ABSTRACT
Veranilda was not quite fmished when George Gissing was seized by his fatal illness. It was decided, however, to print the manuscript as it was left, and not, as was done in the case of Stevenson's Saint Ives, to invite another author to complete the work. The decision was, we think:, a wise one. The interest of the story in no way depends upon the plot; and one's pleasure in reading it is not marred by the fact that it leaves off: like an epic, instead of ending, like a drama. Gissing's admirers, therefore, will welcome it; though it remains to be seen whether it will appeal to quite the same public as his realistic studies of the lower Bohemianism and the world of the shabby genteel. He had just achieved a success which, though not dazzling or overwhelming, justified him in making experiments, attempting a new genre, and writing to please himself without considering too closely what readers desired or expected from him. Very possibly, ifhe had been able from the first to write solely for his own satisfaction, the novel, in which he so unmistakably excelled, would never have been his medium. By taste and temperament he was a scholar. In spite of restricted opportunities, he made himself a scholar; not, perhaps, such a scholar as Shilleto and Mr Robinson Ellis, but rather such a scholar as Gibbon and Grote. He had, we have heard, made an elaborate study, and acquired a wonderful knowledge, of the Greek choric metres; and there are reasons for supposing that he would have preferred to devote himself to researches into these and kindred matters and to the leisurely writing of such cultivated books of travel as he achieved in his relation of his journey through Magna Graecia. But that could not be. The man who writes books for a living-ifhe be an artist and not a mere bookmaker or publisher's hack-must write novels; and it is right and proper, if not inevitable, that he should write of the life he knows. This Gissing did for rather more than twenty years. The life which he knew happened to be hideous, and he did not try to represent that it was beautiful. It was the life of those who dwell on the edge of the abyss,
in continual danger offalling into it, deteriorating mentally and morally in the endeavour to keep out of it, cut off from the saving grace of culture by carking material cares: a world in which the battle is to the strong, and the delicately and sensitively organized go under in the struggle with those of coarser fibre. That is the environment, and the story is always ofthe organism at war with it. It is a note first defInitely struck in literature, so far as we can recall, in Madame Bovary. Just as the tragedy ofthe heroine ofthat romance was that her surroundings were unfavourable to the life ofsentiment, so the tragedy ofGissing's heroes and heroines is that their circumstances are unfavourable to the life of refinement and leisure and culture for which their gifts qualify them, and for which they long. The difference is that Flaubert wrote in irony, whereas George Gissing wrote in earnest. He resembled Flaubert in describing the life of which he wrote as if it would be a degradation to touch it with a pair oftongs. He resembled Flaubert also in employing minute description as the instrument of his disdain. But there the likeness ends. Gissing had not Flaubert's aloofness. He wrote as ifhe himself suffered from the coarse banality which it was his mission to depict. Book after book, exposing some aspect of that banality, reads like the protest and the bitter cry of the weak man who is hurt by the hustling in spite of his contempt for it-who feels that he is prevented by it from entering into his kingdom.
