology, Herculean proportions, and the rest of the c.u.mbrous and grandiose paraphernalia of _Chuzzlewit, Pendennis_, and _Middlemarch_. But they received the legacy in a totally different spirit. Mark Rutherford, after a very brief experiment, put all these elaborate properties and conventions reverently aside. Cleverer and more docile, George Gissing for the most part accepted them; he put his slender frame into the ponderous collar of the author of the _Mill on the Floss_, and nearly collapsed in wind and limb in the heart-breaking attempt to adjust himself to such an heroic type of harness.

The distinctive qualities of Gissing at the time of his setting forth were a scholarly style, rather fastidious and academic in its restraint, and the personal discontent, slightly morbid, of a self-conscious student who finds himself in the position of a sensitive woman in a crowd. His att.i.tude through life was that of a man who, having set out on his career with the understanding that a second-cla.s.s ticket is to be provided, allows himself to be unceremoniously hustled into the rough and tumble of a noisy third.

Circ.u.mstances made him revolt against an anonymous start in life for a refined and educated man under such conditions. They also made him prolific. He shrank from the restraints and humiliations to which the poor and shabbily dressed private tutor is exposed--revealed to us with a persuasive terseness in the pages of _The Uncla.s.sed, New Grub Street, Ryecroft_, and the story of _Topham's Chance._ Writing fiction in a garret for a sum sufficient to keep body and soul together for the six months following payment was at any rate better than this. The result was a long series of highly finished novels, written in a style and from a point of view which will always render them dear to the studious and the book-centred. Upon the larger external rings of the book-reading mult.i.tude it is not probable that Gissing will ever succeed in impressing himself.

There is an absence of transcendental quality about his work, a failure in humour, a remoteness from actual life, a deficiency in awe and mystery, a shortcoming in emotional power, finally, a lack of the dramatic faculty, not indeed indispensable to a novelist, but almost indispensable as an ingredient in great novels of this particular genre.[1] In temperament and vitality he is palpably inferior to the masters (d.i.c.kens, Thackeray, Hugo, Balzac) whom he reverenced with such a cordial admiration and envy. A 'low vitality' may account for what has been referred to as the 'nervous exhaustion' of his style. It were useless to pretend that Gissing belongs of right to the 'first series' of English Men of Letters. But if debarred by his limitations from a resounding or popular success, he will remain exceptionally dear to the heart of the recluse, who thinks that the scholar does well to cherish a grievance against the vulgar world beyond the cloister; and dearer still, perhaps, to a certain number of enthusiasts who began reading George Gissing as a college night-course; who closed _Thyrza_ and _Demos_ as dawn was breaking through the elms in some Oxford quadrangle, and who have pursued his work patiently ever since in a somewhat toilsome and broken ascent, secure always of suave writing and conscientious workmans.h.i.+p, of an individual prose cadence and a genuine vein of Penseroso:--

'Thus, Night, oft see me in thy pale career...

Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings, And the night-raven sings.'

[Footnote 1: The same kind of limitations would have to be postulated in estimating the brothers De Goncourt, who, falling short of the first magnitude, have yet a fully recognised position upon the stellar atlas.]

Yet by the larger, or, at any rate, the intermediate public, it is a fact that Gissing has never been quite fairly estimated. He loses immensely if you estimate him either by a single book, as is commonly done, or by his work as a whole, in the perspective of which, owing to the lack of critical instruction, one or two books of rather inferior quality have obtruded themselves unduly. This brief survey of the Gissing country is designed to enable the reader to judge the novelist by eight or nine of his best books.

If we can select these aright, we feel sure that he will end by placing the work of George Gissing upon a considerably higher level than he has. .h.i.therto done.

