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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Ryecroft and Gissing

Ryecroft and Gissing

The works of George Gissing are a bridge between the three-decker Victorian novel and the modern psychological novel which rests on the immediate observation of a solitary mind. He aspired to be the English Balzac, but had not that French master’s omnivorous curiosity. This fictitious diary of a retired journalist is rightly regarded as his masterpiece, for he expresses here in all its complexity the sense of inward failure felt by a man who has been broken on the wheel of commerce; yet also the spiritual power of a man who knows that however much he has been shaped by his circumstances, hepage 136 has not been totally subdued by them. ‘Ryecroft’ lives in a world of books, a recluse awaiting his death in a small country cottage. ‘Life, I fancy, would very often be unsupportable, but for the luxury of self-compassion; in cases numberless, this it must be that saves from suicide. . . . And now, thanks be to the unknown power which rules us, my past has buried its dead. More than that; I can accept with sober cheerfulness the necessity of all I lived through. So it was to be; so it was. For this did Nature shape me; with what purpose I shall never know; but, in the sequence of things eternal, this was my place.’

A not entirely convincing Stoicism. Far more than for his didactic self- explanation, one is moved by Ryecroft’s description of the English seasons; there his true pathos emerges, a pathos close to that of Hardy. But which is ‘Ryecroft’ and which is George Gissing – the sententious Stoic or the humble, intense observer – one can hardly guess. Perhaps Gissing was all these things and more.

1953 (75)