GEORGE GIS SING 
 
 A- CRITICAL -STUDY- BY 
 
 FRANK- SWINNE RTON 
 
 
 .-y,^^ a 
 
 .1, 4"': 
 
 
 MM
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE
 
 Unifoi'm with this Volume 
 
 THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK 
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY 
 
 BY 
 
 A. MARTIN FREEMAN 
 
 "Mr. Freeman's study will be eagerly welcomed. He 
 deals with all Peacock's known writings, giving analy- 
 sis of each ; and he writes with a freshness, a searching 
 clearness and thoroughness delightful in these days of so 
 much slovenly, slipshod criticism. He sends one to 
 Peacock, and thereby does the best service a critic of 
 Peacock can do." Evening Standard. 
 
 " It is distinguished and critical, and captures the atmo- 
 sphere of Peacock." Observer. 
 
 " We recommend it to Peacockians, and also to those 
 who would become such ; it reveals him better than any 
 anthology could. . . . The book contains biography and 
 criticism in a manner quite sufficient to equip the casual 
 reader with a knowledge of the man and his books." 
 
 World. 
 
 " Mr. Freeman's monograph recounts all that is known 
 about the circumstances of Peacock's career, and it con- 
 tains also a good deal of acute criticism of his writings. 
 It gives us many clues to interpretation, and helps us to 
 understand the whimsical characteristics of a man who 
 had a magic pen, and who was nothing if not original." 
 
 Standard.
 
 Uiiifoi'iu with this Volume 
 
 HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY 
 
 BY 
 
 R. ELLIS ROBERTS 
 
 "The contribution which makes this book a notable 
 addition to critical literature, is its sense for what was 
 fundamental in Ibsen. The master thoughts of the man, 
 his permanent habit of mind, emerge from this book with 
 a limpidity and definition which we have found in no 
 other critic, however sympathetic."*' The Nation. 
 
 " It is a capital and thoughtful piece of criticism, one 
 which will be found acceptable by readers who see an in- 
 exhaustible theme of interest in the gi'eat Norwegian 
 poet and his work." Daily Telegraph. 
 
 " The work of a thoughtful and suggestive critic." 
 
 Times. 
 
 " It is good to have a study of Ibsen from so fine a 
 jouster among critics as Mr. Ellis Roberts." 
 
 Daily News. 
 
 "He brings to the task of interpreting Ibsen just that 
 happy blend of fresh insight and mundane experience 
 which is needed for the right apprehension of this lonely 
 prophet." Manchester Guardian.
 
 GEORGE GISSING
 
 UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME: 
 
 J. M. SYNGE 
 
 By P. P. Howe 
 
 HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 By R. Ellis Roberts 
 
 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 By Lascelles Abebcrombie 
 
 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 By John Drinkwater 
 
 THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK 
 
 By a. Martin Freeman 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 By Edward Thomas

 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY 
 
 FRANK^^SWINNERTON 
 
 1 1 » 
 
 LONDON 
 MARTIN SECKER 
 
 NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET 
 
 ADELPH I 
 
 MCMXII
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR: 
 
 THE MERRY HEART 1909 
 THE YOUNG IDEA 1910 
 
 THE CASEMENT 1911 
 
 THE HAPPY FAMILY 1912
 
 To 
 M. &: F. W. WHELDON
 
 NOTE 
 
 I WISH to thank Mrs. H. G. Wells, Mr. Thomas 
 Seccombe, and Mr. George Whale for kind 
 assistance in the preparation of the first chapter 
 of this book. Mr. Seccombe generously allowed 
 me to make use of his Introduction to The House 
 of Cobwebs and to read both the MS. and proof 
 of his article on Gissing for The Dictionary of 
 National Biography. To him my thanks are 
 chiefly due. Mr. Whale, a friend of Gissing's 
 from 1896 onwards, also made valuable sugges- 
 tions ; while Mr. H. G. Wells and Mr. Austin 
 Harrison have consented to the quotations from 
 their essays upon Gissing. ResponsibiUty for 
 the opinions expressed rests, however, with me 
 alone, because the greater part of the chapter is 
 founded upon a careful study of Gissing's work. 
 
 Mr. Rothenstein and Messrs. Constable have 
 permitted me to reproduce as a frontispiece to 
 the book Mr. Rothenstein's lithograph portrait 
 of Gissing; and the various quotations appear 
 by permission of Gissing's executors, and of 
 Messrs. Constable and Co., Ltd., Smith, Elder, 
 and Co., Chapman and Hall, Ltd., The Gresham 
 Pubhshing Co., Sidgwick and Jackson, Ltd., 
 and Methuen and Co., Ltd., the publishers of 
 
 Gissing's books. 
 
 F. A. S.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. BIOGRAPHICAL 13 
 
 II. THE LOWER CLASSES 44 
 
 III. STUDIES OF TEMPERAMENT 80 
 
 IV. SHORT STORIES 122 
 V. DICKENS 134 
 
 VL ITALY AND GREECE 151 
 
 VII. THE WRITER 165 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 197
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 The question as to whether a man who is 
 temperamentally unhappy is to be admired 
 or pitied is seldom considered by those whose 
 standards are regulated by convenience or con- 
 ventional life. Almost any degree of introspec- 
 tion involves retirement from the life of ordinary 
 people ; and as a man without social sense is apt 
 to become misanthropical, it is clear that abnor- 
 mality and the hatred of ordinary standards is 
 wasteful in the case of all but the most individual 
 of men. It is as clearly a source of power when 
 it is accompanied by the will to act. But there 
 are very many mediocre people whose egoism 
 takes the form of despising their normal fellows. 
 The tendency was bound to increase with the 
 spread and the imperfection of popular education. 
 And just as Nietszche is seen by one of George 
 Gissing's characters as one who will " do a lot 
 of harm in the world " in strengthening "the 
 jingo impulse, and all sorts of forces making for 
 
 13
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 animalism," so George Gissing will help discon- 
 tent to arise in the mediocre. It is not that he 
 has any liking for mediocrity — he hated it ; nor 
 that his books are addressed to stupid people. 
 But in the nature of things his books will be 
 increasingly read by ill-educated egoists, because 
 they voice numerous dislikes — of the vulgar 
 herd, of conventional Christians, and so on, — 
 which are capable of flattering a sense of superi- 
 ority in mis -cultured readers. The ideas he 
 expressed have, as it were, percolated through 
 the strata of intellectual and intelligent people, 
 and they are now food for the agitated lower 
 middle-class. Accordingly, it is among members 
 of that class that Gissing is at present finding 
 his most constant readers. 
 
 The middle-class proper, the members of 
 which form the mainstay of the subscrip- 
 tion libraries, never cultivated Gissing very 
 thoroughly. It took on trust his pictures of 
 low life, but as it found them tiresome and 
 painful it dismissed him as "a terrible pessi- 
 mist." Gissing was not a philosophical pessi- 
 mist; he was a man who preferred his own 
 thoughts to the world he dimly apprehended 
 beyond the circle of his immediate surround- 
 ings. He was temperamentally an egoist, a 
 student, and a solitary. The affairs of common 
 life both shocked and preoccupied him. Litera- 
 
 14
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 ture and ancient history were his chosen studies ; 
 mankind he saw only through the sufferings 
 which attended the Hmitations of his tempera- 
 ment and his own material difficulties. Thus, 
 in the whole of his work, the world in which 
 his characters live is bounded by material things, 
 and his best books are studies of abnormal tem- 
 perament. 
 
 Being an egoist, he dwelt frequently upon 
 the egoistical temperament, on the point of 
 individual frustration, of individual rebellion. 
 He never in any large sense was a revolu- 
 tionary, for this reason. His anger with the 
 conditions of life was the anger simply of a 
 man who finds himself out of sympathy with 
 his familiars. It was instinctive, not philosophic, 
 not social. That was why he never has had a 
 very large appeal to those who would best have 
 been able to appreciate the quality of his work. 
 
 ii 
 George Robert Gissing was born in Wake- 
 field on November 22, 1857. He was the eldest 
 child of Thomas Waller Gissing, a pharma- 
 ceutical chemist, who was also an enthusiastic 
 botanist, and a man of considerable individuality. 
 It is difficult for us to know anything about his 
 early years, although we know that his interest 
 in books may be said to date from the time 
 
 15
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 when, at the age of ten, he read " The Old 
 Curiosity Shop." IVIr. Wells says that Gissing's 
 father was " in a double sense the cardinal 
 formative influence in his life. The tones of his 
 father's voice, his father's gestures, never departed 
 from him ; when he read aloud, particularly if it 
 was poetry he read, his father returned in him. 
 He could draw in those days with skill and vigour 
 — it will seem significant to many that he was 
 particularly fascinated by Hogarth's work, and 
 that he copied and imitated it — and his father's 
 well-stocked library and his father's encourage- 
 ment had quickened his imagination and given it 
 its enduring bias for literary activity." Gissing's 
 father died, it seems, before the boy was 
 thirteen, and at that age he went to the Lindow 
 Grove boarding-school at Alderley Edge, where 
 he was " the eldest and most zealous of three 
 brothers." Here he worked with tremendous 
 exertion, little concerned with games, but even 
 at this time seeking recreation and solitude in 
 long walks. Only in occasional " violent bouts 
 of tilting" did Gissing show himself as other 
 boys ; and we learn that he rose to eminence in 
 connection with the performances on half-yearly 
 speech-nights of Greek, French, or English 
 plays. Otherwise he shunned rather than sought 
 fellowship, and if an anecdote in Henry Rye- 
 croft may be taken as applying to himself, his 
 
 16
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 knowledge of his lessons was acquired as much 
 by will as by inclination. He describes himself 
 thinking that if other boys could understand 
 the work, he ought to do so ; " and in a measure 
 succeeded. In a measure only ; there was always 
 a limit at which my powers failed me, strive as 
 I would." 
 
 In 1872, before he was fifteen, Gissing won 
 the junior exhibition (involving free tuition for 
 three sessions) granted by Owens College, 
 Manchester, to the candidates most distin- 
 guished in the Oxford and Cambridge Local 
 Examination. In order that he might take 
 advantage of this exhibition the age-limit (the 
 minimum age prescribed in the regulations of 
 the college being fifteen) must have been a little 
 strained ; but we are told by Professor A. S. 
 Wilkins that as subsequent candidates also 
 qualified under the required age the exhibi- 
 tion was later withdrawn. At Owens College 
 Gissing continued his course of fierce work. 
 He walked much alone, shunned companionship 
 here as he had done at Alderley, " worked as 
 he walked, and was marked down as a 'pot- 
 hunter.' " But his aims were achieved, at 
 whatever cost. He gained in his first session 
 Professor Ward's English Poem Prize, and a 
 special prize and exhibition for classics, already 
 his chief enthusiasm. In 1874, when he was 
 B 17
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 only seventeen, Gissing " matriculated with 
 high honours in the University of London, and 
 in the following year he achieved the almost if 
 not quite unique distinction of gaining, in the 
 examination for honours following the Inter- 
 mediate B.A., the first place in the first class 
 with the University Exhibition in both Latin 
 and English. He also won the Shakspere 
 Scholarship." Mr. Wells says of Gissing's in- 
 cessant labour: "The penalty came not in a 
 palpable, definable illness, but in an abrupt, 
 incongruous reaction and collapse. He trun- 
 cated his career at Owens, with his degree 
 incomplete . . . and from that time his is a 
 broken and abnormal career." 
 
 iii 
 
 The occasion of Gissing's withdrawal from 
 Owens, and the breaking of that succession of 
 educational achievements, was the earliest result 
 of his incorrigibly amorous inclination, which 
 led him subsequently into great difficulties. A 
 connection formed in Manchester was followed 
 by a marriage which was in every way unsuit- 
 able, and which was very seriously to add to his 
 later embarrassments. Mr. Harrison, in alluding 
 to this matter, describes it as " decisive upon 
 Gissing's whole future," a statement which may 
 perhaps be regarded as slightly excessive, al- 
 
 18
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 though it undoubtedly contains a certain amount 
 of truth. In this connection it may be suggested 
 that Gissing's habit of raihng, his restless discon- 
 tent with life, was as natural to him in childhood 
 (by his own account) as it was afterwards to be 
 in the course of his life ; and that the propensity 
 exemplified was already formed. 
 
 Doubtless Gissing's personal troubles had 
 much to do with his desire to seek other ex- 
 perience, but there may have been other, and 
 minor, reasons. It was the time of the Cen- 
 tennial Exhibition at Philadelphia (1876), when 
 there was much talk in England of the United 
 States ; and Gissing, like his own character in 
 New Grub Street^ was perhaps attracted to 
 America by the hope of finding material of 
 which he could make literary use. For a time 
 he had money to live upon, and, in addition to 
 writing, for a time taught the classics in Boston ; 
 but as the days went on his money became less, 
 so that a decisive step of some kind was 
 necessary. He went West, taking an emigrant 
 ticket for Chicago. Here he seems to have had 
 some literary success, the proceeds of which for 
 some time kept him alive. But he did not make 
 enough money to pay his fare home to England. 
 The piracy of one of his stories (contributed to 
 a Chicago paper) by a paper published in Troy, 
 N.Y., led him to suppose that the latter 
 
 19
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 town might offer a good market for his work. 
 Unfortunately he was told by the pirate that 
 editors in Troy could "get as much of such 
 stuff as they wanted without paying for it " ; 
 and, almost utterly destitute, he was reduced 
 for days to the basest lodgings and a diet of 
 pea-nuts. Then, one afternoon, he found in a 
 lawyer's office the only example of sympathy 
 and kindness that he could afterwards recall. 
 An odd-looking old man, in shabby black, who 
 was reading the Bible in his dinner-hour, recom- 
 mended him to a man he knew who was in need 
 of an assistant. 
 
 In New Gj'ub Street^ Gissing describes this 
 man as a photographer who sought orders for 
 the photographic reproduction of old portraits. 
 In some very interesting *' Recollections of 
 George Gissing," published in " The Gentleman's 
 Magazine" for February, 1906, however, the 
 man is described as a traveller in gas-fittings. 
 " The agent did the necessary booming, and 
 Gissing the practical demonstration, going to 
 out-of-the-way country places and seeing an 
 America few English people know." But his 
 association with this travelling agent did not 
 last, for the reason, it is suggested, that Gissing 
 proved not sufficiently " practical." 
 
 After what was perhaps his bitterest ex- 
 perience of hardship, Gissing returned to Europe 
 
 20
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 — to Germany. Here, " in the quiet atmosphere 
 of a German university town," he both taught 
 and studied. He also made the acquaintance of 
 Edward Bertz, who figured in The Unclassed as 
 JuUan Casti. Together, the two young men 
 developed their dialectical powers, and they 
 remained lifelong correspondents. It was at 
 Jena that Gissing became familiar with modern 
 philosophic writings, while also, we may suppose, 
 he continued his studies in classical literature 
 and history. In the philosophical progress of the 
 heroine of Woi^kcrs in the Dawn we may find 
 echoes of his own work. He read "Schiller, 
 Goethe, Hackel, Schopenhauer, innumerable 
 German tomes on ancient philosophy," says 
 Mr. Harrison. His reading was directed to 
 Positivism and the works of Comte, a very sig- 
 nificant fact in relation to the character of his 
 early novels ; and the reading of Strauss's " Leben 
 Jesu " was " like the first ray of heavenly light 
 piercing the darkness of a night of anguish and 
 striving and woe unutterable." In Workers in 
 the Dawn he writes : — 
 
 Schopenhauer, Comte, and Shelley — these three in turn 
 have directed the growth of my moral life. Schopenhauer 
 taught me to forget myself and to live in others. Comte 
 then came to me with his lucid unfolding of the mystery 
 of the world, and taught me the use to which my sym- 
 pathy should be directed. Last of all Shelley breathed 
 
 21
 
 GEORGE GTSSING 
 
 with the breath of life on the dry bones of scientific 
 theory, turned conviction into passion, lit the heavens 
 of the future with such glorious rays that the eye 
 struggles in gazing upwards, strengthened the heart with 
 enthusiasm as with a coat of mail. 
 
 Such enthusiasm, of course, was splendid ; 
 such reading, however, is not the best prepara- 
 tion for a novelist's craft. Gissing returned to 
 London with a head so full of ideas as to over- 
 weight any but a physically strong man. His 
 interest in ideas and in books had been culti- 
 vated to the ruin of his purely human sympa- 
 thies. He came to England burning with 
 thoughts about life, but alienated from the 
 ordinary paths of human experience. 
 
 iv 
 
 His life in London during the period following 
 his German stay must have been full of misery. 
 To this period, according to Mr. Austin Harri- 
 son, must be confined those often-described 
 sufferings when Gissing was " the literary jet- 
 sam of garret and cellar tossed hither and thither 
 by poverty and hunger in the grim immensity 
 of London." His only intimate friend was 
 Mr. Morley Roberts, like Gissing an Owens 
 College man, two or three years his junior, and 
 like Gissing compelled to make his way against 
 the discouragements besetting all those who live 
 
 22
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 by literature. The British Museum Reading 
 Room was open to him when he was twenty- 
 one, and of the opportunities it offered of 
 further study he availed himself thankfully. 
 It was no doubt at this time that Gissing made 
 acquaintance with the garret, and later with the 
 cellar to which economic reasons dictated his 
 removal. Ruefully, Gissing exclaims regarding 
 the move from garret to cellar : " There was a 
 difference, if I remember rightly, of sixpence a 
 week. . . . The front cellar was stone-floored ; 
 its furniture was a table, a chair, a washstand, 
 and a bed ; the window, which of course had 
 never been cleaned since it was put in, received 
 light through a flat grating in the alley above. 
 Here I lived ; here I wrote.'" Here, too, Gissing 
 tasted the poor man's joys in pease-pudding 
 (" magnificent pennyworths at a shop in Cleve- 
 land Street, of a very rich quality indeed "), as 
 well as " excellent faggots." Here he worked as 
 severely as ever, both teaching and writing ; but 
 principally reading classical authors at the 
 Museum, and grudging time spent away from 
 them. His teaching was mostly a matter of 
 " coaching," and he tells in Henry Ryecroft of 
 how, when he coached a business man for the 
 London matriculation, he had to rise at half-past 
 five in the morning and walk from Hampstead 
 Road to Knightsbridge in order to reach his 
 
 23
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 pupil by half-past six — that being the only hour 
 at which he could conveniently be received. 
 Long rambles about London showed him the 
 seamy outdoor side of poor Hfe ; at this time 
 holidays, even country walks, were denied to 
 him. His only solaces were found in the 
 companionship of his one friend, in reading all 
 manner of books, in reading particularly Forster's 
 " Dickens." 
 
 Of Forster's book he was later to speak in 
 terms of warm praise, for the purchase of it 
 opened a new phase in his love for his great 
 Victorian idol. " To me," he says, " it yielded 
 such special sustenance as, in those days, I could 
 not have found elsewhere, and, lacking which, 
 1 should perhaps have failed by the way." Yet 
 at this time he was writing to his sister that he 
 worked " with fervour and delight " ; and he had 
 written Workers in the Daivn. A legacy of 
 ^100 enabled him to pay for the publication in 
 1880 of this novel, and although its sale was 
 inconsiderable, a copy sent to Mr. Frederic 
 Harrison produced valuable results. 
 
 Mr. Frederic Harrison tells, in his preface to 
 VeraniJda, how the book and the writer inter- 
 ested him. With a considerable kindness he 
 not only recommended Gissing to the notice 
 of Lord Morley, who was then editor of " The 
 Pall Mall Gazette," but engaged the young 
 
 24
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 man as classical tutor to his two elder sons. 
 The first meeting of Gissing with his young 
 pupils is delightfully described by Mr. Austin 
 Harrison in an article in " The Nineteenth Cen- 
 tury." Mr. Harrison writes : — 
 
 Tall, spare, and lissom of movement, George Gissing 
 had a marked personality even then. Here is a conscious 
 autobiographical portrait of himself taken from his first 
 novel, Workers in the Daxvn. "His eyes were of light 
 blue, his nose was of a Grecian type, his lips and chin 
 were moulded in form expressive of extreme sensibility 
 and gentleness of disposition, showing traces, moreover, of 
 instability in moral character.'' Thick, brown hair clus- 
 tered round a brow of noble shape; his head was well 
 shaped. Though his cheeks lacked colour he looked healthy, 
 strong and vigorous. His facial expression was extra- 
 ordinarily mobile, sensitive, and intellectual. I have 
 never seen so sad and pathetic a face. In repose his 
 features contracted into a look of ineffable dreariness, 
 sorrow and affliction, of mute submissiveness and despair. 
 Yet it was a noble face, dignified, dehcate, sensuous, 
 thoughtful. And then it would flash and light up, and 
 the eyes would beam in radiant transport, and the mis- 
 anthrope would become a tempestuous schoolboy, and he 
 would thump the table and positively shout with buoyant 
 exuberance. 
 
 Through Mr. Frederic Harrison Gissing 
 obtained other pupils, whom he taught in 
 the day-time, while giving his "leisure" hours 
 to writing and reading. Upon the publication 
 
 25
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 in " The Pall Mall Gazette " of a short sketch, 
 he was entreated to write more; but from 
 journahstic work he vehemently abstained. He 
 "would not degrade himself by such 'trash.'" 
 Yet we are assured by Mr. Austin Harrison 
 that from 1882 onwards, Gissing had "a livable 
 income derivable from teaching, which he could 
 always increase or modify at will." Gissing's 
 continued struggles with abject poverty Mr. 
 Harrison describes as "fiction of fiction," and 
 since Mr. Harrison constantly saw and visited 
 Gissing and his friend during the years 1882- 
 1890, "in Milton Street, in Chelsea, behind 
 Madame Tussaud's, at Cornwall Residences and 
 elsewhere," he should be regarded as giving us 
 the most intimate description so far obtainable 
 of Gissing's material conditions at this period of 
 his life. 
 
 All this time Gissing was feeling his way to 
 his own notion of what the novel should be. 
 He was continuing that philosophical reflective- 
 ness to which reference has already been made. 
 He was also exploring the depths of his own 
 nature. Even now he saw the danger of " that 
 cold, critical spirit which makes me so intensely 
 self-conscious." Later, he says : " Often, often, 
 I would so gladly surrender myself to my in- 
 stincts of passion and delight " ; but " this rest- 
 less scepticism has often been to me a torment." 
 
 26
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 In The Unclassed, published in 1884, he ana- 
 lyses the philosophical doctrines of Pessimism 
 and Optimism, without, however, doing more 
 than exalt the individual nature and in the same 
 breath pray to be delivered from its irresistible 
 power. " He had never known, felt that he 
 might never know, that sustained energy of 
 imaginative and sensual longing which ideal 
 passion demands. . . . Yet there remained that 
 fatal conviction of the unreality of every self- 
 persuasion save in relation to the influences of 
 the moment." 
 
 Eager to write real novels, far away from 
 conventional make-belief Action which domesti- 
 cated folk read to Uft them out of what they 
 call " sordid realities," he is yet perfectly aware 
 of the limitations of his knowledge. 
 
 Let me get a little more experience (says Wayniark), 
 and I will write a novel such as no one has yet ventured 
 to write, at all events in England. I begin to see my way 
 to magnificent effects ; ye gods, such light and shade ! The 
 fact is, the novel of every-day life is getting worn out. We 
 must dig deeper, get into untouched social strata. Dickens 
 felt this, but he had not the courage to face his subjects ; 
 his monthly numbers had to lie on the family tea-table. 
 Not virginibus puerisque will be my book, I assure you, 
 but for men and women who like to look beneath the sur- 
 face, and who understand that only as artistic material 
 has human life any significance. . . . Life as the source 
 of splendid pictures, inexhaustible material for effects — 
 that can reconcile me to existence, and that only. 
 
 27
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 Could there have been a more enthusiastic 
 beginning? Equally good is another passage 
 which I shall venture to quote : — 
 
 I have come out of all that, in proportion as my artistic 
 self-consciousness has developed. For one thing, I am not 
 so miserable as I was then, personally ; then again, I have 
 found my vocation. You know pretty well the phases I 
 have passed through. Upon ranting radicalism followed 
 a period of philosophical study. My philosophy, I have 
 come to see, was worth nothing ; what philosophy is worth 
 anything .^ It had its uses for myself, however ; it made 
 me by degrees self-conscious, and brought me to see that 
 in art alone I could find full satisfaction. 
 
 In 1884, just after the publication of TJie 
 Unclassed, Gissing had from Mr. Frederic 
 Harrison the offer of further work ; but he wrote 
 that " almost a livelihood " was assured to him 
 for some months, and spoke enthusiastically of 
 many plans for work. At this time, too, he had 
 some experience of " that w^ell-millinered and 
 tailored herd," of which he spoke so disdainfully 
 in Henry Ryecroft ; and Mr, Wells says that 
 " he entered spheres where bishops' wdves are 
 not unknown, and has described to the present 
 writer a conversation upon the decay of butlers 
 with one of these ladies." It is Mr. Wells who 
 gives us an explanation which I think goes far 
 to reconcile Gissing's stories of his ow^n poverty, 
 the poverty-legend, and Mr. Austin Harrison's 
 account. He says : — 
 
 28
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 It will be incredible to every level-minded reader, but, 
 as a matter of fact, he maintained this fair appearance, he 
 received his pupils in his apartment, he toiled and wrote 
 unceasingly, upon scarcely any food at all. Partly, no 
 doubt, it was poverty : he grudged every moment taken 
 by teaching from his literary purpose, and taught as little 
 as he could ; but mainly it was sheer inability to manage. 
 His meals were of bread and dripping, stewed tea, cheese 
 at times, soup bought desiccated in penny packets, and 
 such like victual ; and a common friend, himself no mean 
 novelist, has described his entertainment there of a Sunday 
 afternoon ; — Gissing, with flushed face and shining eyes, 
 declaiming Greek choruses and capping sonorous quota- 
 tions — "There are miserable wretches," he would say, 
 " who know not the difference between dochmiacs and 
 antispasts ! " — until hunger could wait no longer. There- 
 upon he would become spasmodically culinary in a swift 
 anti-climax : " Now for the squalid meal ! " 
 
 That this was a time of great literary activity 
 we can have no doubt. Both Isabel Clarendon 
 and Demos appeared in 1886 ; and we are told 
 that, as the latter went into a second edition, 
 the proceeds (£50) enabled Gissing to put into 
 execution a long-cherished plan for going to 
 Italy. Still teaching, writing, and reading, he 
 published in 1887 Thyrza (Mr. Seccombe thinks 
 this was written before Demos), in 1888 A Life's 
 Morning, in 1889 The Nether World, and in 
 1890 The Emancipated, in which book he for 
 the first time made use of his Italian experience. 
 In this year, his first wife having died, he re- 
 
 29
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 married, again with unfortunate results. Mean- 
 while, the prices paid for his work were increasing, 
 so that when, in 1891, he published New Grub 
 St7'eet, he received for the copyright the sum of 
 £250. "This," says Mr. Seccombe, "proved 
 anything but a prosperous speculation from the 
 publisher's point of view " ; but all the same 
 Gissing had received £200 a couple of years 
 previously for The Nether World. 
 
 Of Gissing's definite actions in the years be- 
 tween 1891 and 1897 we know very little, save 
 that he was now comparatively successful, and 
 able to live with greater ease. In 1892 he made 
 the acquaintance of George Meredith,* who had 
 for some time admired his work, and who had 
 certainly influenced Gissing in such a book as 
 A Lifes Morning. It is also certain that he 
 several times visited his old home, besides travel- 
 ling in the South of England. Mr. George 
 Whale, who was well acquainted with Gissing 
 during this period, tells of Gissing's " horror of 
 squalid quarters of the town as he looked from 
 
 * Thisj however, was not their first meeting, which had taken 
 place many years before at the office of Messrs. Chapman and Hall. 
 Meredith, when reader to that firm, discussed with the author 
 certain revisions to be made in The Unclassed. Mr. B. W. Matz, 
 in an article entitled "'Meredith as Publisher's Reader," in ''The 
 Fortnightly Review" for August, 1909, says of Isabel Clarendon: 
 " It passed through Mr. Meredith's hand two or three times, and 
 when we finally decided to publish it, it had been reduced from 
 three volumes to two." 
 
 30
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 a balcony across to Lambeth and spoke of 
 that part and its denizens." Mr. Whale recalls 
 Gissing at a jovial meeting of the Omar Khayyam 
 Club at Marlow; and explains that his friend 
 went to Budleigh Salterton in 1897 for reasons 
 of health, because he could not live in or near 
 London except in the summer. At this time, 
 also, Gissing was acquainted with the late Grant 
 Allen (with whose early novels, written under 
 the pseudonym of "Cecil Power," those of 
 Gissing may be interestingly contrasted). With 
 Grant Allen, Mr. Whale remembers him talking 
 over metres and capping quotations by the hour. 
 It is therefore clear that his long neglect by 
 people of his own intellectual calibre was at an 
 end. It is interesting to hear from Mr. Austin 
 Harrison, who adds other pleasant reminis- 
 cences, that Gissing once lodged above a com- 
 poser of popular waltzes, because that fact 
 accounts for the expert knowledge of the recipe 
 for musical popularity shown in The Wkhipool; 
 and we are glad to have glimpses of him in 
 various connections in Mr. Harrison's essay. 
 For the rest, we can only record that the order 
 of his novels in these years shows unbroken 
 work, as well as curious fluctuations of power. 
 The fluctuations were due as much as anything 
 to his uncertain health and the need for regular 
 production, whether his illness hindered, or his 
 
 31
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 mood made the task the harder. It is certain 
 that, as we say, he "enjoyed" very precarious 
 health and strength in these days. Early priva- 
 tions and incessant labour at one or other form 
 of mental activity combined to impair a con- 
 stitution never at any time truly robust, and 
 always subject to fits of nervous disorder or to 
 languors consequent upon over-strain. The books 
 appeared as follows : Denzil Quariiei^ and Born 
 in Exile, 1892 ; The Odd Women, 1893 ; In the 
 Year of Jubilee, 1894 ; Eve's Ransom, The 
 Paying Griiest, and Sleeping Fires, 1895 ; and 
 The Whirlpool, 1897. 
 
 vi 
 Some time previous to 1897, Gissing made 
 the acquaintance of Mr. and Mrs. H. G. Wells, 
 who spent a spring-time holiday with him and 
 his sister at Budleigh Salterton in that year. 
 Mr. Wells speaks of him as "no longer the 
 glorious, indefatigable, impracticable youth of the 
 London flat, but a damaged and ailing man, full 
 of ill-advised precautions against the imaginary 
 illnesses that were his interpretations of a 
 general malaise.'" The three friends walked 
 much about the beautiful country around Bud- 
 leigh Salterton ; they heard much of his occupa- 
 tions, which were at that time those not of 
 creation, but rather of absorption. He was 
 
 32
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 busy with Cassiodorus and with papers referring 
 to Theodoric ; and even now was planning that 
 sixth-century romance which was at last to be 
 left incomplete. " As much as anything," JNIr. 
 Wells says, "he was homesick for Italy." And 
 when they were near Lulworth Cove he one 
 day showed suddenly the little treasures he 
 carried as mementoes of a former visit to Italy 
 — "treasured as one treasures the little things 
 of those we love." It is little wonder that in 
 this same year he is again in Italy, receiving 
 the impressions which are gathered into By the 
 Ionian Sea; and in November writing ecstatic- 
 ally to another friend — Mr. Edward Clodd — 
 from Siena. " Chiefly," he says, " I am delighted 
 here with the magnificent white oxen, with 
 huge horns, which draw carts about the streets. 
 Oxen and carts are precisely those of Virgil." 
 