The time has not yet come to write the history of his career--fuliginous in not a few of its earlier phases, gathering serenity towards its close,--finding a soul of goodness in things evil. This only pretends to be a chronological and, quite incidentally, a critical survey of George Gissing's chief works. And comparatively short as his working life proved to be--hampered for ten years by the sternest poverty, and for nearly ten more by the sad, illusive optimism of the poitrinaire--the task of the mere surveyor is no light or perfunctory one. Artistic as his temperament undoubtedly was, and conscientious as his writing appears down to its minutest detail, Gissing yet managed to turn out rather more than a novel per annum. The desire to excel acted as a spur which conquered his congenital inclination to dreamy historical reverie. The reward which he propounded to himself remained steadfast from boyhood; it was a kind of _Childe Harold_ pilgrimage to the lands of antique story--

'Whither Albano's scarce divided waves s.h.i.+ne from a sister valley;--and afar The Tiber winds, and the broad ocean laves The Latian coast where sprang the Epic War.'

Twenty-six years have elapsed since the appearance of his first book in 1880, and in that time just twenty-six books have been issued bearing his signature. His industry was worthy of an Anthony Trollope, and cost his employers barely a t.i.the of the amount claimed by the writer of _The Last Chronicle of Ba.r.s.et_. He was not much over twenty-two when his first novel appeared.[2] It was ent.i.tled _Workers in the Dawn_, and is distinguished by the fact that the author writes himself George Robert Gissing; afterwards he saw fit to follow the example of George Robert Borrow, and in all subsequent productions a.s.sumes the style of 'George Gissing.' The book begins in this fas.h.i.+on: 'Walk with me, reader, into Whitecross Street. It is Sat.u.r.day night'; and it is what it here seems, a decidedly crude and immature performance. Gissing was enc.u.mbered at every step by the giant's robe of mid-Victorian fiction. Intellectual giants, d.i.c.kens and Thackeray, were equally gigantic spendthrifts. They worked in a state of fervid heat above a glowing furnace, into which they flung lavish ma.s.ses of unshaped metal, caring little for immediate effect or minute dexterity of stroke, but knowing full well that the emotional energy of their temperaments was capable of fusing the most intractable material, and that in the end they would produce their great, downright effect. Their spirits rose and fell, but the case was desperate, copy had to be despatched for the current serial. Good and bad had to make up the tale against time, and revelling in the very exuberance and excess of their humour, the novelists invariably triumphed.

[Footnote 2: Three vols. 8vo, 1880 (Remington). It was noticed at some length in the _Athenoeum_ of June 12th, in which the author's philosophic outlook is condemned as a dangerous compound of Schopenhauer, Comte, and Sh.e.l.ley. It is somewhat doubtful if he ever made more for a book than the 250 he got for _New Grub Street_. 200, we believe, was advanced on _The Nether World,_ but this proved anything but a prosperous speculation from the publisher's point of view, and 150 was refused for _Born in Exile_.]

To the Ercles vein of these t.i.tans of fiction, Gissing was a complete stranger. To the pale and fastidious recluse and anchorite, their tone of genial remonstrance with the world and its ways was totally alien. He knew nothing of the world to start with beyond the den of the student. His second book, as he himself described it in the preface to a second edition, was the work of a very young man who dealt in a romantic spirit with the gloomier facts of life. Its t.i.tle, _The Uncla.s.sed,_[3] excited a little curiosity, but the author was careful to explain that he had not in view the _decla.s.ses_ but rather those persons who live in a limbo external to society, and refuse the statistic badge. The central figure Osmond Waymark is of course Gissing himself. Like his creator, raving at intervals under the vile restraints of Philistine surroundings and with no money for dissipation, Osmond gives up teaching to pursue the literary vocation. A girl named Ida Starr idealises him, and is helped thereby to a purer life.

