George Gissing

Vie; Autobiographical an& -Itttagtruttive.e- From the Watts of .aorgeGissing. By A. C. Gigging. With an Introduc- tion by Virginia Woolf. (Cape. Is. 6d.) IN the English-speaking world there is a secret society coin- posed-of quiet people, perhaps sad and burdened people, who

are not (Comforted-by fashion, but feed upon some manna of the 'mind that drops upon the desert of their lives. They are the lovers of George Gissing, and it is he who supplies that nourishment which they share—a food thrown away by the harsher and pampered. appetites of so many literary enthusi- asts. I confess to being .one of this society ; for Gissing's gentle irony, his tmbribable spirit of rebellion against the humbug and compromise of this institutional world, his

dignified prose style with its subtle rhythms so akin to those of Samuel Johnson ; these are qualities to my liking.

It is doubtful whether there will ever be a boom in Gissing, for the material out of which he made most of his books is so drab that one lives in constant misery whilst with him. He recalls all the horror of a late Victorian childhood the gloom of the gas-lit home ; the monstrous spectre of Jehovah; the dusty saddleback furniture and the sense of illness and disease colouring the day ; the distress of seeing one's parents victims of the industrial economic which ground them to despair before one's innocent eyes.

These are the things which Gissing, under the veil of his smooth Roman prose, brings back to us, opening old wounds, so that we start up again, choking with grief, calling upon the

names: of our vanished dead, those who left us too, soon,

prematurely . outworn. Gissing, . you - bring this panorama of a dark,. familiar past, carrying it on the stream of your- lovely phrases, until the procession drives us mad. " No !

we cry out. - ".This was all forgotten : we live now in another age ; we are different people, free at last ! ". And we try to escape from him as his calm voice replies, "Are you free? Are you different ? "

Perhaps those who are children to-day will be able to exam- ine the material of his work with unshaking hands ; to enjoy its smoke-grey tints, and to bring an unbiassed aesthetic to trace the • subdued pattern • of Ionian tints, the threads of univemal Rome, which the cunning artist wove into it., They are to be- envied for that detachment ; but to them Gissing can never be what- he is to us, the voice of our own outraged selves, our generation born in darkness, leading us by the ruse of beautiful hopelessness to a new faith and vitality which we should, by any other route, have distrusted, so deeply had the iron entered our souls.

It will be seen-that I am thus quite unsuited to review, with detachment, this selection of passages from Gissing's work. They are chosen by his son, who links them together by reticent

comment that barely hints at the tragedy of sickness, want, and sensibility which drove the master to an early grave. At thirty Gissing was already an invalid, reduced by the intangible-

exasperation of an injudicious youth-time marriage, and the drudgery which it involved. It is said that he never wanted to be a novelist ; that his mind, scholarly and detached, would more naturally have led him to a career among the classics. Judging from his early verse, he might have devel- oped into a poet of the calibre of Thomas Gray, such a delight did he exhibit in choice of rhyme and stanza. There is a riparian and elegiac grace about his verse which shows that- his spiritual home lay among the later Latins, under a smoke- less and pagan sky.

All through his life, condemned to the north and the squalor which were the GiSt fruits of the age of machinery, he kept that nostalgia of his youth, and as soon as bettered' means enabled him he escaped to the Mediterranean. The result • was immediately reflected in his work, and we get descriptions in The Emancipated which make us long to spread Our wings, away from this prison, and to see for ourselves the places" which are more familiar than home, since there are to be found" all the colour and warmth that make life valuable. Here is a paragraph, by this artist who has been accused of dull drabness,• describing a moment spent in the ruined temple at Paestum :—

"Within reach of his band wag a fern that had shot up between the massive stones ; he gently caressed its-fronds, as though it were a sentient creature. Or his eyes dwelt upon the huge column just in-front of him--now scanning its superb Proportions, now enjoying the hue of the sunny-golden travertine, now observing the myriad crevices .of its time-eaten surface, the petrified forms of vegetable growth, the little pink snails that housed within its chinks. Dear and glorious temples ! sanctuaries still for all to whom poetry is religion.- These stones, have they not echoed to Hellenic speech ? When Latin worship had fled from them, when the Saracen had done his worst, when the Norman pirate had pillaged all he could to adorn his Christian church at Amalfi, time and solitude became warders of what remained, hallowing the austere beauty of these abandoned fans-to be a monument of the world where gods and men walked . together."

That is the free spirit of Gissing, possessing a noble historical vision, brooding with a large criticism over the time-procession of mankind, piercing the "twilight of history" with the sun of his passionate imagination. It was only towards the end of his life that circumstances permitted him to indulge that self so positively. His strength had been given to a negative expression of it ; to bitter denunciation of the ugliness, the cold, the social and economic sores of England during its great race for wealth. We must show him in that mood, because it was, alas ! his more prevalent one. Here is a passage which John.Morley considered to be one of the " most beautiful in modern literature." It is a piece of prose which makes us trace some relationship—it must be the same moral pulse— between Gissing and Johnson, that grand man. This is a picture of Manor Park Cemetery :—

" Here on the waste limits of that dread east, to wander among the tombs is to go _hand in hand with the stark and eyeless emblems of mortality ; the spirit -fails beneath the cold burden -of ignoble destiny. Hera lie those who were born for tail ; who, when toil has worn them -to the uttermost, have but - to yield -their useless breath and pass into oblivion. -For them is no day, only the brief twilight of a winter's ,k-y between the former and the latter night. For them aspiration for them no hope of memory in the dust their very. children are wearied into forgetfulness. Indistinguishable units in the vast throng that labours but to support life, the name of each, father, mother, child, is but a dumb cry for the warmth and love of which fate so stinted them. The wind wails above their narrow tenements ; the Sandy- soil, soaking in the rain as soon as it has fallen,, is a symbol of the great world which absorbs their toil and straightway- blots their being." , - Mrs. Virginia Woolf, in her sensitive introduction, has quoted this passage. She has also pointed out the quality in Gissing which still remains to be mentioned. We have shown the two poles between which his emotional vitality flowed. Much more needs to be said of it, and we should quote many passages showing his detailed appreciation of nature and his power to describe it sensuously without raising the dignified tempo of his prose. We have no space here, however, and must turn to that point mentioned by Mrs. Woolf. " Gissing," she says, " is one of the extremely rare novelists who believes in the power of mind, who makes his people think. They are thus differently poised from the majority of fictitious men and women. The awful _hierarchy of .the. passions is slightly. displaced. Social snobbery does not exist ; money is desired almost entirely to buy bread and butter ; love itself takes a second place. But the brain works, and that akme is enough to give it a sense of freedom. For to think into become complex; it is to overflow boundaries, to cease to be a ' Character,' to merge one's private life in the life of politics or art or ideas, to have relationships based on them _partly, and not on sexual

desire alone. The impersonal side of life is given its due place in the scheme. ' Why don't people write about the really.

important things of life ? ' Gissing makes one of his charac-. ters exclaim, and at the unexpected cry the horrid burden of fiction begins to slip from the shoulders."

It is this quality, this exuberance of mental vitality and enthusiasm, which made Gissing " overflow- boundaries," and • which filled his novels with an energy and beauty so fierce that their drab bitterness was caught up and made