Commonplace 179  George & All Art Being Quite Useless.

It was, of course, the Divine Oscar Wilde who said that all Art is quite useless. As Oscar was never frivolous, particularly when he was being amusing, we can take it that he meant what he said. But, what did he mean? I think he means Art doesn't have to have a point, or a meaning, or a function or a need to be anything other than what it is. It isn't required to teach us anything or point anything out to us, or represent anything but what it is.

George considered himself an Artist at a time when literature held more cultural clout than the visual Arts. Anyone of a creative bent wanting to make a name (and a fortune) for themselves might be tempted to gravitate towards writing because it might be seen as less hard work and offer the originator more free time to sit unmolested reading books and thinking up less than life-enhancing poetry. Visual Arts - painting and sculpture in particular - are unforgiving beasts, requiring skill and much practise to perfect. The notion that it is all spectacular feats of serendipitous legerdemain is tosh. Picasso said 'Inspiration exists but it has to find us working'.

The Artistic spark might be spontaneous, but the manifestation of it requires endless practise perfecting the process and mentally debating those decisions about what to keep and what to bin. Experienced artists get better at anticipating what will or won't work, and so save on materials. Writers are lucky, in that their materials are relatively cheap - whereas Visual Artists usually waste a lot of expensive gear before they realise they are barking up the wrong tree with marble carving and move to a cheaper medium - such as wood - then settle for working in a bookshop (I didn't put ‘settle for teaching’ there, see? Because teaching is a hard, troublesome and sometimes thankless task and needs more love shown to it haha)). Thus, money usually dictates what Art is made - as George found out so harshly.

George's decision to abandon all but Art for Art's Sake (about the time he gave up Positivism, c 1883/4) in his work was an economic disaster and an impossible to pull off piece of wonky magical thinking, but it did provide him with an excuse in the unlikely event that no-one understood his work. If something he produced did not go down well, he might be able to claim he was 'misunderstood'; 'ahead of his time'; 'surrounded by philistines'... In fact, anything but 'mediocre' or 'unpopular'. 

Philistines by Jean-Michel Basquiat 1982

Selling creative work means someone approves of it - which is one of the reasons some people make it - for approval. With or without a patron, Artists have always wanted to make money, if only to live and buy paints and materials, and so unless they have a ready-made income, they will always have to pander to the market in order to finance their work. It's reactionary stuff constructed from envy and resentment to suggest, as George did, that only one who has starved can truly be an Artist. Some of the most gifted of his contemporaries had never struggled for money, but still came up with the goods: Jacques aka James Tissot, Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse Lautrec all came from comfortable financial backgrounds, and look what they managed to turn out - though in the case of Whistler, it couldn't make him a likeable, decent human being. 

The struggle for making or even appreciating Art often starts with a debate about what is good or bad. The creative 'Artistic process' is a series of judgements and corrections based on mysterious forces dictating what to include and what to leave out. Unless there is totally random abstraction, this is so, but I am not aware of any Artist who works in this way - maybe machines do it, and the future cyborgs and robots probably have an app already installed, but the most abstract of artists - say, Jackson Pollock - control their paint, decide its direction, and choose its colours (or colors, in the case of Pollock haha) and deliberate every minute detail. 

The Key by Jackson Pollock 1946

George made visual Art - paintings and sketches - in his youth, much as he dabbled with poetry. He left the paints behind, except as a 'weekend' activity-cum-hobby, but carried on making poems, not in the very best interests of Poetry, but because he felt strongly moved to put pen to paper. I know nothing about poetry beyond what moves me, but George's poems are mostly awful, over-long and pompous, merely showing off all he knows about Greek works and their construction, and failing to rise to the appropriate intimate emotional heights. What we want from a poem is monumental in the same way The Doors' Light My Fire brings the listener to a happy ending click. Robby Krieger in sublime form here. There is a small sketch George did of a tree - which couldn't be less skilled if it tried, or more phallic (or tumescently erect!) and could easily have been done by DH Lawrence at his painterly worst.

George was much taken with the many teachings of John Ruskin, who was of the mind that Art can only be produced by those with high spiritual sensibilities; George was of the belief that this might be so, but only if those persons were also 'a cultured, highly intelligent & reflective minority' - according to his letter of August 28th 1898. Up to his armpits in the arduous and time-consuming task of wooing Gabrielle Fleury, he took time off to respond to a letter sent to him by a disciple/fan of his, a Russian émigré living in Paris and working as a translator - Il'ja Halperine-Kaminsky click. This young man addressed George as 'Dear Master' - which went down a storm with our man, and made its way into a letter he sent to Gabrielle. Il'ja sent him his translation of a book written by Leo Tolstoy - ' Qu'est-ce que l'Art? (click for full English text) Of course, at this time, Tolstoy was a legend, but had lost some of his credibility because of his socialist behaviour - by turning his back on privilege and choosing to live like a peasant, he hoped to lead the way for the rich to redeem their souls by giving away their money and estates and living like simple folk. His thoughts on Art were in sympathy with Ruskin's - distinctly pro-proletariat and democratic and socialistic - three things not much to George's taste.

