George Gissing: A Fan's Commonplace Blog

Commonplace 161  George & God.

I share three things with the late, great Christopher Hitchens: a birthday, a birthplace and that clarity of thinking that is Antitheism. If I only I had his brains click. (Not his literal brains, you damned fool!) And his courage click. Anyone who 'vibrates' to Marxism - as he put it - is all right with me. I am sure there was no cowardly last minute scramble for redemption at his end. What a loss was his passing.

God Blessing The Seventh Day by William Blake c 1805

At George's death (see Commonplace 139), there was a kerfuffle about religion, which can be summed up as 'what form did George want his send off to take?'. In his day, and with his background, the assumption would be that some sort of Christian religious rite would be involved. Gabrielle Fleury, George's third wife, was on the scene, so we may assume her wishes were taken into account, and that she was acting on his wishes, perhaps guided by some arrangement made when George was compos mentis enough to make decisions. Just to recap, George was in the final throes of heart disease brought on by paresis - a complication of tertiary syphilis. Not every Gissing scholar wants to believe George had contracted this disease, but I do because: 1) I'm not a scholar; 2) all evidence points in that direction. His Owens College friend, John George Black wrote letters about it, HG Wells knew about it, as did Morley Roberts; Frank Swinnerton pulled no punches on it. See Commonplaces 62-69.

So, there George was, desperate to come home to England (his long-term plan, alas left too late), but too ill to travel. He knew a thing or two about illness, and death had been courting him for years, but now, he no doubt felt the end was nigh. He would have recognised the lack of adequate medical and nursing care that surrounded him would be the death of him. His friends were sent for - Morley Roberts and HG Wells were summoned by Gabrielle. It's worth saying that HG Wells had a low opinion of Gabrielle based on a series of long and needy letters she wrote on the subject of George and his unreasonable, selfish and somewhat flaky behaviour. We will return to these letters in a future post, because they shed much light on George. She is the only wife to get a hearing, after all. She had already been driven to distraction by trying to satisfy his very odd requirements and when he was obviously on his last legs, she was coping more or less alone, and facing a dismal future, fairly broke, well past her prime, and continuing to care for her ageing mother.

God Judging Adam by William Blake 1795

Both of these friends did their best to get to the distant part of France that George was holed up in. If only he'd settled for northern France, like many British and Irish ex-pats such as Oscar Wilde or Joseph Sickert because then it would have been a hop, skip and a jump back to Blighty for help. Or even Paris, with its expertise on all things syphilis.

Ispoure.

In his 'Experiment in Autobiography', Wells says:

He had been writing with deepening distress to Morley Roberts in November. Just on the eve of Christmas came telegrams to both of us: “George is dying. Entreat you to come. In greatest haste.”

When he arrived, HG was shocked at the state of the place in terms of Gabrielle's provision of care. He took the matter in hand: There was however a good little Anglican parson about, with his wife, and they helped me to get in a nurse. 

Wells knew his friend was dying, but he had never witnessed death before, and it shocked him. George's delirium produced hallucinations and delusions:

"What are these magnificent beings!” he would say. “Who are these magnificent beings advancing upon us?” Or again, “What is all this splendour? What does it portend?” He babbled in Latin; he chanted fragments of Gregorian music. All the accumulation of material that he had made for Veranilda and more also, was hurrying faster and brighter across the mirrors of his brain before the lights went out for ever.

The Anglican chaplain, whose wife had helped with the beef-tea, heard of that chanting. He allowed his impression to develop in his memory and it was proclaimed later in a newspaper that Gissing had died “in the fear of God’s holy name, and with the comfort and strength of the Catholic faith.” This led to some bitter recriminations. Edward Clodd and Morley Roberts were particularly enraged at this “body-snatching” as they called it, and among other verbal missiles that hit that kindly little man in the full publicity of print were “crow,” “vulture” and “ecclesiastical buzzard.” But he did not deserve to be called such names. He did quite honestly think Gissing’s “Te Deums” had some sort of spiritual significance.

But, according to Wells, Gissing, like Gibbon, regarded Christianity as a deplorable disaster for the proud gentilities of classicism.