 In Rome he again met Mr. and IVIrs. Wells, 
 and " there were tramps in the Campagna, in 
 the Alban Hills, along the Via Clodia, and so 
 forth, merry meals with the good red wine 
 of Velletri or Grotta Ferrata." Here he had 
 completed his plans for Keranilda ; but he could 
 only work intermittently at the book during the 
 next few years. He was to publish three books 
 in 1898 — Human Odds and Ends, Dickens, and 
 IVie Town Traveller, and one in 1899 — The 
 Crown of Life, before he recorded his Italian 
 c 33
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 impressions in By the Ionian Sea (published, 
 along with Our Friend the Charlatan, in 1901) ; 
 and the short Private Papers of Henry Rye- 
 eroft were written while yet he was busy upon 
 his historical novel. In the last years of his life 
 he seems to have spent much time in the south 
 of France, at Arcachon, St. Jean Pied de la 
 Port, and St. Jean de Luz, in very delicate 
 health, much occupied with Veranilda. From 
 St. Jean Pied de la Port, in June, 1903, he 
 wrote : " I have decided to write my sixth- 
 century story. ... If I have anything like 
 decent health here I inust get this book done," 
 Four months later he was " past the middle," 
 and hoped, " with trembling," to finish it by the 
 end of the year. But he was never to finish 
 Veranilda, for he caught cold in December, and 
 pneumonia followed ; and he died at St. Jean 
 de Luz on December 28th, 1903. In the follow- 
 ing year appeared Veranilda, lacking its final 
 chapters; in 1905 Will Warburton was issued; 
 and The House of Cobwebs, a collection of short 
 stories, with a long critical and biographical 
 introduction by Mr. Thomas Seccombe, con- 
 cluded his published work. Gissing left two 
 sons by his second marriage, and to his sons was 
 granted in 1904 a joint pension from the Civil 
 List during their minority. He had long been 
 separated from his second wife. 
 
 34
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 vu 
 There has grown up a legend of Gissing's life 
 which naturally is very picturesque, and which 
 is exceedingly piteous. He has been thought of 
 as one perpetually in want, a figure of tragic 
 frustration. That figure, it is now known, 
 through the essays of Mr. Wells and Mr. 
 Harrison, has been falsely created in our minds. 
 Frustration there was — of talent ; but not 
 wholly through an insufficiency of poor food 
 and a surfeit of bad lodgings. The frustrate 
 Gissing was, largely speaking, the real Gissing, 
 the egoistic warrior against the things he disliked. 
 He was handicapped by his nature, a nature 
 which made him turn very frequently to the 
 contemplation of pain, and dwelt with mournful 
 satisfaction upon sadness and melancholy. And 
 it may perhaps be suggested that his insane 
 work at school and at Owens was in itself a sign 
 of weakness. It is to be noticed that one gets 
 no impression of spontaneous work : it is dogged, 
 persistent labour, prompted by emulation. That 
 carried him far. Owens carried him farther. 
 The experiences which preceded his sudden 
 American flight were those of a boy, starved of 
 romance, grasping at something which was to 
 stand indeed in place of romance. The Ameri- 
 can troubles convinced Gissing of the prevalence 
 
 35
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 of human unkindness. His German studies re- 
 solved themselves into an attempt to generalise 
 his small experiences into a philosophic notion 
 of life. It was youthful, egoistical, vain ; but 
 the attempt brought him to London incapable 
 of looking without bias upon simple facts. He 
 had now the generalising and moralising habit 
 which is the novelist's danger. He could not 
 see an incident without spinning from it — not 
 a story, but a series of reflections. He was an 
 essayist, a writer upon moral themes ; and he 
 began to write novels. What could be expected 
 from such an equipment ? His brain was already 
 forced into certain grooves, and formed. He 
 was finished, without any power of sudden 
 expansion, such as it is the novelist's privilege 
 to possess. Maturity he had, reflectiveness, in- 
 telligence — many things but the gift of flaming 
 imagination, of complete self-forgetfulness (which 
 he thought he had learned from Schopenhauer). 
 So he began as a frustrate man of talent. His 
 brain was too early mature. In books and books 
 and more books lay his interests : in life lay the 
 menace of material discomforts. 
 
 What Gissing calls " the course of an educa- 
 tion essentially aristocratic " — he explains that 
 " Greek and Latin can have no other tendency 
 so long as they are the privilege of the few " — 
 had caused him, he says, to " hoist the standard 
 
 36
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 of idealism." But he soon began to find that 
 novel-writing without many influential friends is 
 a poor way of earning fame. He had friends, 
 but lacked that particular quality which enables 
 a man to accept generosity in a spirit of ease. 
 It is evidently of himself he speaks when Mil- 
 vain, in New Grub Street, says : — 
 
 "There's a friend of mine who writes novels. His 
 books are not works of genius, but they are glaringly 
 distinct from the ordinary circulating novel. Well, after 
 one or two attempts, he made half a success ; that is to 
 say, the publishers brought out a second edition of the 
 book in a few months. There was his opportunity. 
 But he couldn't use it ; he had no friends, because he had 
 no money. A book of half that merit, if written by a 
 man in the position of Warbury when he started, would 
 have established the reputation of a lifetime. . . . But 
 the novel Tm speaking of was practically forgotten a year 
 after its appearance."" 
 
 Reardon, in another part of the same book, 
 which is full of very interesting notes of Gissing's 
 own literary experience, says that to have kept 
 at his best he ought to have published only one 
 book in every two or three years. But he 
 knows that he could not have lived upon that. 
 For Gissing, like Reardon, once begun, had to 
 keep on at novel-writing ; even when inclination 
 rebelled. Often he would begin a book, only to 
 feel utterly despondent. " I write twenty pages, 
 perhaps, and then my courage fails. I am dis- 
 
 37
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 gusted with the thing, and can't go on with it — 
 can't!" Gissing proceeds to say of Reardon's 
 condition that it is " a familiar symptom of the 
 malady which falls upon outwearied imagination. 
 .... A sign of exhaustion, it of course made 
 exhaustion more complete." So he suffered ; 
 yet is not this trouble the same that Gissing 
 always had, at school, at college, in writing? 
 The close labour, wearying his brain ; the 
 pertinacious resolve not to be defeated, sustained 
 by pride, until his tired brain sagged or snapped ? 
 That was what made his later books compara- 
 tively insignificant. Just as he "crammed" know- 
 ledge, so he forced his brain to activity when he 
 was writing. He lived always at high pressure, 
 striving for something beyond his attainment. 
 His was not quite a first-class brain ; the 
 strength of desire made him strive to do with 
 sweat and toil what a man with a less sense of 
 personal value would have left undone. He was 
 flogging his brain all his life, sustained only by 
 the self-confidence which was part of his nature, 
 which drew him apart from his schoolfellows, 
 which made him to the end a solitary figure. 
 *' Intensely self-conscious, he suffered " (this is 
 written of the hero of The Crown of Life) 
 " from a habit of comparing, contrasting himself 
 with other men, with men who achieved things, 
 who made their way, who played a part in the 
 
 38
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 world. He could not read a newspaper without 
 reflecting, sometimes bitterly, on the careers 
 and position of men whose names were promi- 
 nent in its columns." 
 
 • • • 
 
 viu 
 It was ambition — at conflict with itself, often 
 varying, never defined by any instinct other 
 than that of feverish application — that poisoned 
 Gissing's life. As a boy he made up his mind 
 to he something ; and his lifelong dissatisfaction 
 was largely due to the feeling that he was not 
 achieving his end. Only so can we understand 
 his complaints of the world. It was not con- 
 genial to him to do journalistic work, because 
 he wanted somehow to write masterpieces. He 
 thought he could do what other men, other 
 boys, were doing. We have only to examine 
 the structure of some of his books — Deinos, The 
 Nether World, The JFhirlpooI, In the Year of 
 Jubilee, to see how ambitious they are. Even 
 in 1884 he wrote to JNIrs. Frederic Harrison : — 
 
 A kind of exhaustion possesses me when I sit at my 
 desk a quarter of an hour, and my will power gets weaker. 
 At most I am able to produce a short poem now and then 
 of a very savage character. Of course, all this means 
 that the conditions of my life are preposterous. There is 
 only one consolation, that, if I live through it, I shall 
 have materials for a darker and stronger work than any 
 our time has seen. If I can hold out till I have written 
 
 39
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 some three or four books, I shall at all events have the 
 satisfaction of knowing that I have left something too 
 individual in tone to be neglected. 
 
 Beginning thus with tremendous belief in his 
 own powers, hampered by his self-conscious- 
 ness, which made his work too often " literary," 
 he found the public unmoved to any great 
 extent. Admirers he had, of course, sincere 
 and perceptive ; but he makes one of his charac- 
 ters compare himself with " poor Jackson, the 
 novehst," whose books, for fifteen years, had been 
 described in the press as " above the average." 
 His comment is : *' This is damned poor consola- 
 tion for a man with a temperament like mine ! " 
 It was not that Gissing was entirely self- 
 engrossed, or that he valued his work too 
 highly. He spoke very generously of his con- 
 temporaries, and had a very clear idea of his 
 personal faults. I think that probably he made 
 no attempt to eradicate them; but he knew 
 they were there. But as his books were con- 
 ceived they were all-embracing in their range ; 
 as they were written they became, as most 
 novels do become, shrunken, undersized versions 
 of their first projection. Muffled as they were 
 with explanatory words, they were muffled also 
 by press and public. To Gissing this muffling 
 must have been similar in effect to imprison- 
 ment in a small room. Just as one of his 
 
 40
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 temperament would have found madness in 
 prison, so to him the eternal discouragement of 
 living without distinction was paralysing. The 
 self-confidence of his boyhood was that self-con- 
 fidence which goes hand in hand with self- 
 distrust. It perhaps was self-distrust just as 
 much as self-belief that made him condemn 
 the suggestions of journalistic work. He was 
 conscious of abilities ; he saw no reason why, 
 with his talent, he should not enjoy that im- 
 munity from the fear of poverty which other, 
 less talented, men took for granted. Why 
 should he not be happy and safe from the dread 
 of catastrophe ? The thought was always with 
 him ; the sense of failure ; the horrible sus- 
 picion, perhaps, that he might be destined 
 for ever to fail. Perhaps it is with every young 
 writer who does not instantly achieve success ; 
 perhaps when book after book goes out, its 
 destiny unknown, the sincere novelist always 
 suffers the same expectations and dismays. 
 Only, however, if, like Gissing, he sees himself 
 without humour. And Gissing always saw 
 himself seriously. He dwelt much upon his 
 imperfections ; at the end of his life he did not 
 think he had ever really been a man to deserve 
 love. There was the temperament of the 
 egoist — not the complacent egoist of whom Sir 
 Willoughby Patterne is the type ; nor the trucu- 
 
 41
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 lent egoist, like his own Alfred Yule ; nor the 
 graceful egoist caricatured by Dickens in "Bleak 
 House." It was the self-haunted egoist to 
 whose type Gissing came nearest. Unpractical, 
 life-shunning, complaining, ambitious, gentle, 
 mournful, laughing aloud— Gissing is never a 
 child, but always the thoughtful, elderly boy, 
 too early self-educated out of his boyishness, 
 self-confident, yet never quite self-reUant. He 
 was oppressed by the immaturity, the practical 
 inexperience of the egoist, who is never at ease 
 in a world which simply ignores him without 
 aggressiveness. And at the end of his life he 
 was saying, and really meaning it : — 
 
 If I could but start again, with only the experience 
 gained ! I mean, make a new beginning of my intellectual 
 hfe ; nothing else, O heaven ! nothing else. 
 
 To write of Gissing is to write of one who 
 failed. To point to his virtues, to the quality 
 of his books, is to reahse how much one would 
 like to point to other quahties which are not 
 there. One may say that he was never elusive, 
 never the charming, fascinating, unpractical 
 artist who makes devotees ; but he was a man 
 who left a deep impression upon all who knew 
 him. That is the clear fact to be gathered 
 from those who have, here and there, made 
 known their affection. They have been tempted 
 to exaggerate his literary merits in their sense 
 
 42
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 of Gissing's personal value. Quite great names, 
 of men of much deeper and wider knowledge, 
 have been mentioned by way of comparative 
 criticism. But those of us who take the books 
 upon their own account, and try from them to 
 form an estimate of Gissing's value as a writer, 
 can do no more than glance at the personality 
 of the writer as it was known to his intimates. 
 In the imperfection of our picture may be 
 found something of Gissing's failure in self- 
 expression ; for of definite self-exposition there 
 is much in the novels. Gissing's temperament 
 comes to us through these books much colder, 
 much more, in a way, dead, than it comes from 
 the recollections of his friends. He lacked that 
 ease of personality that conveys itself subtly in 
 the printed page : his was always, in his novels, 
 the rather querulous, random self-expression of 
 the serious egoist. This is the case even in 
 By the Ionian Sea. Only in the appreciation 
 of another novelist's work did he reveal himself 
 with gentleness and delight. Until we have 
 the story of Gissing's life, told by his lifelong 
 friend, we can do no more than appraise his 
 work, and grope, by what light we may gather, 
 into the semi -darkness that envelops his personal 
 character. This book does not claim to be more 
 than a critical study of his work. 
 
 43
 
 II 
 
 THE LOWER CLASSES 
 
 It is very surprising, when one considers the 
 whole of his work, that Gissing should be 
 persistently described as the realistic historian 
 of the lower classes, and particularly of the 
 lower middle-class. Whether he knew anything 
 about the professional and economically-in- 
 dependent classes or not, it is to these that he 
 most often turns in what proves, on the whole, 
 to be his best and most characteristic work. Of 
 clerks, and of the ordinary wage-earning members 
 of the lower middle-class, he seems to have 
 made practically no use in his novels ; and where 
 they appear, as in Eve's Ranso7?i, In the Yea?- of 
 Jubilee, and 21ie Town Traveller, they are 
 generally so eccentric as to give the books no 
 value as social studies. In several of his earlier 
 novels, it is true, a number of the characters 
 belonged to the lower orders ; but in only one 
 of them — Tlie Nether World — were all the char- 
 acters by birth proletarian. The bulk of what 
 remains is composed of studies of the modern 
 
 44
 
 THE LOWER CLASSES 
 
 nervous temperament set against a background 
 of the middle and professional classes. Also, in 
 spite of the fact that Gissing is vaguely labelled 
 a realist by those who suppose realism to connote 
 everything dismal, it is among the studies of 
 abnormal temperament that his most notable 
 successes are to be found. In the books about 
 the lower classes there is a lack of exact know- 
 ledge, due to his own temperamental lack of 
 sympathy with the Hfe he is describing ; and in 
 the few stories which touch the class named by 
 one of his characters the "ignobly decent" ("the 
 essentially unheroic . . . that vast majority of 
 people who are at the mercy of paltry circum- 
 stance") only one— The Odd JFomen—hsiS any 
 claim to rank with his best books. In the studies 
 of temperament, the quality of Gissing's work 
 varies ; but it is in the more deliberately personal 
 of them, such as New Grub Street and Bo7m in 
 Exile, that he is sufficiently at ease to produce his 
 most deeply felt and imagined novels, unham- 
 pered by the philosophical bias which at most 
 times obscured his interest in pure character. 
 
 11 
 
 According to Mr. H. G. Wells, Gissing was 
 
 fired, in his early years, to do for Enghsh 
 
 life what Balzac had done for France in the 
 
 Comedie Humaine — an extraordinarily ambi- 
 
 45
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 tious dream for even the most sanguine young 
 writer. Certainly, his first novel, Workei^s in 
 the Dawn, showed him to be both inexperi- 
 enced and irresolute, for the book has no 
 Balzacian omniscience and romantic quality. 
 It is a curious mixture of conventionalism, raw 
 philosophy, imperfect observation, imperfect but 
 laborious humour, and imitation of Dickens. 
 That is to say, its descriptions of poor life in 
 London have the peculiar humanitarian inexacti- 
 tude of Dickens, combined with a fastidious 
 indignation at the conditions amid which the 
 London poor live. Never having lived in the 
 spirit of the London poor, Gissing could not view 
 dirt with the large tolerance of Dickens, in 
 whom it was ingrained ; but he was full of 
 earnest desire to catch that reforming temper 
 which marked the less humorous works of 
 Dickens. Horror is the chief note sounded 
 whenever the poor are under observation. He 
 says : — 
 
 One could find matter for hour-long observation in 
 the infinite variety of vice and misery depicted in the faces 
 around. It must be confessed that the majority do not 
 seem unhappy ; they jest with each other amid their 
 squalor ; they have an evident pleasure in buying and 
 selling ; they would be surprised if they knew you pitied 
 them. And the very fact that they are unconscious of 
 their degradation affects one with all the keener pity. We 
 suffer them to become brutes in our midst, and inhabit 
 
 46
 
 THE LOAVER CLASSES 
 
 dens which clean animals would shun, to derive their joys 
 from sources from which a cultivated mind shrinks as from 
 a pestilential vapour. And can we console ourselves with 
 the reflection that they do not feel their misery ? 
 
 Or again, later in the book, he says : — 
 
 O, what a hell could I depict in the Whitecross Street 
 of this Christmas Eve ! Out of the very depths of human 
 depravity bubbled up the foulest miasmata which the 
 rottenness of the human heart can breed, usurping the 
 dominion of the pure air of heaven, stifling a whole city 
 with their infernal reek. 
 
 But, in spite of his horror, and his sense of 
 the " inherent impracticability in the nature 
 of the lower classes," he is full of generous 
 desire to deliver the poor from their hopeless 
 scrambling existence. His endeavour is to draw 
 attention to the state of things which he has 
 seen in his walks in the neighbourhood of White- 
 cross Street ; and he approvingly causes his 
 herome to organise some classes and some non- 
 religious charities for the removal of the evil 
 conditions. He is, in an incoherent way, striv- 
 ing to express here what as yet he has hardly 
 grasped ; and the evidence of his lack of grasp 
 is to be found in the painfully grotesque pictures 
 of individuals, partly drawn from his imagination 
 and partly derived from Dickens. There is one 
 rather suggestive study, immature and melo- 
 dramatic, but interesting, in the young girl-wife 
 
 47
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 of the hero, who cannot be weaned from drink, 
 and who finds the lessons set by her patient lover 
 so far beyond her power that she is provoked, 
 through her own shame, into a resentful anger 
 and fear. In the scenes between the two, 
 Gissing at once strikes a note which recurs again 
 and again in his work — the marriage of a refined 
 man with a girl who is either of a lower spiritual 
 order or who is deficient in culture ; and he 
 gives us the first of a striking series of pictures 
 showing two incompatible natures, each unable 
 to respond to the other's point of view. That 
 the fault of stupidity is almost invariably attri- 
 buted in Gissing's studies to the woman, and 
 the fault of weak generosity to the man, would 
 in any case be interesting. At the present day, 
 when the contrary state of affairs is much pro- 
 claimed by novelists, such an attitude as Gissing's 
 would be heroic ; at the date of his writing, 
 however veracious it may have been, his con- 
 stant preoccupation with the wrongs of men 
 was, perhaps, unchivalrous. At any rate, it is 
 revealed as the author's opinion in Workers in 
 the JDcnvn that Arthur Golding's generosity to 
 the betrayed girl whom he married was both noble 
 and disastrous. Gissing writes, after one of the 
 quarrels to which allusion has been made ; — 
 
 Carrie was all radiance at once, and as pretty a lover's 
 tattle followed as novelist might wish to chronicle ; but 
 
 48
 
 THE LOWER CLASSES 
 
 — somehow or other I have no taste for it. Perhaps the 
 shadow of coming events falls already upon me and makes 
 me gloomy. 
 
 So it is, for the book would be a painful one 
 if it were not unimpressive. The heroine, a 
 clergyman's daughter, dies young ; and the hero 
 throws himself into the Niagara Falls. There 
 are many pages of the heroine's diary, filled with 
 allusions to philosophical studies in Germany, 
 and there is much very warm-hearted and in- 
 telligent (rather than profound) talk of the 
 poor and of popular education. It is noticeable 
 that at this time Gissing has hopes of benefit- 
 ing the poor, by means of sufficient food, cloth- 
 ing, and primary education. 
 
 Even now, he will hear nothing of Christian 
 dogma. His first philosophical — and therefore 
 agnostic — clergyman appears early in the book, 
 and the comic relief, of which there is fortunately 
 very little, is supplied by a curate of forty — 
 afterwards a fashionable vicar— whose pamphlet 
 upon " Fundamental Ideas " reveals only three — 
 the Inviolability of the Church as by Law estab- 
 lished, the Immutability of the Poor Laws, and 
 the Condemnability of Dissent. Gissing thinks, 
 as he appears to have thought to the end, that 
 there must always be rich and poor, but he is 
 
 not convinced that, of these rich and poor, the one must 
 be a class of brute beasts — of ignorant, besotted, starving, 
 
 D 49
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 toilworn creatures — whilst the other must be a class of 
 lords and princes, spending in profitless luxuries — 
 luxuries which perish with them and are of no further 
 good to the world — riches which would suffice to put 
 every poor man at his ease, which they obtain without 
 labour, which serve only to rear generation after genera- 
 tion of vicious prodigals. 
 
 Gissing's philosophical democratic feeling, thus 
 expressed, was not of a quality to last. In the 
 character of Waymark, in The Unclassed, he 
 admitted that his early championship of the 
 poor and ignorant was nothing more nor less 
 than disguised zeal on behalf of his own starved 
 passions ; in Demos he emphasised this point by 
 exclaiming, " Never trust the thoroughness of 
 the man who is a revolutionist on abstract prin- 
 ciples ; personal feeling alone goes to the root 
 of the matter." Subsequent declarations in Our 
 Friend the Charlatan and Ryecroft tend to sup- 
 port this view. 
 
 But in spite of the fact that Workers in the 
 Dawn represents the crude and youthful Gissing, 
 it has, in view of his later work, very consider- 
 able interest for the student. It made a rough 
 attempt to contrast the life of ease and the life 
 of poverty ; it allowed Gissing to express many 
 of his various immature philosophical thoughts ; 
 and it indicated his inability to imagine life in 
 the warm colours of hfe itself. It was remote 
 from experience ; it revealed a writer who was all 
 
 50
 
 THE LOWER CLASSES 
 
 his life to lack " intimacy," and who was all his 
 life to write from the head. Gissing was here, 
 even in his first book, the intellectual novelist, 
 following the plan of George Eliot, endeavour- 
 ing to frame his characters (as George Eliot 
 framed her characters) instead of imagining 
 them. Here, too, was shown his habit of 
 holding the reader, and drawing his attention 
 by anxious interpretation, like a host, conscious 
 of failure, who steps out over the threshold with 
 his guest, explaining why the evening has been 
 dull. Gissing did not shake ofif that habit until 
 his best work was done. It even appears in 
 New Grub Street. He was too conscious of 
 the defects of his own artistic methods, and 
 too distrustful of the reader's powers of under- 
 standing or sympathy, to let the characters 
 explain all. And in the attempt to shape the 
 reader's mind he confessed everything — he con- 
 fessed that he was writing to the mind, that 
 the characters were mind-created. His attitude 
 was too often : " You might think this rather 
 strange, eh ? At any rate inconsistent ? Yes, 
 but don't you see that, given the characteristics 
 . . . the mind works in such and such a way ? " 
 His early books, about the lower classes, are 
 crowded with such interpolations. In The 
 Nether World, for example, we are frequently 
 addressed with such remarks as : " You see that 
 
 51
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 she had formulated her philosophy of life " ; 
 " His marriage had implied more generosity than 
 you in the upper world can at all appreciate " ; 
 " Try to read her mind " ; " Knit not your brows 
 against her " ; " You will not understand him " ; 
 and so on. It was only when his principals 
 took complete hold of him — as they did in 
 Thyrza — that the button-holing method, being 
 unnecessary, was cast aside ; and then Gissing 
 truly showed his power as a novelist. He was 
 always analytical, scrupulous — in one of his 
 own favourite words, used, surely, in rather 
 a formal sense, intelligent ; but it was when 
 he trusted himself and the reader that he could 
 also be subtle and convincing. There is every 
 difference between revelation and exposition. 
 
 iii 
 After such a book as JForkers in the Dawn, 
 which was very lengthy and verbose, and, one 
 would suppose, not very successful, it is only 
 natural that there should be a long pause. It 
 was not until four years afterwards that The 
 Unclassed made its appearance ; and then, with 
 two breaks, followed, in the order named, the 
 other books dealing with the lower classes — 
 Demos, Thyrza, and The Nether World. These, 
 with T'he Town Traveller, a humorous book 
 published very much later, are the only ones to 
 
 52
 
 THE LOWER CLASSES 
 
 be dealt with in the present chapter ; and it will 
 be seen that Tlic Town Traveller is inferior 
 in value to the others, since it is intentionally 
 "light," whereas the three books just mentioned 
 contain some of Gissing's most ambitious work. 
 They are, consciously, " social studies," a name 
 generally applied to novels in which an author 
 portrays the life of a class lower than his own. 
 Thyrza shows a freer emotion than any other 
 of Gissing's stories, while The Nether Woi^ld, 
 squalid and sterile though it may seem, deserves 
 high praise as being especially consistent, both 
 in its level of workmanship and in the definite 
 restriction of its scheme to characters sprung 
 from the proletariat. 
 
 In all these books — The Unclassed, Demos, 
 Thyrza, and The Nether World — there is a great 
 deal of sociological discussion, much of it shrewd, 
 but all showing how purely objective was the 
 writer's knowledge of the poor. He had lived 
 among them, watched the wastage of money 
 and energy, drawn deductions, seen their work, 
 their home life, their recreations ; but always 
 with a distaste that suggests almost physical 
 repulsion. He emphasises dirty finger-nails, 
 unwashedness, perspiration — in a way that is 
 feminine in its extravagance. He never sug- 
 gests for an instant the humour of poor 
 people ; only in the idyllic characters of 
 
 53
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 Thyrza and her sister, who are, after all, the 
 daughters of a school-teacher, does he seem to 
 admit the conscious perception of beauty. In 
 these sisters, and in Jane (the "belle fleur" 
 whose presence alone, according to the quota- 
 tion on the title-page of The Nether World, 
 justifies the picture of a dunghill) are found 
 the spots of tragical purity amid such grim 
 surroundings ; but while Thyrza and Lydia are 
 indubitably pathetic, Jane seems to carry with 
 her the same mournful staleness that we feel 
 in Balzac's excessively virtuous young women. 
 The cause is the same in both Jane and 
 the young woman in Balzac — the authors' 
 shamed, rather sentimental disbelief in their 
 own imagined figure ; the sense in the reader 
 that the girls are waxen, and seriously un- 
 interesting. In both cases the effect on the 
 reader is physical discomfort, such as he may 
 feel at the sight of little London girls going 
 to a school-treat, with their thin hair still cling- 
 ing at the temples from the recent special face- 
 washing ; an incongi'uity, a painful cause for 
 averting sentimental eyes from something 
 which, beneath a brilliantly starched dress, may 
 still have a stale little body. With Thyrza and 
 Lydia, that is not the case. They are, in spite 
 of sentimentality, genuinely sad figures, wrought 
 with deep and moving emotion ; and in virtue 
 
 54
 
 THE LOWER CLASSES 
 
 of these two girls, Tliyrza stands out from among 
 Gissing's early novels as possessing merits quite 
 above those to be found in its predecessors. It 
 is the only book in which the author's emotion 
 is free from the fever of exciting occasion. 
 
 iv 
 
 In The Ujiclassed, Gissing the conscious 
 sociologist and artist begins to express him- 
 self. We have several declarations upon Art, 
 such as the one that " Art, nowadays, must be 
 the mouthpiece of misery, for misery is the key- 
 note of modern life." It would be impossible 
 to expect a novelist with such a conviction to 
 write otherwise than cheerlessly ; and the book 
 is dark with a sense of much evil. But it is 
 a very marked improvement upon Workers in 
 the Dawn. We begin to feel the author's power 
 of grasping character. Sometimes that power 
 wavers, and the minor personages are all at the 
 mercy of " characteristic " speeches laid thought- 
 fully upon them by Gissing. Also, the contrast 
 between the heroic but dcdassee Ida Starr and 
 her more cultured rival Maud Enderby is less 
 one of nature than of ideas and breeding. Ida 
 Starr's mother has been a prostitute, and Ida 
 is forced by poverty and brutal seduction into 
 the same path. Her acquaintance with Way- 
 mark, the indignant young schoolmaster, proves 
 
 55
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 the turning-point in her Hfe ; but he, blind to 
 Ida's love, coquettes with the more intellectual 
 and refined Maud. That Maud, upon the sus- 
 picion of an hereditary taint, should renounce 
 marriage, allows Waymark a convenient free- 
 dom to marry Ida ; but it also enables Gissing 
 to shirk all the problems he has raised in the 
 course of the book. Thus the most convincing 
 character in The Unclassed is a repulsive and 
 scrofulous girl named Harriet, who lures into 
 marriage her enthusiastic young cousin Julian 
 Casti. She is overdrawn, and ends as a melo- 
 dramatic figure ; but the scenes in which she 
 develops her claims upon Casti's generosity, 
 and her squahd grip upon his person, are given 
 with a horror and an unwilling detail that make 
 them more lasting in the recollection than 
 others of more intrinsic value. Yet even here 
 we recognise some viciousness, as though 
 Gissing had not yet achieved the impersonality 
 that he strove after ; and the book is again 
 interesting rather in its promise than its per- 
 formance. Gissing had assured himself of one 
 thing — that "the artist ought to be able to 
 make material of his own sufferings, even while 
 the suffering is still at its height." It was upon 
 a framework of his own sufferings that Gissing 
 reared his best work : when he no longer 
 suffered, the quality of his work deteriorated. 
 
