Gissing, George - Private Papers Of Henry Ryecroft

One of my battered veterans, purchased decades earlier.
My edition is a leatherbound Modern Library from the 1920’s.
I find it altogether fitting for the text.

Ryecroft would be Gissing’s alter ego, faring better than the author. Ryecroft receives an unexpected inheritance and is able to retire to the countryside. There he observes, recollects, contemplates.
An older soul, our character is selectively nostalgic, possibly like many whose days are numbered.
The book is packed with quotable lines, and I include a fistful.
This may be better for seasoned readers, older than 50 perhaps, who can handle Victorian prose.

“It is because nations tend to stupidity and baseness that mankind moves so slowly; it is because individuals have a capacity for better things that it moves at all.

“Man in not made for peaceful intercourse with his fellows; he is by nature self-assertive, commonly aggressive, always critical in a more or less hostile spirit of any characteristic which seems strange to him.

“Ah! The books that one will never read again. They gave delight, perchance something more … yet never again shall I hold them in my hand; the years fly too quickly, and are too few.

“I know just as little about myself as I do about the Eternal Essence, and I have a haunting suspicion that I may be a mere automaton, my every thought and act due to some power which uses and deceives me.

“Once more, the year has come full circle. And how quickly; alas, how quickly! Can it be whole twelvemonth since the last spring? Enjoy the day, and, behold, it shrinks to a moment.”