Experience and Wisdom

EVER since the late H. J. Massingham told me that it was his favourite book, I have been eager to read The Private Papers of Henry Rye- croft by George Gissing, and so I was delighted when it fell into

my hands in this attractive new edition. The old cliché, " a little masterpiece," is for once fully justified. After years of literary servitude, Ryecroft comes into money and retires to a cottage in the West Country, where he sets down these random reflections on life and experience in the form of a journal divided into the four seasons. 1 do not know whether to admire most Gissing's psycho- logical perception—as when he says : " I think that one has to distinguish between two forms of intelligence, that of the brain, and that of the heart, and I have come to regard the second as by far the more important.",; the charm of his sketches of man and nature ; or the shrewdness of his political comments—as when he writes of Queen Victoria's second Jubilee in words that are appro-

priate to our own Coronation year : " Though wishing the uproar happily over, 1 can six the good in it as well as another man. English monarchy, as we know it, is a triumph of English commonsense." Although hts judgements are not always equally acceptable and are often tinged with self-pity, the humour, artistry and mellow wisdom of Ryecroft remain a continual pleasure.

The book first appeared in instalments in the Fortnightly in 1901, called An Author at Grass, and was published under its present

rather cumbersome title in 1903. I have been looking up what

Gissing said about the book in his Letters. Mr. Cecil Chisholm, who contributes a foreword to the new edition, maintains that Ryecroft at first " stirred scarcely a ripple " and owed its success to T. P. O'Connor, who discovered it " on a summer day of 1903 " and praised it in T.P's Weekly. This can hardly be true, for we find Gissing writing to his sister from St. Jean de Luz on March 21st, 1903, to say that " Ryecroft is just announced in a third edition Even here, in the English colony, the book is being universally read." Gissing's references to Ryecroft leave no doubt that he felt that he

had, at last, written something that would survive. Earlier, he had

told Miss Collet : " On the whole I suspect it is the best thing I have done, or am likely to do ; the thing most likely to last when all

my other futile work has followed my futile life." One is glad to

think that, before he died on December 28th, 1903, aged forty-six, Gissing knew that Ryecroft had been recognised. I do not believe that all his novels deserve the neglect into which they have fallen ; but it is a matter of selection ; I find Thyrza, for example, more rewarding than Life's Morning, which was recently re-printed. Perhaps this revival of Ryecrpft will induce an overdue re-considera- tion of Gissing's work as a whole.

Mr. Malcolm Barnes's careful editing and abridgement of Augustus Hare's The Story of My Life has undoubtedly re-established quit

industrious Victorian gadabout and gossip as an author who may

still be read with pleasure and profit. In My Solitary Life, an abridge- ment of Hare's last three volumes, now follows The Years With Mother, which was a potted version of the first half of his auto-

biography. As before, Mr. Barnes has shown himself a model editor. He has even discovered and quoted from an unpublished journal of Hare's last years bringing the story up to his death, which occurred in the same year as Gissing's, 1903. In a footnote to a journal entry of 1899, he is able to record that Queen Mary " well remembers meeting Hare ... they quickly made friends, she says, because they found so many interests in common." The addition would have greatly pleased Augustus, and has been made possible by painstaking editing, which historians will wish to salute.

I have been interested to observe that the Spectator referred in 1872 to Hare's Memorials as containing " passage after passage

worthy of comment or quotation," but that, reviewing a further volume in 1876, it spoke of " the veiled self-conceit " with which Hare had placed himself " upon the voluminous records of his family as upon a pedestal." Hare thought this " a singular review

to have been admitted by the Spectator," but his general attitude towards hostile reviews was laudably philosophical. "They are most

disagreeable doses to take, but I believe they are most wholesome medicine for one's morals and capital teachers of humility." It is perhaps an unexpected remark from a man who often seems vain, snob-

bish and a prig, and who had "an affected manner and rather trying voice." But there is no doubt that Hare, like his voluminous auto- biography, was a better proposition than might appear at first sight, especially in small doses. Being endlessly curious and industrious by nature, he beguiles us—as he beguiled his contemporaries—with his gossip and tall stories ; while to a later generation he has the additional recommendation of speaking as a social historian, whose lavish detail fills his books like the bric-a-brac in a Victorian drawing- room. In My Solitary Life includes, among much else, revealing glimpses of Rosebery as a young man, of Tennyson at Aldworth, and of Whistler in his studio.

Reading Mr. L. B. Walton's welcome new translation of Baltasar Gracian's The Oracle, I have been surprised to find how well these maxims of conduct set down by a seventeenth-century Spanish Jesuit chime in with the books I have just mentioned. Both Gissing and Hare would, I believe, have enjoyed the worldly wisdom of Gracian, though they might well have been astonished that a priest could enter so thoroughly into the affairs of secular life. To under- stand his mentality, as Mr. Walton points out, one must appreciate that " the existence of two orders of being ' and two orders of value,' the supernatural on the one hand, the natural on the other, was almost universally accepted in the age of Gracian.... It was regarded as part of a priest's job, especially a Jesuit priest's, to study men's natural ' behaviour and to know thoroughly the kind of creature with which he had to deal." And so we follow Gracian through a long and entertaining vade mecum for gentlemen—"Culti- vate a happy spontaneity," " Acquire a reputation for being polite," " Know how to sell your accomplishments," " Do not waste influence," " Without lying, do not tell the whole truth "—until the whole shrewd, cynical catalogue comes to the unexpected conclusion : " In a word, be a saint : that is the sum total of all my advice." The ending seems quite unjustified by what has gone before, but is something of a paradoxical master-stroke. It agrees with Gracian's favourite counsel, which Mr. Walton sums up as " Don't be an ass ! " Gissing and Hare, looking back on their lives, might both have remembered occasions when they would have benefited from Gracian's advice. I recommend all three books to everyone inter- ested in the art of living. DEREK HUDSON.