Detail from a Portrait of Tolstoy
by Kramskoy Ivan 1873

 Tolstoy answered his own question 'What is Art?' with:

The object of this activity is to transmit to others feeling the artist has experienced. Such feelings intentionally re-evoked and successfully transmitted to others are the subject-matter of all art. By certain external signs, movements, lines, colours, sounds, or arrangements of words an artist infects other people so that they share his feelings. Thus 'art is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings'

  

This was, of course, written before the rise of Modernism, which might, in the second sentence, substitute 'ideas' for 'feelings'. And with absolutely no regard for females - though the term 'man' or 'men' stood in for 'human' in those days. And the bit about joining them in feelings? Not necessarily, as no two people see the same thing in a painting. 

In his response to this, George wrote that he agreed, up to a point, but that he could not agree that Art was the product of the prevailing 'religious spirit of the age', and that morality had nothing to do with Art. Echoes here, of Oscar Wilde's 'There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are either well written or badly written'  (when quizzed about The Picture of Dorian Gray). In his defence of Dorian, Oscar wrote: 'An artist has no ethical sympathies at all. Virtue and wickedness are to him simply what the colours on his palette are to the painter'. He adds, 'If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson.' However, 'If a man sees the artistic beauty of a thing, he will probably care very little for its ethical import.' click

But where George is most at odds with Tolstoy's view is in deciding that only simple folk - the proletariat - can truly appreciate Art. George writes that the new sentiment (in literature) does not appeal to the uncultured reader, it is recognized only by a highly intelligent & reflective minority, & received very slowly indeed by the world at large. George is not referring to painting here; but is Tolstoy speaking about literature, or is he thinking of the Visual Arts? Literature is always going to be a much more difficult Art form to appreciate because it depends so much on knowing the intricacies of a language with its rules of grammar and punctuation, depth of vocabulary, knowledge of cultural references, rules of composition and genre... and painting and the other Visual Arts can be just as simple as looking. You don't even have to think - you just let it wash over you. Like music.

Where George was in total agreement with Tolstoy is in the matter of Art not being considered a 'trade'. This is a one of the most significant, but subtle, influences on the production of Art - the rise of the Visual Artist as a non-tradesperson. In the Renaissance, the likes of Michelangelo and Leonardo were tradespeople, happy to work for anyone and probably paid by the hour - or the yard! JMW Turner regarded himself likewise, and mass-produced his watercolours in an almost industrial way to maximise his ideas and make as much money as he could. At some point, the move to regard Artists as special in a good way - personified by the Pre-Raphaelite Brethren - demanded a distinction between Artists and artisans. It is the difference that exists between journalists and novelists. Artists ceased to be jobbing tradespeople who could decorate an inn sign as readily as paint a church screen, and became the lofty souls we now recognise. William Morris was an artisan because he was principally a designer (amongst other things, of course) - Rossetti was an Artist. Artists do not like to be referred to as artisans. Graphic Arts are looked down on by Fine Artists... Snobbery crept in and elitism followed; Andy Warhol was initially seen as a lesser talent because he started in advertising. Now he is rightly placed at the top table as one of the greatest Artists of all time.

Andy Warhol photographed by Dennis Hopper 1963

The Visual Arts are a universal language which is appreciated by those who 'get' it - you can like an Art work and not know why, and appreciate it without knowing how or why it was made; even when you get the wrong end of the stick about it, you can still find it meaningful. A book requires a particular set of skills and a specific form of knowledge already in place in order to access the stuff to be found in between the pages - and if you haven't got much learning, that can make you feel inadequate. An Art work is 'take it or leave it', and it doesn't judge the onlooker. Everyone has a creative reflex that reacts to Art works - you either like Puppy, or you are indifferent. You are either glad it exists, or you pass it by.

Puppy by Jeff Koons 1992

All Art is quite useless? Yes, inasmuch as it doesn't have to fulfil a function - like a teapot or a cushion. That is the difference between Art and craft. 

Commonplace 178  George & Money.

With paintings by Tamara Lempicka (1898-1980)

In February 1895, George's longest-serving friend, Morley Roberts, wrote asking if he could write a piece about him in the Fortnightly Review. Roberts liked to bask in what there was of George's glory, but, naturally, George needed to stage-manage the affair. He once said Morley Roberts didn't really understand him or his work, so that probably gave an urgency to compiling his own version for Roberts to use. But there was a more pressing matter of three fairly negative articles in the sort of publications that secured a wide readership (the Spectator, Sketch, and Illustrated London News) that was preying on his mind. Nettled, George grabbed at the chance to respond to all three (but especially the Spectator) making use of Roberts as his willing, and partisan mouthpiece.

Lassitude 1927

It is a masterly work, this reply from George agreeing to the request, and opens with a classic line of control-freak manipulation: 

My dear Roberts, - What objection could I possibly have - unless it were that I should not like to hear you reviled for log-rolling? (Logrolling is the practice of authors bigging up each other's work often to increase sales). 

So, George starts off making sure Roberts keeps his praise reasonably restrained and beyond the gushing that would give away his motives. George assumes Roberts would want to gush, of course. And no mention of how much fake logrolling he might have to do to reciprocate - after all, it takes two to logroll!