 56
 
 THE LOWER CLASSES 
 
 During the next few years, Gissing's observa- 
 tion of the poor grew more exact, until it 
 advanced, from a vague spiritual shame and 
 anger, through experiences of Clerkenwell Green 
 orators, as exemplified in Demos, through humani- 
 tarian sentiment, as in Tfujrza, to the hope- 
 lessness of IVie Nether World. Often, in his 
 progress, he almost convinces us of his under- 
 standing, only to fall into an exposure of his 
 complete lack of sympathy with his material. 
 These were perhaps the years in which he tried 
 to realise the idea of a Human Comedy. Jlie 
 Unclassed is obviously puny when it is com- 
 pared with a single work of Balzac. Even 
 The Nether World, which appears to be in- 
 tended to challenge comparison with Les Parents 
 Pauvres, lacks both the breadth and the intensity 
 which compels readers breathlessly to continue 
 in the company of La Cousine Bette and Le 
 Cousin Pons. But the idea is there. Gissing, 
 labouring in his garret or his cellar, living upon 
 pease-pudding, faggots, and bread-and -dripping 
 (though Mr. Harrison says he was long past 
 occasion for this), may in imagination have seen 
 a vast structure composed of novels describing 
 every stratum of English society. In Dcjuos 
 there is low life and savage ambition, most fit 
 
 57
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 material for a Balzac ; Thyrza is entirely Eng- 
 lish, and often Dickensian ; and The Nether 
 Woi'ld is a faithful and patient portrayal of a 
 milieu seen without subtlety by this sensitive, 
 scrupulous, temperamentally aristocratic man, 
 who forced himself to go into unsavoury alleys 
 holding his nose for the foul reek that he was 
 ready to encounter. Demos had its convention- 
 alities and conventions — a wonderful will hid in 
 a church pew, and an idealist lover to satisfy 
 the refinement of the much-tried wife of Richard 
 Mutimer ; but both Thyrza and The Nether 
 World were written with a stern sense of 
 responsibility. By checking their author in the 
 softness of heart which hoped for all to be well 
 in the end, they put a constraint upon him. 
 By compelling him to relinquish idle happiness, 
 constraint put upon Gissing fetters of intolerable 
 weight. It was not perception that made these 
 books unhappy, but hopelessness, because he could 
 not see a way out of the difficulties he had created. 
 We feel him, not as one offering us a poignantly 
 imagined picture with the impersonality of the 
 artist, but as one who has ended his stories ill 
 in obedience to an inverted sentimentality — a 
 shrinking agonised recognition of the inevit- 
 ability of sorrow. More than any others of his 
 books, Thyrza and The Nether World, with 
 New Grub Street, which is much more heroic, 
 
 58
 
 THE LOWER CLASSES 
 
 caused Gissing, for all his anxiety to be just, to 
 give the public an excuse for making the con- 
 stantly heard charge that he "whined." The 
 seriousness of his endeavour, and w^hat might 
 have been supposed the gratefulness of his out- 
 look upon the poor, were as nothing to the 
 public. He was condemned by novel-readers 
 as a writer who whimpered at life. And, 
 in the sense that he regarded his work as 
 being a fair picture, it may be said that he 
 betrayed lack of imagination as well as lack of 
 savoir vivre. Although he had seen in his first 
 book that " the majority do not seem unhappy," 
 he could not believe that recreation which he did 
 not approve was genuinely amusing to anybody. 
 He had never been able so far to sink his own 
 standards as to realise that bookishness spells 
 boredom for quite a number of sincere and 
 capable folk. That he could not see anything 
 except bestiality in the recreations of the poor 
 we have ample proof in the painfully biased 
 description (in The NetJier World) of a bank- 
 holiday jaunt to the Crystal Palace. In these 
 early novels about the poor the majority is 
 always hopelessly sprawling in slime, unwashed 
 (e.g. "Personal uncleanliness made Slimy 's 
 proximity at all times unpleasant ") and re- 
 pulsive ; while, with few exceptions, the virtuous 
 men are agnostic, book-loving, uncultured ideal- 
 
 59
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 ists, fated to unhappiness and useless life. The 
 public was prepared to agree with him in think- 
 ing the poor unpleasant, but when his sensitive- 
 ness made the poor also uninteresting, he had 
 robbed them of the one chance they had of 
 giving him a power to use in their favour. 
 Other novelists, arriving subsequently, and see- 
 ing the possibilities of the lower classes as a 
 picturesque peep-show, displaced Gissing at 
 once, and showed his picture as pitiably false 
 in spirit. They made a "corner" in the poor, 
 filled their books with refined substitutes for 
 lower-class oaths, and by the aid of phonetics 
 gave a subtle appearance of exactitude which 
 was not truly supported by the sensationalism 
 of their thematic material. It was only among 
 the studious, who mistrust missions and district 
 visiting, and who have an incorrigible dislike 
 of approaching the poor nearer than by omnibus 
 rides through the more open slums, that he 
 obtained and kept any authority. Gissing, who 
 denied himself the pleasure of recording a con- 
 versation " under fear of being stigmatised as a 
 ' realist ' by the critical world," was ousted by 
 men who popularised a strange form of " ultra- 
 realism " and forced people to talk about their 
 books. It is impossible to talk about Gissing's 
 books, except to middle-aged enthusiasts who 
 distrust democracy, or to literary folk who are 
 
 60
 
 THE LOWER CLASSES 
 
 more anxious to " place " him in literary history 
 than to discuss his particular virtues as a delinea- 
 tor of social manners. Very few people who read 
 Gissing have the power to see where his books 
 are true and where they are astray ; very few 
 educated people have lived among the poor for 
 any reason but that of benefiting them or 
 " studying " them. Gissing both lived among the 
 poor and " studied " them ; but he lived among 
 them by reason of the most lamentable necessity, 
 and he studied them without ever learning their 
 spiritual language. He was always a stranger, 
 homeless and miserable. Is it any wonder that 
 what he saw was as lugubrious as his own mood ? 
 
 vi 
 
 His generalisations, and the manner in which 
 various points of view are rendered, have always 
 an honourable fairness. He lost his indignation 
 about the poor, and came, in his prose passages 
 — as distinguished from actual description of 
 life — to recognise and to say very intelligent 
 things about them. Various attitudes towards 
 democracy, for example, appear to obtain 
 sincere treatment in Demos, a most interestingly 
 conceived book ruined by melodramatic inci- 
 dents and feminine ferocity, as well as by the 
 caving-in of Gissing's elaborate attempt to 
 suggest the failure of a model manufacturing 
 
 61
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 community. The idea was that a rich manu- 
 facturer, dying suddenly, left no will. Accord- 
 ingly his wealth, instead of passing to the man 
 for whom it was intended, fell into a lower-class 
 London family, of which the head, Richard 
 Mutimer, was a Socialist. JNIutimer, shrewdly 
 recognising some of his shortcomings, but de- 
 termined to put into execution his ideas for the 
 betterment of working-class conditions, saw at 
 the same time an opportunity of immense self- 
 aggrandisement. He started his model com- 
 munity, discarded his old love, and married a 
 refined girl whose love was really given else- 
 where. The discovery of the will by Mutimer's 
 wife as she sat in the family church-pew reduced 
 them once again to poverty ; and Mutimer's 
 later endeavours to make money and inter- 
 estedly to benefit the poor resulted in such 
 disaster that he was killed by an angry mob. 
 
 Here was an ambitious subject. Unfortu- 
 nately the will episode, besides being novelettish 
 in treatment, was very obvious. So, too, was 
 the machinery by which Mutimer obtained his 
 refined wife, a young woman who, until late in 
 the book, followed convention in an unexcep- 
 tionable way. In fact, all the portions dealing 
 with people belonging to a superior class were 
 written without pretence of freshness. The dis- 
 carded working-girl bride, intended as a noble 
 
 62
 
 THE LOWER CLASSES 
 
 figure of restraint and simplicity, became merely 
 mawkish. JMutimer himself, seen with fair con- 
 sistency, yet needed too much of the author's 
 explanatory method to be firmly individual, be- 
 cause the young author who seeks to impose 
 character by interpretation always muffles the 
 figure and reveals his own weakness. The 
 wicked persons of the story, whose schemes for 
 making money by evil means are very vaguely 
 realised, have an exaggerated villainy, due to the 
 author's inexperience of their craft. But the 
 scenes describing the Mutimer family, and the 
 entire portrayal of old Mrs. Mutimer, are sure 
 and good. Old Mrs. Mutimer is one of the best 
 character-studies of the poor to be found either in 
 Gissing's books or outside them. Her distrust 
 of the newly acquired wealth, her loyalty to 
 Mutimer's discarded sweetheart, her discomfort 
 in any home but the one to which she is accus- 
 tomed, her demand to be allowed to do her 
 own housework — all these things are well seen 
 and felt. They have none of the amused toler- 
 ance of the conventional novelist ; they are all 
 shown with perfect delicacy and grace ; and they 
 are never sentimental. The figure of Mrs. 
 Mutimer was, whatever Gissing might have 
 thought of such a description, admirably real- 
 istic. It is the brightest spot so far to be seen 
 in Gissing's novels about the poor. 
 
 63
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 vu 
 
 When we come to Thyrza, which I regard as 
 one of Gissing's best books, we shall see that 
 while Thyrza herself is idealised into an almost 
 ethereal person, her sister Lydia is revealed 
 with a sympathy and restraint which is more 
 than commendable. There is, for the first time, 
 an extraordinary subtlety in the method em- 
 ployed. Almost without having our attention 
 drawn to the fact, we are made to realise not 
 only the essential difference between the sisters, 
 but also the attitude towards each of them of 
 every other person in the book. I may perhaps be 
 allowed to give a very bald summary of Thyrza, 
 which will serve as a basis for further comment. 
 
 At Ullswater Hve Mr. Newthorpe, a fairly 
 well-off man with a great interest in books, and 
 his motherless daughter Annabel. They dis- 
 cuss Walter Egremont, a young, well-educated 
 idealist, son of an oil- cloth manufacturer of 
 Lambeth. Egremont, to their surprise, appears 
 suddenly at the house, and takes occasion to 
 propose to Annabel. She, however, does not 
 love him, though she encourages his scheme to 
 help the working-men of Lambeth to a sense of 
 the value of culture. He accordingly returns to 
 Lambeth, and prepares to accomplish his task 
 by means of lectures. 
 
 64
 
 THE LOWER CLASSES 
 
 Among the men who attend his first lecture 
 are two, Gilbert Grail and Luke Ackroyd, who 
 are very different in temperament. Grail is a 
 man of thirty-five, a worker in a candle factory, 
 and very bookish. Ackroyd, on the other hand, 
 is much interested in Practical Science. He 
 does not continue to attend the lectures. But 
 he is in love with Thyrza Norman, a beautiful 
 and strange girl who lives, with her elder sister 
 Lydia, in the same house as Gilbert Grail. The 
 two girls are employed in making linings for 
 hats. When Thyrza will have nothing to do 
 with him, Ackroyd consorts with Totty Nan- 
 carrow, a good but harum-scarum girl, and then 
 goes steadily to the bad. In the same house 
 as Totty lives an atheistical workman, named 
 Bunce, who also attends Egremont's lectures. 
 It is Bunce's sickly daughter who goes at times 
 to stay at a home for poor children kept in 
 Eastbourne by a widowed friend of Egremont's 
 named Mrs. Ormonde. Thyrza makes ^Irs. 
 Ormonde's acquaintance through the agency of 
 Bunce's daughter, whom she once accompanies 
 to Eastbourne. 
 
 Egremont, meanwhile, continues to busy him- 
 self with lectures and other plans for benefiting 
 altruistically the working-men of Lambeth. He 
 is steadily made to feel that his plans are tend- 
 ing towards failure ; but he has made a friend of 
 E 65
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 Grail, a thoroughly good sort of man and one 
 of a kind for whom Gissing has a partiality. It 
 is the friendship for Grail that brings Egremont 
 into malignant disfavour with a man called 
 Bower, a pompous and ambitious person whose 
 place in the book is simply that of a property. 
 
 At length Egremont's plans define themselves 
 into a scheme for the estabhshment of a free 
 library and reading-room. He invites Grail to 
 act as librarian ; and Grail at this point asks 
 Thyrza to marry him. She admires Grail so 
 much that she consents. From this comes the 
 first meeting of Thyrza with Egremont, for she 
 cannot resist going alone to see the house in 
 which the library is to make its start. Egre- 
 mont is there, unpacking books. He is fascinated 
 by her wonderful beauty, allows her to help in 
 arranging the books, and then asks her to keep 
 the fact of the books being there at all a secret 
 from Grail, for whom he intends their presence 
 to be a post-nuptial surprise. This involves for 
 Thyrza the suppression of the fact that she has 
 seen him, and she goes twice more, uncontrollably, 
 the victim of intense love. But she is seen 
 coming out of the house by Bower, who also 
 sees Egremont, and spreads a scandal. Thyrza, 
 finding that Egremont does not keep a further 
 appointment, speaks to him piteously in the 
 street. Egremont, loving her, and wishing not 
 
 66
 
 THE LOWER CLASSES 
 
 to be traitorous to Grail, repulses Thyrza, and 
 abruptly leaves England, first for Jersey, and 
 then for a more distant place. Thyrza runs 
 away from home. Everybody thinks they must 
 be together. Mrs. Ormonde writes to Egremont 
 in Jersey, and the letter is returned ; Grail goes 
 to Jersey, but finds Egremont gone. At last 
 Thyrza reappears in a Caledonian Road eating- 
 house, where she falls very ill ; and as an 
 old envelope with Mrs. Ormonde's address on 
 it is found in her pocket by the keeper of the 
 eating-house, Mrs. Ormonde is the one sum- 
 moned to her assistance. 
 
 Mrs. Ormonde tends Thyrza and takes her 
 to Eastbourne secretly. Egremont returns to 
 London, has an interview with the distracted 
 Grail, clears himself, and promises to try and 
 find Thyrza. At last he goes to Mrs. Ormonde's 
 house at Eastbourne, where he learns that the 
 girl is safe, and Thyrza overhears a conversation 
 between Mrs. Ormonde and Egremont in which 
 his love for herself is disclosed. In this talk, so 
 strangely overheard, it is arranged that Egre- 
 mont shall go to America for two years. If his 
 love is the same at the end of that time Mrs. 
 Ormonde will not attempt to stop a marriage 
 which at present she regards as impossible. 
 Thyrza is so buoyed up by the secret discovery 
 that Egremont loves her that she submits 
 
 67
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 unprotestingly to all that is proposed for her 
 own future. She returns to London, under 
 Mrs. Ormonde's direction, and is given singing 
 lessons to develop her beautiful voice. For two 
 years she works tremendously. When the time 
 is up, she expects Egremont. He does not 
 come to her. He leaves America with the in- 
 tention of seeking her out, and goes straight to 
 Mrs. Ormonde for her address. But Mrs. 
 Ormonde has several things in mind. She 
 thinks Annabel Newthorpe now loves Egremont 
 (as indeed she does), and that he would be 
 happier with Annabel. And, not knowing that 
 Thyrza has overheard the old talk, she tells 
 Egremont that Thyrza has seemed perfectly 
 cheerful and happy in his absence. This con- 
 veys to him the impression that Thyrza's love 
 has faded, even as his own has a little done. 
 He knows that Thyrza's presence would soon 
 make his love bright again, yet upon Mrs. 
 Ormonde's advice, he does not go to Thyrza, 
 but North, to the Newthorpes. Thyrza waits 
 broken-hearted. At last she comes passionately 
 to Eastbourne, to learn from the penitent Mrs. 
 Ormonde of the mistake that has been made. 
 She is really in despair, but she goes back to 
 London, offers to marry Grail, hears that Lydia 
 is to marry Ackroyd, even as Totty Nancarrow 
 is to marry Bunce, the widower ; and then 
 
 68
 
 THE LOWER CLASSES 
 
 dies. Egremont and Annabel finally arrange a 
 marriage based on esteem and sympathy, but 
 without pretence of a passion which neither any 
 longer feels. 
 
 The outline of any story, when bereft of the 
 imagining which alone can interweave its main 
 strands, is bound to falsify its values. In llujrza 
 this is particularly the case, because while the 
 author's manner is formal, and liable to " date " 
 the book, the writing shows much deep feel- 
 ing, which it is impossible to suggest clearly. 
 But in every way, even in the presentment of 
 the people among whom the lives of the principal 
 characters are spent, the book has a sympathy 
 and a distinctiveness that give it actual value. 
 There is no melodrama, and the various parts 
 are much more interdependent than ever before. 
 The weakest scenes are those in which Mrs. 
 Ormonde appears ; but even in these there is a 
 successful attempt to show the distance between 
 an educated woman and the most beautiful and 
 sensitive girl of a lower class. Mrs. Ormonde's 
 failure of sympathy is well rendered ; her 
 adherence to personal standards, rather than to 
 individual justice, is strictly feminine and charac- 
 teristic. And the book has a certain emotional 
 momentum. For the only time in Gissing's 
 lower-class studies we take an active, and not 
 a purely intellectual, interest in the welfare of 
 
 69
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 the persons engaged. This is such a very marked 
 advance for Gissing that it seems to place Thyrza 
 easily first among the books of this order, sup- 
 posing we look first, as we should, for emotion 
 in any work of the imagination. To move by 
 legitimate means is the aim of even the most 
 realistic novelist. 
 
 viii 
 
 There is one point about Thyrza that is worth 
 discussing at some length. It will be remarked 
 that the machinery of the book involves the 
 reaction of members of one class, the moneyed 
 and cultured class, upon another. We may see in 
 many English novels of first-rate importance — 
 such as those of Mr. Thomas Hardy — that this 
 is regarded as a permissible thing, just as it no 
 doubt is, from a popular point of view, a desir- 
 able thing. But this interaction does in some 
 respects tend to rob the book of singleness of 
 impression. It makes for variety, and, as we 
 have already seen in Demos, it may sometimes 
 serve as a very admirable method of drawing 
 forth particular reserves of personality which 
 otherwise would remain latent. But in a book 
 like Thyrza it is arbitrary and accidental, 
 although, in directing attention to the point 
 of inter-class marriage, Gissing may be supposed 
 to have used the device with effect. Moreover, 
 
 70
 
 THE LOWER CLASSES 
 
 the personal tragedy of Thyrza herself is accom- 
 pHshed by this means. But the personal tragedy 
 of Thyrza lies in her lack of accord with her 
 environment. It may quite well be argued that 
 such a matter is beside the point in reference 
 to Gissing's story, since criticism of this sort 
 might idly be advanced against any story of a 
 personal tragedy. It is, in effect, a calling in 
 question of any author's inventiveness. Gissing 
 conceived the story as it is written, and there 
 the problem might be left. Thyrza is balked 
 of her idea of happiness by the fateful inter- 
 position of a well-intentioned lady. That is 
 quite true ; but the question of whether Thyrza 
 and Egremont, married, might have been happy 
 does not arise out of the book as written. The 
 book is, in large measure, occupied in raising 
 the doubt as to whether Thyrza might have 
 achieved her destiny in marrying Grail, a man 
 of her own class. That being so, why drag in 
 Egremont? My suggestion is, that while the 
 mutual affection of Thyrza and Egremont is 
 romantically possible, a story equally well reveal- 
 ing the subtle tragedy of Thyrza's place in her 
 own social order might have been made without 
 bringing about the intrusion of Egremont into 
 Lambeth domestic history. It would possibly 
 have been more true to what Gissing (quoting 
 Lamb) called " the quiddity of common objects " 
 
 71
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 if Thyrza had been allowed to find the tragedy 
 of her soul without quitting her own environ- 
 ment. Most real people work out their lives in a 
 sinsfle environment. To introduce an alien ele- 
 ment is certainly to add to the variety of the 
 material ; but it surely detracts from the sub- 
 stantial accuracy of a social picture, and it makes 
 the author less reliant upon the richness of the 
 material which is to be found in the normal 
 lives of human beings. Thyrza is thus an 
 example of what I have called Gissing's inverted 
 sentimentality. Many novels and novelettes 
 have been written round a poor heroine who, 
 by the excellence of her personal quaUties, has 
 transcended the conditions of her environment. 
 The fact does not make Thyrza less interesting 
 and even valuable as an emotional picture ; but in 
 the sense that the book conforms more or less to a 
 convention, however sincerely the conventional 
 solution may have been disregarded, the facts do 
 suggest that Thyrza, by its leap out of common 
 experience, becomes less notable than it might 
 otherwise have been. 
 
 ix 
 
 Some such idea as the one which has been 
 suggested may account for the nature of Gis- 
 sing's next social novel. In The Nether World 
 the truths of environment are strictly observed. 
 
 72
 
 THE LOWER CLASSES 
 
 Except that it turns upon the unexpected wealth 
 of a working-class man, and his wish to use this 
 money for the rehef of poor people in general, 
 the story is self-supporting. It is easily the 
 ugliest of Gissing's books, in spite of the charac- 
 ter of Jane, who is the granddaughter of the 
 rich old man ; but it is consistent and deserving 
 of respect. 
 
 The story shows how Sidney Kirkwood, loving 
 an original girl — Clara Hewett — yet drives her 
 by his love to an extreme of vanity and destruc- 
 tion. That he later loves Jane Snowdon is little 
 to the point, since morbid scruples prevent him 
 from accepting the girl with her grandfather's 
 legacy and its consequent duties. His final 
 marriage with Clara, whose face has been par- 
 tially destroyed by vitriol thrown in jealousy by 
 a rival actress, is full of unhappy duty ; and the 
 end of the book shows him meeting Jane, who 
 has been despoiled of her legacy by an un- 
 scrupulous father, over the grave of the old 
 man, her grandfather. Other interest is sup- 
 plied, or should be supplied, by the rascally 
 Amazon, Clem Peckover, married to and de- 
 serted by Jane's father ; by the exploits of Bob 
 Hewett, who is led by a vanity similar to his 
 sister's into the manufacture of base coin ; and 
 by Bob's indescribably squalid wife, Pennyloaf 
 Candy. 
 
 73
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 The quality of the book, judged as a series of 
 chapters, is very high ; but as a novel its strength 
 is dissipated by the absence of any clearly defined 
 theme. The characters are finely differentiated, 
 and if that were the aim of the novelist it would 
 be achieved here. What the book lacks, how- 
 ever, is that difficult thing, light. It is patient 
 and well reasoned ; it does not lack convincing- 
 ness ; it simply lacks movement and fire. The 
 writing is often heavy ; in some cases the scenes 
 described have no genuine importance. The 
 book as a whole leaves an impression of hope- 
 lessness and incoherence. It shows at its most 
 remarkable point Gissing's failure at times to 
 lift his excellent work to the plane of vitality. 
 Whether it is that the characters have no in- 
 trinsic interest, or whether, in its attempt to 
 give such a picture of the poor as Balzac gives 
 of the French peasantry, or of such persons as 
 La Cibot, in " Le Cousin Pons," it loses original 
 impulse, it is hard to say. Yet there is a curious 
 deadness, a lack of spontaneity, which, if it is to 
 be regarded as arising from the subject-matter, 
 shows that Gissing had not thoroughly fathomed 
 that curious humour, and even joy, that pre- 
 vents the poorest people from losing heart. 
 
 I have referred to Pennyloaf Candy as in- 
 describably squalid ; but she has life. She is 
 based upon observation. Only, while she is real, 
 
 74
 
 THE LOWER CLASSES 
 
 and while the environment is brutal, Gissing's 
 pictures, and the brutality he illustrates, lack the 
 authentic note. They have the air of Saturday- 
 night walks in poor districts, when public-houses 
 are crowded, and women are standing about in 
 mud, loaded with their marketing. The pictures 
 have a little more than superficial truth, because 
 they are drawn from observation ; but just as 
 one character in Isabel Clarendon condemns a 
 story as " too subjective," so, in their approved 
 objectivity, do the persons in The Nether World 
 fail to satisfy any reader who has a first-hand 
 knowledge of the poor. Gissing could not un- 
 derstand the mind of the proletarian. When 
 he tries to suggest its natural working he fails. 
 Take this as an example of his insight, as well 
 as of his habit of so justifying his portraits by ex- 
 planation as to betray their intellectual origin : — 
 
 Genuine respect for law is the result of possessing 
 something which the law exerts itself to guard. Should 
 it happen that you possess nothing, and that your educa- 
 tion in metaphysics has been grievously neglected, the 
 strong probability is that your mind will reduce the 
 principle of society to its naked formula : Get, by what- 
 ever means, so long as with impunity. On that formula 
 Bob Hewett was brooding ; in the hours of this Saturday 
 evening he exerted his mind more strenuously than ever 
 before in the course of his life. And to a foregone 
 result. Here is a man with no moral convictions, with no 
 conscious relations to society, save those which are hostile, 
 
 75
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 with no personal affections ; at the same time, vaguely 
 aware of certain faculties in himself for which life affords 
 no scope and encouraged in various kinds of conceit by 
 the crass stupidity of all with whom he associated. It is 
 suggested to him all at once that there is a very easy way 
 of improving his circumstances, and that by exercise of a 
 certain craft with which he is perfectly familiar; only, 
 the method happens to be criminal. " Men who do this 
 kind of thing are constantly being caught and severely 
 punished. Yes ; men of a certain kind ; not Robert 
 Hewett. Robert Hewett is altogether an exceptional 
 being; he is head and shoulders above the men with 
 whom he mixes ; he is clever, he is remarkably good- 
 looking. If anyone in this world, of a truth Robert 
 Hewett may reckon on impunity when he sets his wits 
 against the law. Why, his arrest and punishment is an 
 altogether inconceivable thing ; he never in his life had a 
 charge brought against him." 
 
 Again and again it came back to that. Every novice 
 in unimpassioned crime has that thought, and the more 
 self-conscious the man, the more impressed with a sense of 
 his own importance, so much the weightier is its effect 
 with him. 
 
 We know in what spirit John Hewett regarded rebels 
 against the law. Do not imagine that any impulse of 
 that nature actuated his son. . . . Bob's temperament 
 was, in a certain measure, that of the artist ; he felt 
 without reasoning ; he let himself go whither his moods 
 propelled him. Not a man of evil propensities; entertain 
 no such thought for a moment. . . . Weakness, vanity, a 
 sense that he has not satisfactions proportionate to his 
 desert, a strong temptation — here are the data which, in 
 ordinary cases, explain a man's deliberate attempt to 
 profit by criminality. 
 
 76
 
 THE LOWER CLASSES 
 
 Tlie Town Traveller^ a short, mildly hilarious 
 novel belonging to a much later period, deals 
 with the lower middle-class, excepting that the 
 plot hangs upon the tracking of a bigamous earl. 
 There are a good many references to perspira- 
 tion, and the author's attitude throughout is 
 genially condescending, since he is writing for 
 cultured people an amusing story about an un- 
 cultured order. Mr. Gammon and Polly Sparks 
 are, however, shown in their meanness with 
 good humour, and although the book is very 
 faintly vulgar in its attempt to reproduce the 
 manners of vulgar society, it would be tolerable 
 as coming from a less conscientious writer than 
 Gissing. 
 
 This is the last book in which the interest is 
 chiefly one of class. Most of Gissing's other 
 stories, although many of them deal directly 
 with the subject of class, do so by means of 
 individuals, and not of a section of life. Class 
 and the sense of class is the groundwork of such 
 books as Born in Exile, In the Year of Jubilee, 
 The Paying Guest, and JVill Warburton; but 
 one of these books is practically a short story, 
 while in the other three the main interest is 
 entirely personal. As I have suggested, it is in 
 the studies of temperament that Gissing's most 
 
 77
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 notable work is to be found ; but although 1 
 have taken occasion to assert his shortcomings 
 as a delineator of lower-class manners, it does 
 very decidedly stand to Gissing's credit that at 
 a time when most modern novelists, with the 
 exception of Mr. Hardy and, in one novel, 
 George Meredith, were finding inspiration in 
 the middle and upper classes, he should have 
 had the courage to strike below the pleasant 
 surface of life. The comparison between Gissing 
 and " Mark Rutherford," made by Mr. Thomas 
 Seccombe, is suggestive ; but in the work of the 
 living writer there is an essential tranquillity 
 which endears it to quiet minds, rather than the 
 nervous, irritable, and passionate sense of writh- 
 ing life which we may find in Gissing's work. 
 That Gissing was, as Mr. Seccombe says, in- 
 fluenced by the " cumbrous and grandiose 
 paraphernalia " of the Victorian novelists is also 
 profoundly true. Gissing was caught midway 
 between the two schools — the Victorian and the 
 modern. His early books are thus robbed of 
 the freshness which they might have had in 
 virtue of the author's youth. What they possess 
 of maturity is too often purchased by the sacri- 
 fice of spontaneous nature ; while the dogged 
 " objectivity " which one may trace to the more 
 solid Victorian novels is an artistic blemish 
 destined to keep over-controlled the spiritual 
 
 78
 
 THE LOWER CLASSES 
 
 understanding which Gissing later revealed. 
 When we realise, from a reference in his third 
 book, that Gissing was acquainted with the 
 extraordinarily pure method of Turgenev, we 
 cannot help wondering whether, if the persistent 
 hold of the English middle-class objective 
 novelists had been less firm, Gissing might 
 earlier have reached a true spiritual maturity, 
 and thus realised the promise of his own native 
 talent. As it is, he remains a dubious figure, at 
 least in his relation to the life of the lower 
 classes, negative instead of positive. It is thus 
 impossible for any sincere critic of his work to 
 describe these early books in terms of such high 
 praise as would be welcome and pleasant. Their 
 faults of lack of sympathy and of a slight 
 stodginess are too notable to be ignored. In 
 the chapter which follows there is more occasion 
 for enthusiasm, because Gissing was less shackled 
 and more at ease when his determination to be 
 relentless and scholarly gave way to the personal 
 emotion which alone can inspire works of art. 
 