In the four years' interval between this somewhat hurried work and his still earlier attempt the young author seems to have gone through a bewildering change of employments. We hear of a clerks.h.i.+p in Liverpool, a searing experience in America (described with but little deviation in _New Grub Street_), a gas-fitting episode in Boston, private tutors.h.i.+ps, and cramming engagements in 'the poisonous air of working London.' Internal evidence alone is quite sufficient to indicate that the man out of whose brain such bitter experiences of the educated poor were wrung had learnt in suffering what he taught--in his novels. His start in literature was made under conditions that might have appalled the bravest, and for years his steps were dogged by hunger and many-shaped hards.h.i.+ps. He lived in cellars and garrets. 'Many a time,' he writes, 'seated in just such a garret (as that in the frontispiece to _Little Dorrit_) I saw the suns.h.i.+ne flood the table in front of me, and the thought of that book rose up before me.' He ate his meals in places that would have offered a way-wearied tramp occasion for criticism. 'His breakfast consisted often of a slice of bread and a drink of water. Four and sixpence a week paid for his lodging. A meal that cost more than sixpence was a feast.' Once he tells us with a thrill of reminiscent ecstasy how he found sixpence in the street! The ordinary comforts of modern life were unattainable luxuries. Once when a newly posted notice in the lavatory at the British Museum warned readers that the basins were to be used (in official phrase) 'for casual ablutions only,' he was abashed at the thought of his own complete dependence upon the facilities of the place. Justly might the author call this a tragi-comical incident. Often in happier times he had brooding memories of the familiar old horrors--the foggy and gas-lit labyrinth of Soho--shop windows containing puddings and pies kept hot by steam rising through perforated metal--a young novelist of 'two-and-twenty or thereabouts' standing before the display, raging with hunger, unable to purchase even one pennyworth of food. And this is no fancy picture,[4] but a true story of what Gissing had sufficient elasticity of humour to call 'a pretty stern apprentices.h.i.+p.'

The sense of it enables us to understand to the full that semi-ironical and bitter, yet not wholly unamused pa.s.sage, in _Ryecroft_:--

'Is there at this moment any boy of twenty, fairly educated, but without means, without help, with nothing but the glow in his brain and steadfast courage in his heart, who sits in a London garret and writes for dear life? There must be, I suppose; yet all that I have read and heard of late years about young writers, shows them in a very different aspect. No garretteers, these novelists and journalists awaiting their promotion. They eat--and entertain their critics--at fas.h.i.+onable restaurants, they are seen in expensive seats at the theatre; they inhabit handsome flats--photographed for an ill.u.s.trated paper on the first excuse. At the worst, they belong to a reputable club, and have garments which permit them to attend a garden party or an evening "at home" without attracting unpleasant notice. Many biographical sketches have I read during the last decade, making personal introduction of young Mr. This or young Miss That, whose book was--as the sweet language of the day will have it--"booming"; but never one in which there was a hint of stern struggles, of the pinched stomach and frozen fingers.'

[Footnote 3: Three vols., 1884, dedicated to M.C.R. In one volume 'revised,' 1895 (preface dated October 1895).]

[Footnote 4: Who but Gissing could describe a heroine as exhibiting in her countenance 'habitual nourishment on good and plenteous food'?]

In his later years it was customary for him to inquire of a new author 'Has he starved'? He need have been under no apprehension. There is still a G.o.d's plenty of attics in Grub Street, tenanted by genuine artists, idealists and poets, amply sufficient to justify the lamentable conclusion of old Anthony a Wood in his life of George Peele. 'For so it is and always hath been, that most poets die poor, and consequently obscurely, and a hard matter it is to trace them to their graves.' Amid all these miseries, Gissing upheld his ideal. During 1886-7 he began really to _write_ and the first great advance is shown in _Isabel Clarendon_.[5] No book, perhaps, that he ever wrote is so rich as this in autobiographical indices. In the melancholy Kingcote we get more than a pa.s.sing phase or a momentary glimpse at one side of the young author. A long succession of Kingcote's traits are obvious self-revelations. At the beginning he symbolically prefers the old road with the crumbling sign-post, to the new. Kingcote is a literary sensitive. The most ordinary transaction with uneducated ('that is uncivilised') people made him uncomfortable. Mean and hateful people by their suggestions made life hideous. He lacks the courage of the ordinary man. Though under thirty he is abashed by youth. He is sentimental and hungry for feminine sympathy, yet he realises that the woman who may with safety be taken in marriage by a poor man, given to intellectual pursuits, is extremely difficult of discovery. Consequently he lives in solitude; he is tyrannised by moods, dominated by temperament. His intellect is in abeyance. He shuns the present--the historical past seems alone to concern him. Yet he abjures his own past. The ghost of his former self affected him with horror. Ident.i.ty even he denies. 'How can one be responsible for the thoughts and acts of the being who bore his name years ago?' He has no consciousness of his youth--no sympathy with children. In him is to be discerned 'his father's intellectual and emotional qualities, together with a certain stiffness of moral att.i.tude derived from his mother.' He reveals already a wonderful palate for pure literary flavour. His prejudices are intense, their character being determined by the refinement and idealism of his nature. All this is profoundly significant, knowing as we do that this was produced when Gissing's worldly prosperity was at its nadir. He was living at the time, like his own Harold Biffen, in absolute solitude, a frequenter of p.a.w.nbroker's shops and a stern connoisseur of pure dripping, pease pudding ('magnificent pennyworths at a shop in Cleveland Street, of a very rich quality indeed'), f.a.ggots and saveloys. The stamp of affluence in those days was the possession of a basin. The rich man thus secured the gravy which the poor man, who relied on a paper wrapper for his pease pudding, had to give away. The image recurred to his mind when, in later days, he discussed champagne vintages with his publisher, or was consulted as to the management of butlers by the wife of a popular prelate. With what a sincere recollection of this time he enjoins his readers (after Dr.