George goes on:

But it seems to me that you might well write an article which would incur no such charge; and indeed, by so doing, you would render me a very great service. For I have in mind at present the careful and well-written attack in the current Spectator. Have you seen it? Now I will tell you what my feelings are about this frequent attitude in my critics.

There we have it - removing Roberts' freedom to write what he pleased. George could have written the piece himself and published under his own name, but that would have disrupted his cunning plan to be eternally aloof and seemingly indifferent to outside influences. And, Roberts, desperate to please and with the devotion of an unrequited lover, was happy to play the eternal patsy fully prepared to take a bullet for his hero if the response backfired. 

The Spectator piece published 9th February 1895 was Anonymous, but George commented that it was a careful and well-written attack. In fact, it is a very good piece, and gives an introduction and overview to George's main themes, whilst fairly critiquing his strengths and weaknesses. It sums up the central theme of the 'post slum ghetto' (or whatever George's early works can be termed) books as being preoccupied with middle class men with mediocre education, talents and expectations, who have aspirations to climb the greasy pole to the upper middle class but no big plan or motivation/options to achieve this. The author of the article makes the point that the lower middle classes and below had Charles Dickens as their champion - now the aspirational but dismal middle classes have George. (As there is a tinge of sarcasm here, we can take it this was not meant as a compliment!) But the author goes on to observe that, anyone from this class who reads about themselves as George portrays them (probably having borrowed a volume from a circulating library) will turn away from the finished work 'as if dissatisfied'... they will only feel in a vague, uncomfortable, resentful sort of way that the general effect is false, misleading, even libellous; that it is in essence caricature, though it has been produced without any of those obvious tricks of draughtsmanship which make ordinary caricature at once recognisable for what it is.

Portrait Of Madame G. 1930

Anon goes on to say that George has a way of caricaturing his types by what they don't do or fail to say as much as what they actually do, and by the omitting useful information and insights into their motives and thoughts, rather than by delineating details that might make them seem real to the reader. The author (who could be male or female - I rather hope female) points out:

The artist who sees life steadily and sees it whole, never allows us to forget that whatsoever be a man's caste, or calling, or condition, he is first of all a human being, and only secondarily a courtier, a rustic, a lawyer, a publican, a barbarian, or a Philistine. The humanity which unites him to his fellows is really more significant, and should, in any serious art, be made more emphatic than the idiosyncrasies which distinguish him from them; but it is Mr Gissing's way to give distinctness and force to his delineation of a species by emphasising its special isolating features, which are frequently, if not generally, the features that indicate weakness or limitation.

So far, so true. In the Year of Jubilee was George's most recent fictional offering, so this comes in for some harsh but fair flak. In discussing the characters, this Anon author writes:

The seniors live a dull, colourless, vegetating life, unglorified by any fine emotion or elevating instinct; the young throw the energies of youth either into sham culture, which leads only to unlovely priggishness, into degraded pleasures which land them in still more unlovely profligacy, or into a sordid money-worship which, in the young, is perhaps the unloveliest, because the most unnatural of all.

Spring 1930

The insightful author goes on:

Now, no one will deny that such characters as these represent existing types, or that such types (at least some of them) are most frequent in communities where the materials of comfort are in marked excess of the resources of culture; but to paraphrase Matthew Arnold, even in a cheap suburb life may be lived with well, - certainly not less well in the main than in any other civilised human sphere. But in Mr Gissing's pages the brutish stupefaction of his men and women is obviously treated as the inevitable, unescapable (sic) result of their social conditions and surroundings; therefore, in so far as fidelity to the fact is essential to art (and to realistic art such fidelity in the one thing needful), his treatment may be challenged on purely artistic grounds by critics who would treat its fatalistic pessimism  as an indifferent thing for which they have neither approval nor condemnation. 

You can see why George was pissed off.

There's more: 

Mr George Gissing must therefore be regarded not as a realist, but as an idealist of the new school... His acquaintance with certain social features is hardly less intimate than that of the Greek sculptor with certain anatomical features; but just as we know that there never was a living man or woman so physically perfect as the Apollo Belvedere or the Venus of Milo, so do we know that there never was a civilised community in which human nature was so largely denuded of its attractive elements as is the human nature of the community depicted in Mr Gissing's latest story. He has lately been the recipient of enthusiastic praise, and though we think that some of it has been extravagantly expressed, we do not grudge it to him. But it is in the interests of art that praise should be awarded on the right grounds; and praise can be awarded to Mr Gissing only for the vigour and vividness with which he renders his own vision - a most distorted vision it seems to us - of the vulgarity, sordidness, and ugliness of life.

George must have thought this piece of criticism was accurate or he never would have formulated a response - most of the time, he remained above any debate about his work. and was always happy to disregard what he didn't think much of in terms of understanding of his writing. Being misunderstood was George's thing, and he revelled in it. He added in his letter to Roberts, a clear manifesto for Roberts to repeat:

My books deal with people of many social strata. There are the vile working-class, the aspiring and capable working-class, the vile lower-middle, the aspiring and capable lower-middle, and a few representatives of the upper-middle . . . . But what I desire to insist upon is this: that the most characteristic, the most important part of my work is that which deals with a class of young men distinctive of our time – well educated, fairly bred, but without money.

