INTRODUCTION

Long years have gone by since G. W. Stonier, a half-forgotten literary figure of the 1950s, would with apparent truthfulness refer to the peculiar status of George Gissing with a frustration which must have been shared by more than a few contemporaries: All he needs, Stonier wrote in the Worlds Classics edition of New Grub Street, is a whole-hearted admirer.1 It was indeed an embarrassing paradox that, in the half-century which had elapsed since his premature death, Gissings most articulate devotees were modest academics with next to no influence whose writings did not reach the reading public at large, and that the two widely known critics of his works were men of inferior talent clearly anxious to increase their own reputation at the expense of his Morley Roberts and Frank Swinnerton. Stonier did not name them. He merely noted that H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf and George Orwell had once seemed prepared to uphold Gissings reputation, but they had eventually stepped back a view of things which, unknown to him at the time, did not do justice to Orwell, whom only death prevented from writing a biography of the writer he thought one of the best novelists that England had produced. It was in reality not one but many commentators who declared their lasting attachment to Gissings personality and achievement, and most of them were academics who showed with determination that not only was his work worth reading carefully, but worth studying very closely. Whereas in the 1950s he had only been the subject of an occasional article and his books were most difficult to procure, the flow of comment and new publications about the man and his works now surpasses in bulk the amount devoted to most other Victorian novelists, with the sole exceptions of Dickens and Hardy. It was realized early on that his life and professional career had been heroic. A scrupulous, original artist who cared more for the quality and sincerity of his work than for the demands of the public, he was, when publishers could no longer exploit him cynically, at best poorly rewarded for his strenuous work. Throughout his unconventional private life, the shadow of economic hardship hung over him; not only did he have to provide for the needs of his own household, but occasionally for those of his unscrupulous younger brother and his growing family. Being generous by nature, he would sometimes lend money that

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he could ill afford to part with and which more often than not would not be paid back. Except in the mid-1890s when he (successfully) tried to increase his meagre income by turning out, with a bad conscience, a large number of short stories and sketches, he always feared that he might be reduced to poverty if his health broke down. Few of his contemporaries understood his situation; in the better part of the press, he was as a rule respected and sometimes warmly praised by the more intelligent and perceptive critics, mainly those who had, like him, an elevated notion of literature. However, the least enlightened of his critics, being irritated by some irrational decisions he took in his periods of personal crisis, would like to organize him; they look upon him severely, blame him almost comically because they, who imagine themselves to be invested with the supreme mission of removers of grievances, would have obeyed the unwritten dictates of wisdom. In short as well as in long accounts of his terrestrial ups and downs, stress is frequently laid on the self-destructive strain in him, and the unlucky events and catastrophes reported by biographers have often produced unsympathetic responses which have extended from the man to his books. The record of his domestic and professional misfortunes often prompts a sagacious pose. Selfsatisfied biographers and shallow journalists become impatient how could he be so unpractical? they ask their readers. How could he sometimes be so impervious to the teachings of experience? They sententiously attempt to reconstruct him, to put him on the way to normality. Only critics who go beyond appearances and can push aside their mortar-boards have a chance of doing him justice, for indeed his temperament fares badly at the hands of wiseacres. It was informed with arresting contrasts and contradictions, of which, more than his morose censors, he was disarmingly conscious. It fascinates by its blend of hopefulness and despair. Discreet, almost elusive in some respects, it nonetheless impresses by a formidable tenacity. If less gifted with an admirable staying power which was noted by relatives, teachers and schoolfellows alike, he would not have left to posterity such a rich, stimulating and varied collection of works. His capacity for absorption in the task in hand, as anyone who has read his diary for the years of his second, calamitous marriage will be compelled to admit, was extraordinary. The material conditions under which he wrote some of his novels his masterpiece New Grub Street is a signal example hardly affected his mental work. Basically this is a fact which has very rarely been noticed Gissing was an optimist and an idealist. His early life wreaked havoc on him and he was at forty more disillusioned than many old men whom fate has dealt with roughly. Yet, even in his darkest days, his zest for life never quite deserted him. Besides, all his works are not as uniformly sombre as poorly informed critics delight in making them appear. Who, one wonders, has ever been depressed by The Paying Guest, The Town Traveller, The Crown of Life or Will Warburton? Although in his lifetime he was unknown to the general public, people would commonly

