ABSTRACT
Mr Seccombe has prefaced this volume of remains, containing fifteen short stories by the late George Gissing (1857-1903), with a discriminating essay of considerable biographical and critical interest. In his lifetime George Gissing's work as a novelist received but scanty encouragement, and Mr Seccombe admits that 'upon the larger external rings of the book-reading multitude it is not probable that Gissing will ever succeed in impressing himsel£' The pathetic details of his life, in
so far as they can well be narrated at present-'hampered for ten years by the sternest poverty, and for nearly ten more by the sad, illusive optimism of the poitrinaire'-are sympathetically touched upon by Mr Seccombe. The £50 he got for Demos (1886) was then riches. The £250 he got for New Grub Street (1891) was his high-water mark for pecuniary profit from his books. His publishers paid him £200 for The Nether World (1889), and lost by it.* A man of fine scholarship, remarkable literary gift, and, by compulsion of the 'twin monsters Bread and Cheese,' cast amid the shabbiest genteel or lower life of modern London, he followed the call ofhis genius by portraying what he knew, and all but starved. The public and the literary magnates found his stories drab and dreary and depressing. At the end ofhis life, when he published The Private Papers of Henry Ryecrofi (1903)-a volume of meditative self-revelation, of a quality rare in English literature-the average reviewer began to rub his eyes. The posthumous Veranilda (1904)-a Byzantine romance full of archaeological learning, and dead as a doornail-was eulogistically prefaced by an eminent writer who had employed Gissing as a classical tutor in earlier life, but confessed that he could not enjoy his social novels. Yet ifpublishers, who after all are men of business, and literary magnates, who sometimes prefer their own tastes to the encouragement ofan uncomfortable originality, did little for Gissing in his lifetime, and reviewers who can find you a 'modern Thackeray' in a successful serial-writer never gave him a niche in their English Pantheon, Mr Seccombe (who is indeed no tiro in the estimation of biographical and literary merit) contends that 'he will sup late, our Gissing,' and that a 'place is reserved for him' among the immortals, though not of the highest rank. Mr Seccombe's careful and judicious essay must speak for itself on this point, and prophecy is a dangerous thing. He is at all events echoing a judgment which has been that of an honourable minority since Demos impressed itself on them in 1886. And this new batch of posthumous short stories, though they can add nothing to Gissing's reputation, are all alive with his characteristic touch.