This doesn't quite address the points raised in the Spectator piece, which charges him with accentuating the vile and sordid and failing to do justice to the good and uplifting in the lives of these well educated, fairly bred paupers. (Oddly, as George puts it, he deals with all social strata except the middle class and the actual hereditary aristocracy!) 

The Blue Hour 1931

These young middle class poor people George so wanted to champion - when they received their fancy education, did no-one tell them about Charles Darwin and his Theory of Natural Selection? Did they not learn we all have to adapt to survive? This was where George might have given them hope. There was work, of course, for them to do, if they accepted it. Not middle class well-paid work, but honest labour in lowly trades - like teaching. 

It's soon back to the usual shenanigans with our man deep in a funk of self-pity. He ends his letter to Roberts moaning about the cold weather: I write with a numbed hand. I haven't been warm for weeks. This weather crushes me. I suppose he was vexed at the accursed unfairness of it all - he was far too aristocratic to suffer the indignity of being cold. That was for the lower orders, the ones George Orwell later termed 'proles'.

The Spectator piece and the letter from George to Morley Roberts appears in the The Critical Heritage edited by Pierre Coustillas pages 238-245.

Commonplace 177   George & Money PART ONE

The Moneylender And His Wife by Quentin Matsys 1514

George had money on his mind all of the time. All that he was to himself, depended on it. It was the chief reason he wrote - because he was the sort of writer who created until he had a large enough income to be able him to give up the work. The pursuit of money, the spending of it, the lack of it, the earning of it, the value of it to your self-image if you had it or lacked it, the doling out of it to 'dependants' were his major preoccupations. Any pleasure George derived from the imaginative creative process was offset by the misery of having to do the thing he found difficult, claimed he didn't much enjoy, and which was innately poorly paid.  Fear of Freedom meets Masochism - see previous Commonplaces! Drawing to himself financial burdens like his wider family ensured he was forced to keep at it, 'nose to the grindstone', which was itself a valuable thing as it gave him something to moan about, rebel against, and resent. He had contempt for women... he had contempt for women whom he considered 'wasted their husband's money' (I will let that pass just this once!) on fripperies and then himself went out and bought books by the tonne, tobacco and evening dress suits when he claimed to have no social life. If you dabble in online quotes searches, you might find these George quotes on money:

1) Time is money says the proverb, but turn it around and you get a precious truth. Money is time.

George enjoyed quite a lot of 'time' - if by the word he means bits of life spent not actually working. He may have lacked the funds to do all the things he wanted to do, but he never stinted himself on time spent reading; even time he could have spent writing things that made him more money (magazine articles, for example) couldn't entice him away from the solitary vice of reading books. In fact, it could be argued that he worked to pay for time to read. Nothing in George's life ever gave him the pleasure that reading did. Even when he was low in funds and living with Marianne aka Nell, he kept them both (he claimed) half-starved in order to buy books. This is not rational behaviour. Which is why it stinks of untruth. We know he greatly exaggerated his poverty - Austin Harrison (son of Frederic) blew this claim out of the water early when he described George as being reasonably well paid for his tutoring, and never really poverty-stricken - that his claims to poverty were 'a fiction of fictions'. Roger Milbrandt has made a study of George's bogus claims to poverty, published in the Gissing Journal of October 2007 click and makes the point that, even when George was as his lowliest paid (1877, newly arrived in London and working as a clerk for St Vincent Mercier), he was likely to be sharing wage-earning with Marianne aka Nell. She might have worked as a seamstress though we don't know enough about her to be sure of her source of income. It seems the only mention we have of her possibly being in the needle trade is the John George Blacks' letter telling George about the struggle he had moving a sewing machine - George was clearly not involved in this venture and there is no evidence this was Nell's sewing machine, and though Morley Roberts tells us George bought her a sewing machine, he is wrong on so many things, he should not be trusted on specifics, considering he never actually met Nell in the flesh, and so had no experience of her as a real person, and wrote his self-serving fake biography in 1912, nine years after George died. But, this alleged 'buying of a machine for her' is touted as evidence she sponged off George and forced him into becoming a thief, but, really...? 

Marianne probably made money sewing - as ten of thousands of women had to and still do - but there were hundreds of factories in Manchester and London that needed employees to do piecework and make all manner of items, and work doled out on a 'first come first served' basis to those queuing outside factories at the start of the shift made earning a day's wage not too difficult, so she could have been employed at any sort of unskilled factory work. In fact, when George was working as some sort of clerk, there were probably a variety of jobs he could have taken, if he had parked his aspirations to be considered bona fide middle-class. However, he no doubt lacked the strength and temperament for hard labour and would have starved if all he had to rely on was manual skills, so presumably that will have impacted on his sense of masculinity. Not that we often associate him with that trait.It is considered a bonus if you enjoy your money-making activity click - and being happy in your working life is still an aspiration worth advocating: 'it doesn't matter what you do as long as you feel fulfilled, enjoy it and by honesty, it pays the bills' it is not a bad bit of advice to give to young folk setting out on their career journey. Doing well in education is touted as a way to guarantee more options, and help avoid working as a toilet attendant, but being a toilet attendant who loves their work is a happier bunny than a university don who loathes her/his post. Choice is a huge part of happiness, it seems. 

