of blindness towards his fellow-men, so that he never entirely grasped
the spirit of everyday life, so that he, who was so copiously
intelligent in the things of the study, misunderstood, blundered, was
nervously diffident, and wilful and spasmodic in common affairs, in
employment and buying and selling, and the normal conflicts of
intercourse. He did not know what would offend, and he did not know
what would please. He irritated others and thwarted himself. He had no
social nerve.'

Does not Gissing himself sum it up admirably, upon the lips of Mr.
Widdowson in _The Odd Women_: 'Life has always been full of worrying
problems for me. I can't take things in the simple way that comes natural
to other men.' 'Not as other men are': more intellectual than most, fully
as responsive to kind and genial instincts, yet bound at every turn to
pinch and screw--an involuntary ascetic. Such is the essential burden of
Gissing's long-drawn lament. Only accidentally can it be described as his
mission to preach 'the desolation of modern life,' or in the gracious
phrase of De Goncourt, _fouiller les entrailles de la vie_. Of the
confident, self-supporting realism of _Esther Waters_, for instance, how
little is there in any of his work, even in that most gloomily photographic
portion of it which we are now to describe?

During the next four years, 1889-1892, Gissing produced four novels, and
three of these perhaps are his best efforts in prose fiction. _The Nether
World_ of 1889 is certainly in some respects his strongest work, _la letra
con sangre_, in which the ruddy drops of anguish remembered in a state of
comparative tranquillity are most powerfully expressed. _The Emancipated_,
of 1890, is with equal certainty, a _réchauffé_ and the least successful of
various attempts to give utterance to his enthusiasm for the _valor
antica_--'the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.' _New
Grub Street_, (1891) is the most constructive and perhaps the most
successful of all his works; while _Born in Exile_ (1892) is a key-book as
regards the development of the author's character, a _clavis_ of primary
value to his future biographer, whoever he may be. The _Nether World_
contains Gissing's most convincing indictment of Poverty; and it also
expresses his sense of revolt against the ugliness and cruelty which is
propagated like a foul weed by the barbarous life of our reeking slums.
Hunger and Want show Religion and Virtue the door with scant politeness in
this terrible book. The material had been in his possession for some time,
and in part it had been used before in earlier work. It was now utilised
with a masterly hand, and the result goes some way, perhaps, to justify the
well-meant but erratic comparisons that have been made between Gissing and
such writers as Zola, Maupassant and the projector of the _Comédie
Humaine_. The savage luck which dogs Kirkwood and Jane, and the worse than
savage--the inhuman--cruelty of Clem Peckover, who has been compared to the
Madame Cibot of Balzac's _Le Cousin Pons_, render the book an intensely
gloomy one; it ends on a note of poignant misery, which gives a certain
colour for once to the oft-repeated charge of morbidity and pessimism.
Gissing understood the theory of compensation, but was unable to exhibit it
in action. He elevates the cult of refinement to such a pitch that the
consolations of temperament, of habit, and of humdrum ideals which are
common to the coarsest of mankind, appear to elude his observation. He does
not represent men as worse than they are; but he represents them less
brave. No social stratum is probably quite so dull as he colours it. There
is usually a streak of illusion or a flash of hope somewhere on the
horizon. Hence a somewhat one-sided view of life, perfectly true as
representing the grievance of the poet Cinna in the hands of the mob, but
too severely monochrome for a serious indictment of a huge stratum of our
common humanity. As in _Thyrza_, the sombreness of the ground generates
some magnificent pieces of descriptive writing.

'Hours yet before the fireworks begin. Never mind; here by good
luck we find seats where we can watch the throng passing and
repassing. It is a great review of the people. On the whole, how
respectable they are, how sober, how deadly dull! See how worn-out the
poor girls are becoming, how they gape, what listless eyes most of
them have! The stoop in the shoulders so universal among them merely
means over-toil in the workroom. Not one in a thousand shows the
elements of taste in dress; vulgarity and worse glares in all but
every costume. Observe the middle-aged women; it would be small
surprise that their good looks had vanished, but whence comes it they
are animal, repulsive, absolutely vicious in ugliness? Mark the men in
their turn; four in every six have visages so deformed by ill-health
that they excite disgust; their hair is cut down to within half an
inch of the scalp; their legs are twisted out of shape by evil
conditions of life from birth upwards. Whenever a youth and a girl
come along arm-in-arm, how flagrantly shows the man's coarseness! They
are pretty, so many of these girls, delicate of feature, graceful did
but their slavery allow them natural development; and the heart sinks
as one sees them side by side with the men who are to be their
husbands....

On the terraces dancing has commenced; the players of violins,
concertinas, and penny whistles do a brisk trade among the groups
eager for a rough-and-tumble valse; so do the pickpockets. Vigorous
and varied is the jollity that occupies the external galleries,
filling now in expectation of the fireworks; indescribable the mingled
tumult that roars heavenwards. Girls linked by the half-dozen
arm-in-arm leap along with shrieks like grotesque maenads; a rougher
horseplay finds favour among the youths, occasionally leading to
fisticuffs. Thick voices bellow in fragmentary chorus; from every side
comes the yell, the cat-call, the ear-rending whistle; and as the
bass, the never-ceasing accompaniment, sounds the myriad-footed tramp,
tramp along the wooden flooring. A fight, a scene of bestial
drunkenness, a tender whispering between two lovers, proceed
concurrently in a space of five square yards. Above them glimmers the
dawn of starlight.'--(pp. 109-11.)