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Introduction

imagine that he was incapable of enjoying life. Two anecdotes will illustrate this point. At a dinner of the Omar Khayym Club on 6 December 1895 Gissing was amused when a stranger, who turned out to be Wilfrid Meynell, came up to him and remarked that he was not at all the kind of creature he had expected to meet: Why, you are lively jovial! Does life really depress you?2 Some four years later, Alice Ward, the English correspondent of the Author in Paris, made his acquaintance in the French capital and confessed her surprise. She had pictured him to herself as an old man, with a long, white beard, living like a hermit and revelling in his work. When he called on her, she
saw a man who looked between thirty and forty. He was well-built, with square shoulders and he had a singularly expressive, intellectual face, with remarkably observant eyes He was extremely amused at the idea I had had of him and we laughed at the white beard I had arranged for him to have.3

The persistent critical semi-neglect of his work until about 1960 and the occasional perky reviews one still comes across in dailies and weeklies each time a book of Gissing interest is published can be ascribed to various causes temperamental hostility of this or that reviewer who, more often than not, refreshed his or her faded memory of the subject by turning to obsolete appreciations characteristic of the early days of Gissing criticism, invincible ignorance giving rise to inane judgements which disqualify their authors, or a pathetic urge to shine at the novelists expense. However, at a different level of criticism, disparaging judgements of the works a few decades ago, when academics like John Goode were active and, in some circles, influential, could result from the application to Gissings work and personality of preconceived notions borrowed from Marxist criticism. At a time when Henry Jamess theory of the novel seemed to reign supreme and no writer could find grace in the eyes of critics who ignored his principles, Gissing occasionally paid a high price for his creditable artistic independence. Present-day serious discussions of his life and work can safely ignore current fads, though there cannot be any safeguard against commentators who are bent on belittling all his human qualities and his original contribution to English literature from fiction long or short to criticism and essay writing. Throughout his career he fought at great cost for the recognition of his idiosyncratic approach to the art of fiction, and memorably asserted at critical moments that it was for his best, for his most culturally respectable readers that he was writing and that the only criticism of interest to him was that which came, whether in published form or not, from the cultural intelligentsia of both sexes, that is, he said bluntly, from people who could distinguish between diamond and paste. The two most earnest pioneers in Gissing studies before the last quarter of the twentieth century, scholars who recognized Gissings importance and who respected his originality were Jacob Korg and Adrian Poole. Korg was the first to

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offer a critical biography based on reliable facts as they were known in the early 1960s and to analyse the works thematically without any preconceived notions. His biographical dissection takes into account what the Berg Collection and the Beinecke Library held at the time, but little more. Unfortunately his knowledge of Gissings correspondence was only elementary; he had seen no letter to Gabrielle Fleury and a wealth of miscellaneous letters to minor correspondents totally escaped his notice. His research was restricted to what a serious, unprejudiced academic about 1960 could not fail to come across in his unambitious way. In retrospect, we see him as a young contemporary of then-eminent American professors such as Gordon Haight, G. N. Ray and Bradford A. Booth, men who knew better where they wished to stop in their research than where truly innovative enquiries could be conducted. But Korgs subsequent work, which covered some fifty years, amply compensated for the summary nature of his early research: he examined critically many aspects of Gissings work, wrote a large number of critical reviews of his successors studies, and in due course adequately saluted the significance of Adrian Pooles Gissing in Context. Poole focused his stimulating analysis on Gissings language, imagery, symbols and narrative patterns without neglecting his outstanding capacity for characterization. The seeds sown by Poole have borne fruit in a number of critical studies. Fortunately the novels have since 1975 been generally read as imaginative works and no longer exclusively or mainly as sociology in fictional form vide John Goode, who used Gissings novels as a peg on which to hang his political ideas or as the semiautobiographical expression of an unclassifiable temperament, as according for instance to John Halperin. Anybody culturally attached to Gissing has ipso facto been impressed by his immense culture, which one would imagine to be the fruit of a long life of passionate study, and which was only equalled, if at all, in depth and extent, by his predecessor George Eliot. From an early age his abilities in the field of learning were inseparably coupled with a prodigious appetite for cultural self-improvement which after his fathers death was appreciated by no one in his own family and only by the very best of his teachers. He had an overwhelming respect for intellectual distinction, for which he deserves to be repaid. Only David Grylls in his admirable 1986 study does him full justice in this regard. Let anyone who might be tempted to accuse Gissing of exaggerating pause and reflect before bridling at his approval of Samuel Johnsons blunt statement that there is as much difference between a lettered and an unlettered man as between the living and the dead.4 The environment in which Gissing was for years compelled to live put him in touch with human types which few of his reviewers ever saw durably at close quarters, and his early correspondence shows that he literally conquered the right to pass judgement on the undeserving poor which no critic can venture to blame without exposing himself to a severe rebuff. Few fellow writers of his are