2) Money is time. With money I buy for cheerful use the hours which otherwise would not in any sense be mine; nay, which would make me their miserable bondsman.
 In fact, George did very little actual 'work' - if we take that to mean activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a result. Most of his 'effort' went into reading, a solitary activity guaranteed to appear to be self-improving, but which really kept him away from the sort of people he didn't want to be with. He once opined that his life had been led in the sort of company he found 'inferior', and that was his great tragedy. The business of writing was little more than a means to an end - the end being the solitary life. 
George was a classic case of under-achiever, whether from design as a product of deep-rooted anxieties about being judged by his peers and found wanting, or because his natural haughty temperament kept his sense of self safe from outside influence. His fiction is a psychodrama hard copy of this sensibility. One comment we frequently see about his style is the intellectual distance he puts between himself and his creations; another is the failure to express any opinions or explain the inner workings of his characters' minds. All his posturing about being an impartial observer when describing events that unfurl for his characters is in fact, George showing us his reaction to the sort of person he really wouldn't have wanted to associate with if they were real living, breathing people. And, remember: without his self-inflicted financial hardships, George would have had very little to complain about - and complaining is what kept him going. Lack of money was the metaphorical grit in his oyster that made him do more than sit about reading and smoking and reflecting on his wasted genius. Perhaps we should take him at face value when he told Gabrielle Fleury he had no respect for his own works, and that they were all inferior.

3) That is one of the bitter curses of poverty; it leaves no right to be generous.

On the surface, it's hard to know how he came to this conclusion - after all, he was raised in a Christian tradition and would have heard the parable of The Widow's Mite click. However, it is a line lifted from The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Winter III); taken out of its context, it can be misread. George is talking about how, when he was poor, he had feelings of dread when giving to beggars because he might one day be in a position where he had to beg, himself. He rightly notes giving is an empowering enterprise, and in the rest of the paragraph extols his own generosity (as Ryecroft, he gives away £50 to a needy friend) and sings his own praises and declares 'I feel myself a man' when he gives. Freud would no doubt concur, because to him man is the symbolic giver, woman the receiver.. However, George's view that giving is impossible to do when one is poor, is not borne out by the statistics click. This article suggests poor people identify with the struggling disadvantaged and so give more in order to distance themselves from the calamity of being identified as needy themselves. George's belief that money wouldn't solve the poor's problems misses the point that, what really will help us all is the spirit of generosity inherent in giving - that by showing we notice the suffering of others and make a financial gesture of support is as important as the monetary value of what is donated.

Dollar Signs by Andy Warhol 1981

JOIN ME IN PART TWO TO TEST BOB DYLAN'S ASSERTION THAT 'MONEY DOESN'T TALK, IT SWEARS'.

Commonplace 176  George & Mrs Grundy.

If Douglas Adams' ground-breaking The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy click teaches us anything, it is that everything is meshed together by Interconnectedness. So it is with Mrs Grundy.

Phryne Revealed Before The Areopagus by Jean-Leon Gerome (1861)

Of all the women in George's life, it could have been Mrs Grundy who gave him the most grief. He often mentions how flabbergasting she is. Such was her power over him that he wrote, but destroyed unpublished, a novel entitled Mrs Grundy's Enemies; no doubt he considered himself in their number. A quick squint at her Wikipedia page click proves how influential she was and how she continues to vex writers in particular. So, who was this femme fatale who so tied George up in knots that his mojo was comprehensively flummoxed?

She first gets a mention in Speed The Plough, a play by Thomas Morton (1764-1838), but she is only present as a 'ghost at the feast' reference and does not make an actual appearance. She is the personification of what is proper and right, and all human doings are judged by her pronouncements. She is an expert on etiquette and social manners - with particular reference to what is or is not, morally decent - and is the standard by which all actions can/should be judged, mostly by those who cannot set their own parameters. Thomas Morton for some time attended a school in Soho Square in central London. Soho Square was a thorn in George's side because he thoroughly disapproved of Marianne aka Nell visiting there to meet her friends. This was probably at what is now known as The House of St Barnabas, but was originally named as The House of Charity, a place of support for the homeless or those in need of help, though there is really no reason to suggest Nell didn't have friends who were thriving. Despite the worst from George's biographers, it's clear she made a good impression on his brother William, his uncle and his grandfather, and was even asked to work in a food shop by his Uncle Paul, so it cannot be assumed she was some kind of abject slattern. Morley Roberts reports visiting George and Nell when she was too ill to see visitors. Roberts noted the room George received him in was untidy and he also mentions there was a servant, and yet, somehow, the state of the place becomes Nell's fault, even though she was sick in bed! 

Of course, those who don't know London history well will always think of Soho in its present context - strip clubs, peep shows and shady dealings and dealers, as well as being the heart of the British film industry. The late Daniel Farson is the go-to guy for all manner of interesting stuff about the area, from its early days of infamy and legend to the 1960s and the rise of the gangster and the work of Francis Bacon. Check out the wiki page click. Much is made of Nell visiting friends in the area in the 1880s as if it was a bastion of vice and the only inhabitants were bad 'uns. In fact it was a moderately poor area (according to the 1898 Booth Poverty Map) but not the very worst or even the second very worst. 

