ABSTRACT
Far better than the frigid Veranilda, which we note many literary pundits, seduced by the classical dignity of the theme, hailed as 'belonging emphatically to literature ... the higher scope ... his most original work,' etc., is Will Warburton, a novel which Gissing aims straightat the breast ofour British commercial gentility. The story, which is doubleedged, will probably arouse uneasy suspicions in the mind of the British public that Gissing is satirising the system by which the bulk of our middle-class draw their profits from trade of some kind or, other while despising and eyeing uneasily the tradesman's life. Will Warburton, Gissing's refined and sensitive middle-class hero, a partner in a wholesale West India sugar house, having lost his invested capital by his partner's speculations, is forced to turn grocer to support himself
and his mother and sister. Here are no learned archaeological researches amid the dust and ashes of Belisarius's and Totila's tombs, no pictures of problematical Roman nobles and imaginary Christian priests, but an atmosphere ofshabby-genteel trouble in a London lodging and in a vulgar London shop, with the depressing dulness of the dingy Fulham streets to nerve the hero-another Gissing-to fight against the wearisome routine ofhis struggle with the indifferent world. Decidedly unpopular this novel should be with the majority ofpeople, for the whole effort ofsuburban idealism is directed towards keeping the vulgar facts of commercial life in the background and losing all memory of the shop-if shop there be-in the tasteful refinements of villa culture. The novel, Will Warburton,isnotthemostpowerfulofGissing'sworks, but it is saner, riper, and less pessimistic than the majority, and withal it is characteristic of the talent which doggedly set itself to paint the harsh, mean outlines of lower-middle class life in Demos, New Grub Street, and a dozen other works drab as the great town's smoke. Moreover, the paradox of Gissing's career is in the book: that he has taken his place in literature, that 'his work emphatically belongs to literature,' because he was unlucky and out ofplace in his environment. Had he not deliberately chronicled all the vulgar unloveliness, all the harsh, sordid cares and commonplace drudgery of 'this wilderness of brick and mortar,' had he been able to follow the tranquil scholarly life of a University professor, and 'the higher scope' of the classical studies that attracted him he would probably have won no more recognition than falls to the majority of talented scholars who lecture and coach and edit classical texts from year's end to year's end. But the mean, monotonous life led by hundreds of thousands of dispirited, anxious, toiling Londoners it was his distinction as an artist to stamp in literature with an insistence and a scrupulous patience that have left their mark. Beauty ofstyle and beauty offeeling are alike too far lacking from his work for it to endure permanently as imaginative literature, but it will endure as a series of grim documents simply because Gissing alone had the courage to set down what he saw. All the others shrank from recognising that life. All the interested tribe ofjournalists and storywriters hastened to ignore it, all the great horde of readers naturally avert their gaze from it, hurrying along the wan London streets, journeying by 'bus or tram or rail from dreary London lodgings to dingy desks and offices. Gissing alone faced insistently the drabness and the vulgar tonelessness ofthat anaemic, joyless growth ofLondon lower-middle class existence, a life so often drained of its ideals, de-
pressed in its environment, and broken in, like the tired London cabhorse, to its lot.
