Classic or Commercial?
PART of the peculiar interest of George Gissing as a novelist is 'that he represents, particularly clearly and sharply, one of the most intense intellectual and philosophical dilemmas of the late nineteenth century, that of reconciling the optimism of social reform and scientific human- ism with the pessimistic insights of environ- mentalist and determinist thought. Like Hardy, whom intellectually he resembles, Gissing was a populist and a provincial, a man of poor home whose natural environment and sympathies lay, it seemed, particularly with the working class and others whose natural circumstances gave them little control of their own destiny, yet whose personal experiences and esthetic com- mitments made him doubtful about the con- sequences of social reform. Temperamentally Gissing seems to have been unable to find his way to the optimism of Shaw (who preferred Lamarck to Darwin on the grounds that it was pleasanter to believe that evolution was the product of a creative rather than a mindless force) or even to the final glimmer of Hardy. So, though he was in some ways deeply committed to social reform, he was on other issues pro- foundly anti-democratic; the tinge of pessimism which runs through all his fiction indicates both his own attempt to struggle out of his own dif ficult personal situation, that of poverty and two unhappy marriages, and his uncertainty about the attempts of others.
The particular value of Professor Korg's lucid study is that it places Gissing clearly in the context of his time, examining the novels for their expression of his uncertainties and in- tellectual struggles. In Workers in the Dawn Gissing indicates the value of uncertainty to the artist, praising the man 'who recognises no patent key as in existence, for whom the mystery of life and death begins and ends with a vast doubt whose very thought is the fruit of, and leads sto, boundless conjecture.' Gissing was such a man, divided between his social and aesthetic commitments, between proletariat, which provided his fictional subject largely, and middle class, which provided his reading public and his 'culture,' between, too, England and Italy. Like many writers before and after him, he was helped to solve his confused social sympathies by visiting the Mediterranean and finding a third kind of life that escaped the grinding dullness of the British poor and the commercial commitment of the British bourgeoisie.
Above all Europe gave him asthetic insight, esthetic confidence—'0n crossing the Channel I have become a poet, pure and simple, or per- haps it would be better to say an idealist student of art.' Hereafter he tends to discard poverty as a theme, while his reflections appear to pave the way for New Grub Street, which Q. D. Leavis calls his only great novel. His study of the heavy pressures on a writer of the time helps, indeed, to explain the most irritating thing about Gissing's fiction, of which there is a re- markable body (Professor Korg mentions quite a number of unfinished novels)—its amazing unevenness.
It is this unevenness that makes the problem of the ambiguities in his work so difficult to solve—is he, here, writing under some commer- cial pressure or commercial demand? Is this, here, a real conflict of value or a failure in 'rendering his point? At times Professor Korg seems to make the matter almost too lucid, and at others he makes too little of Gissing'3 very real sympathy with social reform. But he is, particularly good in showing Gissing's debt to that strand in nineteenth-century fiction which represents the theme of man betrayed by the principle that the individual can conduct' a self-defined and self-regulated moral life on scientific principles. The Raskolnikov hero had a special fascination for Gissing, not least, perhaps, because of the disastrous episode at Owen's College when his thefts from other students blighted a promising academic career; and Gissing was familiar with novels by Turgenev, Bourget and Jacobsen which deal with the misfortunes of those who pursue a subjective morality. Born in Exile is the clear- est statement of the theme, but it appears elsewhere in his work. As H. G. Wells per- ceptively commented in an article, Gissing's novels are primarily concerned not with in- dividual character but with general social forces studied through their effect on individuals, and the subdued nature of his heroes is clearly part of Gissing's attempt to convey this. Professor Korg here traces, usefully, a debt to George Eliot, and a debt another way is clearly sug- . gested by Gissing's remarkably sharp writings on Charles Dickens. Gissing does, in fact, play an important part in the development of the socio-moral novel, and the problems with which he deals are of course in no sense super- annuated today. The same strands of optimism and pessimism are, after all, part of our present intellectual composition, in grimmer form, while the technical problems that Gissing meets, and the concern he expresses about the relation,„ of the writer to social alteration and commer- cial pressure, have changed very little. In raising these questions, Professor Korg's book does' usefully enlarge our thinking about Gissing and. the period in which he lived, and the new bio- graphical material he provides from diaries and other sources widens our picture of him as a person.
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