From the delineation of this profoundly depressing milieu, by the aid of
which, if the fate of London and Liverpool were to-morrow as that of
Herculaneum and Pompeii, we should be able to reconstruct the gutters of
our Imperial cities (little changed in essentials since the days of
Domitian), Gissing turned his sketch-book to the scenery of rural England.
He makes no attempt at the rich colouring of Kingsley or Blackmore, but, as
page after page of _Ryecroft_ testifies twelve years later, he is a perfect
master of the _aquarelle_.

'The distance is about five miles, and, until Danbury Hill is reached,
the countryside has no point of interest to distinguish it from any
other representative bit of rural Essex. It is merely one of those
quiet corners of flat, homely England, where man and beast seem on
good terms with each other, where all green things grow in abundance,
where from of old tilth and pasture-land are humbly observant of
seasons and alternations, where the brown roads are familiar only with
the tread of the labourer, with the light wheel of the farmer's gig,
or the rumbling of the solid wain. By the roadside you pass
occasionally a mantled pool, where perchance ducks or geese are
enjoying themselves; and at times there is a pleasant glimpse of
farmyard, with stacks and barns and stables. All things as simple as
could be, but beautiful on this summer afternoon, and priceless when
one has come forth from the streets of Clerkenwell.

*       *       *       *       *

'Danbury Hill, rising thick-wooded to the village church, which is
visible for miles around, with stretches of heath about its lower
slopes, with its far prospects over the sunny country, was the
pleasant end of a pleasant drive.'--(_The Nether World_, pp.
164-165.)

The first part of this description is quite masterly--worthy, I am inclined
to say, of Flaubert. But unless you are familiar with the quiet,
undemonstrative nature of the scenery described, you can hardly estimate
the perfect justice of the sentiment and phrasing with which Gissing
succeeds in enveloping it.

Gissing now turned to the submerged tenth of literature, and in describing
it he managed to combine a problem or thesis with just the amount of
characterisation and plotting sanctioned by the novel convention of the
day. The convention may have been better than we think, for _New Grub
Street_ is certainly its author's most effective work. The characters are
numerous, actual, and alive. The plot is moderately good, and lingers in
the memory with some obstinacy. The problem is more open to criticism, and
it has indeed been criticised from more points of view than one.

'In _New Grub Street_,' says one of his critics,[13] 'Mr. Gissing
has endeavoured to depict the shady side of literary life in an age
dominated by the commercial spirit. On the whole, it is in its realism
perhaps the least convincing of his novels, whilst being undeniably
the most depressing. It is not that Gissing's picture of poverty in
the literary profession is wanting in the elements of truth, although
even in that profession there is even more eccentricity than the
author leads us to suppose in the social position and evil plight of
such men as Edwin Reardon and Harold Biffen. But the contrast between
Edwin Reardon, the conscientious artist loving his art and working for
its sake, and Jasper Milvain, the man of letters, who prospers simply
because he is also a man of business, which is the main feature of the
book and the principal support of its theme, strikes one throughout as
strained to the point of unreality. In the first place, it seems
almost impossible that a man of Milvain's mind and instincts should
have deliberately chosen literature as the occupation of his life;
with money and success as his only aim he would surely have become a
stockbroker or a moneylender. In the second place, Edwin Reardon's
dire failure, with his rapid descent into extreme poverty, is clearly
traceable not so much to a truly artistic temperament in conflict with
the commercial spirit, as to mental and moral weakness, which could
not but have a baneful influence upon his work.'

[Footnote 13: F. Dolman in _National Review_, vol. xxx.; cf. _ibid_., vol.
xliv.]

