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The rising novelist is never pestered to come togin and winkles with the
plumber and his wife. Surelythe street, the drawing-room, are promising
subjects; modern lifeis worthy of the muse. Blank verse has proved itself the
mostremorseless enemy of living speech.
But our ignorance of the aristocracy is
nothing compared with ourignorance of the working classes.
For it becomes clear
as we read that, whatever Mrs.
He wasdetermined to visit Greece and Rome.
The
Elizabeths and the Emmasof Miss Austen could not possibly be taken for anything
else.
The awful hierarchy of the passions is slightly displaced. He would rush
off to school with asharp herring bone in his throat for fear of missing his
lesson.
To neithercould he speak the simple language of daily life.
Certainly,there is compensation to a degree. But because Gissing was always
thinking, he was always changing.
We are galloped to them over every obstacle
on thepounding hoofs of rhapsodical prose.
Ofall the things that might have
happened this surely is thestrangest.
Someof the most emotional scenes in
fiction are the quietest. We shall never know what the Court ofLouis XIV looked
like to Louis XIV himself.
It was natural that he should attempt it.
He has
amind stuffed with ideas, hungry for argument. It is in talk that thehigh
moments of life, the shock of character upon character, aredefined.
George, his
sister said,had a passion for learning.
The writer has dined upon lentils; he
gets up at five; hewalks across London; he finds Mr.
The rising novelist is
never pestered to come togin and winkles with the plumber and his wife.
The
folds of light andshadow everywhere were satin rich. Englishfiction without the
nieces of Earls and the cousins of Generalswould be an arid waste. Thepast,
with its literature and its civilization, solidifies thepresent. Ofall the
things that might have happened this surely is thestrangest.
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