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likely to have shown more sincere consideration for learning, it must be repeated after David Grylls, for literary and artistic culture. To him books of a respectable nature were the vade mecum of a respectable life, as innumerable examples testify in his own narratives. Of his native English, which his father early on encouraged him to use gracefully, whether orally or in writing, he had a distinguished knowledge that extended to such cognate fields as etymology and prosody. The section on words in his edited Commonplace Book speaks for itself. All major and minor writers that his masters had taught him to consider as elements of the national heritage were part and parcel of his cultural patrimony, and the full extent of his reading will only be correctly sized up when an overall inventory of culturally significant names in his works, correspondence and private papers has become available. It will appear in the daunting list produced by systematic research that Gissings prodigious appetite embraced not only books in English but in French, German, Italian and Spanish literature, all of which he could read in the original, let alone the Russian works with which he became acquainted through French and German translations. The same can be said of the Scandinavian plays and novels to which he had access thanks to the brave but not invariably brilliant efforts of a few pioneering linguists. The old languages he had begun to learn as a child belonged to that body of knowledge which his educated contemporaries regarded as common intellectual property. It is much to be regretted that Samuel Vogt Gapp, who was the first scholar to assess Gissings knowledge of Latin and Greek in his George Gissing, Classicist, has had no successor. The very deficient sources at his disposal at the time led him to underestimate grossly his subjects distinction as a classicist. How could Gapp hope to assess the importance of his nearly boundless enquiry so long as he only had access to the published works, a few badly edited letters and arbitrary selections from the diary? Nor can his statement that Gissing read very little contemporary literature pass muster he was on the contrary an assiduous reader of new books and in that field as in many others was remarkably knowledgeable about the new literature that publishers and printers put on the market. The integration of the best of past literature into the development of his novels is likely to remain a cultural feat in the eyes of future generations. In Gissings novels, a characters favourite books invariably function as a psychological and cultural index to his personality. No less specifically did Gissing see with an admirable clarity of vision that culture may be a factor of estrangement. Many of his characters, from Bernard Kingcote in Isabel Clarendon to Harvey Rolfe in The Whirlpool, to Henry Ryecroft in his semi-autobiographical meditations, only find happiness of sorts in their own company or in that of a few friends whose presence in ones home would be spoilt by an overlong stay. As time passed he became more and more convinced of mans loneliness, of the difficulties in communicating harmoniously with ones fellow creatures (there is in Henry Ryecroft a justly famous passage on

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the universality of quarrelling), on the impossibility for husband and wife, for relatives in any family to understand one another other than at the cost of frustratingly suppressing essential aspects of ones personality. To every man, he had his alter ego solemnly declare, it is decreed: thou shalt live alone. Few flights of imagination were more soothing than such doleful admissions, of which so few men are capable, and they account for the popularity among reviewers of the last words of his thought-laden travel narrative By the Ionian Sea, modestly subtitled Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy: As I looked my last towards the Ionian Sea, I wished it were mine to wander endlessly amid the silence of the ancient world, to-day and all its sounds forgotten. Only the professional writer he was, absorbed in the nostalgic elaboration of his reminiscences of a memorable journey, could express himself in these terms; the man who had found in Edward Clodd a sympathetic, cultured, tolerant friend whose opinions he shared in a way bordering on the absolute, was content to receive and respond to letters with a delicacy of feeling which moved their recipient. As has been noticed by Jacob Korg, the writers true confidants, whose sensibilities he need not constantly fear he might hurt, were not blood relations, but friends whose feelings and opinions had been tested by the passing of years, that is men whom, in the full sense of the term, he could trust. It is no exaggeration to say that Gissing was, after 1870, an exile in his own family. And he had so many unpalatable deep-felt truths to deliver, truths that only mindless critics could fail to identify as such. How often he must have been led to cultivate obliqueness when experience, had he obeyed its dictates, would have prompted him to write more bluntly and transparently! Gissing was gifted with a prodigious memory, and this helped greatly in sharpening his consciousness of all the misfortunes of mankind throughout the ages. Characteristic statements of his on this eternally painful subject are not lacking and they offer a key to a better understanding of his personality and its artistic achievements as well as to his sensibility. My admiration of the Martyr is less fervent than my loathing of his slayer, he wrote in his Commonplace Book, and earlier in life:

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A very frequent source of misery to me is the reflecting on all the frightful physical sufferings through which men have gone. The martyr at the stake, the torture-chamber, the arena &c &c. These things haunt me in the night.