George makes The House of Charity sound like a hell-hole full of filth and ill-repute but it was a place run by followers of the Church of England, and William Gladstone was a regular supporter. In fact, it was started by The Oxford Movement, and offered a range of services to families and individuals who were in want: 'The House of Charity described itself as one of the few institutions in London where men, women and children of all walks of life, were able to 'apply for aid without a loss of self-respect'. Temporary guests of the House included 'all who found themselves in a condition of friendlessness and destitution that is not the manifest result of idleness or vice.' 

House of St Barnabas aka The House of Charity

Soho Square was also where the Catholic St Patrick's Church is situated. George was highly critical of Marianne when she said she wanted to take up the Catholic faith - he thought this was a sign she was mad (this says so much more about George than it ever could about Marianne). Perhaps it was the combination of access to a caring, social support system and its potential for influence that spooked him. Add to this the pastoral care offered by the Catholic faith, perhaps he realised his sway over Nell was threatened. At this time, she was seriously ill and receiving all manner of medical interventions. No doubt she gained more compassion from her friends and supporters than she ever did from her husband; we know he was annoyed when her supporters turned up at his door and told him off about his treatment of her. Biographers assume these women were common termagants but maybe they were the equivalent of social workers who visited mean and heartless husbands who didn't treat their wives well. And Marianne could have been offering support when she could to others in similar or worse situations as she found herself. Perhaps the people who supported her viewed George as a wife abuser and encouraged Marianne to leave him when she finally made the break that took her to live in Brixton. 

From 'Speed the Plough', Mrs Grundy reappears in Samuel Butler's 'Erewhon', an 1872 novel about an imaginary place click, not quite a sci fi but more than a fairy tale. Here, Butler turns the name Grundy into an anagram, but Victorians loved word puzzles and puns, and so there was no real mystery. She is described as an 'incomprehensible goddess' - which is exactly what I aspire to be. Samuel Butler was interesting cove who spent time sheep farming in New Zealand, and who loved to live in isolated study of Homer. 

Entrance to St Patrick's Church Soho Square.

Samuel Butler (1835-1902) was wealthy and so had a few more options than George enjoyed, but they had quite a lot in common. Both were fond of the Classics, both wrote about sex and the Victorians, and both did battle with Mrs Grundy. Butler's later title The Way of All Flesh (1903) had the double-meaning likely to confuse those hoping to find a saucy read, much as The Odd Women and The Private Papers of.... probably did. Any disappointed readers would have perhaps taken themselves of to specialist bookshops or purveyors of artistic prints - copies of My Secret Life by Anonymous - not the current outfit using that name!! - were available from 1888. This work eventually went to almost a dozen volumes, and is now regarded as a classic of Victorian literature, much more informative of its age than anything produced by George and Mr Butler. To whet your appetite, if you haven't been there already (I know I have!), go to click. We may assume George didn't know it was written by someone who coined the name 'Walter' as a pseudonym, unless he wanted his son to be associated with it.

Butler's Erewhon was mistaken as a sequel to Bulwer-Lytton's block-busting Vril: The Power of the Coming Race (1871) - another dodgy title - which was an early sci-fi/fantasy novel from the eugenicist wife beating sodomite memebr of the atr. This misplaced association made it into a best seller, but when the truth was revealed - that Erewhon had nothing to do with Bulwer-Lytton - sales of Butler's book bombed. The fickle reading public, eh? Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) might be remembered as a writer, or even as the originator of phrases such as 'the great unwashed', and 'the pen is mightier than the sword' (though that may have originally been a typo haha) but will always be remembered by half the population as a sexual pervert and wife rapist. It would seem he is also famed for having an influence on those believing the Earth is hollow. And he was embraced by the Theosophists. But there was worse to come.

Cock fight by Jean-Leon Gerome 1846.

Early works by Bulwer-Lytton include several about Romans - The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) was followed the next year by Rienzi, Last of the Roman Tribunes. Now, I don't know much about (anything haha) opera or the Nazis, but I do know Wagner used the book for the basis of his Rienzi and that Hitler said it was his favourite Wagner work, and that it was a huge influence on his political thinking. However unreadable Veranilda is, at least it didn't kick-start the Holocaust.

Of course, the spectre of Mrs Grundy was usually invoked in order to shame people into appearing to be something they were not - which was whatever the norm was that prudes set for themselves and others. The British have a dual personality that lurches from the bawdy to the prudish in all things, but smut and innuendo, and blatant erotica and pornography, have been staples in the British cultural diet since before written records could record them, and illustrators were able to work up the visuals.

                                               Pollice Verso by Jean-Leon Gerome 1872 

When Mrs Grundy was busy making folk feel guilty and shameful about sex, what did she say about the other sort of erotica/porn - that is, violence? The Victorian age is famous for the amount of cruelty it tolerated, but it was also the time when cruelty was beginning to sicken all sectors of the community, and sexual exploitation was beginning to affront the sensibilities of the majority. Risible and annoying as she was, perhaps Mrs Grundy had a small part to play in that.

Commonplace 175  George & Veranilda  PART TWO


As we saw in the previous post, Frederic Harrison, George's sometime patron and a good friend in need, wrote the preface to George's almost finished, posthumously published study of Rome in the time of the Ostrogoth king and military genius, Totila, who set about Rome in 546 AD. 