 79
 
 Ill 
 
 STUDIES OF TEMPERAMENT 
 
 One of the characters in New Gi'uh Street 
 observes : " The best moments of hfe are those 
 when we contemplate beauty in the purely 
 artistic spirit — objectively. I have had such 
 moments in Greece and Italy ; times when I was 
 a free spirit, utterly remote from the temptations 
 and harassings of sexual emotion. What we 
 call love is mere turmoil." Apart from the 
 implied definition of Art as purely objective, and 
 apart also from the curious suggestion of the 
 attitude of one who contemplates beauty, the 
 insistence upon the turmoil of "what we call 
 love " is particularly interesting. It strikes the 
 key-note of Gissing's novels of temperament. 
 The lover passes nights " of the wretchedest in- 
 decision " and is so invariably cat-like in his 
 prowlings and miseries, as to show very clearly 
 how wasting and unsatisfactory the love of 
 woman may be. Jealousy is the dominant note 
 in a Gissing lover ; jealousy in one form or 
 another runs through all the novels. In The 
 
 80
 
 STUDIES OF TEMPERAMENT 
 
 Unclassed Harriet is malignant with jealousy ; 
 in Isabel Clarendon Kingcote spends his time in 
 a frenzy of distrust ; in A Life's Moiling 
 suspicions are ever ready in Wilfrid Athel's 
 mind ; in The Emancipated Miriam spies and 
 betrays ; in Nexv Gi'iib Street Reardon's jealousy 
 of Milvain is hinted ; in Denzil Quarrie?^ Eustace 
 Glazzard's jealousy of Denzil leads him into 
 incredible breach of confidence ; in Born in Exile 
 Marcella's jealousy is magnificently indicated ; 
 in The Odd IVomen Widdowson is jealousy 
 personified, though he tells himself that jealous 
 husbands, according to something he has read, 
 end in making their wives provide just cause for 
 jealousy, as indeed is the case here ; in The Year 
 of Jubilee there are several jealousies ; in Eve's 
 Ransom the hero's thoughts of his beloved, 
 notably well rendered, are base and frigid ; in 
 The Whi7ipool jealousy and intrigue are the 
 basis of the story ; in Veranilda Marcian provides 
 an interesting study of a jealous Roman ; in The 
 Crown of Life, Our Friend the Charlatan, and 
 Will Wai'biirton the atmosphere surrounding 
 the various lovers is charged with jealousy and 
 fever. It is impossible to doubt that Gissing's 
 conviction is deep and sure ; the turmoil of 
 love is persistently emphasised throughout. If, 
 as is said in The Crown of Life, love " is the 
 personal experience of the very few," the fact will 
 F 81
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 help us to realise that these books of Gissing's 
 are all studies of abjiormal temperament ; and, 
 as realism is largely concerned with normality, 
 Gissing's studies are in no way to be regarded 
 (as they have been regarded) as realistic. He 
 throws off in The Emancipated a further 
 remark which puts his conviction in another 
 way. "It is doubtful whether anyone who 
 loves passionately fulfils the ideal of being able 
 to see the object of love in any but a noble 
 light; this is one of the many conventions, chiefly 
 of literary origin, which to the eyes of the 
 general make cynicism of wholesome truth." 
 Such perception as this gives a touch of 
 squalor to the novels of temperament, but it 
 seems also to give these books an intimate 
 concern with a narrowly restricted circle of 
 individuals. In such studies, which are really 
 subjective, and not objective, Gissing reveals his 
 fine quality as a romantic historian of life. 
 
 Subjectivity and objectivity, about which he 
 appears to have held strong views, have aroused 
 much jugglement in the minds of those sophisti- 
 cated persons who frame artistic theories ; but the 
 need of both in the equipment of a novelist was 
 never more clearly shown than in Gissing's 
 case. The imperfect fusion of the two, the 
 extraordinary notion (surely betraying lack of 
 imagination) that one apprehends natural beauty 
 
 82
 
 STUDIES OF TEMPERAMENT 
 
 objectively, hampered him throughout ; but in 
 the studies of lovers, unwelcome and painful 
 though we may sometimes find them, the fusion 
 was achieved. The whole cause of Gissing's 
 artistic perplexity was the objectivity of the 
 Victorians and the misunderstanding in his time 
 of the word "detachment." He thought, I 
 think, that to be impersonal was to be objective, 
 and as he was very nearly unable to escape from 
 himself and his own preoccupations, he fought a 
 losing fight all through his literary life. This 
 perhaps explains why, in considering his work, 
 we so often, after passages of real imagining and 
 power, are brought fiercely up agamst some piece 
 of false, hard, and shallow psychology. We do 
 not suffer in this way in the studies of jealousy, 
 because although they tend, as a whole, to be 
 monotonous through essential similarity, they 
 are freshly and vividly produced from Gissing's 
 own consciousness. 
 
 11 
 
 It would not be true to say, however, that 
 Gissing was obsessed with the idea of jealousy, 
 for the main themes of his books, from A Lifes 
 Morning onwards, are intimately woven and 
 increasingly involved with some "problem." 
 Marriage, the position of woman, class, educa- 
 tion, the relation of husband and wife — these 
 
 83
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 things perpetually occupied his mind. Isabel 
 Clarendon is almost an exceedingly subtle study 
 of an abortive love affair between a comfort- 
 and society-loving woman and a young recluse. 
 Neiv Grub Street is an extraordinarily fine, and, 
 within Gissing's limitations, a richly character- 
 ised, study of professional literary life. The 
 Emancipated, apart from its confused hovering 
 around the defiance of convention by conven- 
 tional people, is a penetrating analysis of an 
 unhappy marriage. In these books that I have 
 named, life, no less than love, is shown as 
 turmoil, terribly complicated by material needs ; 
 in The Wfdrlpool, Gissing, always morbidly 
 concerned, to a feminine degree, with the ten- 
 dencies of his own work, finally claims that life 
 as it is lived in the world is nothing but a vast, 
 agitated, and soul-destroying turmoil of ambi- 
 tions and occupations. It first tears men and 
 women from the simple pleasures by which their 
 natures would be enriched, and then leads 
 irresistibly to failure and despair. He says, 
 elsewhere, that he is afraid of the world, so 
 much afraid as to be useless — a most significant 
 admission, not lightly to be passed when it 
 comes from one who makes the world his 
 province. If we compare such an attitude with 
 that of a supreme novelist of our time, Mr. 
 Arnold Bennett, who is continually, as he ex- 
 
 84
 
 STUDIES OF TEMPERAMENT 
 
 presses it, " savouring " life, we shall see how 
 little of the modern spirit of eager inquiry into 
 phenomena Gissing possessed. He was, accord- 
 ing to Mr. Morley Roberts, " an inverted ideal- 
 ist. He looks back. It is the more hopeless, 
 the more impossibly vain." The sense of life 
 as a maelstrom, resistless and inexorable, is 
 Gissing's bugbear ; failure, grief, inability to 
 struggle against odds, sad handicaps of tempera- 
 ment, endless compromise with the idea of 
 happiness — again and again we find him ex- 
 pressing these things, until his world seems 
 peopled only by satisfied vulgarians and those to 
 whom social intercourse is abhorrent. And 
 while these preoccupations rob his work of 
 resilience and warmth, they do at the same time 
 lend it an uncomfortable distinction. He was 
 a conscious malcontent, not a revolutionary, 
 because he was just as much a social as a 
 religious agnostic ; but repelled by the superficial 
 ugliness of active existence. He was all the 
 time trying sincerely to express, in terms of art 
 and morality, his own sedentary notion of life, 
 the notion of an educated and sensitive student 
 (never a mystic), consciously out of place — 
 " There have always been two entities — myself 
 and the world, and the normal relation between 
 these two has been hostile." Assuredly, how- 
 ever artistic it may be to express sincerely one s 
 
 85
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 deep conviction about life, it is ill to choose the 
 most popular form of art to deplore in set 
 terms the decay of the art of living. By his 
 own definition of Art, Gissing was condemned 
 to eternal j udgment in terms of morality, which 
 is the worst thing that can befall an artist. 
 " Art," he says, may be defined as " an ex- 
 pression, satisfying and abiding, of the zest of 
 life." Never the zest of life did Gissing portray, 
 but admirably the fever. 
 
 iii 
 
 Isabel Clarendon, A Life's Morning, and The 
 Emancijxited, Gissing's first three novels of 
 temperament, all show imitativeness and in- 
 equalities ; but of the three, by reason of its 
 being the most deeply imagined, the earliest is 
 the most vivid. All of the three books are now 
 difficult to obtain, and 1 think the loss is 
 the greatest in the case of Isabel Clarendon. 
 This book, which perhaps hardly merits Mr. 
 Morley Roberts's loyal comparisons with the 
 masterpieces of Turgenev, derives interest from 
 the intensity with which the author shows King- 
 cote's passion for Isabel. In those passages 
 which rise to heights of eloquent emotion there 
 is genuine first-hand feeling. AVhen Kingcote, 
 torn already by his sense of poverty, is doubly 
 tantalised by a jealous perception of Isabel's 
 
 86
 
 STUDIES OF TEMPERAMENT 
 
 temperamental failings, Gissing's insight is subtle 
 and convincing. The two have sworn mutual 
 affection, yet Isabel cannot resist the allure- 
 ments of society : she is the child of gaiety, 
 genuinely loving, yet wedded already to her 
 natural environment. When Kingcote goes to 
 see her he finds Isabel surrounded by friends, 
 and he is too sensitive and too egoistic to adapt 
 himself to such a life as the one that is neces- 
 sary to her. Jealousy grows within him ; he 
 charges Isabel wildly with betrayal of his love ; 
 he repents as fiercely, and again and again 
 wavers between railing and apology. Isabel 
 offers to return home to the country if he will 
 only insist upon it ; but he has not the strength 
 of character to insist on anything. He wears 
 himself out with jealousy, and a little exhausts 
 her by his demands, although her love is 
 splendidly steadfast. Finally, to his agony, he 
 sees her in the distance talking to a man who 
 obviously supplicates, while she appears to listen 
 not unkindly. Kingcote, infuriated with passion, 
 becomes at this time really insane ; and although 
 he is found, desperately ill, and slowly restored 
 to life, he crushes every thought of Isabel from 
 his mind and rejects her generous overtures. 
 That her own love, after its one rapturous 
 blooming, should fade, is natural and con- 
 vincing ; less so is the author's hint on the last 
 
 87
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 page that Kingcote's maturer and more staid 
 affections are to be elsewhere bestowed. 
 
 The book is too fervid to prelude supreme 
 works of art in a similar key, for the emotion, 
 though intense, is febrile rather than abiding — 
 headlong, unbalanced, the sudden sweeping gust 
 of an overstrained sensibility. The comparison 
 with Turgenev, eager and in every way credit- 
 able to the friend who made it, only serves to 
 emphasise the exceeding depth and subtlety of 
 the Russian author's power of emotional analysis. 
 Isabel Clarendon will not bear such a com- 
 parison. It remains interesting, as giving us 
 a picture of Gissing in his progress to inde- 
 pendence ; but as a novel, apart from the value 
 it possesses for those truly inspired to read 
 Gissing in all his moods, it is not memorable. 
 
 Isabel Clarendon belongs to his imitative 
 work, as does A Lifes Morning, which, after a 
 fascinating start, trails off into sensationalism 
 and perfunctory development of intrigue. The 
 Meredithian portions of the story do not 
 combine well with those dealing with events 
 in Dunfield, and the writing is sometimes self- 
 conscious and even bad. We read such passages 
 as the following : — 
 
 Education she did get, by hook or by crook ; there was 
 dire pinch to pay for it, and, too well knowing this, 
 the child strove her utmost to use the opportunities 
 
 88
 
 STUDIES OF TEMPERAMENT 
 
 offered her. Each morning going into Dunlield, taking 
 with her some sandwiches that were called dinner, walking 
 home again by tea-time, tired, hungry — ah, hungry ! . . . 
 In winter you saw her set forth with her waterproof and 
 umbrella, the too-heavy bag of books on her arm ; some- 
 times the wind and rain beating as if to delay her — they, 
 too, cruel. In summer the hot days tired her perhaps still 
 more; she reached home in the afternoon well-nigh faint- 
 ing, the books were so heavy. Who would not have felt 
 kindly to her ? So gentle she was, so dreadfully shy and 
 timid, her eyes so eager, so full of unconscious pathos. 
 ... A little thing that happened one day — take it as an 
 anecdote. . . . 
 
 The anecdote which follows is quite as senti- 
 mental as might be expected from such an 
 induction. The story itself tells how Wilfrid 
 Athel, a young student, falls in love with a 
 governess. Family pressure only makes him 
 obdurate ; but Emily Hood takes her own 
 course, after the death of her father and mother, 
 by disappearing. Whereupon Wilfrid goes in 
 for politics and presently becomes engaged to 
 a sanguine beauty, named Beatrice Redwing. 
 She, in time, discovers that while Wilfrid pre- 
 tends to love her, and while indeed he thinks he 
 loves, he yet keeps Emily's letters as something 
 entirely sacred. A meeting between himself 
 and Emily reveals to both that their love is 
 intact ; and Beatrice heroically immolates her- 
 self. The sensational portions of the story, 
 
 89
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 which form a sub-plot, refer to Emily Hood's 
 father and his employer, a lay-figure of a 
 passionate brute. This man desires to marry 
 Emily, puts temptation in her father's way, and 
 after first trying to use his knowledge of old 
 Hood's fall as a way to Emily's hand, drives 
 the unfortunate father to suicide. These episodes 
 are both unpleasant and unconvincing. 
 
 The Emancipated, which is not a very bold 
 book, has been unduly scorned by one or two 
 critics. It is true that the story is tentative, 
 that there are poor things in it, and that the 
 Italian backgrounds are scanty ; but the book 
 has points. It describes the sudden marriage 
 of an intelligent girl with an intellectual phil- 
 anderer, a sort of charlatan : and her gradual 
 disillusion. There is much more in the book 
 than that, much talk of something rather timid 
 which goes by the name of emancipation, and 
 which consists in revolt against "the domestic 
 point of view " ; but this cannot be regarded as 
 being very definitely considered. 
 
 Yet it would be unfair to suggest that The 
 Emancipated, with all its pallor, lacks subtlety, 
 for it is full of it. Only the subtlety is pressed, 
 it is argued. Here, as elsewhere, Gissing forced 
 his own version of affairs to the front. He 
 could not allow the story to tell itself— his ex- 
 perience was not considerable enough to keep 
 
 90
 
 STUDIES OF TEMPERAMENT 
 
 him from disquisition or exposition. The book 
 was water-logged from the outset by his in- 
 experience ; and the minor personages are 
 grotesquely over-explained. If we compare it 
 with an early book by Mr. Henry James, say 
 '* The Portrait of a Lady," we cannot fail 
 to see how unfortunately The Emancipated 
 bears scrutiny in its own school ; because where 
 the finer artist's texture is close and delicate, 
 Gissing's seems coarse and very lacking in finish. 
 Nevertheless, the study of Elgar, if forced, has 
 character and perception. It is, I think, one 
 of the best of Gissing's experiments in an 
 unsympathetic type. Elgar, compared with 
 Lashmar, in Ou?' Frieiid the Charlatan., has all 
 the advantage which an imagined person must 
 have over one that has been invented. There 
 is, curiously enough, much more cynicism in 
 The Emancipated than in any other of Gissing's 
 books ; the beloved Italian scenes are unhappily 
 made settings for base intrigue and " the harass- 
 ings of sexual emotion." 
 
 iv 
 
 Although the next three years saw also the 
 short and inferior novel Dcnzil Qiuirrier, they 
 marked the highest point of Gissing's achieve- 
 ment. Only a novelist with very unusual 
 gifts could have produced so rapidly three such 
 
 91
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 notable books as New Grub Street (1891), Born 
 in Exile (1892), and The Odd Women (1893). 
 The two first are assuredly very fine novels 
 indeed ; and present a striking contrast when 
 we realise that while New Grub Street is packed 
 with individuals (much better imagined than 
 elsewhere), Bojii in Exile is a remarkably close, 
 and even copious, study of a small number of 
 unusual people. In both books, of course, there 
 are failures : the minor personages in Born in 
 Exile are stereotyped and uninteresting, obvious 
 makeshifts. Mrs. Jacox is a perpetual vocative ; 
 Chilvers is as much a parody as any other 
 clergyman in Gissing's books ; Malkin, besides 
 being an echo of Whelpdale, in New Grub 
 Street, is also a type. But on the whole these 
 two books contain work that demands not 
 merely praise, but admiration. New Grub Street 
 is for the first time a book based absolutely on 
 Gissing's personal knowledge of Hfe and hving 
 people. Where he has been hitherto a spectator 
 of the classes he has described, he is now 
 writing from experience. The characters are 
 made either from parts of his own life — wit- 
 ness Reardon's struggles, BifFen's occupations 
 and food-stuffs, Whelpdale's American ex- 
 periences; or from people he has seen and 
 known in the British Museum reading-room. 
 The book is almost realistic, in the sense that 
 
 92
 
 STUDIES OF TEMPERAMENT 
 
 it is convincing as a picture of individuals and, 
 more largely, as a picture of a section of life. 
 It would be entirely realistic if certain passages 
 were revised and if the dialogue had greater 
 precision ; but Gissing either scorned or had no 
 ear for genuine conversation. V^ery likely he 
 would have condemned precision in dialogue as 
 " reporting." 
 
 The main idea of New Grub Sireet is the 
 contrast between two types of literary man. 
 Jasper Milvain, a determined young writer with 
 an eye to the main chance, gaily progresses 
 through popular journalism and through a 
 discreditably handled love affair to complete 
 material success. Edwin Reardon, on the other 
 hand, a novelist of serious intentions, loses power 
 by ill-health and anxiety, loses the company (and 
 almost the affection) of his wife, and finally 
 loses the strength to resist illness. The cynical 
 conclusion, which shows Jasper securing post- 
 humous fame for Reardon and marrying Rear- 
 don's widow, is in keeping with the book. In 
 addition to these parallel lines, which are most 
 delicately and wisely drawn so as to be not too 
 insistent, there are the internal affairs of three 
 families — the Reardons, the Milvains, and the 
 Yules — which are given in each case with sure- 
 ness and with proper relation to the rest of the 
 story. Thus the book is well balanced and 
 
 93
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 sane ; and while it lacks just that imaginative 
 power which would have made it a great novel, 
 — even accordino- to the author's technical ideas, 
 which were old-fashioned — it remains the best 
 picture of middle-class hterary life that has been 
 written in English. In every way it is an 
 advance on Gissing's earlier work. It belongs, 
 of course, to the early nineties, a fact which is 
 emphasised unduly by the typography of the 
 current edition ; but it is a deliberately planned 
 and conscientiously executed work of art which 
 will never lose its value as a moving revelation 
 of the conditions of life. By its very " shop- 
 pishness" it enables Gissing's purely literary 
 humour (too often that self-conscious irony that 
 degenerates into sarcasm) to have freer play than 
 we shall discover anywhere else in his work. 
 And all the thought which he had given to his 
 own work and to the work of his contemporaries 
 appears in New Grub Street, never " direct and 
 flaming from the heart of man," as the best 
 novels may be, but restrained and reflective to 
 the point of provoking admiration from all who 
 can appreciate the virtues of restraint and 
 thought. In fact, all Gissing's virtues as a 
 writer have their opportunity of display in this 
 book. Minor faults are to be found in Little 
 Willy, the property child of Reardon ; in the 
 legacies, which, although carefully " laid," are 
 
 94
 
 STUDIES OF TEMPERAMENT 
 
 really a device, and interfere with the scrupulous 
 reader's sense of probability ; and I think Jasper's 
 proposal to the rich young woman who rejects 
 him is an extravagance which, being serious, is 
 offensive. In his desire to be particular, more- 
 over, Gissing makes a man on one page a law- 
 stationer and on another a dentist ; but this is 
 a detail hardly worth mentioning. We read 
 New Gruh Street with all the apprehensiveness 
 that we accord to Gissing's minor works, but 
 with none of the discomfort. It is a true 
 attempt to show human beings working through 
 life ; and we feel that each character has a 
 definite and logical past, rooted in profound 
 probability. 
 
 The question of three volumes against one is 
 clearly examined ; the commonplace of the 
 reviewers of that time, that the novelist's first 
 duty is " to tell a story," is not unfairly satirised ; 
 the mental pabulum of the quarter-educated is 
 seriously discussed ; the ethics of reviewing are 
 canvassed by so patent an authority as Milvain ; 
 the various points that arise in the life of any 
 seriously intentioned writer are steadily and 
 convincingly illustrated ; in a thousand ways the 
 influences at work on such widely differing 
 writers as Reardon, Milvain, and Alfred Yule 
 are brought home to one. Reardon, the 
 novelist who has run through his ideas, and who 
 
 95
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 is so fastidious and so exhausted that he fiddles 
 first with this plan and then with the other ; 
 Milvain, the journalist who writes what will sell 
 and who recognises that nowadays a man reaches 
 literary success through society, instead of 
 reaching society through literary success ; Yule, 
 the arrogant hack whose ambitions take no 
 account of changed taste, and whose matrimonial 
 misalliance is eternally a vision of intellectual 
 failure — these are the work of no common man, 
 but of one who has seen and suffered in what he 
 calls " the valley of the shadow of books." 
 There is a magnificently clever picture of the 
 British Museum reading-room, warmed as it is 
 for the shambling decrepitude of octogenarian 
 insomniacs. Especially good are the relations 
 of Reardon and Amy, the wife who " can't bear 
 poverty," and who has assured her husband in 
 early days that his is "the kind of face that 
 people come to know in portraits." The way in 
 which their natural love is undermined by mis- 
 understanding is shown with a minimum of 
 explanation (for Gissing) ; and so is Amy's 
 comparison of her husband with the successful 
 Milvain, although this is a little over-argued. 
 BifFen, who, for sufficient reasons, will not 
 remove his overcoat on a warm evening, and who 
 eats bread-and-dripping with a knife and fork 
 because it " seemed to make the fare more sub- 
 
 96
 
 STUDIES OF TEMPERAMENT 
 
 stantial," who philosophically plans and writes a 
 novel called " Mr. Bailey : Grocer," which is 
 about the "ignobly decent," is a pathetic and 
 real figure who never loses nobility. Marian 
 Yule, the girl so unpleasantly jilted by Mil vain, 
 is a good contrast to Amy Reardon, and reveals 
 herself in touching loyalty, without over- 
 anxiety on the part of the author. Even Rear- 
 don, who is not allowed to reach the reader 
 without apostrophic comment (" But try to 
 imagine a personality," etc.), is drawn with a 
 sureness generally lacking in self-portraits. His 
 love for Amy is shown in many ways, even in 
 those where " the stress of injured love is always 
 tempted to speech which seems its contradiction "; 
 and the double pulling of the married but un- 
 sympathetic lovers is a companion-picture to that 
 one which has been described in Isabel Clarendon^ 
 where two opposed temperaments in disorder are 
 revealed with understanding. Certain minor 
 personages, such as Mr. and Mrs. Carter, Mrs. 
 Edmund Yule, and John Yule, are lacking in 
 vitality ; and the book begins to show, even in 
 twenty years, a shght staleness ; but on the 
 whole it is rich in genuine characterisation to an 
 extent unusual with Gissing. There are very 
 few of those unhappy attempts, which disfigure 
 others of his novels, to improvise a man or 
 woman with a set way of speaking, and to beat 
 G 97
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 them into a dull sort of stupid relation to the 
 book. It leaves on the mind the impression it 
 was intended to make ; and it has an original and 
 personal value as a novel which deserves to be read 
 and remembered on its own account. No book 
 which lacks beauty can be expected to do more 
 than that. 
 
 With the minor characters of Borii m Exile 
 I have already dealt. The novel itself, how- 
 ever, transcends the imperfections, technical or 
 spiritual, of its minor characters. It is much 
 more pretentious than Neiv Gi^ub Street,, because 
 it attempts to give a full-length picture of a 
 man of considerable but perverted talent, who 
 is hampered throughout his life by exclusion 
 from the society to which he aspires. 
 
 Godwin Peak, the son of poor parents, early 
 shows unusual intellectual powers, and is enabled, 
 by the kindness of the founder, to benefit by 
 increased education at Whitelaw College (by 
 which name Gissing is supposed to represent 
 Owens College, where he received part of his 
 own tuition). His abrupt changes of study, and 
 his final relinquishment of his immediate ambi- 
 tion, enforced by the thoughtless efforts of a 
 restaurant-keeping uncle, are detailed. Later 
 we find him in London with huge and hungry 
 
 98
 
 STUDIES OF TEMPERAMENT 
 
 social ambitions. In those years he has decided, 
 a plebeian himself, to marry a lady. Chance 
 leads him to an acquaintance, in Exeter, with 
 Sidwell Warricombe, a young and beautiful girl, 
 for whom he conceives a calculated attachment 
 which grows into sincere love. But, apparently, 
 the only way he can secure admittance to her 
 father's house is to feign a Christianity which he 
 no longer feels, and to proclaim his intention of 
 taking Orders. Thus he wins upon Sidwell's 
 father, and, through his intercourse with her, 
 upon Sidwell herself. But the deceit poisons 
 his life, for the facts became known to several 
 people, and Sidwell's materialistic brother, bent 
 upon Peak's destruction, exposes him. Only 
 Sidwell's magnificent love remains staunch ; and 
 even she, in the long severance of their lives, 
 grows afraid to link her own life with his when 
 unexpected affluence makes Peak at last inde- 
 pendent. So Peak, after wandering, dies abroad, 
 as much socially and spiritually in exile as he 
 has always lived. 
 
 It must be borne in mind that Gissing never 
 shirks the exhibition of Peak's intellectual 
 powers ; he seems to demonstrate them with 
 candour and effect. Moreover, he stakes his 
 emotional appeal upon a scene between Sidwell 
 and Peak, a scene which, I think, for sustained 
 power and truth, is unapproached elsewhere in 
 
 99
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 Gissing's work. Sidwell herself is a fine study ; 
 subtly is Peak's feeling for her shown in the 
 terms of his own temperament : — 
 
 Comparison of her with others had no result but the 
 deepening of that impression she had at first made upon 
 him. Sidwell exhibited all the qualities which most 
 appealed to him in her class ; in addition, she had the 
 charms of a personality which he could not think of 
 common occurrence. He was yet far from understanding 
 her ; she exercised his powers of observation, analysis, 
 conjecture, as no other person had ever done ; each time 
 he saw her (were it but for a moment) he came away with 
 some new perception of her excellence, some hitherto 
 unmarked grace of person or mind whereon to meditate. 
 He had never approached a woman who possessed this 
 power at once of fascinating his senses and controlling 
 his intellect to a glad reverence. Whether in her presence 
 or musing upon her in solitude, he found that the un- 
 sparing naturalism of his scrutiny was powerless to de- 
 grade that sweet, pure being. 
 
 Rare, under any circumstances, is the passionate love 
 which controls every motive of heart and mind ; rarer 
 still that form of it which, with no assurance of recip- 
 rocation, devotes exclusive ardour to an object only 
 approachable through declared obstacles. Godwin Peak 
 was not framed for romantic languishment. In general, 
 the more complex a man's mechanism, and the more pro- 
 nounced his habit of introspection, the less capable is he 
 of loving with vehemence and constancy. Heroes of 
 passion are for the most part primitive natures, nobly 
 tempered ; in our time they tend to extinction. Growing 
 vulgarism on the one hand, and on the other, a develop- 
 ment of the psychological conscience, are unfavourable 
 
 100
 
 STUDIES OF TEMPERAMENT 
 
 to any relation between the sexes, save those which 
 originate in pure animalism, or in reasoning less or more 
 generous. Never having experienced any feeling which 
 he could dignify with the name of love, Godwin had no 
 criterion in himself whereby to test the emotions now 
 besetting him. In a man of his age this was an unusual 
 state of things, for when the ardour which will bear 
 analysis has at length declared itself, it is wont to be 
 moderated by the regretful memory of that fugacious 
 essence which gave to the first frenzy of youth its irre- 
 coverable delight. He could not say in reply to his 
 impulses : If that was love which overmastered me, this 
 must be something either more or less exalted. What he 
 did say was something of this kind : If desire and tender- 
 ness, if frequency of dreaming rapture, if the calmest 
 approval of the mind and the heart's most exquisite, most 
 painful throbbing, constitute love, — then assuredly I love 
 Sidwell. But if to love is to be possessed with madness, 
 to lose all taste of life when hope refuses itself, to 
 meditate frantic follies, to deem it inconceivable that this 
 woman should ever lose her dominion over me, or another 
 reign in her stead, — then my passion falls short of the true 
 oestrum, and I am only dallying with fancies which might 
 spring up as often as I encountered a charming girl. 
 
