ABSTRACT
It is, of course, just this 'grey' quality of his subjects, so repellent to the public, which specially recommends Mr Gissing's work to the critics. The artists who have courage fully to exploit their own temperaments are always sufficiently infrequent to be peculiarly noticeable and welcome. Still more rare are they who, leaving it to others to sing and emphasise the ideal and obvious beauties which all can in some measure see, will exclusively exercise the artist's prerogative as an explorer ofhidden and recondite beauty in unsuspected places. Beauty is strangely various. There is the beauty of light and joy and strength exulting; but there is also the beauty of shade, of sorrow and sadness, and of humility oppressed. The spirit of the sublime dwells not only in the high and remote; it shines unperceived amid all the usual meannesses of our daily existence. To take the common grey things which people know and despise, and, without tampering, to disclose their epic significance, their essential grandeur-that is realism, as distinguished from idealism or romanticism. It may scarcely be, it probably is not, the greatest art of all; but it is art, precious and indisputable. Such art has Mr Gissing accomplished. In The Nether World, his most characteristic book, the myriad squalid futilities ofan industrial quarter
of London are gathered up into a large coherent movement of which the sinister and pathetic beauty is but too stringently apparent. After The Nether JVorld Clerkenwell is no longer negligible. It has import. You feel the sullen and terrible pulse ofthis universe which lies beneath your own. You may even envy the blessedness of the meek, and perceive in the lassitude ofthe heavy laden a secret grace that can never be yours. Sometimes, by a single sentence, Mr Gissing will evoke from the most obscure phenomena a large and ominous idea. The time is six o'clock, and the workshops are emptying. He says: 'It was the hour of the unyoking of men.' A simple enough phrase, but it lends colour to the aspect ofa whole quarter, and fills the soul with a vague, beautiful sense of sympathetic trouble. This is a good example of Mr Gissing's faculty ofpoetical constructive observation-a faculty which in his case is at once a strength and a weakness. He sees the world not bit by bit-a series of isolations-but broadly, in vast wholes. He will not confine himself to a unit, whether of the individual or the family. He must have a plurality, working in and out, mutually influencing, as it were seething. So he obtains an elaborate and complicated reflection of the variety and confusion of life impossible to be got in any other way. So also by grouping similar facts he multiplies their significance into something which cannot be ignored. That is his strength. His weakness is that he seems never to be able to centralise the interest. His pictures have no cynosure for the eye. The defect is apparent in all his books, from The Unclassed, a youthful but remarkable work, wherein several separate narratives are connected by a chain of crude coincidences, down to the recently-published Crown of Life, of which the story loses itselfperiodically in a maze ofepisodes each interrupting the others. Out ofthe fine welter of The Nether World nothing emerges paramount. There are a dozen wistful tragedies in this one novel, of which the canvas is as large as that ofAnna Karenina-a dozen exquisite and moving renunciations with their accompanying brutalities and horror; but the dark grandeur which ought to have resulted from such an accumulation ofeffects is weakened by a too impartial diffusion of the author's imaginative power.