This criticism does not seem to me a just one at all, and I dissent from it
completely. In the first place, the book is not nearly so depressing as
_The Nether World_, and is much farther removed from the strain of French
and Russian pessimism which had begun to engage the author's study when he
was writing _Thyrza_. There are dozens of examples to prove that Milvain's
success is a perfectly normal process, and the reason for his selecting the
journalistic career is the obvious one that he has no money to begin
stock-broking, still less money-lending. In the third place, the mental and
moral shortcomings of Reardon are by no means dissembled by the author. He
is, as the careful student of the novels will perceive, a greatly
strengthened and improved rifacimento of Kingcote, while Amy Reardon is a
better observed Isabel, regarded from a slightly different point of view.
Jasper Milvain is, to my thinking, a perfectly fair portrait of an
ambitious publicist or journalist of the day--destined by determination,
skill, energy, and social ambition to become an editor of a successful
journal or review, and to lead the life of central London. Possessing a
keen and active mind, expression on paper is his handle; he has no love of
letters as letters at all. But his outlook upon the situation is just
enough. Reardon has barely any outlook at all. He is a man with a delicate
but shallow vein of literary capacity, who never did more than tremble upon
the verge of success, and hardly, if at all, went beyond promise. He was
unlucky in marrying Amy, a rather heartless woman, whose ambition was far
in excess of her insight, for economic position Reardon had none. He writes
books to please a small group. The books fail to please. Jasper in the main
is right--there is only a precarious place for any creative litterateur
between the genius and the swarm of ephemera or journalists. A man writes
either to please the hour or to produce something to last, relatively a
long time, several generations--what we call 'permanent.' The intermediate
position is necessarily insecure. It is not really wanted. What is lost by
society when one of these mediocre masterpieces is overlooked? A sensation,
a single ray in a sunset, missed by a small literary coterie! The circle is
perhaps eclectic. It may seem hard that good work is overwhelmed in the
cataract of production, while relatively bad, garish work is rewarded. But
so it must be. 'The growing flood of literature swamps every thing but
works of primary genius.' Good taste is valuable, especially when it takes
the form of good criticism. The best critics of contemporary books (and
these are by no means identical with the best critics of the past and its
work) are those who settle intuitively upon the writing that is going to
appeal more largely to a future generation, when the attraction of novelty
and topicality has subsided. The same work is done by great men. They
anticipate lines of action; philosophers generally follow (Machiavelli's
theories the practice of Louis XI., Nietzsche's that of Napoleon I.). The
critic recognises the tentative steps of genius in letters. The work of
fine delicacy and reserve, the work that follows, lacking the real
originality, is liable to neglect, and _may_ become the victim of ill-luck,
unfair influence, or other extraneous factors. Yet on the whole, so
numerous are the publics of to-day, there never, perhaps, was a time when
supreme genius or even supreme talent was so sure of recognition. Those who
rail against these conditions, as Gissing seems here to have done, are
actuated consciously or unconsciously by a personal or sectional
disappointment. It is akin to the crocodile lament of the publisher that
good modern literature is neglected by the public, or the impressionist's
lament about the great unpaid greatness of the great unknown--the
exclusively literary view of literary rewards. Literature must be governed
by over-mastering impulse or directed at profit.

But _New Grub Street_ is rich in memorable characters and situations to an
extent unusual in Gissing; Biffen in his garret--a piece of genre almost
worthy of Dickens; Reardon the sterile plotter, listening in despair to the
neighbouring workhouse clock of St. Mary-le-bone; the matutinal interview
between Alfred Yule and the threadbare surgeon, a vignette worthy of
Smollett. Alfred Yule, the worn-out veteran, whose literary ideals are
those of the eighteenth century, is a most extraordinary study of an
_arriéré_--certainly one of the most crusted and individual personalities
Gissing ever portrayed. He never wrote with such a virile pen: phrase after
phrase bites and snaps with a singular crispness and energy; material used
before is now brought to a finer literary issue. It is by far the most
tenacious of Gissing's novels. It shows that on the more conventional lines
of fictitious intrigue, acting as cement, and in the interplay of
emphasised characters, Gissing could, if he liked, excel. (It recalls
Anatole France's _Le Lys Rouge_, showing that he, too, the scholar and
intellectual _par excellence_, could an he would produce patterns in plain
and fancy adultery with the best.) Whelpdale's adventures in Troy, U.S.A.,
where he lived for five days on pea-nuts, are evidently
semi-autobiographical. It is in his narrative that we first made the
acquaintance of the American phrase now so familiar about literary
productions going off like hot cakes. The reminiscences of Athens are
typical of a lifelong obsession--to find an outlet later on in _Veranilda_.
On literary _réclame_, he says much that is true--if not the whole truth,
in the apophthegm for instance, 'You have to become famous before you can
secure the attention which would give fame.' Biffen, it is true, is a
somewhat fantastic figure of an idealist, but Gissing cherished this
grotesque exfoliation from a headline by Dickens--and later in his career
we shall find him reproducing one of Biffen's ideals with a singular
fidelity.

'Picture a woman of middle age, wrapped at all times in dirty rags
(not to be called clothing), obese, grimy, with dishevelled black
hair, and hands so scarred, so deformed by labour and neglect, as to
be scarcely human. She had the darkest and fiercest eyes I ever saw.
Between her and her mistress went on an unceasing quarrel; they
quarrelled in my room, in the corridor, and, as I knew by their shrill
voices, in places remote; yet I am sure they did not dislike each
other, and probably neither of them ever thought of parting.
Unexpectedly, one evening, this woman entered, stood by the bedside,
and began to talk with such fierce energy, with such flashing of her
black eyes, and such distortion of her features, that I could only
suppose that she was attacking me for the trouble I caused her. A
minute or two passed before I could even hit the drift of her furious
speech; she was always the most difficult of the natives to
understand, and in rage she became quite unintelligible. Little by
little, by dint of questioning, I got at what she meant. There had
been _guai_, worse than usual; the mistress had reviled her
unendurably for some fault or other, and was it not hard that she
should be used like this after having _tanto, tanto lavorato_! In
fact, she was appealing for my sympathy, not abusing me at all. When
she went on to say that she was alone in the world, that all her kith
and kin were _freddi morti_ (stone dead), a pathos in her aspect
and her words took hold upon me; it was much as if some heavy-laden
beast of burden had suddenly found tongue and protested in the rude
beginnings of articulate utterance against its hard lot. If only we
could have learnt in intimate detail the life of this domestic
serf[14]! How interesting and how sordidly picturesque against the
background of romantic landscape, of scenic history! I looked long
into her sallow, wrinkled face, trying to imagine the thoughts that
ruled its expression. In some measure my efforts at kindly speech
succeeded, and her "Ah, Cristo!" as she turned to go away, was not
without a touch of solace.'