Totila by Francesco Salviati c 1549

It is to be remembered this story was George's primary fixation for a long time, and getting it down on paper was probably what kept him going during his last few years, especially during the unhappy times when he lived in southern France. Being with Gabrielle Fleury, his third wife, was often a trial, partly because he was not suited to intimacy on any level, and partly because he longed to be back home in England, but knew, deep down, that it was never going to happen. HG Wells, his friend, believed George was always planning to come back, and knew he and Gabrielle weren't soul mates - Wells couldn't stand her, and always thought she had misrepresented herself to George to appear to be well-connected to the French intelligentsia (George thought she might network him into literary success), and financially independent (so as to take off the financial pressure on his extended expenses for the family he had deserted back in Blighty), when she was far from either. George made an abortive attempt at remaining in England when he came back for medical treatment, but he returned to her and France because it was too late, and he was too ill to consider relocating. Veranilda took his mind off the inevitability of it all, and gave him an excuse for extended periods of reading and literary busywork away from annoying domestic arrangements. 

A brief snippet from Harrison's preface:
It is a most conscientious study of a time very little understood, by a scholar of rare and curious learning, something of a poet, and something of a philosopher.... In a book to compare with Hypatia, though entirely without the fire and pomp, the polemics or the moralising of that brilliant romance. Gissing writes more as a historian, as a sympathetic student of religious phenomena, old or new, gentle or fierce, fanatical or tolerant... I know no book in which all the elements in this vast cataclysm (ie the last days of Rome), the contrasts of race, of creed, of ideals of life, are  painted with more profound insight and more impartial sympathy.

Judge for yourselves. Here is an extract that gives a real flavour of the book - for your literary... 'pleasure' is too strong a word:

Vast was the change produced in the Romans' daily existence by the destruction of the aqueducts. The Thermae being henceforth unsupplied with water, those magnificent resorts of every class of citizen lost their attraction, and soon ceased to be frequented; for all the Roman's exercises and amusements were associated with the practice of luxurious bathing, and without that refreshment the gymnasium, the tennis-court, the lounge, no longer charmed as before. Rome became dependent upon wells and the Tiber, wretched resource compared with the never-failing and abundant streams which once poured through every region of the city and threw up fountains in all but every street. Belisarius, as soon as the Goths retreated, ordered the repairing of an aqueduct, that which served the transtiberine district, and was indispensable to the working of the Janiculan mills, where corn was ground; but, after his departure, there was neither enough energy nor sufficient sense of security in Rome for the restoration of even one of the greater conduits. Nobles and populace alike lived without the bath, grew accustomed to more or less uncleanliness, and in a certain quarter suffered worse than inconvenience from the lack of good water. 

The Romans Cause A Wall To Be Built To Protect The South
by William Bell Scott 1857

George is often touted as a classical history scholar of the first order, and a bit of an authority on all things Roman. Being thrown out of Owens College, some claim, deprived the world of a great contributor to the study of the ancient world. Not so, according to William Barry. 

William Francis Barry (1849-1930) was a man with a large portfolio - theologian, successful fiction writer (The New Antigone of 1887 is probably his most famous novel), academic, social commentator, lecturer, linguist, Catholic priest, ecclesiastical historian, friend of the Divine Oscar Wilde's chum, Robbie Ross. He was also a reviewer of books, particularly those that touched on classical history and the history of the Christian church. A good choice to give his opinion of Veranilda. In his review, Barry is complimentary but not gushing, and does not pull his punches when it comes to sloppy work. The review isn't included in the anthology The Critical Heritage, so here it is in full:

