ABSTRACT
This is an age of notoriety, and the private life of our public men has become the property of the nation. Our actors talk of their domestic troubles across the footlights, and novelists like Robert Louis Stevenson or Walter Besant are constandy taking us into their confidence in newspaper interviews or by newspaper confessions. But there is one writer of the first rank, in the person of Mr Gissing, about whom the outside world has never evinced any unusual curiosity. Thyrza and its fellows can count on but a limited, if enthusiastic, circle of admirers. It is but natural, for their author indulges neither in sensational claptrap nor in sentimental optimism. All his work has concerned itself with modem life, mainly with the social problems of the hour, and in no case has he preached smooth words. He has pitched his scenes in unromantic spots, such as the grimy manufacturing towns of the provinces, or the squalid outskirts of London of the pattern of Hoxton, Camden-town, or Islington. One might almost attribute to him a partiality for 'regions of malodorous market streets, of factories and timber-yards, of alleys swarming with small trades, of filthy courts and passages leading into pestilential gloom.' Certainly it is here that his vivid powers of description serve him best. His country landscapes are often blurred and bare, but the broad strokes with which he dashes in an impressionist picture of Manor Park Cemetery, 'the abode of chill desolation,' or ofKentishtown, with its dead-faced houses, which crush the heart, with an uniformity of decent squalor, are worthy of
comparison with the bold colouring ofa Turner or a Whistler. Neutral tints seem to have a perverse attraction for Mr Gissing-perverse because he is so ardent a champion of culture and purity, of love and high thoughts, as to merit the title of an idealist. His harshest indictment of the workmen whose lives he has studied with such deep attention and kindliness is founded upon their absolute indifferencenay, their hostility-to all refinement. Yet his choice has been a wise one. His excursions into Society do not indicate more than a nodding acquaintance with its manners and morals. Mr Gissing's mission appe.ars to be bound up with two sections ofour population. He seems intended, on the other hand, to expose with sympathetic insight, the failings of the artisan class, and, on the other, to champion the cause of poor professional families, who, in his eyes, suffer far more hardships than the noisier submerged tenth. All his most successful characters are confined to the middle and working classes. He has given us the average clerk of middle age and mediocre intelligence in Hood, the tale of whose temptation and suicide (in A Life's Morning) is one of the most pitiful things in modern fiction, and again a well-known Northern type in Hood's employer, a shrewd, hard, coarse-grained man, doggedly persistent in his ends, but quite unscrupulous about the means. Thyrza, -model of sweet self-denial; Amy Reardon, the wife made for fair weather only; Adela Waltham, purity incarnate-all these are representative specimens ofmiddle-class English womanhood. Quite as powerfully drawn is the artisan household of the Mutimers, which in Demos is raised to sudden affluence by the death of a rich relative. From the old mother, who will not change her mode of life, and prophesies ill from the accursed wealth, to 'Arry, a born loafer who drifts into crime, all its members are sketched with a master hand. Mr Gissing has written two novels dealing with the working-classesDemos and The Nether World, but the former is more interesting, by reason not only of its more ambitious title (it claims to be a story of English Socialism), but also ofits stronger characterisation. The Labour question and its leaders have grown in importance since Detnos was published, and we think Dick Mutimer, with his unintelligent eloquence and his abnormal vanity a very unfair portrait of the modern Socialist, just as we laugh at the amateurish schemes attributed to him. Yet a recent utterance of Mr Ben Tillett's might have come straight from Mr Gissing's pages. 'I will beard the capitalists in Parliament some day,' practically said Mr Tillett, and such was the boast of Dick Mutimer. Ifwe may judge the author by the characters which seem to
express his convictions, Mr Gissing is, with all his hatred ofoppression, not enamoured of Labour agitation. 'English Socialism,' says one of his creatures, 'is infused with the spirit of shop-keeping;' it 'appeals to the vulgarest minds, and keeps one eye on personal safety, and the other on the capitalist's strong box.' With his tendency to confine his attention to the dark side, he sees interested motives at the root ofmost social discontent. His spokesman in Demos has no belief in the social revolution, for he thinks (as we do not) that the proletarian Socialists are not sincere. The poor do not ceaselessly groan, says he, beneath the burden of existence; the struggle to support their bodies leaves them no time to reflect over their condition, and they are happily not blessed with a lively imagination. So that happiness is, in his opinion, very evenly distributed among all classes and conditions. On the English artisan the novelist speaks often and with authority. Of the hardship of his lot he is not oblivious. 'The working people,' says their representative, 'have no religion; they have no time to think of it.' Their employers 'calculate how long a man can be made to work in a day without making him incapable ofbeginning again on the day following.' The writer admits, too, the strong domestic affection of the artisan, although so undemonstrative. His fatal defect is 'an absence of imagination, which comes to mean a lack of kindly sympathy.' Mr Gissing has met with many sorts oflabourers, but there is one mystery that baffles him, 'that expression insoluble into factors of common sense-the Conservative "working-man." , Ofhis Radical brothers he knows a few. There is the short stout man, very seedily dressed, who tears passion to tatters over a Duke, his especial bugbear; or the leanfaced sna~ling creature with personal motives in the background. He can paint for us the good-natured fellow who cheers all abuse showered upon the rich, but takes care never to risk a penny on the cause, or the wailing old man who, with one foot in the grave, pours out bitter phrases in a terrible arraignment of his own order. Mr Gissing is too much in accord with the last, too distrustful of the people. But though his views are reactionary, they deserve attention because based on an intimate acquaintance with his subject. He awaits the future with the deepest concern, and condemns unmercifully the system of universal education which has produced a class endowed with intellectual needs, and refused the sustenance they are taught to crave. And here we touch one of our author's favourite theses-the miseries of the needy professional classes. His two last books have dealt with it from the side ofman and woman respectively, but the earlier of the two-New Grub
Street-is a far grimmer presentment of life, and a much more perfect work of art. The story traces the parallel development of two literary men, one a success, and the other a failure; and telling, as it does, with directness and truth, experiences many of us have encountered, it leaves the reader hardly prepared to endorse Browning's audacious dictum, 'All's right with the world.' For while we are vexed at the weakness ofEdwin Reardon, the victim of overpressure, who, with a slender gift of originality, was forced to produce work too rapidly, we almost despise selfish, good-natured Jasper Milvain, who deliberately casts ideals aside and devotes himself (with triumphant success) to unscrupulous search of money and fame. And characters like Alfred Yule, the hard-working journalist, with the heavy style, soured nature, and unpresentable wife, or Harold Biffen, the self-contained realist, who treats of 'the ignobly decent' in life, and finally commits suicide, only add to the general gloom. The loveable people all fail and the meaner nature[s] triumph. Yet this is too often an item in our own experience to make us reject books brimful of accurate observation, skilful analysis, and palpable vitality. And we can learn much from Mr Gissing. Hear him on these failures:-'Nothing is easier than to condemn a type of character which is unequal to the coarse demands oflife as it suits the average citizen.' Yet usually such men are endowed in especial with the kindly and imaginative virtues. 'It is their nature and their merit to be passive. The sum of their faults is their inability to earn money; but that inability does not call for unmitigated disdain.' No, indeed.