[Footnote 14: Here is a more fully prepared expression of the very essence
of Biffen's artistic ideal.--_By the Ionian Sea_, chap. x.]

In 1892 Gissing was already beginning to try and discard his down look, his
lugubrious self-pity, his lamentable cadence. He found some alleviation
from self-torment in _David Copperfield_, and he determined to borrow a
feather from 'the master's' pinion--in other words, to place an
autobiographical novel to his credit. The result was _Born in Exile_
(1892), one of the last of the three-volume novels,--by no means one of the
worst. A Hedonist of academic type, repelled by a vulgar intonation,
Gissing himself is manifestly the man in exile. Travel, fair women and
college life, the Savile club, and Great Malvern or the Cornish coast,
music in Paris or Vienna--this of course was the natural milieu for such a
man. Instead of which our poor scholar (with Homer and Shakespeare and
Pausanias piled upon his one small deal table) had to encounter the life of
the shabby recluse in London lodgings--synonymous for him, as passage after
passage in his books recounts, with incompetence and vulgarity in every
form, at best 'an ailing lachrymose slut incapable of effort,' more often
sheer foulness and dishonesty, 'by lying, slandering, quarrelling, by
drunkenness, by brutal vice, by all abominations that distinguish the
lodging-letter of the metropolis.' No book exhibits more naïvely the
extravagant value which Gissing put upon the mere externals of refinement.
The following scathing vignette of his unrefined younger brother by the
hero, Godfrey Peak, shows the ferocity with which this feeling could
manifest itself against a human being who lacked the elements of scholastic
learning (the brother in question had failed to give the date of the Norman
Conquest):--

'He saw much company and all of low intellectual order; he had
purchased a bicycle and regarded it as a source of distinction, or
means of displaying himself before shopkeepers' daughters; he believed
himself a moderate tenor and sang verses of sentimental imbecility; he
took in several weekly papers of unpromising title for the chief
purpose of deciphering cryptograms, in which pursuit he had singular
success. Add to these characteristics a penchant for cheap jewellery,
and Oliver Peak stands confessed.'

The story of the book is revealed in Peak's laconic ambition, 'A plebeian,
I aim at marrying a lady.' It is a little curious, some may think, that
this motive so skilfully used by so many novelists to whose work Gissing's
has affinity, from Rousseau and Stendhal (_Rouge et Noire_) to Cherbuliez
(_Secret du Précepteur_) and Bourget (_Le Disciple_), had not already
attracted him, but the explanation is perhaps in part indicated in a finely
written story towards the close of this present volume.[15] The white,
maidenish and silk-haired fairness of Sidwell, and Peak's irresistible
passion for the type of beauty suggested, is revealed to us with all
Gissing's wonderful skill in shadowing forth feminine types of lovelihood.
Suggestive too of his oncoming passion for Devonshire and Western England
are strains of exquisite landscape music scattered at random through these
pages. More significant still, however, is the developing faculty for
personal satire, pointing to a vastly riper human experience. Peak was
uncertain, says the author, with that faint ironical touch which became
almost habitual to him, 'as to the limits of modern latitudinarianism until
he met Chilvers,' the sleek, clerical advocate of 'Less St. Paul and more
Darwin, less of Luther and more of Herbert Spencer':--

'The discovery of such fantastic liberality in a man whom he could not
but dislike and contemn gave him no pleasure, but at least it disposed
him to amusement rather than antagonism. Chilvers's pronunciation and
phraseology were distinguished by such original affectation that it
was impossible not to find entertainment in listening to him. Though
his voice was naturally shrill and piping, he managed to speak in head
notes which had a ring of robust utterance. The sound of his words was
intended to correspond with their virile warmth of meaning. In the
same way he had cultivated a habit of the muscles which conveyed an
impression that he was devoted to athletic sports. His arms
occasionally swung as if brandishing dumb-bells, his chest now and
then spread itself to the uttermost, and his head was often thrown
back in an attitude suggesting self-defence.'

[Footnote 15: See page 260.]

Of Gissing's first year or so at Owens, after leaving Lindow Grove School
at Alderley,[16] we get a few hints in these pages. Like his 'lonely
cerebrate' hero, Gissing himself, at school and college, 'worked insanely.'
Walked much alone, shunned companionship rather than sought it, worked as
he walked, and was marked down as a 'pot-hunter.' He 'worked while he ate,
he cut down his sleep, and for him the penalty came, not in a palpable,
definable illness, but in an abrupt, incongruous reaction and collapse.'
With rage he looked back on these insensate years of study which had
weakened him just when he should have been carefully fortifying his
constitution.

[Footnote 16: With an exhibition gained when he was not yet fifteen.]