MR. GISSING'S LAST BOOK. It was the fortune of this remarkable writer to attempt great things, to suffer much, and to die at the comparatively early age of forty-six. He has been praised by critics to whom public opinion defers, and Mr. Frederic Harrison, in a feeling preface, recommends this posthumous but almost completed work as ‘a finished piece of sculpture,’ and as ‘most original'. In ‘Veranilda,’ he says, Gissing's ‘poetical gift for local colour, his subtle insight into spiritual mysticism, and, above all, his really fine scholarship and classical learning, had ample field.’ I do not say that there is any hopefulness in the treatment of ‘Veranilda’; there is, however, fine workmanship - and lending to it an inward life, there is the higher scope, the mellow tone which Mr. Harrison recognises. It belongs, emphatically, to literature ; it deserves to be called an historical romance; and it cannot fail to give pleasure when once we have thrown ourselves into the times and the atmosphere, so remote from our own, but to its author in no common degree familiar. He has boldly taken his subject from the forty-third chapter of Gibbon's ‘Decline and Fall,’ from the sixth century, and the adventures of the Gothic King, Totila. Old novel readers will compare his theme and its handling with Kingsley's ‘Hypatia’, to which this might form a sequel. The difference is great. Kingsley was in every fibre romantic; his ardour carried him a-tilt against degenerate Greeks, monkish Egyptians, and Cyril of Alexandria; but we feel that he is Christian as well as Teuton, and himself a part of the story. Not so Gissing. This man stands aloof, calmly noting the ways of declining Rome, of Imperial Byzantium, of Greeks and Barbarians, in a style which we admire, but which has little movement, so choice and dainty is it, so steeped in classic phrases, so bookish, even at its best. The whole treatment is classical, and we wonder if it would not have gained by imitating Kingsley, who has made of his Goths so many big boys, with large limbs, not unkind hearts, and the manliness that is bred of self-control. Gissing, too, sets forth Totila in a shining light; the hero round whom the story moves is Totila. We want to see more of him. Basil and Marcian, the two gentlemen of Verona, but in sterner mould than Shakespeare's, are firmly drawn; for the ends of tragedy Marcian is the more interesting; his too sudden fate leaves us only half-satisfied; nor has Basil the grand proportions that would keep him visible when such world-shaking events as the siege and capture of Rome were filling the stage. These youths who are born in the purple, handsome, attractive, and worshipped by the faithful heroine, have proved too much for their creators in fiction; they baffle Scott, and they leave the reader cold. But what shall we say of the women, Petronilla, Aurelia, Heliodora? They have their several merits; the wicked Heliodora is, however, less worth attending to than the pious Petronilla, whose features are taken from life—an unpleasant character, yet not unreal, mingling malice and devotion in the same cup. This brings us to the religious elements of the story. I cannot praise it in that light without reserve. Very admirably the figure of our great St. Benedict is shown, and his earthly Paradise on Monte Cassino, where the tormented Basil finds peace after storm. Had the author consulted our friends who live there still, he might have added some strokes to his picture and escaped a curious blot. St. Benedict was a deacon, not a priest; he did not possess, therefore, any claim to give absolution, and that episode is without warrant. I have said nothing about Veranilda, who bestows a name on the book. She is pretty enough and touching, but a good deal off the scene, hence we forget her easily. The true heroine is Rome, always fascinating, and though captured, unconquerable. Those who are well acquainted with Roman topography, with Naples and the Campanian coast, and the desert on which the Alban Hills look down, will travel along these pages contentedly. There is no very minute landscape painting in them, but a sobriety and a simple grace which we have learned to call antique. WILLIAM BARRY. The Bookman November 1904 No. 158. VOL. XXVII. NOVEMBER, 1904. PRICE SIXPENCE.

Hypatia by Julia Margaret Cameron 1867

Frederic Harrison, in his preface, had already mentioned a similarity to the novel Hypatia by Charles Kingsley, another polymath, and writer of The Water-Babies (who, as a child, hasn't shed a tear over Tom and his sad life? If you haven't get you here click.) Hypatia click was about the life of the female Greek philosopher, mathematician and astronomer who was murdered by zealous Christians and those jealous of her gifts and angered by her influence. She was demonised as a witch and seducer of men's minds, which is usually how men deal with women they either find sexually beguiling or intellectually intimidating. A woman mounting a challenge to the patriarchal status quo rarely does well - you only have to read the personal comments about Hillary Clinton from that buffoon Donald Trump to know this. 

It was not unusual for George to take from the work of fellow writers and fashion something of his own - nothing in Art, as they say, is original. Barry makes the observation that the story of Veranilda (a made-up character) is taken from events laid out in the forty-third chapter of Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire click, one of George's favourite works, one he reread several times from volumes he treasured. Any privately educated person worth their salt (!) would have a comprehensive knowledge of Gibbon's Decline and Fall, and would have treasured copies on their bookshelf, as a sort of badge of culture and right-mindedness.

George would have been mortified to know his knowledge of ecclesiastical matters was so publicly awry, mixing up his deacons with his priests. I suppose we can assume lack of access to the British Library was to blame for that one. Maybe if he had chance to get a first draft finished he would have had an opportunity to rethink it, but it may also be a sign of his waning powers of recall or even concentration. But, it is a serious error in a book that seeks to place itself so firmly into historic events - even an historic novel needs to be truth, much as a biography of a writer needs to be historically accurate, even if that biographer can't be relied on for impartiality.

The Last Day of Pompeii by Karl Bryullov 1833

Barry also refers to George's writing style. This is an insightful observation, one which has been made by others who criticise his seeming authorial distance from events and characters when telling of personal disasters, bereavements, adversity and loss of all kinds, often displayed in overly-detailed travel guide tones, dispassionately, an omnipotent observer, much like a Roman watching gladiators in the Colosseum. Barry writes: This man stands aloof, calmly noting the ways of declining Rome, of Imperial Byzantium, of Greeks and Barbarians, in a style which we admire, but which has little movement, so choice and dainty is it, so steeped in classic phrases, so bookish, even at its best. And that is what is lacking in most of George's writing - the personal, the emotional. It's as if Positivism's creed of only relying on what is received via the senses bypasses the bit George so wanted for himself, yet so often denies his characters: sympathy. But we readers want to be made to sympathise, and to care. (Just think of how many books and films you abandon early on because you don't care about any of the characters or what happens to them.) It's as if George doesn't want us to care about his people, whilst demanding that we care deeply about him as the teller of the tale. Sometimes, it feels like George is saying: Isn't it awful that I have had to wrestle with summoning up these demons on your behalf, seen these dreadful events, this poverty, these vile people, their disappointment, their loss and hopelessness. But, forget about them; sympathise with me. Poor me.