 Beyond this lengthy passage, there are others 
 which show an equally firm grip upon Peak's 
 character, and the way in which it is most tensely 
 affected by the uprearing of his love for Sidwell 
 and the half-amazed sense of her love for 
 himself ; — 
 
 His native arrogance signified a low estimate of mankind 
 at large, rather than an overweening appreciation of his 
 
 101
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 own qualities, and in his most presumptuous moments he 
 had never claimed the sexual prefulgence which many 
 a commonplace fellow so gloriously exhibits. At most, 
 he had hoped that some woman might find him interest- 
 ing, and so be led on to like him well enough for the 
 venture of matrimony. Passion at length constrained him 
 to believe that his ardour might be genuinely reciprocated, 
 but even now it was only in paroxysms that he held this 
 assurance ; the hours of ordinary life still exposed him to 
 the familiar self-criticism, sometimes more scathing than 
 ever. He dreaded the looking-glass, consciously avoided 
 it ; and a like disparagement of his inner being tortured 
 him through the endless labyrinths of erotic reverie. 
 
 In such a grandiloquent tone is the whole 
 book carried through, but on an intellectual level 
 which Gissing never elsewhere allowed himself. 
 It is clearly and unashamedly an intellectual 
 novel, based upon a comprehension of the point 
 of view of a powerful personality. Sluggish 
 Boim ifi Exile may be, slow in its machinery, 
 paltry in some of its subterfuges and minor 
 interests ; but it moves with a measure, and 
 gains its effects from its own steady, confident 
 growth. It is, in fact, consistent in such 
 a degree as to establish its own importance. 
 For once, Gissing's explanatory method justifies 
 itself; the book makes no attempt to move 
 by means of sentimentality or false reasoning. 
 From the author's brain to the reader's brain its 
 appeal is unhesitatingly made ; and the story 
 
 102
 
 STUDIES OF TEMPERAMENT 
 
 invites thought and sympathy rather than more 
 emotional response. Yet it has momentum 
 and it is moving. It is more tragic than any 
 other of Gissing's stories, because it is free from 
 self-pity. It is large and turgid in expression, 
 and has a seeming ponderousness fit to deceive 
 the facile reader. But its sincerity and its dig- 
 nity of intention are everywhere visible. 
 
 The problem of Born in Eocile appears to us 
 now, perhaps, remote. It is hard to imagine 
 how Peak, with his strength of personality, 
 failed so to express himself as to make his 
 admission to intellectual society certain. His 
 case is not at all that of Dyce Lashmar, in a 
 later book, for he was in no sense a charlatan, 
 but one who thought fearlessly and had the 
 power to hold his own in talk. His continuance 
 in exile is to us inexplicable. Gissing perhaps 
 saw more truly the effect of temperamental 
 deficiencies : it may be that Peak's power of 
 apprehension was not equalled by his power of 
 original thought ; and his ambition, essentially 
 a vulgar ambition, which Gissing does not seem 
 to reahse, may arise from unconscious mediocrity. 
 It is clear that Peak's desire for a Ufe of super- 
 refinement, grotesque though it is, has the 
 author's serious approval ; the book is for this 
 reason humourless. It lacks simplicity ; but 
 it has qualities and a mental vigour which 
 
 103
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 override its obvious shortcomings. Although 
 substantial, it avoids stodginess ; although serious 
 and even, at times, pompous, it yet manages, by- 
 its sincerity, to avoid a solemn ridiculousness, 
 such as other novels making pretensions to in- 
 tellectuality have complacently sported. And, 
 above all, its essential parts are human. It is 
 the personal history of Godwin Peak that is 
 told, not simply the story of his failure in a 
 gratuitous pose. Far more than his ambition is 
 portrayed : we do get, convincingly, a picture 
 of his relations with environment and with 
 persons. And, since Gissing was working in 
 autobiography, there is a note of authenticity 
 in the subject-matter. It is unfortunate that 
 Born in Exile represents the summit of the 
 author's achievement. For now, with the ex- 
 ception of three books — The Odd Women, Eve's 
 Ransom, and The Whiidpool — his novels show, 
 I believe, a marked decline. 
 
 vi 
 
 Denzil Qua?'rier, which was published in the 
 same year as Boiii in Exile, is a book of little 
 power. Married to a man who w^as arrested 
 immediately after the ceremony and imprisoned 
 for several years, Lilian Allen subsequently 
 formed an irregular union with Quarrier. Their 
 secret was told only to Denzil's friend Eustace 
 
 104
 
 STUDIES OF TEMPERAMENT 
 
 Glazzard, but Glazzard, growing jealous of 
 Quarrier, puts the husband on the track of 
 LiHan, and the girl commits suicide. Political 
 scenes in a small town, and a speech by 
 Quarrier, do not serve to give life to the 
 story, which is throughout unattractive and 
 mechanical. 
 
 Mechanical, too, is the opening of The Odd 
 Women, where Gissing, who by now had habitu- 
 ated himself to the writing of novels, sought 
 to strike the book's key-note on the first page. 
 This he proceeded to do in The Odd IFomen 
 and In the Yeai^ of Jubilee, which are occupied 
 with the position of women, both odd and 
 married. So, in The Odd Women, we are 
 faced immediately by the decision of a careless, 
 improvident doctor to insure himself for a large 
 sum ; which resolve is duly followed by his 
 sudden death and the consequent poverty of 
 his many daughters. That only three of these 
 should survive, that one should live in constant 
 old-maidish ill-health, that another should be- 
 come a secret drinker, and that the third — and 
 youngest — should meet and marry an unappetis- 
 ing man of middle-age, suggests that we are 
 in the midst of a problem. " The family," says 
 a benefactress of these unfortunates, " is branded. 
 They belong to the class we know so well — 
 with no social position, and unable to win an 
 
 105
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 individual one. I must find a name for that 
 ragged regiment." Gissing, in the same quan- 
 dary, chose that of "the odd women," but in 
 doing this he was so heavy-handed as to bewray 
 himself. The odd women are chosen with equal 
 doggedness, and we cannot easily shake oiF our 
 dissatisfaction at the method, even when the 
 book becomes illuminating instead of merely 
 illustrative. It has variety in the picture of 
 Rhoda Nunn, who remains unmarried, indeed, 
 but only by a moment's wavering when her 
 struggle with a masculine nature equally strong 
 has reached its cHmax. Rhoda is the chief 
 character in The Odd IVomen, another of Gis- 
 sing's fine portraits of women : the other 
 characters are mostly repulsive. Widdowson, 
 the only visible husband, is, we may hope, 
 exceptional ; as, in a way, is young Mrs. 
 Widdowson's lover. Both of them, however, 
 are painfully convincing, the one in his jealousy, 
 the other in the philandering which shirks its 
 outcome. Virginia Madden, when not quite 
 herself, is great. Drunken people we have had 
 in plenty ; but the stages of secret tippling 
 have rarely been described. It is to Gissing's 
 credit that Virginia's conversation, her delays, 
 her breathless and wandering descriptions of 
 journeys and sights, are unhesitatingly handled. 
 Her sisters are less good, and young Mrs. 
 
 106
 
 STUDIES OF TEMPERAMENT 
 
 Widdowson, in particular, is never realised. 
 Her meeting, late in the story, with the 
 decayed Miss Eade, is grotesque ; and only 
 the ferocious consistency of Widdowson's be- 
 haviour saves the scenes between the two from 
 being ineffective. Widdowson himself is cast 
 in the same mould as Alfred Yule, in New Grub 
 Street, and is by no means entertaining ; but one 
 cannot refuse to believe in his personality and 
 its grisly effects upon himself and his wife. But 
 the conclusion of the book, where the young 
 wife dies after child-birth, where Virginia enters 
 a home for inebriates, and where the characters 
 are all in as low a state of vitality as can be 
 imagined, is — somehow — rather ridiculous. Un- 
 fortunately Gissing did not distinguish between 
 inevitable grief and that form of sentimentality 
 which insists that there shall be no redeeming 
 feature. The Odd IFomen therefore ends as 
 badly as it began, and vies with T/ie Nether 
 World for the doubtful distinction of being the 
 most depressing book he wrote. 
 
 In another aspect The Odd Women is a power- 
 fully expressed plea for intelligence and truth 
 in marriage relations and in the education of 
 women. Gissing declares that " the female sex " 
 cannot be raised from its then low level without 
 asceticism, a revolt against sexual instinct. He 
 also says that " one of the supreme social needs 
 
 107
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 of our day is the education of women in self- 
 respect and self-restraint," an opinion which 
 remains as true now as it was when first written. 
 On the subject of marriage, one of the characters 
 truly observes : — 
 
 " Our Civilization in this point has always been absurdly 
 defective. Men have kept women at a barbarous stage 
 of development, and then complain that they are bar- 
 barous. In the same way society does its best to create 
 a criminal class, and then rages against the criminals. 
 But, you see, I am one of the men, and an impatient one 
 too. The mass of women I see about me are so con- 
 temptible that, in my haste, I use unjust language. 
 Put yourself in the man's place. Say that there are a 
 million or so of us very intelligent and highly educated. 
 Well, the women of corresponding mind number perhaps 
 a few thousand. The vast majority of men must make 
 a marriage that is doomed to be a dismal failure. We 
 fall in love it is true ; but do we really deceive ourselves 
 about the future? A very young man may; why, we 
 know of very young men who are so frantic as to marry 
 girls of the working class — mere lumps of human flesh. 
 But most of us know that our marriage is a pis aller.'''' 
 
 But quite the most notable protest against 
 the corruption of instincts and ideals is con- 
 tained in a passage which attacks conventional 
 novelists. If it is old-fashioned now in respect 
 of our most admirable writers (for the novel 
 may be said to be approaching, via realism, 
 a new and valuable position as an expert view 
 of life), it yet shows Gissing in a characteristic 
 
 108
 
 STUDIES OF TEMPERAMENT 
 
 mood, not quite able to see life whole, but very- 
 intent upon expressing the things which stand 
 clear in his mind. 
 
 " If every novelist could be strangled and thrown into 
 the sea we should have some chance of reforming women. 
 The girPs nature was corrupted with sentimentality, like 
 that of all but every woman who is intelligent enough 
 to read what is called the best fiction, but not intelligent 
 enough to understand its vice. Love — love — love ; a 
 sickening sameness of vulgarity. What is more vulgar 
 than the ideal of novelists ? They won't represent the 
 actual world ; it would be too dull for their readers. 
 In real life, how many men and women fall in love? Not 
 one in every ten thousand, I am convinced. Not one 
 married pair in ten thousand have felt for each other as 
 two or three couples do in every novel. There is the 
 sexual instinct, of course, but that is quite a different 
 thing ; the novelist daren't talk about that. The paltry 
 creatures daren't tell the one truth that would be profit- 
 able. The result is that women imagine themselves noble 
 and glorious when they are most near the animals." 
 
 Even the last sentence, which some may 
 regard as naive, is, properly speaking, a pene- 
 trating thrust at the inveterate romanticism of 
 women. Whatever Gissing may have been, 
 he was sternly unromantic. 
 
 vii 
 It may be imagined that when Gissing was 
 fairly started upon the relations of the sexes, 
 he was not to be deterred from further study. 
 
 109
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 His next three novels, accordingly, deal with 
 marriage and with the casual association of 
 more or less unsuited people. In the Year of 
 Jubilee, an elaborately but ill constructed book 
 showing signs of exhaustion, is about a girl who, 
 loving too strongly, seduced a young man, and 
 (although married to him) had extraordinary 
 difficulties in conceaUng her maternity. The 
 reason of the difficulties was that she would 
 only benefit by her father's will if her marriage 
 remained undiscovered until she reached a 
 certain age. At length her child, and the long 
 parting from her husband, so improved her 
 nature out of all recognition (even, on the 
 reader's part, out of all acceptance), that she 
 became a magnificent wife. Her husband, now 
 obsessed with the idea that happy marriage 
 consists in separation, talks alarmingly to prove 
 this behef ; but his energy dissolves in speech. 
 Nancy and Tarrant, however, are not the only 
 married people in the book, and there is more 
 precise virtue in the horrid picture of a battered 
 clerk and his virago. Bitterly does Gissing 
 comment upon this unfortunate man : — 
 
 Before his marriage he had thought of women as 
 domestic beings. A wife was the genius of home. He 
 knew men who thanked their wives for all the prosperity 
 and content that they enjoyed. Others he knew who told 
 quite a different tale, but these surely were sorrowful 
 
 110
 
 STUDIES OF TEMPERAMENT 
 
 exceptions. Nowadays he saw tlie matter in a light of 
 fuller experience. In his rank of life married unhappiness 
 was a sm'e thing, and the fault could generally be traced 
 to wives who had no sense of responsibility, no under- 
 standing of household duties, no love of simple pleasures, 
 no religion. 
 
 Here was hatred indeed ; and Nancy, who 
 discovered that Nature did not intend a married 
 woman to be anything but the slave of her 
 husband and children, is presumably by this 
 time an ideal wife. Indeed, one finds Gissing's 
 outlook narrowing, as though he had never 
 really believed in individual liberty, but was 
 increasingly tired of the eagerness of conven- 
 tional people to achieve some sort of distinction. 
 Henceforth we find him inclining more and 
 more strongly to a modification of the " do- 
 mestic point of view " which in The Emanci- 
 pated he found so despicable. The desire for 
 a home, an ideal home of fires and burnished 
 fenders, and spotless Unen ; of the pleasant 
 warm smell of inoffensive cooking, with blinds 
 drawn and lamps alight on cold, wet November 
 evenings — this became his most precious thought. 
 Love and peace and quiet life ; a gentle figure 
 on the further side of the hearthrug ; comfort, 
 no struggle, exquisite contentment in a series 
 of slow occupied days. ... 
 
 From such a reverie he bestirred himself to 
 
 111
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 look shudderingly upon The Whirlpool, where 
 Alma Rolfe, soiled by her ambitions and her avid 
 acceptance of flattery, brought herself by evil 
 paths to an overdose of a potent drug. Her 
 father a company-promoting suicide ; sur- 
 rounded with flatterers ; insulted with dis- 
 honourable proposals from a millionaire, and 
 yet not strong enough to keep him at a dis- 
 tance in later years. Alma is fevered and 
 neurotic. Rolfe, a book-loving man, wanting 
 her confidence, and giving her as much freedom 
 as possible ; Hugh and Sybil Carnaby ; the 
 little composer-concert-agent ; the harridan 
 who betrays Alma ; and Alma's stepmother — 
 Mrs. Frothingham — are all powerfully drawn 
 figures. Less believable is the millionaire whose 
 sexual appetites are so large and range so wide : 
 he belongs to the same type as the manu- 
 facturer in A Lifes Morning. The book is 
 marked with anxiety and harassment, but re- 
 sembles rather the stirring of muddy waters 
 than the authentic whirlpool which the author 
 aims at presenting. How should a man, whose 
 experience of the world was so small and so 
 unwilling, reproduce the life of the world con- 
 vincingly ? He could give us firm characters, 
 and, in spite of the broken interests involved in 
 his unfortunate technical method, could keep us 
 afraid of impending disaster ; but he could not 
 
 112
 
 STUDIES OF TEMPERAMENT 
 
 persuade us that he had intimate acquaintance 
 with company-promoters, and sensual miUion- 
 aires, and neurotic amateur vioUnists. As soon 
 as it is done, the book falls into a vague blur 
 of words and opinions, and we are quickly 
 indifferent. We have not looked upon a whirl- 
 pool : we have been present only at an inter- 
 esting attempt at illusion. For able, talented, 
 remarkable as Gissing was, he could not con- 
 tinue to produce books without experience of 
 life : he was forced to throw too great a strain 
 upon his intellect and his inventiveness. He 
 stippled in his effects, conscientiously, instead of 
 drawing them with confidence and the support 
 of experience. He explained here, just as he 
 did in his earliest books, because revelation — 
 the proof of experience as opposed to thought 
 — was impossible to him. He might say as 
 sanely as possible, " IMarriage rarely means hap- 
 piness, either for man or woman ; if it be not 
 too grievous to be borne one must thank the 
 fates and take courage " ; but that faculty of 
 explicit statement is not good novel-writing. 
 He could write two pages analysing Alma's 
 character (pp. 245-6) ; but, as he said himself in 
 his book on Dickens, " Very rarely has analysis 
 of character justified itself in fiction." Yet 
 what else could Gissing do? He thought his 
 characters, and thought them as clear as life, 
 H 113
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 but never as warm and vital. His very great 
 talent enabled him to do this in book after 
 book ; but The WliirlpooU which is a good and 
 honourable book, is not a fine book because it is 
 steadfastly invented, and not imagined out of 
 experience. Experience and imagination are 
 required for the writing of novels : Gissing, 
 when he could draw upon his experience, 
 revealed his true insight ; but his imagination 
 had been stultified by much reading, and his 
 experience was so small and so shrinking as to 
 be useless when it stood up to his ambitions. 
 To call a book The JVhirlpooI, to project a great 
 novel with many lives set struggling against all 
 contrary influences, that is heroic : to do it 
 with Gissing's equipment was offering hostages 
 to despair. 
 
 viii 
 
 I have intentionally spoken of The WhMpool 
 out of its due chronological order, because the 
 short novel Eve's Ransom seems to deserve 
 separate treatment. It is really no more than 
 a sketch, yet it has a value quite its own. A 
 young man named Hilhard unexpectedly re- 
 covers money owed to his father, throws up his 
 pettifogging employment, and leaves the pro- 
 vinces for London and Paris. The money he 
 has come by is only £436, too Httle for useful 
 
 114
 
 STUDIES OF TEMPERAMENT 
 
 investment, and, to Hilliard, sufficient only for 
 an hour of glorious life. Before leaving Dudley, 
 he sees the photograph of a beautiful girl, which 
 so attracts him that he makes a point of carry- 
 ing with him to London messages for her from 
 his landlady ; and after a time in Paris he seeks 
 her out. At her old address he finds she is no 
 longer known ; and although he begs for informa- 
 tion of her, none is forthcoming. Gissing says : — 
 
 It very rarely is under such circumstances, for a London 
 landlady, compounded in general of craft and caution, 
 tends naturally to reticence on the score of former lodgers. 
 If she has parted with them on amicable terms, her in- 
 stinct is to shield them against the menace presumed in 
 every inquiry ; if her mood is one of ill-will, she refuses 
 information lest the departed should reap advantage. 
 And then, in the great majority of cases she has really no 
 information to give ! 
 
 All of which is both humorous and true. 
 Hilliard finds Eve at length, in company with 
 a bright girl who serves in a music-shop. She 
 proves different from his idea, but still tan- 
 tahsing ; and his desire is without doubt to 
 serve her. That Hilliard, by a loan, and by 
 taking her (with Patty, the musical girl) to 
 Paris, should save Eve from an unprofitable 
 liaison with a married man, and that they 
 should become engaged, is all made extraordi- 
 narily interesting. But Eve, bewildering in her 
 
 115
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 every action, presently grows still more mys- 
 terious in her unsuccessful endeavours, on her 
 return to Birmingham, to get work. At length 
 Hilliard finds that, while still engaged to him, 
 she has practically promised to marry his 
 acquaintance Narramore, whom she has met 
 independently. Narramore is a rich man ; and 
 Eve, not in any sense heartless, prefers Nar- 
 ramore's comfort and affection to whatever 
 Hilliard can offer. 
 
 The book is not cynical ; it is a piece of 
 romance. It has a curious and haunting quality. 
 Eve is one of the best of Gissing's several 
 astonishing studies of women — Harriet Casti, 
 Lydia Norman, Isabel Clarendon, Miriam and 
 Cicily in The Emancipated, Amy Reardon and 
 Marian Yule, Sid well Warricombe and Marcella 
 Moxey, and Rhoda Nunn. These are fit com- 
 pany for Eve, and a fine assembly from the 
 work of a single novelist ; and Eve in many 
 ways is the most singular of all. It is possible 
 to understand all Hilliard's base doubtings, and 
 to sympathise with his fire : to the end Eve 
 remains subject for conjecture, a baffling and 
 intriguing personality. 
 
 ix 
 
 Gissing's last three legitimate novels, The 
 Crown of Life, Ou?' Fiiend the Charlatari, and 
 
 116
 
 STUDIES OF TEMPERAMENT 
 
 Will IVarburton, are all marked by a lesser 
 degree of incisiveness than his earlier books. 
 The Crown of Life is of course love — not mar- 
 riage. Mrs. BonsofF makes that perfectly clear 
 half-way through the book. 
 
 " When I say love,"" she says, " I mean Love — not 
 domestic affection. Marriage is a practical concern of 
 mankind at large ; Love is a personal experience of the 
 very few. . . . You can no more choose to be a lover, 
 than to be a poet." 
 
 And the book accordingly sets forth the story 
 of Piers Otway's continuous love for the lady 
 who first inspired his studious youth. Only 
 when Irene has been once engaged, and when 
 Piers has with difficulty supported himself for 
 several years, is the marriage finally arranged. 
 Nothing Gissing wrote could lack personality, 
 or firmly drawn characters ; but the buoyancy 
 of Tlie Croivn of Life is inflated, and the book 
 is so very nearly conventional as to have little 
 importance. There are also one or two very 
 sentimental passages — in particular one where 
 the author imagines " some girl, of delicate 
 instinct, of purpose sweet and pure, wasting her 
 unloved life in toil and want and indignity ; 
 some man, whose youth and courage strove 
 against a mean environment, whose eyes grew 
 haggard in the search for a companion promised 
 in his dreams ; they lived, these two, parted 
 
 117
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 perchance only by the wall of neighbour houses, 
 yet all huge London was between them, and 
 their hands would never touch." 
 
 Between Piers Otway's father, a famous 
 agitator, whose speech is very like that of Car- 
 lyle, and a small character in Our Friend the 
 Charlatcm, who talks like a mixture of Gratiano 
 and Dr. Shrapnel, there is a similarity. Both 
 show that Gissing was now relying more and 
 more on types with literary forbears. Yet 
 Dyce Lashmar, the charlatan, who has "never 
 quite believed in the brilliant future which he 
 liked to imagine," is interesting. The book is, 
 however, rather poor ; it lacks spontaneity. 
 Lady Ogram, the rich woman who purposes 
 forcing Lashmar into Parliament, Constance, 
 her secretary, who confronts him with proof of 
 his charlatanry, JMiss Tomalin, who sends him an 
 egregious anonymous message, are none of them 
 edifying figures ; and the extravagance of the 
 end, where Lashmar, everywhere foiled, marries 
 the twittering Mrs. Woolstan, to find that she 
 has lost most of her fortune, is displeasing. 
 
 Will JVarburto?h is the story of a young man 
 who lost his own money and that of his mother 
 through the recklessness of his friend and 
 partner, and who set up as a grocer in Fulham. 
 It is entirely pleasant and readable ; but it has 
 no serious value as art. Gissing could no 
 
 118
 
 STUDIES OF TEMPERAMENT 
 
 longer, in his last four novels, deny himself the 
 pleasure of giving his characters their deserts, 
 and thereby, no doubt, he did something to 
 redeem himself in the popular mind from a 
 charge of persistent gloom. 
 
 In the year in which he died — 1903 — Gissing 
 published The Private Papers of Henry Rye- 
 c7^oft, which was much praised in the press, and 
 which achieved a distinct success with the 
 pubhc. The reasons for this success were, no 
 doubt, several, but the most notable was perhaps 
 that Gissing's very personal statements about 
 the Hfe of Ryecroft were taken as applying to 
 himself. Readers who had no taste for his 
 serious novels came upon these private papers 
 and felt sorry for the author of them, who had 
 evidently suffered much in his lifetime. Another 
 reason was that the book is written with un- 
 usual simplicity ; it is really honest, clear writing, 
 with a natural grace. The style is far from that 
 of Demos or Born in Exile, but has a lightness 
 and apparent ease that is pleasant to the literary 
 palate. Also Ryeeroft does, as has been said, 
 contain very obvious references to Gissing's life, 
 and the public, which responds readily to the 
 personal note, was glad to find the "gloomy" 
 author so much of a human being. Apart from 
 
 119
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 its autobiographical interest, which is consider- 
 able, the book seems to me to have less merit 
 than is generally supposed. Its intellectual 
 quality is quite undistinguished ; and if the 
 book were not so absolutely unpretentious, 
 there are passages which would not be regarded 
 as having any value at all. What value Rye- 
 crojt has lies almost entirely in its expression of 
 a personality; and this personality is precisely 
 that timid one which represents the less 
 admirable side of Gissing's work. The book 
 is that of a recluse, of one who has fled from a 
 life that makes too many demands upon him. 
 Gissing, having begun his literary Hfe as a 
 bookish man, goes back to his books, after years 
 of unsparing struggle, as the best things in life. 
 Except to the bookish, who are but incomplete 
 men, without " the zest of life " (having lost that 
 virtue in the zest for books), life is of more value 
 than books. It is beginning to be held, by 
 bookish men, that interest in life is usurping, in 
 artists, the place of importance hitherto held by 
 art ; but it is by original observation of life 
 that art receives its inspiration. It is, to me, a 
 pathetic thing to see an artist, whose labours 
 had brought him an honourable place among 
 men, thankful at an escape from life. It is an 
 admission of tiredness, of a message given, a 
 strength spent. And at an age when many 
 
 120
 
 STUDIES OF TEMPERAMENT 
 
 writers are girding their loins for fresh exploits, 
 Gissing produced Ryecroff, the last book of 
 which he saw the publication. Compared with 
 Thyrza, with New Grub Street, or Born in 
 Exile, The Odd Women, or Eves Ransom, is 
 this book really going to hold its place ? Surely 
 it is less valuable ; it contains less brain, less 
 insight, less endeavour. It has literary quality, 
 but not in a supreme degree ; its criticism, of 
 Shakespeare and of other literary matters, does 
 not outstep the casual thought of the literary 
 man ; and while it lacks robustness it never 
 attains to that fineness and delicacy of perception 
 which would enable it to deserve all the lavish 
 praises which it has received. If it were really 
 an excursion into the region of pure character- 
 study, if Ryecroft were an imagined person, it 
 would have some claim to be regarded as a 
 toii/r de force. This, however, is not the case. 
 Ryecroft's temperament is in essentials the 
 temperament of Gissing ; and we are forced 
 back upon the literary quality of the book as 
 its prime claim to our attention. I do not think 
 that its literary quality is far enough removed 
 from the power of many cultured men to justify 
 the book's inclusion among the major works of 
 Gissing. 
 
 121
 
 IV 
 
 SHORT STORIES 
 
 The art of the short story, it has been sufficiently 
 explained by critics who specialise in short 
 stories, is very different from that of the novel. 
 Mr. Max Beerbohm, in a reckless mood, once 
 said that as the brick was to the house, so was 
 the short story to the long one (and it is true 
 that the novel makes in every way greater 
 demands upon the imagination, the invention, 
 and the staying powers of the author) ; but it is 
 well known that Mr. Beerbohm is a law unto 
 himself in these matters, and others, taking his 
 words in a very literal sense, have thought 
 differently. Gissing might have agreed with 
 Mr. Beerbohm upon the most hteral interpreta- 
 tion, for he wrote two little books which were 
 either very long short stories or very short novels ; 
 and of his legitimate short stories (by "legitimate," 
 I mean those which do not exceed eight or ten 
 thousand words), quite a number are very small 
 novels, while others again are the merest sketches. 
 Some of these last, perhaps, do not quite justify 
 
 122
 
 SHORT STORIES 
 
 themselves. They start, and they end ; but 
 otherwise have no positive quaUties. Others, 
 again, have a pleasant and enjoyable flavour, and 
 justify themselves completely, since they have 
 character and kindliness, and show the author's 
 literary sense. 
 
 There are two volumes of Gissing's short 
 stories — Human Odch and Ends, and that post- 
 humous collection edited by JNIr. Secconibe, Tlie 
 House of Cobwebs. The former contains twenty- 
 nine " stories and sketches," the latter fifteen 
 stories, mostly in the author's later key of 
 gentleness and tolerance. Several of them cover 
 ground already used by Gissing— or perhaps one 
 should say that they are a second crop from the 
 same ground — and they all have a quaint air 
 of familiarity, very welcome to any reader 
 acquainted with the author's longer works. They 
 are by no means as good as some other short 
 stories of their day ; and their interest as a collec- 
 tion is a personal rather than a pressing one. But 
 they are not negligible. In Hunan Odds and 
 Ends, it seems to me that some of the sketches 
 have no value — such a one as In No Mans Land, 
 for example, is almost entirely without merit. 
 It is about a man who knows of a string of 
 houses without a landlord, in which people for 
 years have lived rent-free. This man tries to take 
 possession by peremptorily assuming control. He 
 
 123
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 goes to the length of having the houses painted ; 
 but in the end he is forced to acknowledge 
 defeat. Such an idea might possibly be made 
 richly comic by a richly comic writer ; but 
 in Gissing's hands it produces but the ghost 
 of a smile, as any damp joke might do in 
 retelling. It becomes, in fact, pointless, since 
 it is without character. Such another story 
 as In Honour Bound is likewise difficult to 
 explain. A philologist, finding himself ruined, 
 confesses to his landlady that he has very little 
 money ; and she, on the point of buying a 
 business, asks for some of it to assist in the 
 purchase, and keeps him alive for months until 
 he is again self-supporting. The philologist, in- 
 tending " in honour bound " to ask if she cares 
 to marry him, is then told of her marriage to 
 another, and is warned by the woman's servant 
 that the new husband would not like him about 
 the house. The only real interest the story has 
 is that it slightly foreshadows the idea of Will 
 IFarbiLvton, where the hero, being ruined, hears 
 from his landlady of a grocer's business which is 
 for sale, and buys it. But In Honour Bound, 
 even if it were true to an actual case, is not 
 artistically probable ; and Gissing's method does 
 not give it verisimilitude. On the whole, there- 
 fore, it is not quite worthy of serious consider- 
 ation. 
 
