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235
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft
·
George Gissing
2
When
first
I
knew
him,
Ryecroft
had
reached
his
fortieth
year;
for
twenty
years
he
had
lived
by
the
pen.
He
was
a
struggling
man,
beset
by
poverty
and
other
circumstances
very
unpropitious
to
mental
work.
Many
forms
of
literature
had
he
tried;
in
none
had
he
been
conspicuously
successful;
yet
now
and
then
he
had
managed
to
earn
a
little
more
money
than
his
actual
needs
demanded,
and
thus
was
enabled
to
see
something
of
foreign
countries.
Naturally
a
man
of
independent
and
rather
scornful
outlook,
he
had
suffered
much
from
defeated
ambition,
from
disillusions
of
many
kinds,
from
subjection
to
grim
necessity;
the
result
of
it,
at
the
time
of
which
I
am
speaking,
was,
certainly
not
a
broken
spirit,
but
a
mind
and
temper
so
sternly
disciplined,
that,
in
ordinary
intercourse
with
him,
one
did
not
know
but
that
he
led
a
calm,
contented
life.
Only
after
several
years
of
friendship
was
I
able
to
form
a
just
idea
of
what
the
man
had
gone
through,
or
of
his
actual
existence.
Little
by
little
Ryecroft
had
subdued
himself
to
a
modestly
industrious
routine.
He
did
a
great
deal
of
mere
hack-work;
he
reviewed,
he
translated,
he
wrote
articles;
at
long
intervals
a
volume
appeared
under
his
name.
There
were
times,
I
have
no
doubt,
when
bitterness
took
hold
upon
him;
not
seldom
he
suffered
in
health,
and
probably
as
much
from
moral
as
from
physical
over-
strain;
but,
on
the
whole,
he
earned
his
living
very
much
as
other
men
do,
taking
the
day's
toil
as
a
matter
of
course,
and
rarely
grumbling
over
it.
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