New Grub Street, George Gissing [10 best books of all time TXT] 📗

“I don’t see how she could have done. Of course I know what you’re thinking; but for me, it would have been possible. I don’t mind confessing to you that the thought troubles me a little now and then; I shouldn’t like to see you two going off governessing in strangers’ houses. All I can say is, that I am very honestly working for the end which I am convinced will be most profitable. I shall not desert you; you needn’t fear that. But just put your heads together, and cultivate your writing faculty. Suppose you could both together earn about a hundred a year in Grub Street, it would be better than governessing; wouldn’t it?”

“You say you don’t know what Miss Yule writes?”

“Well, I know a little more about her than I did yesterday. I’ve had an hour’s talk with her this afternoon.”

“Indeed?”

“Met her down in the Leggatt fields. I find she doesn’t write independently; just helps her father. What the help amounts to I can’t say. There’s something very attractive about her. She quoted a line or two of Tennyson; the first time I ever heard a woman speak blank verse with any kind of decency.”

“She was walking alone?”

“Yes. On the way back we met old Yule; he seemed rather grumpy, I thought. I don’t think she’s the kind of girl to make a paying business of literature. Her qualities are personal. And it’s pretty clear to me that the valley of the shadow of books by no means agrees with her disposition. Possibly old Yule is something of a tyrant.”

“He doesn’t impress me very favourably. Do you think you will keep up their acquaintance in London?”

“Can’t say. I wonder what sort of a woman that mother really is? Can’t be so very gross, I should think.”

“Miss Harrow knows nothing about her, except that she was a quite uneducated girl.”

“But, dash it! by this time she must have got decent manners. Of course there may be other objections. Mrs. Reardon knows nothing against her.”

Midway in the following morning, as Jasper sat with a book in the garden, he was surprised to see Alfred Yule enter by the gate.

“I thought,” began the visitor, who seemed in high spirits, “that you might like to see something I received this morning.”

He unfolded a London evening paper, and indicated a long letter from a casual correspondent. It was written by the authoress of On the Boards, and drew attention, with much expenditure of witticism, to the conflicting notices of that book which had appeared in The Study. Jasper read the thing with laughing appreciation.

“Just what one expected!”

“And I have private letters on the subject,” added Mr. Yule.

“There has been something like a personal conflict between Fadge and the man who looks after the minor notices. Fadge, more so, charged the other man with a design to damage him and the paper. There’s talk of legal proceedings. An immense joke!”

He laughed in his peculiar croaking way.

“Do you feel disposed for a turn along the lanes, Mr. Milvain?”

“By all means.⁠—There’s my mother at the window; will you come in for a moment?”

With a step of quite unusual sprightliness Mr. Yule entered the house. He could talk of but one subject, and Mrs. Milvain had to listen to a laboured account of the blunder just committed by The Study. It was Alfred’s Yule’s characteristic that he could do nothing lighthandedly. He seemed always to converse with effort; he took a seat with stiff ungainliness; he walked with a stumbling or sprawling gait.

When he and Jasper set out for their ramble, his loquacity was in strong contrast with the taciturn mood he had exhibited yesterday and the day before. He fell upon the general aspects of contemporary literature.

“… The evil of the time is the multiplication of ephemerides. Hence a demand for essays, descriptive articles, fragments of criticism, out of all proportion to the supply of even tolerable work. The men who have an aptitude for turning out this kind of thing in vast quantities are enlisted by every new periodical, with the result that their productions are ultimately watered down into worthlessness.⁠ ⁠… Well now, there’s Fadge. Years ago some of Fadge’s work was not without a certain⁠—a certain conditional promise of⁠—of comparative merit; but now his writing, in my opinion, is altogether beneath consideration; how Rackett could be so benighted as to give him The Study⁠—especially after a man like Henry Hawkridge⁠—passes my comprehension. Did you read a paper of his, a few months back, in The Wayside, a preposterous rehabilitation of Elkanah Settle? Ha! Ha! That’s what such men are driven to. Elkanah Settle! And he hadn’t even a competent acquaintance with his paltry subject. Will you credit that he twice or thrice referred to Settle’s reply to ‘Absalom and Achitophel’ by the title of ‘Absalom Transposed,’ when every schoolgirl knows that the thing was called ‘Achitophel Transposed’! This was monstrous enough, but there was something still more contemptible. He positively, I assure you, attributed the play of Epsom Wells to Crowne! I should have presumed that every student of even the most trivial primer of literature was aware that Epsom Wells was written by Shadwell.⁠ ⁠… Now, if one were to take Shadwell for the subject of a paper, one might very well show how unjustly his name has fallen into contempt. It has often occurred to me to do this. ‘But Shadwell never deviates into sense.’ The sneer, in my opinion, is entirely unmerited. For my own part, I put Shadwell very high among the dramatists of his time, and I think I could show that his absolute worth is by no means inconsiderable. Shadwell has distinct vigour of dramatic conception; his dialogue.⁠ ⁠…”

And as he talked the man kept describing imaginary geometrical figures with the end of his walking-stick; he very seldom raised his eyes from the ground, and the stoop in his shoulders grew more and more pronounced, until at a little