 124
 
 SHORT STORIES 
 
 Other stories in the same volume have far 
 more value, even if it is slight. Such a story as 
 An Inspiration, rather Dickensian and fairly- 
 sentimental, is interesting on two counts. First 
 of all it imparts a faint warmth of pleasure to 
 the reader, who is gratified at the spectacle of 
 happiness for the downcast ; secondly it relates 
 to " Harvey INlunden," an interlocutor several 
 times employed by Gissing in both volumes of 
 short stories. At first I supposed Harvey 
 Munden to be intended for Gissing himself, but 
 one of the stories in The House of Cobwebs is 
 told in the first person, with Munden for a 
 second figure, and in no case does he attain to 
 any character at all. So his existence, or at 
 least the recurrence of his name, is mysterious, 
 and beyond explanation. Sing a Song of Six- 
 pence, The Bay of Silence, The Tout of Yar month 
 Bridge — all have qualities of some description. 
 The Justice and the Vagabond is another episode 
 of interest, relating how a wife-ridden J. P. 
 meets, in the course of his judicial work, a vaga- 
 bond schoolfellow of his own. They take 
 advantage of the absence of the J.P.'s wife to 
 plan a dash to the far regions of the world ; but 
 the J. P. is overtaken by death before he can 
 start. This is well told and good. For the 
 rest. Human dds and Ends, although modestly 
 entitled, does not belie its name. It would 
 
 125
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 have suggested poverty of invention had we not 
 the far richer collection of The House of Cob- 
 tvebs to restore our confidence. 
 
 11 
 Even in The House of Cobwebs, we become 
 aware that Gissing had his own conception of 
 the short story. Most of the stories in The 
 House of Cobwebs are little narratives, depending 
 hardly at all upon surprise or concentration, and 
 consisting of a series of slight events which may 
 be rounded off into a tale. They are, in short, 
 undramatic. If, without pledging ourselves to 
 any particular definition of what a short story 
 should be, we notice the lack of drama in 
 Gissing's two collections, we perceive a particular 
 fact. That fact is, that the dramatic quality is 
 implicit in most effective short stories— either in 
 the sense of surprise, or unexpectedness, or con- 
 flict, or incident. When we find the incidents 
 in Gissing's short stories humdrum, or mild, we 
 recognise that we had expected to be stirred in 
 some way, or to be given some precisely poignant 
 moment, whether of suspense or sympathy. 
 The lack of this emotional heightening in the 
 whole of Gissing's work is notable ; in his short 
 stories it becomes, according to the dramatic 
 test, a positive defect. It is a defect in the 
 sense that the stories are not, regarded techni- 
 
 126
 
 SHORT STORIES 
 
 cally, short stories at all, but merely short as 
 contrasted with long. There is, in essentials, no 
 difference between A Song of Sixpence (in 
 Human Odds and Ends), which is about a woman 
 whose evil habits have been checked by disaster, 
 or Humplebee (in The House of Cobwebs), and 
 such a novel as Eve's Ransom, or Denzil 
 Qua?Tier. The superficial difference is entirely 
 one of area. 
 
 So it is with the volumes contributed to the 
 " Autonym Library " and to Cassell's " Pocket 
 Library" — Sleeping Fires and The Paying 
 Guest. These stories are perhaps 30,000 
 words long, whereas many of Gissing's full- 
 length novels contain 150,000 words ; yet, 
 except for the fact that they are written as 
 separate tales, they might almost, as they stand, 
 form contributory portions of longer books. 
 This, strictly speaking, is not the art of the 
 short story as it is generally understood. It is 
 the art of the episode, an art which has hardly 
 received acknowledgment as an art at all. So 
 far, indeed, is that from being the case, that 
 a book like The Nether World may be right- 
 fully condemned as episodic, which means that 
 it does not progress unerringly from chapter to 
 chapter, but is made up of segments or sections 
 which show their joins and let the reader's 
 interest lapse. 
 
 127
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 Yet if we take these short tales for what they 
 are, we shall see how well they illustrate one 
 aspect of Gissing's art — that of characterisation. 
 He had a very keen sense of those slight per- 
 sonal eccentricities which, duly emphasised, may 
 be made to suggest character in a book. His 
 imagining of character, I should say, was not 
 a strong point, because he never had the jolly 
 visualising faculty of a Dickens, nor the detach- 
 ment of a modern novelist. His bookish heroes 
 were all inclined to run to one sensitive, retiring 
 pattern, since his sympathy with other types of 
 male was small. His women characters are 
 very much stronger and better, possibly because 
 a slight acquaintance with women, a good deal 
 of intuition, and much self-communing may 
 produce portraits of highly subtilised women 
 transcending the acquaintance of ordinary men. 
 That is to say, where portraits of men demand 
 actual experience of men's ways, the woman of 
 fiction is much more highly conventionalised, 
 besides, of course, being much more interesting, 
 experimentally, to a male novelist. 
 
 When Gissing drew character, he did it in firm 
 outline ; but he was not always equal to its ex- 
 pansion. His characters — particularly the men — 
 gradually slide into sensitives, or they run between 
 straight lines. Now the art Gissing possessed, 
 of being able to shake up a character in a few 
 
 128
 
 SHORT STORIES 
 
 words, was particularly useful to him in short 
 stories of the kind we are now considering. A 
 reader does not need to remember the char- 
 acters in a short story : he wishes simply to 
 retain an impression of the whole thing. So 
 characterisation in short stories is required to 
 be, for effect, sharp and typical ; and Gissing's 
 method, which, on a different plane, was the 
 method of Dickens, was adapted to the short 
 story. He Avould describe somebody as "a 
 middle-aged man, bald, meagre, unimpressive, 
 but wholly respectable in bearing and apparel " ; 
 or "A young woman of about eight-and- 
 twenty, in tailor-made costume, with unadorned 
 hat of brown felt, and irreproachable umbrella ; 
 a young woman who walked faster than any 
 one in Wattleborough, yet never looked 
 hurried . . . who held up her head . . . and 
 frequently smiled at her own thoughts." The 
 persons, once seen, are recognised sufficiently 
 for the purposes of Gissing's short narrative. 
 The reader has seen, or can delude himself into 
 the belief that he has seen, just such people ; 
 and the short story has no room for subtleties 
 of characterisation. ,Tust so does Gissing hit 
 off the people in his less notable novels : "A 
 younger girl, this, of much slighter build ; with 
 a frisky gait, a jaunty pose of the head ; pretty, 
 but thin-featured, and shallow-eyed ; a long 
 I 129
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 neck, no chin to speak of, a low forehead with 
 the hair of washed out flaxen fluffed all over 
 it. Her dress was showy, and in a taste that set 
 the teeth on edge. Fanny French, her name." 
 In a long novel, such a method of characterising 
 people loses its effect, because while it is de- 
 sirable that the majority of the dramatis personae 
 should be easily referable to type by the reader, 
 they should present themselves primarily as in- 
 dividuals. In the Gissing short story, on the 
 other hand, the method is used with dexterity, 
 and the stories, being easily read and admirably 
 handled, are in every way enjoyable. They 
 make no great demand upon the reader's 
 emotion, but are intelligible and sufficiently 
 absorbing. And they contain frequent portraits 
 of Gissing's inveterate foes — landladies. 
 
 Gissing, whenever he writes about landladies, 
 does so from flrst-hand knowledge. He writes 
 of them always with feeling — in Born in Exile, 
 in Will Warburton, in Eves Ransom, in The 
 Nethe?' World — it would be possible to marshal 
 such a collection of landladies as to reveal the 
 species in hideous array. So in the short stories, 
 particularly in The Prize Lodger {Humcui Odds 
 and Ends) and in 3Iiss Rodneys Eeisure {The 
 House of Cobwebs). Well does Gissing cry 
 from his heart, in The Year of Jubilee : " To 
 occupy furnished lodgings, is to live in a house 
 
 130
 
 SHORT STORIES 
 
 owned and ruled by servants ; the least tolerable 
 status known to civilisation." Mrs. Turpin, the 
 minor heroine of 3Iiss Rodney s Leisure, is seen 
 with humour: presumably Miss Rodney treats 
 her as Gissing would have wished all landladies 
 to be treated by their tenants — in a spirit of 
 chastening reproof. 
 
 A Daughter of the Lodge is a little pointless, 
 as is A Poor Gentleman; and A Charming 
 Family is, although clever, unpleasantly cynical. 
 Otherwise, the contents of The House of Cob- 
 webs, in addition to being cheerful, are well 
 written and entertaining. To say that they do 
 not challenge comparison with the best English 
 short stories is in no sense to deny their merits. 
 The lack of drama, the lack of any especial 
 poignancy of motif, leaves them smooth and 
 gracefully written tales. 
 
 iii 
 
 The Paying Guest is a bright little story 
 of the suburbs, rather similar in vein to The 
 Town Traveller. A young couple, desirous of 
 adding to their income, agree to receive as 
 guest a girl who finds her own home unbear- 
 able. It seems that her mother has married a 
 second time, and that her stepfather also has 
 a daughter by his first marriage. The rival 
 daughters quarrel particularly over a lover, who 
 
 131
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 transfers his affections from one to the other. 
 Accordingly, this rather flamboyant girl comes 
 to stay with the suburbans, sets their circle in 
 turmoil, and unexpectedly marries an old and 
 determined suitor. This, however, does not 
 happen until the house has been set on fire by 
 reason of the suitor's ardour. The story is not 
 very merry, and its humour runs to violent and 
 grotesque action ; but it is sustained, and does 
 not fail to amuse. 
 
 In quite a different key is Sleeping Fires, 
 which opens in Greece and deals with the 
 meeting between a man and his illegitimate 
 son (both ignorant of the relation), and their 
 instant attachment. The son, however, dies 
 before his identity is fully disclosed ; and interest 
 is then demanded for the father's resuscitated 
 love-story. Sleeping Fires is slight ; but it is 
 characteristic Gissing, and has passages of good 
 quality, which show how lightly Gissing could 
 design and execute when he had a subject fit to 
 his hand. 
 
 These two stories afford the author an oppor- 
 tunity for easy and pleasant writing, quite 
 distinct from the labour which obviously 
 belonged to the writing of their immediate 
 chronological neighbours, In the Year of 
 Jubilee and The Whirlpool. The year 1895, 
 indeed, which saw the publication of Eve's 
 
 132
 
 SHORT STORIES 
 
 Ransom, The Paying Guest, and Sleeping 
 Fires, is one of happy tasks lightly performed ; 
 and while neither of the present stories is the 
 equal or even the immediate inferior of Eve's 
 Ransom, it may perhaps be inferred from the 
 author's success in such shorter works that he 
 would have been more comfortable as well as 
 more successful if the Victorian novel had died 
 decently before he began to write. It is obvious 
 from Reardon's painful struggles with the three- 
 volume book that Gissing found irksome and 
 laborious the excessive length required by the 
 public. His own case is very little improved 
 nowadays, when many commercial publishers 
 stipulate beforehand that the stories they pur- 
 chase shall consist of not fewer than 75,000 
 words ; but it is clear that much of what went 
 to the bulking of Gissing's long novels was 
 strained and conscientious page-filling. How 
 much better if the English reader did not 
 count the number of words in the books he 
 buys ! If Gissing had written other simple 
 narratives of the same kind as Eve's Ransom 
 and these two short novels, his best work, by 
 being purged and simplified, would have stood 
 clear of the wreckage of the Victorian tradition 
 by which it is now encumbered. 
 
 133
 
 V 
 DICKENS 
 
 In an immortal scene, where Mrs. Gamp, after 
 relieving Mrs. Prig at the Bull in Holborn, 
 looks out of the window, Dickens makes his 
 supreme feminine creation remark, " Vm glad 
 to see a parapidge, in case of fire, and lots of 
 roofs and chimley-pots to walk upon." Later, 
 the same lady declares the easy-chair to be 
 " harder than a brickbadge " ; and in her further 
 conversation we perceive that she has a habit 
 of inserting the letter " g " into a host of 
 common words which do not actually need its 
 support. This practice, the one-time existence 
 of which we have no reason to doubt, was prob- 
 ably extinct by the year 1870, in which, syn- 
 chronising with the introduction of a Great 
 Popular Education Act, is laid the scene of 
 Gissing's first novel, Workers in the Daxvn. 
 Yet when Arthur Golding, in that novel, goes 
 out with the villainous Bill, who is disguised as 
 a blind beggar, the latter carries the following 
 declaration : — 
 
 134
 
 DICKENS 
 
 Christien Frends 
 Pray concider a widood Father 
 The victim of a Explogion 
 And may God bless you. 
 
 1 imagine the wording and spelling of this notice 
 to have been directly inspired by Gissing's love 
 of Dickens. That love, Gissing himself tells 
 us, began when he read "The Old Curiosity 
 Shop " at the age of ten, and it is delightful to 
 read further (in an article in the New York 
 *' Critic ") that Gissing enthusiastically demanded 
 the frequent attention of his elders for passages 
 subsequently read aloud from " The l^ickwick 
 Papers." Dickens was, in fact, as great an idol 
 in the Gissing family as he is in the families of 
 all thorough English folk. 
 
 The love which began so early, and which we 
 see (unless I am mistaken) faintly illustrated in 
 Gissing's first novel, was to last a lifetime. It 
 is one of the pleasantest things in the purely 
 literary work of Gissing to find over and over 
 again traces of his sincere and critical admiration 
 of so great a novelist as Dickens. Such a 
 character as Mr. Boddy, the grandfather of 
 Thyrza and Lydia Norman, is entirely Dicken- 
 sian in its tenderness ; even the bold Clem 
 Peckover, in The Nether World, has a suspicion 
 of Sally Brass ; and other pictures, for example 
 the supper near the beginning of Demos, or the 
 
 135
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 strange meeting of Goldthorpe and Mr. Spicer 
 in The House of Cobxcebs, seem to derive from 
 Dickens their particular " manner." It is to 
 Gissing's credit that these suggestions of direct 
 influence are few : although The Town Ti^aveller 
 has been called Dickensian, the comparison is 
 unintelligent, and due only to the fact that, at 
 the time of its publication, Gissing wrote a 
 study of Dickens. The book has a superficial 
 air of good-temper, which one may, if hard up 
 for comment, describe as something like the 
 exuberant fancy of Dickens, but similarities of 
 method are to be discerned in Gissing's pathos 
 rather than in his humour. His humour was 
 always literary and characteristic : his one or 
 two eccentric characters are built out of his own 
 imagination, and not out of any special debt to 
 the writer he so admu-ed. In pathetic scenes, 
 however, it is possible to imagine a striving 
 after the genuine pathos (as distinguished from 
 its maudlin travesty) of such work as Charley, 
 in " Bleak House," and other characters which 
 particularly impressed him. 
 
 When, in 1897 (also the year in which T'he 
 Toivn Traveller appeared), he published a critical 
 study of Dickens, Gissing showed his enthusiasm 
 in a perfectly legitimate way ; and he followed 
 this up with one or two articles — Dickens in 
 Memory^ and Dickens in a series of essays by 
 
 136
 
 DICKENS 
 
 various writers on " The Homes and Haunts 
 of Famous Writers " — and with a few introduc- 
 tions to the Rochester edition, never completed, 
 of Dickens's works. Also, he so abridged and 
 edited Forster's life of Dickens as to remove 
 all irrelevancies and reduce it to less than 
 half its former bulk. Gissing's writings about 
 Dickens contain not only the best criticism of 
 Dickens that has been produced ; they are in 
 every way admirable and creditable to himself. 
 The introductions to particular novels (1 believe 
 only those to " OHver Twist," " Barnaby Rudge," 
 "Bleak House," "The Old Curiosity Shop," 
 "Pickwick," and "Nickleby " were pubhshed) are 
 as good, in their way, as the little book in which 
 Gissing summed up the characteristics of 
 Dickens's work as a whole : they are full of 
 delicate commentary which shows the writer 
 at his happiest. Gissing was sympathetic with- 
 out being uncritical. He condemned Dickens 
 to an extent which led him at one point to 
 protest against misconception ; but he very 
 strikingly warned readers that to judge the 
 author of " Copperfield " by strictly modern 
 standards was " something worse than dulness." 
 With Gissing's own methods of judgment, and 
 with the artistic and personal questions which 
 they raise, it is the purpose of the present 
 chapter to deal. 
 
 137
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 11 
 
 Gissing, having made through the eyes of 
 Dickens a visionary London of his own, came 
 to London as a very young man and set 
 about going "hither or thither in London's 
 immensity, seeking the places which had been 
 made known to me by Dickens." He speaks 
 of having been stirred, " not to imitate Dickens 
 as a noveUst, but to follow afar off his ex- 
 ample as a worker," and adds : " From this 
 point of view, the debt I owe to him is 
 uncalculable." It is easily seen, therefore, 
 in what spirit he undertook the little book 
 in "The Victorian Era Series." No other 
 modern literary subject could have appealed to 
 him more strongly. This one above all others 
 was bound to produce that " enlightened enthu- 
 siasm " which Lytton said was the best criticism. 
 And also it gave Gissing an opportunity of 
 expressing his opinions upon many questions 
 of art. His lucidity was here of the first im- 
 portance ; his appreciation of Dickens's humour 
 an illumination of his own character ; his ease 
 showed how naturally his mind turned to books 
 and found its material. As he says of his 
 subject, " Here is the secret of such work as that 
 of Dickens ; it is done with delight — done (in a 
 sense) easily, done with the mechanism of mind 
 
 138
 
 DICKENS 
 
 and body in splendid order." The words are 
 true of his own little book. 
 
 Dickens stands in relation to his time as a 
 humorist and a social reformer. His first novel, 
 " Pickwick," is the work of the humorist ; his 
 second, " Oliver Twist," is the work of the social 
 reformer. But his reforming zeal very rarely 
 killed the humorist ; rather, his humour was the 
 magnificent impulse of his work, and the 
 generosity which sprang from his vital enjoy- 
 ment of Ufe became an understanding that other 
 people also had rights in happiness. Gissing 
 insists that Dickens was never a democrat, that 
 he never demanded that the poor should be 
 raised above the status of poverty. " Morally, 
 he would change the world ; socially, he is a 
 thorough conservative." It may perhaps be 
 questioned whether this quite accurately ex- 
 presses Dickens's position, for he was essentially 
 a practical man and worked for much-needed 
 material reforms. The writer's own bias was 
 probably responsible for his confidence in that 
 of Dickens, for it is clear that Gissing's view 
 of the matter is satisfactorily contained in his 
 sentence on the greater man. When it comes 
 to the question of the Poor Law, which Dickens 
 denounced in " Oliver Twist," Gissing objects. 
 In the sense that the Poor Law checked abuses, 
 he holds, it was good. It is, I think, the only 
 
 139
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 social point which is raised against Dickens in 
 the whole of the book, and recalls the fact that 
 Gissing was defending the Poor Law as long 
 before as 1880. On this very subject Gissing 
 exclaims : " His partisanship lay in his genius ; 
 it was one of the sources of his strength." But 
 mainly, Dickens's strength was his humour. It is 
 admirably said elsewhere that "it is all very well 
 to talk of right prevaihng, of the popular instinct 
 for justice, and so on ; these phrases mean very 
 little. Dickens held his own because he was 
 amused." " The wonderful thing about such 
 work as this, is Dickens's subdual of his indigna- 
 tion to the humorous note." We see at once 
 that Gissing is at home : he is writing principally 
 of the aspects of Dickens's work which appeal 
 to his own taste ; and he is writing as a novelist. 
 It will be found throughout that Gissing's 
 criticism has a basis of purely technical quality. 
 It is professional criticism, not criticism a clef, 
 or social criticism, or literary criticism. It is 
 never away from the precise instances : Gissing's 
 training as a novelist was all to the good in his 
 criticism of a great novelist ; and he criticised 
 in terms of art, not of eulogy or morality. It 
 is this fact that gives the book on Dickens its 
 pecuhar quality. It is not a series of brilliant, 
 splendid dashes at truth, as is Mr. Chesterton's 
 study ; nor has it the remote, ghostly charm of 
 
 140
 
 DICKENS 
 
 a literary man's appreciation : it is good, well- 
 considered criticism, which relies for its value 
 upon its clear and sober sincerity. 
 
 • • • 
 
 111 
 
 The book is divided into twelve chapters, with 
 such titles as " The Story-teller," " Art, Veracity, 
 and Moral Purpose," "Characterization," "Style," 
 " Comparisons," etc. The divisions alone show 
 how unhesitating Gissing's touch was. He 
 aimed at separating the various strengths of 
 Dickens's work, and at writing upon each a 
 chapter which should be at once allusive and 
 detailed. And in this way, although his person- 
 ality was rarely intruded, Gissing gave many 
 hints as to his own position, and much scope for 
 comparison. For like Dickens he attempted to 
 portray common life, and, unlike Dickens, he was 
 forced to make the attempt without a transfigur- 
 ing; humour. Take two sentences about the 
 poor, one from the book, the other from a preface. 
 Gissing says : " If Dickens could discover shining 
 examples of such virtue among the poor and the 
 ififnorant, their mental dulness seemed to him of 
 but small account." P^lsewhere he cries : " If 
 one fact can be asserted of the lowest English it 
 is that, supposing them to say or do a good 
 thing, they will say it or do it in the worst 
 possible way." Or again, commenting upon the 
 
 141
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 miraculous transformation of Mell, in " David 
 Copperfield," from a poor usher to a distinguished 
 citizen in the Antipodes, he intrudes his own 
 disbehef by saying : " Who would prefer to 
 learn the cold fact ; that Mell, tlie rejected usher, 
 sank from stage to stage of wretchedness and 
 died — uncertain which — in the street or the 
 workhouse ? " This comment, so far from being 
 a criticism of Dickens, is rather an interesting 
 side-glance at himself, for his own lack of that 
 same buoyancy which makes all things possible to 
 a writer like Dickens. It was not that Dickens 
 really saw life less truly ; it was that Dickens, 
 having a large experience of modern miracle, had 
 the courage to proclaim his belief. Gissing saw all 
 changes of fortune resolving into a steady 
 decline : he had never experienced, as Dickens 
 assuredly had, the hot, excited ups and downs of 
 the happy-go-lucky. 
 
 But there was anotherpoint in all this, as Gissing 
 well saw. Dickens had an extraordinary sense 
 of the popular theatre. " With the character- 
 istics of that breezy fiction [of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury] Dickens combined," he says, "a tendency 
 traceable to his love of the stage, a melodramatic 
 violence, already manifested in ' Oliver Twist,' 
 and never to be outgrown." It was the stage, 
 the popular theatre, that Dickens loved, not so 
 much the Drama, which he understood only in 
 
 142
 
 DICKENS 
 
 its broadest examples (e.g. " Every Man in his 
 Humour "). His sense was the sense of " the 
 great semi-educated class from which Dickens 
 sprang, and to which, unconsciously, he so often 
 addressed himself." Gissing, Uke any other self- 
 respecting modern artist, could not look without 
 distaste upon theatricality ; and it is too often 
 the purely theatrical element that dominates 
 Dickens in his serious moments. In his 
 humorous and family-gathering conclusions, 
 moreover, Dickens liked to set everything right, 
 and bring all the good characters on the stage 
 for the final curtain. Gissing is protesting 
 against this tendency when he mentions Mell. 
 It was opposed to his own conviction, which few 
 will gainsay, that men are like mysterious ships, 
 drifting out of sight and ken, and never re- 
 appearing within the lives of their one-time 
 companions. The point is not, however, the 
 coincidence of Mell's good fortune with that of 
 the other characters in " David Copperfield " : in 
 that we could agree with Gissing. It is rather 
 in his view that probability was outraged by 
 Mell's accession to fortune that he was bounded 
 by his inexperience. 
 
 iv 
 
 Gissing loyally and successfully defends 
 Dickens against the common charge of exagger- 
 
 143
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 ation in the drawing of character ; and he 
 acclaims Dickens's extraordinary power of " see- 
 ing." He knew that the great writer had his 
 characteristic vision of Ufe no less than of 
 individual facts ; he was willing to allow Dickens 
 at all times a steady vision of true happenings. 
 " The novelist's first duty," he explains, " is to 
 make us see what he has seen himself, whether 
 with the actual eye or with that of imagination, 
 and no one ever did this more successfully than 
 Dickens in his best moments." " As a boy or 
 youth Dickens was occupied in seeing; as a 
 young man he took his pen and began to write 
 of what he had seen." " He knew every stage 
 covered by the travellers ; he saw the gleam of 
 the lamps, the faces they illumined but for a 
 moment ; the very horses brought out fresh were 
 his old acquaintances. Such writing is no mere 
 question of selecting and collocating words ; 
 there must first be vision, and that of extra- 
 ordinary clearness. Dickens tells us that in 
 times of worry or of grave trouble, he could 
 still write ; he had but to sit down at his desk, 
 and straightway he saiv. Where — as would 
 happen — he saw untruly, a mere fantasm thrown 
 forward by the mind, his hand at once had lost 
 its cunning. When vision was but a subtly 
 enhanced memory, he never lacked the skill to 
 make it seen by others." " There could be no 
 
 144
 
 DICKENS 
 
 better illustration of the difference between 
 Dickens's grasp and presentment of a bit of 
 human nature, a bit of observable fact, and that 
 method which the critics of to-day, inaccurately 
 but intelligibly, call photographic." 
 
 This brings us to the subject of realism, upon 
 which Gissing dwells long, both in his book and 
 his introductions. He was always rather in 
 dread of realism, which in his day (and even, 
 apparently, in ours) was largely regarded as 
 something very repulsive and unimaginative. 
 Gissing, of course, lived before the day of the 
 modern realist : he did not see in realism very 
 much more than laborious technical method. 
 Nowadays, it is to be hoped, only very old and 
 very young men hold it in such abhorrence. We 
 are all realists to-day, trying very hard to see 
 without falsity and to reproduce our vision with 
 exactitude. Realism, I think, is no longer asso- 
 ciated with the foot-rule and a stupid, purposeless 
 reproduction of detail. As Mr. George Calderon 
 daringly says in the introduction to his fine 
 translations from Tchekhof : "The Realist does 
 not copy Life (the result would be meaningless) ; 
 he explains it (that is the business of Art) and 
 gives his explanation the air of a copy." Giss- 
 ing, even by such a test, was never a realist. 
 He was too personal. If his bias had been a 
 happy bias, more in accord (as it became) with 
 K 145
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 conventional ways of skimming dark places, he 
 would have produced the best that was in him. 
 As it was, his bias was in the other direction, 
 excusable, infinitely pathetic, but unscientific and 
 unrealistic. He had no appetite for " savours," 
 but he had lived in poverty and in lonely sensi- 
 tiveness, and against that picture Dickens stands 
 up very convivial and full of hearty spirits. Not 
 retiring, not oppressed with a sense of material 
 cares, this Victorian giant ! How strangely do 
 we read, of " Bleak House," that '* we are held by 
 a powerful picture of murky, swarming, rotting 
 London, a marvellous rendering of the impression 
 received by any imaginative person, who, in 
 low spirits, has had occasion to wander about 
 London's streets." There could hardly be a 
 greater contrast than that between Dickens and 
 his admirer. 
 
 Certainly Dickens was not a " realist." Giss- 
 ing says he was an "ideahst," by which he 
 means, not the youthful, unhumorous Shelleyan, 
 but one who naturally idealises what he describes. 
 There is a mournful comment upon this idealisa- 
 tion in Gissing's own case in the following obvious 
 allusion to Thyrza: " Many a novelist has sinned 
 in this direction ; above all, young authors misled 
 by motives alien to art, who delight in ideahsing 
 girls of the lower, or lowest class." But Dickens 
 ideaUsed instinctively; it was a part of his 
 
 146
 
 DICKENS 
 
 prodigality ; and it was never more worthy than 
 that idealisation of Thyrza of which Gissing him- 
 self was guilty. In that respect, both as apphed 
 to Dickens or to himself, we may quote Gissing's 
 own vindication, as true here as it is of the 
 charge of exaggeration : " The one question we 
 are justified in urging is, whether his characterisa- 
 tion is consistent with itself." Asked so, we 
 should have no hesitation in clearing away the 
 doubts that arose in the author's mind about 
 the legitimacy of his own portrait. 
 
 The comparisons of Dickens with other writers, 
 with Hugo, Balzac, Dostoievsky, and with 
 Daudet, are made with admirable skill ; and it 
 is particularly interesting at this time to find 
 Dostoievsky treated in an Enghsh book with so 
 much courtesy and tact. For all these writers, 
 in their various ways, Gissing professes critical 
 admiration ; and the chapter is one of the most 
 interesting in the book. It becomes more and 
 more clear, as a result of reading this chapter, 
 how strongly associated in our minds the name 
 of Dickens is with " the healthful aftertaste of 
 self-forgetful mirth." It is Dickens's laughter 
 that will be remembered when his Jonas Chuzzle- 
 wits and Oliver Twists have gone the way of 
 dreary old theatrical properties. It is not the 
 
 147
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 shaking, whispering leaves and glooming land- 
 scape, foretelling a crime, that we shall remem- 
 ber ; but the ready laughter of Dickens. It was 
 indeed self-forgetful. Dickens, recognising that 
 he sometimes fell into excessive caricature, 
 apologised to Lytton, admitting that he took 
 such inexpressible joy in some of his comic 
 scenes that he could not help petting the char- 
 acters and making himself laugh anew. But 
 then Dickens had laughed all his life, at many 
 of the things that Gissing scorned or prized. 
 He laughed at ISIrs. Gamp, as filthy and vile 
 a creature as anybody ever portrayed — think 
 what Gissing would have made her ! — and made 
 everybody else laugh too. He laughed at educa- 
 tion (but Gissing explains that) ; and at refine- 
 ment ; and at all sorts of things that Gissing 
 took seriously. Yet he was a great enough man 
 to impose his own humour on his readers ; and 
 Gissing was sincere and humorous enough to 
 run with the rest in appraising the work of his 
 master. 
 