The year of this autobiographical record[17] marked the commencement of
Gissing's reclamation from that worst form of literary slavery--the
chain-gang. For he had been virtually chained to the desk, perpetually
working, imprisoned in a London lodging, owing to the literal lack of the
means of locomotion.[18] His most strenuous work, wrung from him in dismal
darkness and wrestling of spirit, was now achieved. Yet it seems to me both
ungrateful and unfair to say, as has frequently been done, that his
subsequent work was consistently inferior. In his earlier years, like
Reardon, he had destroyed whole books--books he had to sit down to when his
imagination was tired and his fancy suffering from deadly fatigue. His
corrections in the days of _New Grub Street_ provoked not infrequent,
though anxiously deprecated, remonstrance from his publisher's reader. Now
he wrote with more assurance and less exhaustive care, but also with a
perfected experience. A portion of his material, it is true, had been
fairly used up, and he had henceforth to turn to analyse the sufferings of
well-to-do lower middle-class families, people who had 'neither inherited
refinement nor acquired it, neither proletarian nor gentlefolk, consumed
with a disease of vulgar pretentiousness, inflated with the miasma of
democracy.' Of these classes it is possible that he knew less, and
consequently lacked the sureness of touch and the fresh draughtsmanship
which comes from ample knowledge, and that he had, consequently, to have
increasing resort to books and to invention, to hypothesis and theory.[19]
On the other hand, his power of satirical writing was continually expanding
and developing, and some of his very best prose is contained in four of
these later books: _In the Year of Jubilee_ (1894), _Charles Dickens_
(1898), _By the Ionian Sea_ (1901), and _The Private Papers of Henry
Ryecroft_ (1903); not far below any of which must be rated four others,
_The Odd Women_ (1893), _Eve's Ransom_ (1895), _The Whirlpool_ (1897), and
_Will Warburton_ (1905), to which may be added the two collections of short
stories.

[Footnote 17: Followed in 1897 by _The Whirlpool_ (see p. xvi), and in 1899
and 1903 by two books containing a like infusion of autobiographical
experience, _The Crown of Life_, technically admirable in chosen passages,
but sadly lacking in the freshness of first-hand, and _The Private Papers
of Henry Ryecroft_, one of the rightest and ripest of all his productions.]

[Footnote 18: 'I hardly knew what it was to travel by omnibus. I have
walked London streets for twelve and fifteen hours together without even a
thought of saving my legs or my time, by paying for waftage. Being poor as
poor can be, there were certain things I had to renounce, and this was one
of them.'--_Ryecroft_. For earlier scenes see _Monthly Review_, xvi., and
_Owens College Union Mag_., Jan. 1904, pp. 80-81.]

[Footnote 19: 'He knew the narrowly religious, the mental barrenness of the
poor dissenters, the people of the slums that he observed so carefully, and
many of those on the borders of the Bohemia of which he at least was an
initiate, and he was soaked and stained, as he might himself have said,
with the dull drabs of the lower middle class that he hated. But of those
above he knew little.... He did not know the upper middle classes, which
are as difficult every whit as those beneath them, and take as much time
and labour and experience and observation to learn.'--'The Exile of George
Gissing,' _Albany_, Christmas 1904. In later life he lost sympathy with the
'nether world.' Asked to write a magazine article on a typical 'workman's
budget,' he wrote that he no longer took an interest in the 'condition of
the poor question.']

Few, if any, of Gissing's books exhibit more mental vigour than _In the
Year of Jubilee_. This is shown less, it may be, in his attempted solution
of the marriage problem (is marriage a failure?) by means of the suggestion
that middle class married people should imitate the rich and see as little
of each other as possible, than in the terse and amusing characterisations
and the powerfully thought-out descriptions. The precision which his pen
had acquired is well illustrated by the following description, not unworthy
of Thomas Hardy, of a new neighbourhood.

'Great elms, the pride of generations passed away, fell before the
speculative axe, or were left standing in mournful isolation to please
a speculative architect; bits of wayside hedge still shivered in fog
and wind, amid hoardings variegated with placards and scaffoldings
black against the sky. The very earth had lost its wholesome odour;
trampled into mire, fouled with builders' refuse and the noisome drift
from adjacent streets, it sent forth, under the sooty rain, a smell of
corruption, of all the town's uncleanliness. On this rising locality
had been bestowed the title of "Park." Mrs. Morgan was decided in her
choice of a dwelling here by the euphonious address, Merton Avenue,
Something-or-other Park.'

Zola's wonderful skill in the animation of crowds has often been commented
upon, but it is more than doubtful if he ever achieved anything superior to
Gissing's marvellous incarnation of the jubilee night mob in chapter seven.
More formidable, as illustrating the venom which the author's whole nature
had secreted against a perfectly recognisable type of modern woman, is the
acrid description of Ada, Beatrice, and Fanny French.

'They spoke a peculiar tongue, the product of sham education and a
mock refinement grafted upon a stock of robust vulgarity. One and all
would have been moved to indignant surprise if accused of ignorance or
defective breeding. Ada had frequented an "establishment for young
ladies" up to the close of her seventeenth year: the other two had
pursued culture at a still more pretentious institute until they were
eighteen. All could "play the piano"; all declared--and believed--that
they "knew French." Beatrice had "done" Political Economy; Fanny had
"been through" Inorganic Chemistry and Botany. The truth was, of
course, that their minds, characters, propensities, had remained
absolutely proof against such educational influence as had been
brought to bear upon them. That they used a finer accent than their
servants, signified only that they had grown up amid falsities, and
were enabled, by the help of money, to dwell above-stairs, instead of
with their spiritual kindred below.'

