ABSTRACT
Mr George Gissing is a daring man to choose such characters and situations to represent as are to be found in his latest novel, The Unclassed. To choose for heroine a girl who makes her livelihood contentedly enough by the saddest of callings, and for hero a man who has, like too many men of our time, questioned and speculated away all he ever possessed ofprinciples ofmorality or duty, is daring enough; but at any rate it is possible to adopt the treatment familiarised by the Abbe Prevost in Manon Lescaut or by Dumas .fils in the Dame aux Camelias. Mr Gissing, however, original in this as in other respects, shuns sentimentality and courts the serious consideration of the difficult moral problems his subject supplies, and we are bound to say that this confidence in his own power to deal successfully with exceedingly delicate materials is justified by the result now before us. The whole book is rich in situations and in interest. The study ofcharacter is never superficial, and at times really penetrating. The style is unpretentious and clear; and although Mr Gissing neither writes, nor professes to write, virginibus puerisque, yet to the thoughtful reader anxious to see life thorougWy, and to see it whole, The Unclassed contains nothing that will give offence, and much that will repay perusal. It would be interesting to compare the treatment of a similar theme by any living
French author with Mr Gissing's serious and sincere work-work which is absolutely free either from pruriency or prudery, being in fact, and in the best sense, English. The point of view reminds us of De Quincey's in that touching episode of the poor street-walker, whose charity and unselfishness are a bright spot in The Confessions of an Opium-eater. The story opens in Miss Rutherford's School in Lisson-grove, where Ida Starr, the heroine of the book, has just struck down with her slate another girl who had provoked her past endurance, by casting in her teeth that her mother is a bad woman, and gets her living on the streets. The taunt is only too true, though the fact is unknown to Ida. The scene between mother and daughter when Miss Rutherford's letter comes, and, on the mother asking her daughter why she has to leave, Ida tells of her violence and the cause of it, is truly pathetic. The child's look of love and proud confidence intensifies the unhappy mother's anguish, whose dread is that if the child knew how her mother got her living she would cease to love and respect her. The bitterness with which this bread ofpoverty and shame is earned, and the survival of intense motherly affection and watchful care for the child that she may have a good education, and that no breath of evil may sully her young mind, are touchingly described, and will give to many readers a very different notion of the 'unfortunate' class to any they have had before. Ida's mother dies, and sh~ is left to make her way as best she may. As might be expected, the best she can do is little, and she lives a miserable life, first as drudge in an eating-house, then as servant in wretched places where she is starved and bullied, till at last worn out, she succumbs to the desire ofescaping in any way trom her misery, and becomes the mistress ofa young man, son ofthe lady in whose house she had last served. From this the descent is not only easy but almost inevitable to the kind of life which causes her to meet, one night in Pall Mall, Osmond Waymark, the hero, if hero he can be called, of the story. The account of the genuinely platonic friendship between this artistic and Bohemian writer and the beautiful but fallen girl is exceedingly fresh and life-like. We will not spoil the story by describing the plot, which is worked out with considerable skill, and in which the interest is unflagging, and by no means confined to the principal characters. The study of W aymark's feeling for Ida Starr and for Maud Enderby simultaneously, will interest the psychologist as well as the ordinary reader. The descriptions of Litany-lane and Jubilee court show knowledge of the slums and skill in portraying the types found there. There is a terrible realism in
much ofthe writing dealing with the life that festers and decays morally and physically in the rookeries which, in large numbers, are still the disgrace of London. Perhaps the most weird of the dwellers in Jubilee court is the creature known as SlinlY, a hideous caricature ofhumanity, whose death has about it features of special horror. Waymark, who is employed by the owner, Abraham Woodstock, to collect the rents, finds in Slimy a most interesting if repulsive study. One day, on coming up to Slimy's room, Waymark sees signs of something amiss. Slimy, lifting a huge club, quietly tells him he will knock him down like a bullock unless he remains quiet, and then carefully ties him to hooks driven firmly into the floor. Then he takes the satchel in which is contained the money already collected, and last of all declares his intentions. 'Fifty year,' he says, 'an' not one 'appy day. Money means 'appiness, an' them as never 'as money '11 never be 'appy, live as long as they may. Well, I went on a-sayin' to myself: 'Ain't I to 'ave not one 'appy day all my life?' An' it come to me all at once that money was to be 'ad for the trouble 0' takin' it-money an' 'appiness. A pound ain't no use, nor yet two pound, nor yet five pound. There's a good deal more than five pound 'ere now, Mr Waymark. What d'you think I'm going to do with it? I'm a-goin' to drink myself dead. That's what I'm agoin' to do, Mr Waymark.' And the Caliban of the slums is as good as his word. Mr Gissing has succeeded in lifting the veil from the life of a section of the world of London concerning which serious novelists have too long kept silence, and he has done his work with so much good feeling and good taste that no reader will be offended, while all will be the richer for some authentic information, much needed in these days of social reform, when the refuge and the reformatory are stupidly set to cure what might easily be prevented, at least in great part. Mr Gissing is thorougWy acquainted with the main subject on which he writes, but while we thank him for the data, we regard the inferences which he frames into a philosophy of life as altogether erroneous. When, for instance, he touches Christianity, it is, though we doubt not he writes in perfect good faith, to travesty it. Again, the notion that the mind of a prostitute can remain pure and unsullied in the midst of her profession is simply contrary to fact, however well it may fit in with this or that theory. On the other hand, we fail to see how any objection can be taken to the theory that love can save the streetwalker from her life of degradation, and even purify her heart from the pollution of the past. In Mrs Oliphant's Wizard's Son a young man is saved from a life