Johnson) to abstain from Poverty. 'Poverty is the great secluder.' 'London is a wilderness abounding in anchorites.' Gissing was sustained amid all these miseries by two pa.s.sionate idealisms, one of the intellect, the other of the emotions. The first was ancient Greece and Rome--and he incarnated this pa.s.sion in the picturesque figure of Julian Casti (in _The Uncla.s.sed_), toiling hard to purchase a Gibbon, savouring its grand epic roll, converting its driest detail into poetry by means of his enthusiasm, and selecting Stilicho as a hero of drama or romance (a premonition here of _Veranilda_). The second or heart's idol was Charles d.i.c.kens--d.i.c.kens as writer, d.i.c.kens as the hero of a past England, d.i.c.kens as humorist, d.i.c.kens as leader of men, above all, d.i.c.kens as friend of the poor, the outcast, the pale little sempstress and the downtrodden Smike.

[Footnote 5: _Isabel Clarendon_. By George Gissing. In two volumes, 1886 (Chapman and Hall). In reviewing this work the _Academy_ expressed astonishment at the mature style of the writer--of whom it admitted it had not yet come across the name.]

In the summer of 1870, Gissing remembered with a pious fidelity of detail the famous drawing of the 'Empty Chair' being framed and hung up 'in the school-room, at home'[6] (Wakefield).

[Footnote 6: Of Gissing's early impressions, the best connected account, I think, is to be gleaned from the concluding chapters of _The Whirlpool_; but this may be reinforced (and to some extent corrected, or, here and there cancelled) by pa.s.sages in _Burn in Exile_ (vol. i.) and in _Ryecroft_. The material there supplied is confirmatory in the best sense of the detail contributed by Mr. Wells to the cancelled preface of _Veranilda_, touching the 'schoolboy, obsessed by a consuming pa.s.sion for learning, at the Quaker's boarding-school at Alderley. He had come thither from Wakefield at the age of thirteen--after the death of his father, who was, in a double sense, the cardinal formative influence in his life. The tones of his father's voice, his father's gestures, never departed from him; when he read aloud, particularly if it was poetry he read, his father returned in him. He could draw in those days with great skill and vigour--it will seem significant to many that he was particularly fascinated by Hogarth's work, and that he copied and imitated it; and his father's well-stocked library, and his father's encouragement, had quickened his imagination and given it its enduring bias for literary activity.' Like Defoe, Smollett, Sterne, Borrow, d.i.c.kens, Eliot, 'G.C.' is, half involuntarily, almost unconsciously autobiographic.]

'Not without awe did I see the picture of the room which was now tenantless: I remember too, a curiosity which led me to look closely at the writing-table and the objects upon it, at the comfortable round-backed chair, at the book-shelves behind. I began to ask myself how books were written and how the men lived who wrote them. It is my last glimpse of childhood. Six months later there was an empty chair in my own home, and the tenor of my life was broken.