The evils of indiscriminate education and the follies of our grotesque
examination system were one of Gissing's favourite topics of denunciation
in later years, as evidenced in this characteristic passage in his later
manner in this same book:--

'She talked only of the "exam," of her chances in this or that
"paper," of the likelihood that this or that question would be "set."
Her brain was becoming a mere receptacle for dates and definitions,
vocabularies and rules syntactic, for thrice-boiled essence of
history, ragged scraps of science, quotations at fifth hand, and all
the heterogeneous rubbish of a "crammer's" shop. When away from her
books, she carried scraps of paper, with jottings to be committed to
memory. Beside her plate at meals lay formulae and tabulations. She
went to bed with a manual, and got up with a compendium.'

The conclusion of this book and its predecessor, _The Odd Women_,[20] marks
the conclusion of these elaborated problem studies. The inferno of London
poverty, social analysis and autobiographical reminiscence, had now alike
been pretty extensively drawn upon by Gissing. With different degrees of
success he had succeeded in providing every one of his theses with
something in the nature of a jack-in-the-box plot which the public loved
and he despised. There remained to him three alternatives: to experiment
beyond the limits of the novel; to essay a lighter vein of fiction; or
thirdly, to repeat himself and refashion old material within its limits.
Necessity left him very little option. He adopted all three alternatives.
His best success in the third department was achieved in _Eve's Ransom_
(1895). Burrowing back into a projection of himself in relation with a not
impossible she, Gissing here creates a false, fair, and fleeting beauty of
a very palpable charm. A growing sense of her power to fascinate steadily
raises Eve's standard of the minimum of luxury to which she is entitled.
And in the course of this evolution, in the vain attempt to win beauty by
gratitude and humility, the timid Hilliard, who seeks to propitiate his
charmer by ransoming her from a base liaison and supporting her in luxury
for a season in Paris, is thrown off like an old glove when a richer
_parti_ declares himself. The subtlety of the portraiture and the economy
of the author's sympathy for his hero impart a subacid flavour of peculiar
delicacy to the book, which would occupy a high place in the repertoire of
any lesser artist. It well exhibits the conflict between an exaggerated
contempt for, and an extreme susceptibility to, the charm of women which
has cried havoc and let loose the dogs of strife upon so many able men. In
_The Whirlpool_ of 1897, in which he shows us a number of human floats
spinning round the vortex of social London,[21] Gissing brings a
melodramatic plot of a kind disused since the days of _Demos_ to bear upon
the exhausting lives and illusive pleasures of the rich and cultured middle
class. There is some admirable writing in the book, and symptoms of a
change of tone (the old inclination to whine, for instance, is scarcely
perceptible) suggestive of a new era in the work of the
novelist--relatively mature in many respects as he now manifestly was.
Further progress in one of two directions seemed indicated: the first
leading towards the career of a successful society novelist 'of circulating
fame, spirally crescent,' the second towards the frame of mind that created
_Ryecroft_. The second fortunately prevailed. In the meantime, in
accordance with a supreme law of his being, his spirit craved that
refreshment which Gissing found in revisiting Italy. 'I want,' he cried,
'to see the ruins of Rome: I want to see the Tiber, the Clitumnus, the
Aufidus, the Alban Hills, Lake Trasimenus! It is strange how these old
times have taken hold of me. The mere names in Roman history make my blood
warm.' Of him the saying of Michelet was perpetually true: 'J'ai passé à
côté du monde, et j'ai pris l'histoire pour la vie.' His guide-books in
Italy, through which he journeyed in 1897 (_en prince_ as compared with his
former visit, now that his revenue had risen steadily to between three and
four hundred a year), were Gibbon, his _semper eadem_, Lenormant (_la
Grande-Grèce_), and Cassiodorus, of whose epistles, the foundation of the
material of _Veranilda_, he now began to make a special study. The dirt,
the poverty, the rancid oil, and the inequable climate of Calabria must
have been a trial and something of a disappointment to him. But physical
discomfort and even sickness was whelmed by the old and overmastering
enthusiasm, which combined with his hatred of modernity and consumed
Gissing as by fire. The sensuous and the emotional sides of his experience
are blended with the most subtle artistry in his _By the Ionian Sea_, a
short volume of impressions, unsurpassable in its kind, from which we
cannot refrain two characteristic extracts:--

[Footnote 20: _The Odd Women_ (1893, new edition, 1894) is a rather sordid
and depressing survey of the life-histories of certain orphaned daughters
of a typical Gissing doctor--grave, benign, amiably diffident, terribly
afraid of life. 'From the contact of coarse actualities his nature shrank.'
After his death one daughter, a fancy-goods shop assistant (no wages), is
carried off by consumption; a second drowns herself in a bath at a
charitable institution; another takes to drink; and the portraits of the
survivors, their petty, incurable maladies, their utter uselessness, their
round shoulders and 'very short legs,' pimples, and scraggy necks--are as
implacable and unsparing as a Maupassant could wish. From the deplorable
insight with which he describes the nerveless, underfed, compulsory
optimism of these poor in spirit and poor in hope Gissing might almost have
been an 'odd woman' himself. In this book and _The Paying Guest_ (1895) he
seemed to take a savage delight in depicting the small, stiff, isolated,
costly, unsatisfied pretentiousness and plentiful lack of imagination which
cripples suburbia so cruelly.--See _Saturday Review_, 13 Apr. 1896; and see
also _ib_., 19 Jan. 1895.]