 Gissing, however, was admirably scrupulous 
 in this book about the virtues and the vices of 
 Dickens. His comparison of the treatment of 
 Mrs. Gamp and Alice Marlow is excellent, as is 
 his analysis of the laughter and moral effect 
 produced by an encounter between Sally. Brass 
 and her little slavey. It does not spoil Dickens 
 
 148
 
 DICKENS 
 
 to have his work assayed by so delicate a method 
 as Gissing's ; and, on the other hand, the atmo- 
 sphere of Dickens's books is so well suggested 
 as to recall them to the mind with strange vivid- 
 ness. I ndeed , this book reveals a Gissing unknown 
 to readers of his novels. It is a Gissing who 
 approaches more nearly to the man remembered 
 by his friends — genial, ready for laughter, simple 
 and kindly in all his doings. Where his novels 
 contain no spontaneous humour, this single 
 critical book is curiously full of the capacity for 
 laughter. It may be that, having little humour, 
 Gissing was at his best in appreciating ; for when 
 he essays humorous scenes, as he does in The 
 Town Traveller and Tlie Paying Guest, they 
 have noise, but no laughter. Gissing's characters 
 often laugh aloud, never silently. One or two 
 of them — e.g. Alfred Yule and Widdowson — 
 " cackle " ; but never with pure self-forgetful 
 mirth. Uncomfortably, savagely, cruelly, they 
 laugh — a melancholy cachinnation. And of 
 humorous conception none of the books shows 
 any sign. Gissing also had none of that deep 
 silent laughter which Carlyle described as the 
 sense of humour ; and none of that reconcilia- 
 tion of contradictions which Mr. Wells offers as 
 an alternative definition. His jokes are literary; 
 his books about the lower classes contain no 
 sign that poor people have a rich, if mechanical, 
 
 149
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 humour all their own. It is dehghtful to find 
 that he is at home with Dickens's humour, from 
 which it might have been thought that he would 
 shrink, as too crude. That was the only thing 
 which might have been wanting from this fine 
 book : being present, it makes the whole study- 
 invaluable. And a reading of the book on 
 Dickens is essential to a proper understanding 
 of George Gissing. It is almost " self- forgetful," 
 which is to say that it is more simple and 
 unaffected than any of the novels. 
 
 150
 
 VI 
 
 ITALY AND GREECE 
 
 The paramount enthusiasm in George Gissing's 
 life was his love for the classic days of Greece 
 and Rome. From the time when he first read 
 Gibbon, whose History he received as a prize, 
 Gissing was filled with Roman lore : while his 
 interest in Greece lay principally in its greatest 
 literary names, his interest in everything that 
 belonged to Rome was vehement and absorbing. 
 That is quite easily to be understood, for 
 Gibbon's is probably the most enthusiasm-firing 
 history ever written, not at all to be rivalled in 
 its particular qualities by any history of Greece 
 that has been or ever will be produced. So 
 Gissing, caught as a schoolboy in the meshes of 
 Roman history, was to find them to the last his 
 strongest attachment to Ufe. Presumably he 
 came to Gibbon when he was well acquainted 
 with the novels of Dickens. For the rest, 
 these two enthusiasms were to go with him all 
 through his life, the one as a serious intellectual 
 pursuit, the other as a solace in times of exhaus- 
 
 151
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 tion. Rome and Dickens come very character- 
 istically into his first noticeable novel, The 
 U?iclassed, where Casti is bent upon writing an 
 historical drama, and where Waymark is pro- 
 jecting novels more veracious than Dickens, 
 with one eye upon his public, could dare. 
 Casti is to write of Stilicho, Waymark is to 
 write novels about the masses — which may not 
 be left lying on drawing-room tables. We see 
 even here two youthful ambitions rising above 
 all others. Both were in some measure fulfilled. 
 Gissing wrote a novel about sixth-century 
 Italy ; and it is doubtful whether his books are 
 ever left lying on drawing-room tables. There 
 was a plan made between Waymark and Casti 
 for an Italian trip together, abandoned because 
 of Casti's untimely death ; and in Gissing's 
 mind only postponed until such time as he had 
 the necessary money for his fare. 
 
 And it was always " classical Italy " that was 
 Gissing's interest. When he did eventually 
 manage to achieve the journey, it was to as- 
 sociate modern scenes with past events, to recall 
 Roman rule in the districts he visited of modern 
 united Italy. The Italy he met with in his 
 travels by the Ionian Sea, although often mag- 
 nificent in beauty, and suggestive beyond any 
 other country, was inextricably confused in his 
 mind with uncomfortable travelling, passing 
 
 152
 
 ITALY AND GREECE 
 
 illness, bad food, and degeneracy. He even 
 rejected Robert Guiscard as a romantic figure 
 because " I care little for him after all ; he does 
 not belong to my world. . . . The interest of 
 the place suffered because I could attach to it 
 no classic memory." 
 
 ■ « 
 
 n 
 Greece never meant quite as much to Gissing 
 as Rome. His pictures of Greece have never 
 the same fervent love as that v^hich inspires all 
 he wrote of Rome and Roman Italy. It was 
 the literature, the spirit of Greece that he ad- 
 mired ; but with a remoteness and a detachment 
 far different from the enthusiasm of his Roman 
 learning. It is true that the waves of the 
 Ionian sea echo verses of Homer and Theo- 
 critus as he listens to them, and that he 
 applauds the gospel of the Greeks — " Vigour, 
 sanity, and joy." Yet even in Sleeping Fires 
 he has to argue with himself as to the value of 
 their ideals to the present age, and in the art of 
 Greece he seems to find little more than a 
 touching imagination of " the noblest thought 
 of man confronting death." Greece is irre- 
 coverably lost. In Ryecroft he sums up all his 
 thoughts of it in one of the best passages in 
 the book : " Our heritage of Greek literature 
 and art is priceless ; the example of Greek life 
 
 153
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 possesses for us not the slightest value." He 
 concludes, after expressing grave suspicion that 
 a typical Greek of the Periclean age would 
 disappoint a modern inquirer by his barbarian 
 and decadent attributes : " Leave him in that old 
 world, which is precious to the imagination of a 
 few, but to the business and bosoms of the modern 
 multitude irrelevant as Memphis or Babylon." 
 
 Some more vital enthusiasm informs all his 
 references to the Romans. They, after all, are 
 nearer to us ; classic Rome is better known in 
 all those details which most appealed to Gissing. 
 Greece was not, in his hfetime, made to live 
 afresh by the modern school of imaginative his- 
 torians. Professor Gilbert Murray and his 
 allies were not then active in their endeavours 
 to brinp- the Greeks home to our common 
 thoughts. While Gissing lived, Greek history 
 was not the living thing it has since become ; 
 and Gibbon, a supreme historian, had early 
 awakened Gissing's sense of the reality and the 
 eternal fascination of the Roman Empire. It 
 is not then wonderful to find his references to 
 Greece and Rome pitched in different keys. 
 His sympathy, being already given to Rome, 
 could not extend beyond a sense of the " clas- 
 sics " and the antiquity of Greece. For both 
 classics and antiquity he could feel admiration : 
 Greek hfe did not awaken his sympathy. " The 
 
 154
 
 ITALY AND GREECE 
 
 sporadic civilisation which we are too much in 
 the habit of regarding as if it had been no less 
 stable than brilliant, was a succession of the 
 briefest splendours, gleaming here and there 
 from the coasts of the Aegean to those of the 
 western Mediterranean." It was the splendour 
 of a mighty Empire, very grateful in retrospect 
 to an inhabitant of the modern world, that drew 
 Gissing's mind and held it irresistibly during 
 the whole of his life. 
 
 • • ■ 
 
 111 
 
 It has been said that Gissing received Gibbon 
 as a school prize. From Ryecroft we gather 
 that the edition was that of Milman, in eight 
 volumes ; while a marvellous exploit with a 
 copy of the first edition is recorded in the pages 
 of the same book. It was, too, a first edition 
 that Julian Casti, in The Uiiclassed, possessed, 
 in " six noble quarto volumes, clean and firm in 
 the old bindings." When he sits down to read 
 the book we are reminded of Gibbon's opening 
 words : " With what a grand epic roll, with 
 what anticipations of solemn music, did the 
 noble history begin 1 " After reading Gibbon, 
 Casti explains to Waymark that he does not so 
 much long for modern or even for Renaissance 
 Italy. " I think most of classical Italy. I am 
 no scholar, but I love the Latin writers, and 
 
 155
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 can forget myself for hours, working through 
 Livy or Tacitus. . . . The mere names in 
 Roman history make my blood warm. — And 
 there is so little chance that I shall ever be able 
 to go there ; so little chance." 
 
 When Gissing wrote that he was perhaps 
 twenty-six, looking out and forward upon life 
 with confidence in his talent. It is easy to 
 imagine how galled he must have been during 
 the next few years, when, in spite of incessant 
 labour, he found himself no nearer his escape to 
 Italy. Moping, as he suggests, in London, he 
 became slowly passionate in his longing for the 
 country of his dreams. When, in Goethe's 
 " Italienische Reise," he read of one to whom 
 the desire for Italy became a scarce endurable 
 agony, the words represented his own feeling ; 
 and " if I had not seen the landscapes for which 
 my soul longed, I think I must have moped to 
 death." After the publication of Demos, which 
 had a sufficient success to reach a second edition, 
 he was able at length to travel as he had desired. 
 With what enthusiasm may be dimly gathered 
 from Tlie Emancipated. 
 
 With the help of sunlight and red wine, he could 
 imagine that time had gone back twenty centuries — that 
 this was not Pozzuoli, but Puteoli ; that over yonder was 
 not Baia, but Baiaj ; that the men among the shipping 
 called to each other in Latin, and perchance had just 
 heard some news of the perishing Republic. 
 
 156
 
 ITALY AND GREECE 
 
 In every glimpse of scenery in The Emancipated, 
 indeed, the spectacle is not simply one of the 
 scene before his eyes. It always calls up the 
 thought of Rome ; the conscious literary reflec- 
 tion is for ever present. Truly Gissing took with 
 him to Italy his vision of Italy. Whereas he 
 can report with fervour, in New G^^ub Street, 
 the memory of a sunset at Athens, simply as a 
 piece of scenic description, in Italy he is like 
 some waking Roman, trying always to read the 
 past in and below the present. 
 
 iv 
 
 The same feeling is apparent in his legitimate 
 travel-book By the Ionian Sea, a brief, unpre- 
 tentious account of a ramble in Southern Italy. 
 In this, Gissing is gracefully personal and un- 
 affected, writing from his own interest in the 
 things he sees, in a manner which one would 
 suppose very similar to that of his conversation. 
 Descriptions of the places he visited ; specu- 
 lations as to their Roman states ; accounts of 
 journeys, and sights, and hotels ; stories of 
 various hotel servants, and a delightfully char- 
 acterised little doctor — these make the book 
 what it is. What erudition is displayed is 
 carried lightly, and if By the Ionian Sea is not 
 quite a masterpiece (for it lacks distinction), it 
 has much interest for the reader of Gissing. 
 
 157
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 Again he makes profession of his love for Greece 
 and Italy, and attests their power to "draw" 
 him. Again there are illustrations of his, to any- 
 body less refined, rather amusing insistence upon 
 culture and refinement as supreme needs, and 
 upon " things of the mind." " Things of the 
 mind," indeed, is a very excellent phrase by 
 which Gissing avows his limitations : it is 
 always to these, and never to things of the 
 spirit, that he is staunch. Naively, he writes 
 here : "Of course the Tarentine never reads ; 
 the only book-shop I could discover made a 
 poorer display than even that at Consenza. . . . 
 How the women spend their lives one may 
 vainly conjecture." But the vanity of conjec- 
 ture in this case lies surely in the imphcation 
 that a bookless village is abandoned to unworthy 
 pursuits. To put too high a value upon books 
 is to reveal a lack of humour ; and only two or 
 three times does Gissing do this in The Ionian 
 Sea. One of the occasions I have just shown ; 
 another is in the serious references to a bookish 
 sea, already instanced ; and the most serious 
 occurs on the last page, where irrelevant com- 
 plaint is made on behalf of one " who cannot 
 shape his life as he will, and whom circumstance 
 ever menaces with dreary harassment." Else- 
 where the charm of Gissing's character is fully 
 displayed, in such measure as to support the 
 
 158
 
 ITALY AND GREECE 
 
 testimony of one of his fellow-travellers, on 
 another visit to Italy, that he was a delightful 
 companion, and one whose company infallibly 
 provoked delightful happenings by the way. It 
 is said of Gissing that in Italy he was always 
 seen at his best, full of quiet fun and happy 
 allusion. For Italy, to him, was a land still rich 
 in magnificent memories, a country that had 
 been the centre of the greatest united empire 
 that the world has ever known. Italy was far 
 more to Gissing than to any casual wayfarer ; 
 every step w^as made upon " haunted, holy 
 ground," full of memory and interest. It is 
 little wonder if he was at his best in the part of 
 the world to which his heart turned in youth, 
 and in which were buried the heroes of his 
 most devoted reading. Wherever he spoke 
 of Latin authors it was with deep, sincere 
 affection, unlike the self-consciousness which 
 he showed in referring to English writers. 
 And it was Rome to which he was most 
 constant. Even when Rolfe, in The JV/urljjooi, 
 had doubts of history, as the "lurid record 
 of woes unutterable," it was but a passing 
 mood : how much more real and delicious 
 is the frank exclamation : " Ever since the 
 first boyish reading of Gibbon, my imagination 
 has loved to play upon that scene of Alaric's 
 death ! " 
 
 159
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 Veranilda, the novel upon which Gissing was 
 engaged at the time of his death, is very far 
 from being the hasty work of the casual student 
 — of Gibbon or even of Italian history. It is 
 set in an obscure period — that of the sixth 
 century — at the time of Totila's march upon 
 Rome. Actual persons, mcluding Totila and 
 Pelagius, are introduced, though without special 
 portraiture. Even one of the principal charac- 
 ters — Marcian — seems to be an expansion of a 
 real double-dealer of whom practically nothing 
 is known. The foundation of the story is slight 
 enough. Basil, a young Roman, loves Veranilda, 
 a Gothic maiden ; and their enforced parting 
 and eventual reunion, after imprisonments and 
 treacheries, are of comparative unimportance. 
 Gissing's effort has evidently been to recreate the 
 air of the times in which they lived, rather than 
 to tell a striking story. Accordingly, the book 
 is full of very careful and even distinguished 
 historical writing, which is good evidence, even 
 if we had no other, of the author's devotion to 
 ancient things. Of character the book has little, 
 and when characterisation is attempted it is less 
 vivid than the mere description. Veranilda 
 contains fine passages, and is written with really 
 astonishing confidence and freedom from the 
 
 160
 
 ITALY AND GREECE 
 
 self-conscious picking-out of historical facts 
 which generally deaden a romance of ancient 
 times. Of course it has the flatness inseparable 
 from all but the finest and least scrupulous his- 
 torical stories ; but it is never undignified, and 
 moves without painful stiffness. 
 
 In another way, also, Vei^anilda is remarkable. 
 It is very much more dramatic in handling than 
 any other story by Gissing. The scenes are 
 treated in a dramatic way ; the speeches, when 
 long, have eloquence ; and when they are short 
 they carry a distant echo of human voices. The 
 dramatic quality may have been occasioned by 
 the fact that historical novelists almost invariably 
 employ a certain stiffness of speech, so that they 
 may suggest antiquity ; or it may have been due 
 to a conscious change of method on Gissing's 
 part. 1 incline to the latter explanation, for 
 this reason. In books where much explanatory 
 or historical narrative is made necessary by the 
 setting, some degree of heightening in the effects 
 and speeches is used as a purely technical device, 
 to avoid a dead level of literary interest. Gissing 
 perhaps saw that if he followed his usual course 
 of relying upon narrative his venture would 
 sink of its own weight. It followed that he 
 cast his plot and exhibition of character in scenes 
 easily detachable (though not so to the wise 
 reader) from their scholarly setting of history. 
 L 161
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 That the book gains by this use of a semi- 
 dramatic method is unquestionable. It enables 
 us the better to visualise the rather picturesque 
 scenes of intrigue or violence. We are not, it 
 is true, moved ; but we are edified. We are 
 made to recognise the ease with which Gissing 
 moved among these ancient people — an ease 
 born of long association and urgent thought. 
 No book could have gained more from blazing 
 vision or from imaginative glow — these things 
 Gissing never had, and it is useless to expect 
 them. But no book more surely reveals his care 
 and insight. Considering that the MS. was un- 
 finished when he died, it is quite surprising to 
 observe the perfection with which each chapter 
 is written, and to become aware, when the last 
 page is reached, that the final sentences are as 
 full of form as they would have been if the book 
 had been perfect. This fact alone would assure 
 us of Gissing's conscientiousness. That con- 
 scientiousness alone does not make great art we 
 are aware ; but its presence in Veranilda would 
 explain (if explanation be needed) why Gissing's 
 work must always be treated with respect. For 
 the book is free from lapses ; it is almost free 
 from commonplace. It is restrained, thoughtful 
 work, full of quality, which all who care for 
 letters must appreciate and value highly. Lack- 
 ing in splendour, it is still singularly able, and 
 
 162
 
 ITALY AND GREECE 
 
 never amateurish as historical novels are apt to 
 be. Gissing's faculty of clear sight was never 
 better shown. So with his skill of lucid ex- 
 pression, which is everywhere to be observed by 
 those who look for such things. 
 
 vi 
 
 From The Unclassed to Veranilda is a long 
 stretch of twenty years ; but Gissing's last book 
 was surely an inevitable one to any reader who 
 gathered from The Unclassed in what direction 
 the author's bent lay. AVe might wonder whether 
 the attempt to use the background of the sixth 
 century was not originally delayed by popular 
 distaste for historical novels of far periods, just 
 as we know that it was a little delayed by a glut 
 of such novels. More probably, however, Gis- 
 sing never had the required peace of mind to 
 set himself to so quiet and studious a task. He 
 must have been gathering his material during 
 much of the time that is filled for us by the pub- 
 lication of his other novels. For ten years he 
 had thought of Veranilda, and its writing caused 
 him far more labour than that of any of his 
 other books. But it was delighted, hopeful 
 labour. " I think I can make it fairly good," 
 he said, " for 1 have saturated myself with the 
 spirit of the age. It ought to be infinitely pic- 
 turesque." Whether it be picturesque or not, 
 
 163
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 the book could only have been written with such 
 assurance because the author felt perfect com- 
 mand of his resources. It stands for us, with 
 Dickens and By the Ionian Sea^ as the part of 
 his production which represents Gissing's most 
 expert work, the work he did with enthusiasm, 
 because he was drawn to it by taste and inclina- 
 tion. Travail it may have involved, but never 
 toil. The toiling Gissing receives our sympathy, 
 because the enforced continuance of uncongenial 
 work is exhausting. In these books, however, 
 we are permitted to see a Gissing who was not 
 oppressed with tasks. His manner is neither 
 deprecatory nor shrill ; he writes with the pur- 
 pose of increasing our knowledge of the things 
 he loves. 
 
 164
 
 VII 
 
 THE WRITER 
 
 It has been said already that Gissing began to 
 write at a time which was unpropitious to the 
 production of original work. The flood of the 
 Victorian novel had expended itself; and too 
 many writers were following on in its wake with 
 " stories " and diftuse works of little distinction. 
 In the nineties, when Gissing was at the height 
 of his talent, a new impulse was felt, but in the 
 eighties there were only a few belated Victorians, 
 a few brilliant exceptions, and the parasites of 
 those who were dead. Gissing, well-read in 
 the Victorians, had the originality or the mis- 
 fortune to abandon their benevolent tone, and 
 his temperament was perhaps an additional 
 power in the overthrow of the purely senti- 
 mental and moral attitude revealed in their 
 work. But he was still hampered by their 
 methods. In the longer works of the Victorians, 
 continuity was sacrificed to variety of interest, 
 with the result that the art of construction 
 was unknown except in short works or in 
 
 165
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 those where " plot " was important. Gissing 
 despised " plot " ; he had the instinct of the true 
 artist in relation to probability and consistency. 
 At the same time, while he built several elaborate 
 structures — none more so than Demos or The 
 WJm^lpool — he was Victorian in his notions of 
 construction. Many threads go to make up 
 most of his books, threads interwoven with, for 
 the most part, sincere regard for not improper 
 interrelation. In the control of these threads, 
 he was completely sure and capable : even when 
 his main erections caved in for want of the 
 support of experience he preserved his sense of 
 proportion. That, in any writer, would be a feat 
 of strength. In Gissing the historical sense was 
 very strong ; and that may account for the 
 manner of his control. Intricacies of scheme 
 everywhere delight the reader who can perceive 
 them. But the method which involves a large 
 scheme, embracing a section of life, carries with 
 it a particular defect that is very hard to over- 
 come. It gives the appearance of too greatly 
 diffused interest. Only a novelist with very 
 strong constructive or imaginative power can 
 overcome the defect ; and Gissing was too 
 absorbed in care to develop the one or the other. 
 The result, as Mr. Arnold Bennett well says, "is 
 that he seems never to centralise the interest. 
 His pictures have no cynosure for the eye." 
 
 166
 
 THE WRITER 
 
 This was partly due, no doubt, to his sense of life 
 as turmoil, and in so far as it is due to his large 
 conceptions it is a strength. But lacking the 
 heroic sense, and without that glow of the 
 imagination which can carry us beyond the 
 consciousness of an author's technical method, 
 Gissing managed somehow to pitch his work in 
 too low a key. He studiously avoided exagger- 
 ation and drama (except when his invention of 
 normal incidents failed and led him to the use of 
 conventional expedients), and a climax isinstantly 
 smothered in obedience to his sense of veracity. 
 That, so long as the method is successful, could 
 not fail to command our respect : it is where it 
 is unsuccessful that we perceive a fault. It is as 
 unsuccessful in The Whirlpool as it is in The 
 Nether World. On the other hand, New Grub 
 Street almost presents the air of a microcosm. 
 If the chapters did not so mechanically switch 
 the interest unprogressively from one set of 
 characters to another, we should be convinced 
 and dehghted. As it is, Nexv Grub Street is 
 nearly as arbitrary as " Martin Chuzzlewit." The 
 method is the method of Dickens, and as the 
 entertainment provided is less superhuman we 
 are made to feel the machinery. There is no 
 momentum, no sense of irresistible Hfe pushing 
 forward. We read with apprehensiveness, which 
 in itself is a compliment ; but as we recognise 
 
 167
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 the author's skill the illusion is interrupted. It 
 is only when we view the book as a whole that 
 we recognise the artistic aim by which it was 
 inspired. And even so we recognise the intellect 
 rather than the imagination of the writer. 
 
 When Gissing turned from the reproduction 
 of society to themes more simple, and gave his 
 mind to the stories of particular individuals, the 
 artistic gain is clear. Eves Ransom, for example, 
 is free from anything which might hinder the 
 concentration of the reader's mind upon the 
 main theme. In a less degree we may see this 
 method used in Born in Eocile (though here 
 there is a good deal of superfluous matter which 
 can easily be separated) and in the two firm 
 stories in The Odd Women. The novels pub- 
 lished after 1898 are all more satisfactorily 
 constructed : unfortunately their construction 
 was conventional in another sense, and the 
 material was possibly thinned by a failure in 
 mental energy rather than by any momentous 
 change of technical plan. 
 
 11 
 
 Of the characters in Gissing's novels, those 
 which stand out most clearly in the recollection 
 are the women. For calm beauty we have 
 Sidwell Warricombe ; for the type which was 
 perhaps modern in 1893, Rhoda Nunn ; for 
 
 168
 
 THE WRITER 
 
 mystery, Eve INIadeley is easily the most memor- 
 able, a baffling figure ; for humanity, Amy 
 Reardon. Others there are, less impressive. 
 Thyrza is certainly the most exquisite portrait in 
 the vrhole series of novels, fragile and charming ; 
 and her sister Lydia is the personification of 
 goodness and loyalty. Such unattractive but 
 virtuous girls as the two in Demos, Emily Hood 
 in A Lifes Morning, Annabel Newthorpe, Jane 
 Snowdon, and Maud Enderby, all have the 
 author's regard, but their virtue is too osten- 
 tatious, and they have less vitality than some of 
 the others. Marian Yule is admirable ; and 
 Isabel Clarendon rivals Eve in speculative 
 interest. Quite the best of Gissing's portraits of 
 women, however, seem to me to be his two 
 experiments in genre — Mrs. Mutimer in Demos 
 and Virginia in The Odd JVomen. They are 
 creations. 
 
 Of the men, perhaps less can be said. The 
 Denzil Quarrier type of rather beefy insensi- 
 tives, which comes into play where needed as 
 a foil to the principal male character, has not 
 much reality ; and there is a likeness in the 
 brooding egoists who take, for the most part, 
 the chief positions, that robs them of in- 
 dividuality. Godwin Peak is an exceedingly 
 subtle study ; Reardon, and BifFen, and Milvain, 
 and Alfred Yule in New Grub Street are enough 
 
 169
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 to make the book richer in character studies 
 than any other of Gissing's works. Sidney 
 Kirkwood, in The Nether World, is well sug- 
 gested, and some of the thoughtful mechanics 
 in the early books have good and careful work 
 in them. In the main, however, the interest in 
 Gissing's male characters belongs to tempera- 
 ment rather than personality. In his drawings 
 of sensitive, jealous, idealistic men, fundament- 
 ally alike, yet subtly differentiated by means of 
 the parts they play in the general scheme, he 
 is always interesting, and sometimes wonder- 
 fully good. Often we are given profound in- 
 sight into their minds, into the complexities of 
 their self-tormenting, into the nuances of their 
 personal attitudes. They are seen subjectively 
 — too subjectively, for the effect is sometimes 
 spoiled by too much psychological argument 
 and too vague a general outline. A sensitive, 
 we find ; and interesting — but imperfectly char- 
 acterised. Such a fault was perhaps inevitable, 
 for as one of the critics of Henry Ryecroft said, 
 with acerbity : " All his thoughts and opinions 
 express the man who has . . . relied on his 
 own point of view, receiving nothing from the 
 life around him, and giving it neither under- 
 standing nor sympathy. ... If Mr. Gissing 
 should edit the reciprocal feelings of the people 
 of Exeter [in whom Ryecroft found no interest], 
 
 170
 
 THE WRITER 
 
 the volume might be a lively commentary on 
 Ryecroft's." They were all solitaries ; all, from 
 Waymark and Kingcote to Will Warburton, 
 tremendous walkers and country lovers, but 
 none of them ever had an instinct to see himself 
 with the eyes of others. Gissing did not spare 
 them ; he saw their common fault, but he recog- 
 nised it as ineradicable. He was always a better 
 and a finer man than the persons of his books, 
 but in essence he was himself almost always the 
 author of their being. 
 
 • • • 
 
 lU 
 
 Two or three ideas appear very frequently in 
 all Gissing's novels. One, very loyal and good, 
 represents his desire for the emancipation of 
 women from their ignorance and subserviency, 
 and is, I should imagine, based upon very clear 
 thought. He says that "the preservation of 
 the race demands in women many kinds of 
 irrationality, of obstinate instinct, which enrage 
 a reasoning mind," but is none the less firm in 
 his belief in women as capable of activities 
 hitherto monopoHsed by men. It would be 
 absurd to labour this point, but it may be noted 
 that Gissing wrote at a time when few novelists 
 were engaged in expressing such views. But 
 he was not merely a theorist. Both Sidwell 
 Warricombe and Rhoda Nunn were women of 
 
 171
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 considerable character; Ida Starr, in The Un- 
 classed, had nobility and determination; many 
 of Gissing's other women-folk were by way of 
 being great readers, desirous and capable of in- 
 dependent judgment. And of women as a sex 
 the shrewd analyses scattered through his 
 books show his opinions to have been well 
 founded. As an example of his penetration, 
 the following may be quoted. It comes from 
 an early book — Isabel Clarendon— h\il it is as 
 just as it is inclusive. 
 
 A woman mentally occupied with woman possesses a 
 lucidity of reasoning, a swiftness of apprehension, a 
 shrewdness of inference, which may well render her 
 a trifle contemptuous of male conclusions on the same 
 subject. A very few details are enough for her to work 
 upon ; she has the categories by heart, and classifies with 
 relentless acumen. It is the acme of the contradictions 
 of her nature. Instinctively revolting against materialist 
 views when held by the other sex ; passionately, fiercely 
 tenacious of spiritual interpretations where her own affec- 
 tions are concerned ; the fountain of all purity that the 
 world knows, she yet has in her heart that secret chamber 
 for the arraignment of her sisters, where spiritual pleas 
 are scoffed at, where the code administered is based on 
 the most cynical naturalism. She will not acknowledge 
 it ; she will die rather than admit the fact as a working 
 element of her own consciousness ; but she betrays herself 
 too often. 
 
 But if women are to be educated, mankind 
 is also to be emancipated— fi'om dogma. Gissing 
 
 172
 
 THE WRITER 
 
 had all the sensitive man's hatred of overbearing 
 dogma. He was himself intolerant, but he had 
 no sympathy with any bigotry other than in- 
 tellectual bigotry. Religious dogma, the con- 
 ventions of politics, the manners of respect- 
 ability had no appeal to him. Peace as a 
 universal religion seemed to him the one hope 
 of mankind ; democracy in power promised the 
 destruction of natural beauties and the substitu- 
 tion of pure materialism and industrialism. 
 
