George Gissing: A Fan's Commonplace Blog

Commonplace 24         George & Finding the Muse of Henry Ryecroft.



George led something of a sheltered life and so the dictum 'write about what you know' severely hampered the breadth of his subject matter. As a perpetual outsider and voyeur of life; as a solitary reader and a lonely boulevardier in cities, and sometime solo country rambler, George was not best equipped to write tales of human interaction. As a man habituated to not expressing his feelings and thoughts, yet adept at inventing his own history and glossing over his actions, perhaps the novel was the only way to externalise the inner dialogue that, at times, threatened to destabilize his mental wellbeing.

His stories tell of small lives lived intimately in terms of physical space; often, characters are not able to break out emotionally or psychically into full life. The sheer weight of mundane, trivial events bears down on some characters driving them to fatal plunges into waterfalls or lonely relocations to moribund places (as in his Art so in his life) where death will come as a relief in the end - anything to break the dreadful spectre of ennui. Henry Ryecroft, I suspect, was not far from self-murder when he conceived of his memoir - a long suicide note, if ever there was one: the pointlessness of it all, the cod sum of it all wisdom which was really nothing more than banal musings of a conservative and closed-off made-up mind purloining ideas from Ruskin and Japanese haiku and then transplanting them to a fake rural idyll. Maybe £300 pa does buy you nothing more than mediocrity. And, if Ryecroft has a point it is that the artist needs the grit of adversity to make the pearl of a work of art - having an income behind him stopped George's flow of artistic juices, as much as did a decline in health. Or, was it that George was, after all that fuss, a natural born reader, not a natural born writer? 


Ennui by Walter Sickert 1909

Of course, some readers think Ryecroft is autobiography and good luck to them if they do. Some people want to believe that was how George really saw his life. But, to withdraw from the world is the dream of a person desperately seeking to gain control of what he cannot conquer and rule - if you can't beat 'em: avoid 'em. Might it not be better to address the control freakery and change the mindset? George did admit in his later life - to Gabrielle - that he was wrong about some things (that 'love' between man and woman was the 'Crown of Life' - what risible tosh! Was he really such a chronic under-achiever??) but maybe only because he desperately needed a nurse companion to get him through to the end, and so he had to counter all her reservations especially regarding the emancipation of women.


Often in George's stories there is no place of intimate connections to an emotional human landscape. Characters are suffocated as much by their relationships as by their constrained surroundings of space and poverty. This forms part of the meta text of George's writings - the big issues are class and money, failed ambition and being born at the wrong time in the wrong place; beneath this is the personal ordeal of lack of meaning and connection; disappointment and compromise. Lack of direction is also a defining feature for some male characters - Piers Otway, Waymark, Rolfe, for example, don't really have a life plan - they drift through events in a state of existential torpor until something happens for them to react to, often because they have money to see them through. Decisions - affirmative action - are denied them, mainly because they have removed themselves from the mainstream of life - not to complete some higher aim but to avoid occupying some less than satisfying other mental place. George's characters are often victims of their own failure to engage with Life, sterile of dynamic masculine intention. Often, it is only the women who put up a fight - Ida Starr, for example. But George has to punish her for this rebellion - she must comply if she is to be brought into the fold - she must be made to feel inferior (in a way doing Harriet Smales' work for her) before she can be allowed to rise above it. 

Boy by the Sea by Hippolyte Flandrin 1864

 Making decisions in his real life deeply influenced this need to make his characters suffer. In an age than valued success (in a very twenty-first century way) a man who made wrong choices would have felt emasculated: a failure. George made many bad choices and was 'punished' severely for them. The ramifications of defeat warped him, and turned him from a brave idealist to a cringing cynic whose dream (if Ryecroft is real) was to hide and fade away. Standing and fighting was not George's style (as some critics who knew him observed). Only in his writing does he attempt to engage - in an environment entirely controlled by himself - his individuality in asserting itself. His public persona is all about conformity: if you look the part, you are the part. George recognised this in himself - he wasn't stupid! All through his Paris holiday with Mr Plitt he moans about his own lack of assertiveness; his diaries are cross-referenced admissions of contradictions between what he thinks and what he says out loud; what he wants to do and what he actually does. His mind never rests; he never seems at peace with himself. Ryecroft was his imaginary world where all this was resolved; where harmony was restored. But, it wasn't real. What is omitted is the burden of guilt for wrong deeds done from selfish motives - of acts of treachery and stupidity and mindful resentments. Ryecroft a true story?  

The Muses. From the left: Calliope, Clio, Euterpe, Erato, Melopomene. Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia, Urania. Where are they when you need them? Women, eh!! Up the Mall shopping for caligae. This is Roman 2nd century CE from the Louvre.

Making the choice to write for a living was a decision that may not have worked in George's favour. It is tempting to view him as not a naturally creative character - his early successes at school and college were often the product of sheer hard graft and did not require more divine inspiration. Application was not a problem, but the arduous duty of it tended to reinforce the most rigid of his personality traits, rather than liberate the muse of creativity. Fiction writing was not necessarily his first skill because it seems George was a talented painter when younger (some of his most immersive writing is painterly descriptive. almost filmic), and a gifted critic of Dickens. He liked ideas - often his stories are set slightly in the past so his audience would already have the information in their heads before he took them on the journey not as a pioneer explorer but as a thinking person's tour guide. Instead of bringing new points of view, he debated what was already common currency. Even Morley Roberts sometimes tired of the endless chat about the 'intellectual' subjects George preferred; did he ever stand his ground and say 'For feck's sake, Gissing: lighten up!'? 

In the 'whirlpool' of late Victorian life, George took us to that little house and garden where Ryecroft sheltered awaiting death. The world was out of control around him (another twenty-first century notion) and so he disappeared into a quiet backwater retreat. In reality, George did no such thing: he started a new life in France (another bad decision, but what can you do when circumstances dictate?) and tried to offset the effects of deteriorating health by focusing on Veranilda, a project of personal joy. That little house in the country would not have suited him, even if it had been in leafy Devon. George was not cut out for happiness. Adversity was his domain, his default action was to battle through. As Oscar Wilde says: There are only two tragedies in Life: one is not getting what one wants; the other is getting it.' 

Henry Ryecroft lived here and went mad, eventually blowing his brains out with a revolver. You can just make out the mush of his medulla oblongata adorning the inside of the windows to the rear façade, very much in the spirit of William Morris. Here, creepy Thomas Kinkade offers, for the aesthetically infertile and visually impaired, all that is ersatz about Ryecroft - in a jigsaw.