The House of Cobwebs | Page 2

in impressing himself. There is an

absence of transcendental quality about his work, a failure in humour, a
remoteness from actual life, a deficiency in awe and mystery, a
shortcoming in emotional power, finally, a lack of the dramatic faculty,
not indeed indispensable to a novelist, but almost indispensable as an
ingredient in great novels of this particular genre.[1] In temperament
and vitality he is palpably inferior to the masters (Dickens, Thackeray,
Hugo, Balzac) whom he reverenced with such a cordial admiration and
envy. A 'low vitality' may account for what has been referred to as the
'nervous exhaustion' of his style. It were useless to pretend that Gissing
belongs of right to the 'first series' of English Men of Letters. But if
debarred by his limitations from a resounding or popular success, he
will remain exceptionally dear to the heart of the recluse, who thinks
that the scholar does well to cherish a grievance against the vulgar
world beyond the cloister; and dearer still, perhaps, to a certain number
of enthusiasts who began reading George Gissing as a college
night-course; who closed Thyrza and Demos as dawn was breaking
through the elms in some Oxford quadrangle, and who have pursued
his work patiently ever since in a somewhat toilsome and broken ascent,
secure always of suave writing and conscientious workmanship, of an
individual prose cadence and a genuine vein of Penseroso:--
'Thus, Night, oft see me in thy pale career... Where brooding Darkness
spreads his jealous wings, And the night-raven sings.'
[Footnote 1: The same kind of limitations would have to be postulated
in estimating the brothers De Goncourt, who, falling short of the first
magnitude, have yet a fully recognised position upon the stellar atlas.]
Yet by the larger, or, at any rate, the intermediate public, it is a fact that
Gissing has never been quite fairly estimated. He loses immensely if
you estimate him either by a single book, as is commonly done, or by
his work as a whole, in the perspective of which, owing to the lack of
critical instruction, one or two books of rather inferior quality have
obtruded themselves unduly. This brief survey of the Gissing country is
designed to enable the reader to judge the novelist by eight or nine of
his best books. If we can select these aright, we feel sure that he will
end by placing the work of George Gissing upon a considerably higher
level than he has hitherto done.
The time has not yet come to write the history of his career--fuliginous
in not a few of its earlier phases, gathering serenity towards its

close,--finding a soul of goodness in things evil. This only pretends to
be a chronological and, quite incidentally, a critical survey of George
Gissing's chief works. And comparatively short as his working life
proved to be--hampered for ten years by the sternest poverty, and for
nearly ten more by the sad, illusive optimism of the poitrinaire--the task
of the mere surveyor is no light or perfunctory one. Artistic as his
temperament undoubtedly was, and conscientious as his writing
appears down to its minutest detail, Gissing yet managed to turn out
rather more than a novel per annum. The desire to excel acted as a spur
which conquered his congenital inclination to dreamy historical reverie.
The reward which he propounded to himself remained steadfast from
boyhood; it was a kind of Childe Harold pilgrimage to the lands of
antique story--
'Whither Albano's scarce divided waves Shine from a sister
valley;--and afar The Tiber winds, and the broad ocean laves The
Latian coast where sprang the Epic War.'
Twenty-six years have elapsed since the appearance of his first book in
1880, and in that time just twenty-six books have been issued bearing
his signature. His industry was worthy of an Anthony Trollope, and
cost his employers barely a tithe of the amount claimed by the writer of
The Last Chronicle of Barset. He was not much over twenty-two when
his first novel appeared.[2] It was entitled Workers in the Dawn, and is
distinguished by the fact that the author writes himself George Robert
Gissing; afterwards he saw fit to follow the example of George Robert
Borrow, and in all subsequent productions assumes the style of 'George
Gissing.' The book begins in this fashion: 'Walk with me, reader, into
Whitecross Street. It is Saturday night'; and it is what it here seems, a
decidedly crude and immature performance. Gissing was encumbered
at every step by the giant's robe of mid-Victorian fiction. Intellectual
giants, Dickens and Thackeray, were equally gigantic spendthrifts.
They worked in a state of fervid heat above a glowing furnace, into
which they flung lavish masses of unshaped metal, caring little for
immediate effect or minute dexterity of stroke, but knowing full well
that the emotional