'Seven years after this I found myself amid the streets of London and had to find the means of keeping myself alive. What I chiefly thought of was that now at length I could go hither or thither in London's immensity seeking for the places which had been made known to me by d.i.c.kens.

'One day in the city I found myself at the entrance to Bevis Marks! I had just been making an application in reply to some advertis.e.m.e.nt--of course, fruitlessly; but what was that disappointment compared with the discovery of Bevis Marks! Here dwelt Mr. Bra.s.s and Sally and the Marchioness. Up and down the little street, this side and that, I went gazing and dreaming. No press of busy folk disturbed me; the place was quiet; it looked no doubt much the same as when d.i.c.kens knew it. I am not sure that I had any dinner that day; but, if not, I daresay I did not mind it very much.'

The broad flood under Thames bridges spoke to him in the very tones of 'the master.' He breathed Guppy's London particular, the wind was the black easter that pierced the diaphragm of Scrooge's clerk.

'We bookish people have our connotations for the life we do not live.

In time I came to see London with my own eyes, but how much better when I saw it with those of d.i.c.kens!'

Tired and discouraged, badly nourished, badly housed--working under conditions little favourable to play of the fancy or intentness of the mind--then was the time, Gissing found, to take down Forster and read--read about Charles d.i.c.kens.

'Merely as the narrative of a wonderfully active, zealous, and successful life, this book scarce has its equal; almost any reader must find it exhilarating; but to me it yielded such special sustenance as in those days I could not have found elsewhere, and lacking which I should, perhaps, have failed by the way. I am not referring to d.i.c.kens's swift triumph, to his resounding fame and high prosperity; these things are cheery to read about, especially when shown in a light so human, with the accompaniment of so much geniality and mirth. No; the pages which invigorated me are those where we see d.i.c.kens at work, alone at his writing-table, absorbed in the task of the story-teller. Constantly he makes known to Forster how his story is getting on, speaks in detail of difficulties, rejoices over spells of happy labour; and what splendid sincerity in it all! If this work of his was not worth doing, why, nothing was. A troublesome letter has arrived by the morning's post and threatens to spoil the day; but he takes a few turns up and down the room, shakes off the worry, and sits down to write for hours and hours. He is at the sea-side, his desk at a sunny bay window overlooking the sh.o.r.e, and there all the morning he writes with gusto, ever and again bursting into laughter at his own thoughts.'[7]

[Footnote 7: See a deeply interesting paper on d.i.c.kens by 'G.G.' in the New York _Critic_, Jan. 1902. Much of this is avowed autobiography.]

The influence of d.i.c.kens clearly predominated when Gissing wrote his next novel and first really notable and artistic book, _Thyrza_.[8] The figure which irradiates this story is evidently designed in the school of d.i.c.kens: it might almost be a pastel after some more highly finished work by Daudet.

But Daudet is a more relentless observer than Gissing, and to find a parallel to this particular effect I think we must go back a little farther to the heroic age of the _grisette_ and the tearful _Manchon de Francine_ of Henri Murger. _Thyrza_, at any rate, is a most exquisite picture in half-tones of grey and purple of a little Madonna of the slums; she is in reality the _belle fleur d'un fumier_ of which he speaks in the epigraph of the _Nether World_. The _fumier_ in question is Lambeth Walk, of which we have a Sat.u.r.day night scene, worthy of the author of _L'a.s.sommoir_ and _Le Ventre de Paris_ in his most perceptive mood. In this inferno, amongst the pungent odours, musty smells and 'acrid exhalations from the shops where fried fish and potatoes hissed in boiling grease,' blossomed a pure white lily, as radiant amid mean surroundings as Gemma in the poor Frankfort confectioner's shop of Turgenev's _Eaux Printanieres._ The pale and rather languid charm of her face and figure are sufficiently portrayed without any set description. What could be more delicate than the intimation of the foregone 'good-night' between the sisters, or the scene of Lyddy plaiting Thyrza's hair? The delineation of the upper middle cla.s.s culture by which this exquisite flower of maidenhood is first caressed and transplanted, then slighted and left to wither, is not so satisfactory. Of the upper middle cla.s.s, indeed, at that time, Gissing had very few means of observation. But this defect, common to all his early novels, is more than compensated by the intensely pathetic figure of Gilbert Grail, the tender-souled, book-wors.h.i.+pping factory hand raised for a moment to the prospect of intellectual life and then hurled down by the caprice of circ.u.mstance to the unrelenting round of manual toil at the soap and candle factory. d.i.c.kens would have given a touch of the grotesque to Grail's gentle but ungainly character; but at the end he would infallibly have rewarded him as Tom Pinch and Dominie Sampson were rewarded. Not so George Gissing. His sympathy is fully as real as that of d.i.c.kens. But his fidelity to fact is greater. Of the Christmas charity prescribed by d.i.c.kens, and of the untainted pathos to which he too rarely attained, there is an abundance in _Thyrza_. But what amazes the chronological student of Gissing's work is the magnificent quality of some of the writing, a quality of which he had as yet given no very definite promise. Take the following pa.s.sage, for example:--