[Footnote 21: The whirlpool in which people just nod or shout to each other
as they spin round and round. The heroine tries to escape, but is drawn
back again and again, and nearly submerges her whole environment by her
wild clutches. Satire is lavished upon misdirected education (28), the
sluttishness of London landladies, self-adoring Art on a pedestal (256),
the delegation of children to underlings, sham religiosity (229), the
pampered conscience of a diffident student, and the _mensonge_ of modern
woman (300), typified by the ruddled cast-off of Redgrave, who plays first,
in her shrivelled paint, as procuress, and then, in her naked hideousness,
as blackmailer.]

'At Cotrone the tone of the dining-room was decidedly morose. One
man--he seemed to be a sort of clerk--came only to quarrel. I am
convinced that he ordered things which he knew that the people could
not cook, just for the sake of reviling their handiwork when it was
presented. Therewith he spent incredibly small sums; after growling
and remonstrating and eating for more than an hour, his bill would
amount to seventy or eighty centesimi, wine included. Every day he
threatened to withdraw his custom; every day he sent for the landlady,
pointed out to her how vilely he was treated, and asked how she could
expect him to recommend the Concordia to his acquaintances. On one
occasion I saw him push away a plate of something, plant his elbows on
the table, and hide his face in his hands; thus he sat for ten
minutes, an image of indignant misery, and when at length his
countenance was again visible, it showed traces of tears.'--(pp.
102-3.)

The unconscious paganism that lingered in tradition, the half-obscured
names of the sites celebrated in classic story, and the spectacle of the
white oxen drawing the rustic carts of Virgil's time--these things roused
in him such an echo as _Chevy Chase_ roused in the noble Sidney, and made
him shout with joy. A pensive vein of contemporary reflection enriches the
book with passages such as this:--

'All the faults of the Italian people are whelmed in forgiveness as
soon as their music sounds under the Italian sky. One remembers all
they have suffered, all they have achieved in spite of wrong. Brute
races have flung themselves, one after another, upon this sweet and
glorious land; conquest and slavery, from age to age, have been the
people's lot. Tread where one will, the soil has been drenched with
blood. An immemorial woe sounds even through the lilting notes of
Italian gaiety. It is a country, wearied and regretful, looking ever
backward to the things of old.'--(p. 130.)

The _Ionian Sea_ did not make its appearance until 1901, but while he was
actually in Italy, at Siena, he wrote the greater part of one of his very
finest performances; the study of _Charles Dickens_, of which he corrected
the proofs 'at a little town in Calabria.' It is an insufficient tribute to
Gissing to say that his study of Dickens is by far the best extant. I have
even heard it maintained that it is better in its way than any single
volume in the 'Man of Letters'; and Mr. Chesterton, who speaks from ample
knowledge on this point, speaks of the best of all Dickens's critics, 'a
man of genius, Mr. George Gissing.' While fully and frankly recognising the
master's defects in view of the artistic conscience of a later generation,
the writer recognises to the full those transcendent qualities which place
him next to Sir Walter Scott as the second greatest figure in a century of
great fiction. In defiance of the terrible, and to some critics damning,
fact that Dickens entirely changed the plan of _Martin Chuzzlewit_ in
deference to the popular criticism expressed by the sudden fall in the
circulation of that serial, he shows in what a fundamental sense the author
was 'a literary artist if ever there was one,' and he triumphantly refutes
the rash daub of unapplied criticism represented by the parrot cry of
'caricature' as levelled against Dickens's humorous portraits. Among the
many notable features of this veritable _chef-d'oeuvre_ of under 250 pages
is the sense it conveys of the superb gusto of Dickens's actual living and
breathing and being, the vindication achieved of two ordinarily rather
maligned novels, _The Old Curiosity Shop_ and _Little Dorrit_, and the
insight shown into Dickens's portraiture of women, more particularly those
of the shrill-voiced and nagging or whining variety, the 'better halves' of
Weller, Varden, Snagsby and Joe Gargery, not to speak of the Miggs, the
Gummidge, and the M'Stinger. Like Mr. Swinburne and other true men, he
regards Mrs. Gamp as representing the quintessence of literary art wielded
by genius. Try (he urges with a fine curiosity) 'to imagine Sarah Gamp as a
young girl'! But it is unfair to separate a phrase from a context in which
every syllable is precious, reasonable, thrice distilled and sweet to the
palate as Hybla honey.[22]

[Footnote 22: A revised edition (the date of Dickens's birth is wrongly
given in the first) was issued in 1902, with topographical illustrations by
F.G. Kitton. Gissing's introduction to _Nickleby_ for the Rochester edition
appeared in 1900, and his abridgement of Forster's _Life_ (an excellent
piece of work) in 1903 [1902]. The first collection of short stories,
twenty-nine in number, entitled _Human Odds and Ends_, was published in
1898. It is justly described by the writer of the most interesting
'Recollections of George Gissing' in the _Gentleman's Magazine,_ February
1906, as 'that very remarkable collection.']