Jupiter and Io
by Antonio da Correggio 1532-3

It's doubtful if George would ever have consented to a overtly religious ceremony of any stripe, though nothing of the kind can be totally ruled out. His whole writing life he sat on a fence about the topic, leaning more to the agnostic side. He was sceptical of anyone who lived their life by religious tenets, and many times castigated his sister Madge for her devotion to her god. He was too much of an iconoclast (albeit in a modest, repressed British Victorian way) to follow formats for how to live life - he was very dismissive when his younger brother, William, took up the best-seller of the age, 'Self-Help' by Samuel Smiles, described as 'the bible of mid-Victorian liberalism'. In his early days, George was much taken with Arthur Schopenhauer who had a fondness for Buddhism, and George did his best to absorb those ideas - much as did Friedrich Nietzsche - and make sense of the world through introspection and intellectual distance. 'Be of the moment' says Buddhism, but that doesn't put a vegetarian nut-roast on the table when the means of production is in the wrong hands. As it still is. Anyhoo, when pressed, George, in a piece of 100% solid George Gissing over-complicated over-thought intellectual fence-sitting, once said he was most in sympathy with Manicheism. WTF is that, I hear you ask. Well, it's the ideal religion/system for anyone who can't make up her/his mind but has a long night of the soul realisation judgement day is just around the corner and wants to cover all bases just in case there really is a god.

Let's look at in from a learned perspective such as click, where light is shed (see what I've done there haha you have to read the link to get that) on the funeral practices of Manicheans in long ago China, a place where the teachings made a great impact, but also gave rise to resentment amongst Buddhists and Confucians who persecuted Manicheans wherever they could:

The list of scriptures shows that the Manicheans in south China still retained scriptures, which were clearly translated in the T'ang era even though new ones might have been added. The officials were particularly concerned about the well-organized sects whom they vaguely labelled as "Vegetarian demon worshippers" (ch'ih-ts'ai shih-mo). As one Confucian official would memorialise: "The sect of the 'demon worshipping vegetarians (sic)' is strictly prohibited by the laws. Even the family members of the offenders who are not privy to their crime are exiled to distant lands and half of the offender's property would be awarded to the informer and the rest confiscated. Nevertheless the number of followers has increased in recent times. The sect originated in Fukien and spread to the Province of Wen and the two Che Provinces (i.e. eastern and southern Chekiang). When Fang La rose in rebellion, the followers of the sect incited each other to rebel everywhere. It is said that their rules prohibit the eating of meat and the drinking of wine. They do not worship spirits or Buddhas or ancestors. Nor do they entertain guests. When [a member of the sect] dies he is first laid out fully clothed and capped, and then buried naked. Two fellow members of the sect then sit beside the corpse and one of them will ask: 'Did he come with a cap?' and the other will reply: 'No, [he did not].' They then proceed to take off his cap and in similar fashion they remove one by one his other items of clothing, until nothing is left. One of them will then ask: 'What did he wear when he first came?' The other will answer: 'Placenta [i.e. the clothes of the womb].' They then put the corpse into a cloth...

Their refusal to pay respects to their ancestors and their practice of naked burial are detrimental to public morals. They also assert that human existence is full of misery. Hence, to terminate it by killing is to relieve misery. This is what they call 'deliverance,' and he who 'delivers' many will become a Buddha. Therefore, once their numbers increase, they will take advantage of political chaos and rise in revolt. Their greatest crime is the pleasure they take in killing. They hate Buddhism in particular because its prohibition of killing is an offence to them.

Maybe George didn't read the fine print about not eating meat or drinking wine or killing folk, but was attracted to the bit about 'life being full of misery' - he certainly tried to live up to that, and make sure that others followed his lead. Perhaps that's why he left his first wife to starve and die in abject poverty - which according to George was how he found her after her death - in order to 'deliver' her. No, that wasn't from any religious conviction or spiritual path following, but old-fashioned selfishness that allowed George to be so cruel. The sort of thing religion - god - is supposed to be pretty judgemental about.

Did Nell get any religious rites at her passing? She was, by George's account, a person of faith who considered converting to Catholicism, much to his amusement/derision. George ended his days dragged unwittingly into a religious tradition he claimed to despise, but if he had been sent off in Manichean style he would have been buried bollock naked, so maybe he was better off in the arms of Jesus after all.

Manichean temple in Jinjiang showing Buddha of Light