[Footnote 8: _Thyrza: A Novel_ (3 vols., 1887). In later life we are told that Gissing affected to despise this book as 'a piece of boyish idealism.'

But he was always greatly pleased by any praise of this 'study of two sisters, where poverty for once is rainbow-tinted by love.' My impression is that it was written before _Demos_, but was longer in finding a publisher; it had to wait until the way was prepared by its coa.r.s.er and more vigorous workfellow. A friend writes: 'I well remember the appearance of the MS. Gissing wrote then on thin foreign paper in a small, thin handwriting, without correction. It was before the days of typewriting, and the MS. of a three-volume novel was so compressed that one could literally put it in one's pocket without the slightest inconvenience.' The name is from Byron's _Elegy on Thyrza_.]

'A street organ began to play in front of a public-house close by.

Grail drew near; there were children forming a dance, and he stood to watch them.

Do you know that music of the obscure ways, to which children dance?

Not if you have only heard it ground to your ears' affliction beneath your windows in the square. To hear it aright you must stand in the darkness of such a by-street as this, and for the moment be at one with those who dwell around, in the blear-eyed houses, in the dim burrows of poverty, in the unmapped haunts of the semi-human. Then you will know the significance of that vulgar clanging of melody; a pathos of which you did not dream will touch you, and therein the secret of hidden London will be half revealed. The life of men who toil without hope, yet with the hunger of an unshaped desire; of women in whom the sweetness of their s.e.x is peris.h.i.+ng under labour and misery; the laugh, the song of the girl who strives to enjoy her year or two of youthful vigour, knowing the darkness of the years to come; the careless defiance of the youth who feels his blood and revolts against the lot which would tame it; all that is purely human in these darkened mult.i.tudes speaks to you as you listen. It is the half-conscious striving of a nature which knows not what it would attain, which deforms a true thought by gross expression, which clutches at the beautiful and soils it with foul hands.

The children were dirty and ragged, several of them barefooted, nearly all bare-headed, but they danced with noisy merriment. One there was, a little girl, on crutches; incapable of taking a partner, she stumped round and round, circling upon the pavement, till giddiness came upon her and she had to fall back and lean against the wall, laughing aloud at her weakness. Gilbert stepped up to her, and put a penny into her hand; then, before she had recovered from her surprise, pa.s.sed onwards.'--(p. 111.)

This superb piece of imaginative prose, of which Shorthouse himself might have been proud,[9] is recalled by an answering note in _Ryecroft_, in which he says, 'I owe many a page to the street-organs.'

And, where the pathos has to be distilled from dialogue, I doubt if the author of _Jack_ himself could have written anything more restrainedly touching or in a finer taste than this:--

[Footnote 9: I am thinking, in particular, of the old vielle-player's conversation in chap. xxiii. of _John Inglesant_; of the exquisite pa.s.sage on old dance music--its inexpressible pathos--in chap. xxv.]

'Laughing with kindly mirth, the old man drew on his woollen gloves and took up his hat and the violin-bag. Then he offered to say good-bye.

"But you're forgetting your top-coat, grandad," said Lydia.

"I didn't come in it, my dear."