Henceforth Gissing spent an increasing portion of his time abroad, and it
was from St. Honorè en Morvan, for instance, that he dated the preface of
_Our Friend the Charlatan_ in 1901. As with _Denzil Quarrier_ (1892) and
_The Town Traveller_ (1898) this was one of the books which Gissing
sometimes went the length of asking the admirers of his earlier romances
'not to read.' With its prefatory note, indeed, its cheap illustrations,
and its rather mechanical intrigue, it seems as far removed from such a
book as _A Life's Morning_ as it is possible for a novel by the same author
to be. It was in the South of France, in the neighbourhood of Biarritz,
amid scenes such as that described in the thirty-seventh chapter of _Will
Warburton_, or still further south, that he wrote the greater part of his
last three books, the novel just mentioned, which is probably his best
essay in the lighter ironical vein to which his later years inclined,[23]
_Veranilda_, a romance of the time of Theodoric the Goth, written in solemn
fulfilment of a vow of his youth, and _The Private Papers of Henry
Ryecroft_, which to my mind remains a legacy for Time to take account of as
the faithful tribute of one of the truest artists of the generation he
served.

[Footnote 23: It also contains one of the most beautiful descriptions ever
penned of the visit of a tired town-dweller to a modest rural home, with
all its suggestion of trim gardening, fresh country scents, indigenous
food, and homely simplicity.--_Will Warburton_, chap. ix.]

In _Veranilda_ (1904) are combined conscientious workmanship, a pure style
of finest quality, and archaeology, for all I know to the contrary, worthy
of Becker or Boni. Sir Walter himself could never in reason have dared to
aspire to such a fortunate conjuncture of talent, grace, and historic
accuracy. He possessed only that profound knowledge of human nature, that
moulding humour and quick sense of dialogue, that live, human, and local
interest in matters antiquarian, that statesmanlike insight into the pith
and marrow of the historic past, which makes one of Scott's historical
novels what it is--the envy of artists, the delight of young and old, the
despair of formal historians. _Veranilda_ is without a doubt a splendid
piece of work; Gissing wrote it with every bit of the care that his old
friend Biffen expended upon _Mr. Bailey, grocer_. He worked slowly,
patiently, affectionately, scrupulously. Each sentence was as good as he
could make it, harmonious to the ear, with words of precious meaning
skilfully set; and he believed in it with the illusion so indispensable to
an artist's wellbeing and continuance in good work. It represented for him
what _Salammbô_ did to Flaubert. But he could not allow himself six years
to write a book as Flaubert did. _Salammbô_, after all, was a magnificent
failure, and _Veranilda_,--well, it must be confessed, sadly but surely,
that _Veranilda_ was a failure too. Far otherwise was it with _Ryecroft_,
which represents, as it were, the _summa_ of Gissing's habitual meditation,
aesthetic feeling and sombre emotional experience. Not that it is a
pessimistic work,--quite the contrary, it represents the mellowing
influences, the increase of faith in simple, unsophisticated English
girlhood and womanhood, in domestic pursuits, in innocent children, in
rural homeliness and honest Wessex landscape, which began to operate about
1896, and is seen so unmistakably in the closing scenes of _The Whirlpool_.
Three chief strains are subtly interblended in the composition. First that
of a nature book, full of air, foliage and landscape--that English
landscape art of Linnell and De Wint and Foster, for which he repeatedly
expresses such a passionate tendre,[24] refreshed by 'blasts from the
channel, with raining scud and spume of mist breaking upon the hills' in
which he seems to crystallise the very essence of a Western winter.
Secondly, a paean half of praise and half of regret for the vanishing
England, passing so rapidly even as he writes into 'a new England which
tries so hard to be unlike the old.' A deeper and richer note of
thankfulness, mixed as it must be with anxiety, for the good old ways of
English life (as lamented by Mr. Poorgrass and Mark Clark[25]), old English
simplicity, and old English fare--the fine prodigality of the English
platter, has never been raised. God grant that the leaven may work! And
thirdly there is a deeply brooding strain of saddening yet softened
autobiographical reminiscence, over which is thrown a light veil of
literary appreciation and topical comment. Here is a typical _cadenza_,
rising to a swell at one point (suggestive for the moment of Raleigh's
famous apostrophe), and then most gently falling, in a manner not wholly
unworthy, I venture to think, of Webster and Sir Thomas Browne, of both of
which authors there is internal evidence that Gissing made some study.

[Footnote 24: 'I love and honour even the least of English landscape
painters.'--_Ryecroft_.]

[Footnote 25: 'But what with the parsons and clerks and school-people and
serious tea-parties, the merry old ways of good life have gone to the
dogs--upon my carcass, they have!'--_Far from the Madding Crowd_.]

'I always turn out of my way to walk through a country churchyard;
these rural resting-places are as attractive to me as a town cemetery
is repugnant. I read the names upon the stones and find a deep solace
in thinking that for all these the fret and the fear of life are over.
There comes to me no touch of sadness; whether it be a little child or
an aged man, I have the same sense of happy accomplishment; the end
having come, and with it the eternal peace, what matter if it came
late or soon? There is no such gratulation as _Hic jacet_. There
is no such dignity as that of death. In the path trodden by the
noblest of mankind these have followed; that which of all who live is
the utmost thing demanded, these have achieved. I cannot sorrow for
them, but the thought of their vanished life moves me to a brotherly
tenderness. The dead amid this leafy silence seem to whisper
encouragement to him whose fate yet lingers: As we are, so shalt thou
be; and behold our quiet!'--(p. 183.)

And in this deeply moving and beautiful passage we get a foretaste, it may
be, of the euthanasia, following a brief summer of St. Martin, for which
the scarred and troublous portions of Gissing's earlier life had served as