ABSTRACT
The singular severity shown by the strongest of our most recent novelists, Mr George Gissing, towards his own characters is not wholly undeserved. As if to revenge himself for some experience ofan odious class of society, he impresses its dreadfulness on the reader's mind with the force of a rigid and penetrating style. If at the same time his picture is impressed the more deeply on his own, to the abuse of irony and the partial deadening of the senses of humour and beauty, this perhaps is the price to be paid for such success. The suburbs, London or provincial, will never recognise with what completeness their pretensions are stripped naked by this student. The text of Mr Matthew Arnold against the middle classes is driven home with a zeal that shows not only the satirical but the Protestant strain. For, though the writer shows no leaning to a Protestant formula, it is from this strain in our national character that he draws both the exposing zeal which guides his pen and also the element of relief which he allows to his pictures of the sordid-the moral relie£: we mean, without which those pictures would be bad, insupportable art. A world of persons nominally of good consideration but living ravenous little reptilian lives, and a chosen few who make their way out of that world much the worse
for wear and with little life left in them for enjoyment, but savedsuch, or nearly such, is the formula of ?vir Gissing. The tale called In the Year ofJubilee gathers about two households. The three sisters French, the best of them coarse and ambitious, the second a mere domestic hyaena, the third a predestined wanton, are examples, presented in harsh photography, oftypical low life in 'respectable' society. The only relieving incident, happily told, is the escape of the husband of the second sister with their child. The other household is that of the Lords -Horace, the vapid, consumptive son, amorous of the appropriate Miss French; old Lord, gnarled, inhuman, and honest; the servant Mary, whom Mr Gissing attempts with great but scarcely successful pains to make attractive; and the heroine, Nancy. The mother appears in the course ofthe book under an alias which never deludes the reader and could scarcely delude the characters; she, again, is elaborately but wastefully drawn. The real story is the growth of Nancy from a pseudo-educated girl with perilous instincts into a woman of experience who understands her part in life. The instruments of this change are her seducer, who is her subsequent husband, Lionel Tarrant, and her child; besides the temptation (to which she long succumbs in order to inherit under her father's queer will) to deny her marriage, while being compelled to own her child. The husband, described as ajournalist of a certain savage talent, is not ill presented. His desertion and recourtship ofhis wife are not conventional. The stages of their reconciliation, the embarrassed visits of husband and wife to one another, show a gleam of humanity at last, after the howling wilderness of recrimination, greed, and lies which the rest of the story portrays. Neither is the end commonplace, though it is not theatrical. The Tarrants, at the instance of the husband, agree to live separately, visiting occasionally, and remain on terms of real respect, Tarrant helping to maintain his wife and child. The weakness of this situation is that while Nancy emerges a fine and pure if too docile character, Tarrant, in his marital fireside philosophy, becomes self-complacent and priggish. The author does not observe that his assertion of his superior greatness, sense, and intellect is, after all his currish conduct, ludicrous. We speak thus particularly of Mr Gissing because he has more to say than anyone else of a certain kind of contemporary life, and because his unsparing utterance betokens a mind ofunusual honesty. Misdirection of force is its chief defect, whether by way of overemphasis or in laboured and doubtful character drawing; but force, the condition of most excellence, is there indubitably.
