New Grub Street by George Gissing Read Free Book Online

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 distance one might have
taken him for a hunchback. At one point Jasper made a pause to
speak of the pleasant wooded prospect that lay before them; his
companion regarded it absently, and in