 Dyce Lashmar, in Oiw Friend the Charlatan, 
 speaking under the influence of the " French 
 book" from which he obtains his opinions, 
 writes : — 
 
 I am a Socialist — but not a Social-democrat ; demo- 
 cracy (which for the rest has never existed) I look upon 
 as an absurdity condemned by all the teachings of modern 
 science. I am a Socialist, for I believe that the principle 
 of association is the only principle of progress. . . . 
 What the true Socialism has to Iceep in view is a principle 
 of justice in the balance of rights and duties between the 
 few who lead and the multitude who follow. In the 
 history of the world hitherto, the multitude has had less 
 than its share, the ruling classes have tyrannized. At 
 present ifs pretty obvious that we are in danger of just 
 the opposite excess — Demos begins to roar alarmingly, 
 and there'll be a poor look-out for us if he gets what he 
 wants. What we need above all things is a reform in 
 education. We are teaching the people too much and 
 too little. The first duty of the State is to make citizens. 
 . . . When the principle of association, of solidarity, 
 
 173
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 becomes a part of the very conscience, we shall see a 
 true State and a really progressive civilization. 
 
 Gissing explains his own mature feeling still 
 further in Ryecroft where, carefully discrimi- 
 nating between individuals and a class, he 
 writes : — 
 
 I have known revolt against the privilege of wealth 
 . . . but I could never feel myself at one with the native 
 poor among whom I dwelt. ... I came to know them 
 too well ... I knew the poor, and I knew that their 
 aims were not mine. 
 
 Emancipation from dogma was the real eman- 
 cipation he desired. Education, he thought, 
 made life very much harder to live, but education 
 meant escape from dogma, since "most people 
 who are capable of independent thought rapidly 
 outgrow the stage when compromise is ab- 
 horred." He was almost, in fact, what is 
 generally called nowadays a Humanitarian. It 
 is true that he was strongly individualistic, and 
 that he scorned Vegetarianism (it is curious 
 that animals do not figure at all in his books) ; 
 but in his desire for a non-dogmatic faith he 
 was constrained to believe in a sort of Pacific- 
 ism. His sensibility was such as to suggest that 
 if his sense of personal wrongs had been less 
 keen he would have expressed a theoretical 
 belief in Humanitarianism apart from its senti- 
 
 174
 
 THE WRITER 
 
 mental dogmas. Narrow faith was intolerable 
 to him. His revelation of the character of 
 Miriam, in TJte Kmancipatcd, was vicious in its 
 distaste. His orthodox clergymen are always 
 grotesque. 
 
 But naturally Gissing was too wise a man to 
 attempt a perilous consistency. Views of various 
 kinds are expressed freely in his books, and we 
 who try to discover his own feeling are always 
 liable to take for his own opinions some which 
 he intended to be merely characteristic of an 
 individual. He was, for example, peace-loving ; 
 yet he was often provoked by irrational general 
 notions. On the subject of children he ex- 
 pressed himself strongly, in such a way as to 
 run counter to much humanitarian feeling. It 
 seems to have been his idea that parents should 
 not have direct relations with their children 
 until the latter were ten or twelve years old. 
 He was indignant because "people snivel over 
 the deaths of babies," and saw nothing to grieve 
 over in this matter, since if children die the 
 probability is that they ought to die, in order 
 that the fittest may survive. Children, perhaps, 
 did not appeal to him : they only occur as 
 properties in his books. The children in 
 Workers in the Dawn are the merest Dickensian 
 puppets ; in IViyrza, Demos, The Nether World, 
 New Grub Street, In the Year of Jubilee, and 
 
 175
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 The Whirlpool, the characters of the children 
 are non-existent. They have names, and some- 
 times make tiny speeches ; but that is all. In 
 the other books babies sometimes become ill or 
 die in order to bring about states of mind in 
 mothers or fathers ; and in no case do the 
 children serve any useful purpose, since the 
 books go on their destined way without more 
 than momentary interruption. If it were not 
 for the remarks upon children in The Whiidpool, 
 it might have been assumed that Gissing ignored 
 them altogether. Yet that is not the case. He 
 foresees huge creches for the children of the 
 middle-classes, and protests against the failure 
 of parents to recognise their responsibilities. 
 When one of his characters says that the care of 
 children is a matter for the individual, the inter- 
 locutor observes, evidently with Gissing's con- 
 currence : " It's a matter for the world, too." 
 And on the subject of the education of children 
 he exclaims bitterly : — 
 
 For the teaching of children after they can read and 
 write, there seems to be no method at all. The old 
 classical education was fairly consistent, but it exists no 
 longer. Nothing has taken its place. Muddle, experi- 
 ment, and waste of lives — too awful to think about. 
 We're savages yet in the matter of education. Somebody 
 said to me once : ' Well, but look at the results ; they're 
 not so bad.' Great heavens ! not so bad — when the 
 supreme concern of mankind is to perfect their instru- 
 
 176
 
 THE WRITER 
 
 ments of slaughter ! * Not so bad — when the gaol and the 
 gallows are taken as a matter of course ! Not so bad — 
 when huge filthy cities are packed with multitudes who 
 have no escape from toil and hunger but in a wretched 
 death ! Not so bad — when all but every man's life is 
 one long blunder, the result of ignorance and unruled 
 passions ! 
 
 If one reads " Philistinism " for " ignorance " 
 in the last sentence of the quotation, it will be 
 seen wherein lay Gissing's quarrel with human 
 nature. He was not so much a " Wild knight " 
 who rides " for ever seeking God," nor a re- 
 former in relation to social affairs : Philistinism 
 menaced his quietude, or his desire for quietude, 
 and was responsible for the ugliness he saw in 
 the life around him. I do not think the word 
 Philistine occurs in his books at all, although 
 it had been popularised by Matthew Arnold ; 
 but it expresses all he loathed. In the poor he 
 found little but Philistinism, and in the ignorant 
 of all classes. That he set his standards upon a 
 particular degree of refinement and on a certain 
 way of regarding books was a pity. It robbed 
 his constructive side of strength, because bookish- 
 ness and refinement are poor ideals in them- 
 selves. His other preoccupation, the difficulty 
 
 * An opinion repeated in The Cronm of Life, where one 
 of the characters, naturally a man of the most fiendish 
 temperament, spends his time in devising new means of 
 destruction. 
 
 M 177
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 of the educated poor bachelor in making friends 
 among the educated class rather than among his 
 economic equals, was another personal affair. 
 It is not impossible for the educated poor 
 man of brains to receive social recognition from 
 those of better equipment. Gissing himself is 
 alleged by others to have done so. It is what 
 Gissing would call " a matter for the individual." 
 Gissing's own experience as recorded by himself 
 was hard and cruel because he self-consciously 
 refrained from following his opportunities. 
 Perhaps his pride was too great ; his ambition 
 was certainly considerable. And if we find 
 Godwin Peak's social difficulties hard to accept 
 in earnest, we cannot fail to find Gissing's sense 
 of the difficulties of entry, and the lure of refine- 
 ment, somewhat excessive. 
 
 iv 
 As a lover of Nature, Gissing stands in a 
 very happy light. He attributed his love to the 
 reading at an early age of " The Old Curiosity 
 Shop," — as pretty a compliment as one might 
 desire to see paid to Dickens. And he was 
 a great rambler through London, through 
 Southern Italy, through Devon and in the 
 West, and through the home counties of 
 England. In Tliyrza there are fine descrip- 
 tions of the lakes, and, in the last chapter, of 
 
 178
 
 THE WRITER 
 
 the Sussex downs at a picturesque part. The 
 beautiful counties in the middle of England are 
 described in Isabel Clarendon and JDe?nos; York- 
 shire is the scene of parts of IVte Croivn of 
 Life ; Devon and Somerset appear in Boim in 
 Exile, In the Year of Jubilee, and The Odd 
 Women. In the latter, too, there are again 
 pictures of the lakes. In The Nether World, 
 Kirkwood goes with the Snowdons into Essex ; 
 and other little sketches of Surrey and Kent 
 appear in The Crotvn of Life and Will War- 
 burton. Not all these scenic descriptions are 
 good ; many of them are too formal, and some 
 are too detailed. But there is a sense of the 
 country in the best which sets one smiling with 
 pleasure at the loving care with which they 
 have been written. Just as the walker sees the 
 best of the country, so Gissing, oftentimes 
 roaming haphazard, saw the face of England in 
 his happiest moods. Although alone, he was 
 not solitary in the country. He could, 1 think, 
 feel more at home with country folk than with 
 town dwellers. He speaks somewhere of not 
 hating all orders of uneducated people. " A 
 hedger, a fisherman, a country mason — people 
 of that kind I rather like to talk with. . . . 
 But the London vulgar I abominate, root and 
 branch. ... I know so nmch about them." 
 That is to say, Gissing had to live among them 
 
 179
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 in poverty. The uneducated countryman was 
 seen in a pleasant glow of unaccustomed free- 
 dom. Just so was the country-side seen, so that 
 it brings out all the native kindness and sim- 
 plicity of his character. And when the country 
 was not England he could imagine that the 
 peasants thought more of " things of the mind " 
 than the English ; and when he wrote of 
 England at the end of his life, in The Private 
 Papers of Henrij Rijecrqft, it was to discover 
 that he was Enghsh to the core. That is what 
 we find him. Sometimes narrow when he 
 thought himself most fine, sometimes senti- 
 mental, often intolerant of things which he was 
 only unable to understand, proud, sensitive, 
 " difficult," but essentially a lover of home and 
 quiet life, Gissing was in none of these things 
 un-English. He belonged to the country. He 
 belonged to an intellectual order in which, until 
 late, he found no home. He was dependent 
 upon his fastidious sense of refinement and 
 creature comforts. And he had to live poorly 
 and obscurely, forever at work, chafing at his 
 environment, with the sense of failure upon 
 him. A more robust man might have risen 
 above difficulties, for sensitiveness has never 
 yet been a virtue in material affiiirs ; but as 
 Gissing was, so did he make his own reading of 
 life. We hear of his having no holiday for 
 
 180
 
 THE WRITER 
 
 several years ; but eventually he was bound to 
 find solace in the open spaces. And it is 
 pleasant to think that while his one pure travel 
 book is devoted to Italy, the land of his dreams, 
 the last book published in his Hfetime — Henrij 
 Rijecrqft— is full of the English country, seen 
 and spoken of with delight and affection. Here, 
 as in Demos, his view was that there was "no 
 value in human lives in a world from which 
 grass and trees have vanished." 
 
 During the whole of his life Gissing was a 
 wide reader of many sorts of books. In his 
 early days, as is shown in the diary of the 
 heroine of his first book, he read a good deal of 
 philosophy. He was of the kind that reads 
 Shelley fiercely in youth and grows out of 
 Shelley in early manhood. Dyce Lashmar, 
 "chancing to open Shelley," was surprised to 
 find that "the poet of his adolescence not 
 merely left him cold, but seemed verbose and 
 tedious." But Tennyson remained a life-long 
 hero. Among English novelists he certainly 
 gave Thackeray and Dickens the palm ; George 
 Eliot's soul he found " miserably conventional " ; 
 Meredith he once or twice imitated. For the 
 rest he probably expressed his own view when 
 he made a character in Denzil Qum^rier say 
 
 181
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 that he only read EngHsh novels when he was 
 m need of an emetic. Among foreign novelists 
 he speaks in very high terms of Dostoievsky, of 
 Turgenev, of Balzac, and Victor Hugo and 
 Daudet. INIr. Seccombe says that the last- 
 named was his favourite contemporary novelist. 
 References to the byways of English literature 
 occur in Isabel Clarendon, where some Shake- 
 spearean criticism is ventured, and where the 
 hero is overjoyed at buying the first edition of 
 " Venice Preserved " ; a monumental and gener- 
 ally unread work by Sir Thomas Browne is 
 familiarly mentioned elsewhere ; and there is a 
 good deal of admirably rendered pedantry in 
 New G-rub Street, in the conversation of Alfred 
 Yule. 
 
 These slight allusions, however trivial as sug- 
 gesting the extent of Gissing's reading, perhaps 
 illustrate something of its range. Curiously 
 enough, on the rare occasions when he used 
 literary taste as a direct means of suggesting 
 character, he was not very successful. The part 
 played by Dante in the emancipation of Miriam 
 Baske, and the same author's fascination for the 
 agitator in The Crown of Life, are interesting 
 rather than conclusive. So, too, Henrietta 
 Winter (in TJie Whirlpool) is not visualised by 
 her love of George Eliot and Christina Rossetti, 
 although the author's intention was to imply by 
 
 182
 
 THE WRITER 
 
 the former an intellectual mediocrity and pre- 
 occupation with ethical problems on the part of 
 Henrietta, and by the latter to suggest spiritual 
 devotion. Otherwise a love for two such writers 
 is much more a psychological problem than an 
 illumination of character. On the other hand, 
 the analysis in Demos of Richard Mutimer's 
 library is masterly, followed though it is by 
 a painfully laboured imagining of a future state 
 when the Bible will exist only in " comic " 
 editions, and when Shakespeare will be decried 
 as " a mountebank of religious tendencies." 
 
 Too often, indeed, there is self-consciousness 
 in the literary allusions. Gissing was proud of 
 his reading, engrossed in it. His manner of 
 referring to famous authors is sometimes dis- 
 tressing in its labour — the manner of a young 
 man still impressed by his own acquaintance 
 with the conventionally-acknowledged " masters 
 of English literature." For example, he was 
 capable of saying (of Mutimer) " English liter- 
 ature was to him a sealed volume ; poetry he 
 scarcely knew by name " ; or, of Maud Enderby's 
 exploits with Rossetti's poems, " These gave her 
 much help in restoring her mind to quietness." 
 And it was not alone in the early books that 
 this curious stiltedness arose ; for in Ryecroft 
 he could still allude to Johnson in a phrase 
 that is common to every literary hack — " that 
 
 183
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 rugged old master of common sense ! " Nothing 
 could be more terrifying to the book-lover who 
 takes English literature as he finds it. 
 
 vi 
 It would not have been worth while to refer 
 to these lapses if they did not indicate a failure 
 in Gissing's sense of humour. I have suggested 
 that his humorous books are not truly very 
 cheery ; but indeed Gissing's laughter (which I 
 take to be a different thing from sense of 
 humour) is often — as he said — " from the throat 
 rather than the midriff." There are most curious 
 jokes in his books, accompanied by loud laughter 
 on the part of the jokers, which do not seem 
 quite to justify them.selves in print. Absurdities 
 always provoked him to mirth — ineptitudes of 
 phrase or expression moved in him a similar 
 sense of antic merriment to the sense of little 
 boys watching a concealed slide. For instance, 
 in Bom in Exile, one of the characters has not 
 "met with anything more irresistible" than Hugh 
 Miller's discussion of Noah's collection of animals 
 in the ark. When Miller says insects could only 
 have been gathered together "at enormous ex- 
 penseof miracle," laughter isprovoked to a degree. 
 The phrase is, of course, sufficiently absurd ; but 
 surely it was almost indecent to excavate it? 
 Similarly, in all good faith, we are shown a 
 
 184
 
 THE WRITER 
 
 character in Our Friend the Charlatan, who is 
 extraordinarily amused at two advertisements 
 — one saying that sixty thousand bullocks are 
 annually slaughtered for a certain beef tea, the 
 other that every minute of the day so many 
 of somebody's pills "reach their destination." 
 Moreover, Henry Ryecroft enjoys a hearty laugh 
 because certain steamboats were advertised as 
 "replete with lavatories and a ladies' saloon." 
 These things are not really the best jokes that 
 could appear in any books ; and they seem to 
 show an unhappy failure to see that a joke good 
 enough for telling, among others, to a single 
 companion, is not necessarily good in print. 
 Laughter at them implies satiric censure, a re- 
 coil upon one's sense of superiority, and, as 
 such, is not genuine laughter at all. Laughter, 
 to be pure, must be self-forgetful, and this 
 laughter is merely self-complacent ridicule of 
 stupidity. In the same way, all Gissing's 
 travesties of clergymen, from the one in Workers 
 in the Daivn to Mr. Vialls, in Denzil Quarrier, 
 whose satisfied narrow-mindedness is heavily 
 satirised, are not amusing. They demand that 
 we should laugh contemptuously. 
 
 When Gissing wishes to show one of his 
 amiable characters in a humorous mood, he 
 adopts the obsolete method of the late Sir 
 W. S. Gilbert. Gilbert, who got much enjoy- 
 
 185
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 ment from such a phrase as " a living gangUon 
 of irreconcilable antagonisms," or " I can trace 
 my descent from a protoplasmic primordial 
 atomic globule," and other similar phrases, 
 would have recognised the pleasure that Gissing 
 felt when he made his heroes talk in heightened 
 language, in the substitution of longer words 
 for those in common use. Instead of saying 
 " Say when you're hungry," they observe 
 inanely " Tell me when hunger overcomes 
 you." Here again the defect is similar. Just 
 as a humorous thing written in a novel would 
 be pallid if said on the stage, so a certain 
 degree of exuberance must enliven a speech 
 printed. As the demand of the stage is to the 
 written word, so is the demand of the written 
 word to the word exchanged in pleasant talk. 
 Gissing had quite enough humour to be a good 
 and genial friend and companion ; but his 
 humour was not strong enough to bear the 
 test of print — particularly, and this is important, 
 when the reader's laughter is expressly de- 
 manded. Gissing would have been the first 
 to feel discomfort if he had been 'prepared for 
 a joke, than which preparation few things are 
 more disastrous. Yet he over and over again 
 tries to force his joke home by an introductory 
 commendation. Is it any wonder that the 
 reader is repelled ? In humour as in pathos 
 
 186
 
 THE WRITER 
 
 any lack of spontaneity creates a feeling of in- 
 tolerable confusion ; and while Gissing's pathos 
 is almost always written from his heart, his 
 laughter is never the rich merriment of a 
 happy man. 
 
 vu 
 
 On the other hand, a strong sense of humour, 
 which involves the power to see oneself in 
 relation to the world, instead of seeing the 
 world in relation to oneself, would have been 
 invaluable to Gissing. He could certainly 
 appreciate humour, if it was sufficiently ridiculous 
 in its manifestation, and we have good evidence 
 of his being naturally jocular in familiar talk. 
 Of sense of humour he had practically none. 
 Otherwise, he could never have permitted him- 
 self some of the expressions that fall in the 
 course of the books. " Fanny, sweet blossom I" 
 " To use a coarse but expressive word, he was a 
 hopeless blackguard," "The chances are that 
 you have neither understanding nor sympathy 
 for men such as Edwin Reardon and Harold 
 Biffen. They merely provoke you. They seem 
 to you. . . . But try to imagine a personality. . . ." 
 " Let us employ negative terms in speaking of 
 this pair," and so on. All these are self-conscious 
 in a bad and unhumorous fashion. The self- 
 consciousness of the artist is an alertness, a 
 
 187
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 consciousness of his own risk of being misunder- 
 stood, an acknowledgment of his own short- 
 comings as clear-sighted and terrible as that 
 which he makes of the shortcomings of other 
 people. It is never connected with gaucherie 
 or constraint. And Gissing, owing to his 
 temperament, was often constrained : one feels 
 him moving stiltedly like a shy man under 
 observation. A sense of the eternal contradic- 
 tions of life made him indignant : it did not sink 
 into his being and beget a true detachment. 
 He had to be content with a strange objectivity 
 which he transcended in his moments of true 
 perception. When it came to his best work 
 he was never bounded by such a theory of art 
 as the one expressed in Isabel Clarendon. 
 
 He who is giving these chapters of her history may 
 not pretend to do much more than exhibit facts and 
 draw at times justifiable inference. He is not a creator 
 of human beings, with eyes to behold the very heart of 
 the machine he has himself pieced together; merely one 
 who takes trouble to trace certain lines of human ex- 
 perience, and, working here on grounds of knowledge, 
 there by aid of analogy, here again in the way of colder 
 speculation, spins his tale with what skill he may till the 
 threads are used up. 
 
 That is the method of the historian. The 
 novehst's business is the exploration of human 
 nature. It is essential that he should know 
 more than he tells, that his story should be based 
 
 188
 
 THE WRITER 
 
 on the assumption that nothing is hid from him. 
 In the degree to which he imposes his own 
 understanding upon the reader is he successful. 
 But a pretence that he is simply a recorder is a 
 barren pretence. It means that he has not 
 imagined the characters, but that he has pieced 
 them together. The novelist is one who makes 
 the springs of human action his incessant study ; 
 by intuition, by many means, he learns more 
 of his characters than the reader knows. To 
 pretend that he cannot explain their actions 
 is to profess incompetence. It is this habit of 
 building or evolving his characters that robs 
 some of Gissing's work of genuine importance. 
 Too often he takes a few scraps of observation 
 or intelligent construction, and presents the 
 reader with his work under the impression that 
 objectivity is the sum of art. Objectivity is 
 simply a part of the novelist's technical method : 
 alone, it makes puppets : only allied with true 
 understandhig — with a subjective imaginative 
 method of creation — has objectivity any value. 
 Most inferior novelists never realise their char- 
 acters at all. In the sense that they see them 
 only from the outside they are using the objective 
 method. Gissing was, at his best, far from the 
 objective method. It was when he was frankly 
 and eagerly personal and partisan that he 
 achieved success. The only exception to this 
 
 189
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 was his remarkable book Eves Ransom, where 
 he reached a point of detachment never elsewhere 
 attained. That is what I meant by speaking 
 earlier of his unfortunate technical method. 
 It is only when a writer is completely confident, 
 knotting that he is right, that he creates con- 
 fidence in the reader. Gissing, when he was 
 really successful, did not question his own 
 knowledge : having a supreme consciousness of 
 his own power, he wrote from that consciousness. 
 Elsewhere, his work had no considerable imagina- 
 tive value. It always proved what he calls 
 "good brains and infinite labour," but it was 
 shackled by his habits. He was often intent 
 upon proving something ; he sometimes moral- 
 ised, and too frequently drew forth from a 
 single action a disquisition of little significance 
 to the case in point. Like his own Mallard, 
 he was "a curious instance of the puritan 
 conscience surviving in a man whose intellect 
 is liberated." Conscientiousness was the note of 
 his artistic character, no less than of the char- 
 acter of Mallard. The books are full of steady 
 and sincere work. Only when they were written 
 with joy (which does not signify gaiety) were 
 they of original value. 
 
 But when we pass in review the work of a 
 man like Gissing we cannot fail to take into 
 account the conditions in which it was written. 
 
 190
 
 THE WRITER 
 
 1 have purposely refrained from emphasising 
 this point in the present book because there is 
 no need for me to be an apologist. Apologists 
 in plenty have been found in the past for Gissing, 
 who have been led to suggest that we ought 
 to deal very leniently with his work because he 
 suffered. His sufferings can only affect con- 
 temporary judgments. The importance or un- 
 importance of his work as literature or as art is 
 something quite apart from his sufferings. If 
 all men who suffered had their apologists we 
 should have the whole of English literature 
 more choked with piously preserved lumber 
 than it is at present. And of course Gissing's 
 best work is quite good enough to stand the 
 test of art. We may say, and obviously it is 
 true, that nobody who has not suffered extreme 
 temperamental discomforts can understand the 
 horrors of producing literary work in such cir- 
 cumstances as Gissing was compelled to support. 
 But the fact that he continued to produce 
 literary work is a proof that it was his chosen 
 occupation, and in the end he was justified by 
 the fame that was his in the last years of his 
 life. Many young novelists (as a library list 
 will show) produce one or two books and relapse 
 into silence. They continue their clerking, or 
 whatever daily drudgery may be their means 
 of livelihood. Gissing could have done the like 
 
 191
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 if a tremendous belief in his own talent had not 
 upheld him. The fruit of that belief is before 
 us. If it is good, as I believe some of it is, 
 the question of the travail behind its production 
 can interest only the biographer. The critic's 
 business is to assay the work, not at all to 
 inquire into the conditions of the author's Hfe. 
 We have no need to inflate an author's talent 
 after he is dead : before his death, by all means 
 let us exalt the good, because we know that the 
 bad will exalt itself. 
 
 That is the reason that the present book has 
 sought to value Gissing's books without refer- 
 ence to the author's material prosperity. In the 
 sense that the books are crowded with the 
 author's dislikes of the lower classes, of poverty, 
 of narrowness, dogma, insincerity, they must be 
 studied as revelations of personality. Not every 
 poor novelist, however, tells as much of his 
 poverty, or rates it so important, as Gissing. 
 We know now that he suffered, and we know 
 that he was as much at the mercy of his tem- 
 perament as any other artist. He could not be 
 unmoved by starvation or by base surroundings, 
 although other, less personal, artists have re- 
 vealed nothing of their own condition of life 
 through their books. That Gissing saw hfe 
 through his own poverty and discomfort is just 
 as much a blemish upon his literary character as 
 
 192
 
 THE WRITER 
 
 is the preposterous snobbery of L. E. L. upon 
 the Uterary character of Miss Landon. His 
 strength Hes in another direction altogether. It 
 lies primarily in the judgment he displayed in 
 his analyses of situation, in his portraits of 
 women, and in his resolute defiance of low 
 standards of work. He lies between the Vic- 
 torians and the present day, secure of a certain 
 meagre attention from the pubhc, secure of the 
 respect of all who can appreciate the mental 
 o' ilities of a novelist. That should be a suffi- 
 cient fame for one who was not driven into 
 novel-writing by the irresistible impulse of his 
 own nature. We may grant Gissing many 
 minor qualities as a novelist, in addition to those 
 major ones just detailed ; but the fact remains 
 unassailable that for a novelist who is afraid of 
 the world, who possesses none of that marvelling 
 ardour which alone makes the great creative 
 artist, he has received since his death as hand- 
 some treatment as could be desired. Certain 
 books of his will always be resid—Thyrza, New 
 Gimb Street, The Odd Women, Born in Exile, 
 and Eve's Ransom seem to me the best of them — 
 with all the respect and admiration that is their 
 due. Of the highest kind of vivid imagining, 
 of the deepest emotional understanding, of the 
 sure, steady, unwavering knowledge of life they 
 cannot be said to show proof. They remain 
 N 193
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 serious, intelligent novels, marked with fine 
 qualities. In Thyj'za there is much more fer- 
 vour than in the others ; in New G-rub Street 
 there is a more comprehensive knowledge of the 
 life described. The others have distinguished 
 merits. But do not let us pity Gissing : let us 
 select what is worthy of sincere admiration, and 
 let the rest die. Gissing himself would surely 
 have desired this, for he was a critic and a man 
 of letters. The fact that he was broken in 
 health sufficiently accounts for the self-pity 
 revealed in some of the early and some of the 
 late books. We shall do him more honour if 
 we disregard it than if we try to exalt it into 
 a vii'tue. 
 
 There could be nothing more sincerely pitiful 
 than the underlying truth of something Gissing 
 wrote of himself in Henry Ryecroft, It may 
 perhaps fittingly be quoted here on the last page 
 of the present study : — 
 
 I had in me the making of a scholar. With leisure 
 and tranquillity of mind, I should have amassed learning. 
 Within the walls of a college, I should have lived so 
 happily, so harmlessly, my imagination ever busy with 
 the old world. . . . Through all my battlings and miseries 
 I have always lived more in the past than in the present. 
 
 194
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Workers in the Danm. 3 vols. 1880. 
 
 The Unclassed. 3 vols., 1884 ; 1 vol., 1895. 
 
 Isabel Clarendon. 2 vols. 1886. 
 
 Demos. 3 vols, (by G. R. G.), 1886 ; 1 vol., 1888. 
 
 ^\i/rza. 3 vols., 1887 ; 1 vol., 1889. 
 
 i Life's Morning. 3 vols., 1888 ; 1 vol., 1891. 
 
 The Nether World. 3 vols., 1889 ; 1 vol., 1889. 
 
 The Emancipated. 3 vols., 1890 ; 1 vol., 1893. 
 
 New Gnib Street. 3 vols., 1891 ; 1 vol , 1891. 
 
 Denzil Quarrier. 1 vol. 1892. 
 
 Born in Exile. 3 vols., 1892 ; 1 vol., 1893. 
 
 The Odd Women. 3 vols., 1893 ; 1 vol., 1894. 
 
 In the Year of Jubilee. 3 vols , 1894 ; 1 vol., 1895. 
 
 Eve''s Ransom. 1 vol. ] 895. 
 
 The Paying Guest. 1 vol. 1895. 
 
 Sleeping Fires. 1 vol. 1895. 
 
 The Whirlpool. 1 vol. 1897. 
 
 HxLman Odds and Ends. 1 vol. 1898. 
 
 Charles Dickens : A Critical Study. 1 vol. 1898; 
 
 revised edition, 1902. 
 The Town Traveller. 1 vol. 1898. 
 The Croivn of Life. 1vol. 1899. 
 Introductions to the Rochester Dickens. 1900, etc. 
 Our Friend the Charlatan. 1vol. 1901. 
 By the Ionian Sea. 1 vol., 4to., 1901 ; 1 vol., cr. 8vo., 
 
 1905. 
 
 197
 
 / 
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 Dickens in Memory. In New York " Critic," Jan., 1902 ; 
 
 Abridgement of Forster's Dickens. 1 vol. 1902. 
 
 The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. 1 vol., 1903 ; 
 
 pocket edition, 1 vol., 1905. 
 Veranilda (with introduction by Frederic Harrison). 
 
 1 vol. ]904. 
 Will Warhurton. 1 vol. 1905 
 The House of Cohioehs (with introduction by Thomas 
 
 Seccombe). 1 vol. 1906. 
 Dickens (in " Homes and Haunts of Famous Authors ""). 
 
 1906. 
 
 A very full list of essays, articles, etc., on Gissing is 
 given by Mr. Thomas Seccombe in his introduction to 
 The House of Cohoebs. The most important essays are 
 the following: "Monthly Review" (by H. G. Wells), 
 August, 1904; "Nineteenth Century" (by Austin Har- 
 rison), September, 1906 ; " Gentleman's Magazine " 
 (Anon.), February, 1906 ; " Owens College Union Maga- 
 zine" (by A. S. Wilkins), January, 1904; "Literature" 
 (by Morley Roberts), July 20, 1901 ; "Athenaeum" (by 
 C. F. Keary), January 16, 1904; New York "Nation" 
 (Anon.), June 11, 1903; "Times" (Anon.), January 11, 
 1912. An essay on Gissing is included in Mr. Arnold 
 Bennett's "Fame and Fiction," 1901. 
 
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