The learned, intelligent conversation that Harvey Rolfe and his friend Morton have on the subject in The Whirlpool would be a fitting introduction to his more melancholy works. It is an amplification of thoughts that Gissing could not banish from his mind when his meditations wandered into the immense temporal eras in which he liked to immerse himself more and more deeply as he felt his time on earth was drawing to its close. Like Rolfe

Introduction he marvelled at the indifference with which men habitually live in a world where tragedy is every hours occurrence. He told himself that this was merely a morbid condition of the brain, but could not bring himself to believe it. On the contrary, what he now saw and felt was the simple truth of things, obscured by every-day conditions of active life.

Whereupon Gissing, whose consciousness of the horrors of history threatened to choke him to silence, let out an anguished cry:
And that History which he loved to read what was it but the lurid record of woes unutterable? How could he find pleasure in keeping his eyes fixed on century after century of ever-repeated torment war, pestilence, tyranny; the stake, the dungeon; tortures of infinite device, cruelties inconceivable? He would close his books, and try to forget all they had taught him.5

Thus did Gissing himself feel, not only his engaging character Harvey Rolfe, at the time he wrote The Whirlpool, but there was another Gissing, the one who was led to contemplate death, and who bravely, rationally, assured his motherin-law that he did not at all fear death. Indeed in some specific moods the thought of death, as in the twelfth Autumn section of Henry Ryecroft, made him wax lyrical when visiting a country churchyard:
There is no such gratulation as Hic jacet In the path trodden by the noblest of mankind these have followed; that which of all who live is the utmost thing demanded, these have achieved. I cannot sorrow for them, but the thought of their vanished life moves me to a brotherly tenderness. The dead, amid this leafy silence, seem to whisper encouragement to him whose fate yet lingers: As we are, so shalt thou be; and behold our quiet!

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A free man in the noblest sense of the epithet, Gissing consciously placed his greatest artistic hopes in his sincerity. The vast majority of the critics of his day repeatedly attempted as it were to deflect him from his course, predicting for him a greater commercial success when he would make concessions to the taste of the majority of readers; that is, when he would be prepared to betray his mission. Throughout his career he scorned the inanity of such vulgar advice, and one wishes that death had not robbed him of the chance to read what A. St John Adcock wrote in the English Bookman for August 1905:
Some [in fact many] of his critics used to reprove him for his gloomy views of life, as if it were desirable that all novelists should be of the same optimistic temperament and monotonously regard the world from the same standpoint: they were continually urging him to be less depressing, to look more on the brighter side of things, to write more hopefully, seeming to think, indeed, that the only right thing for him, as a sincere artist, to do was to write of humanity not as he saw it but as they saw it, and I have often read with wonder their wonderings at his perversity in choosing sombre themes and writing of them sombrely.6

The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part I

Equally pertinent to an objective representation of his aims and tendencies, conscious or unconscious, is his rejection of the idea that a writer can obliterate his personality from his writings. He knew that imagination was not his strongest asset, which could only be of relative importance in a realist novelist bent on offering his audience a recognizable image of the world around them and was scrupulous in his quest for likelihood and factual accuracy as is attested by the wealth of working notes in his personal papers. Students of his achievement may be grateful to him for having skilfully and humanely converted his personal misfortunes, some of them self-inflicted, into attractive, stimulating works of art which were intended not only for the best and most intelligent readers of his generation, but for those of the innumerable generations yet unborn. Austin Harrison was probably more perceptive than he thought himself to be when he wrote of his former tutor that unlike other men, he practically began life with no illusions to face.7 This handicap, that few artists could have so masterfully transcended, was in him a formidable appanage which he turned to account with a conscience absolutely untainted by the turpitudes ingrained and eternal of his profession. In some moments of waning self-confidence or renascent assurance it was a moral as well as an intellectual advantage that few of his literary contemporaries enjoyed, and although he forbore dilating on this (to him) most painful subject, it is not likely to have ever been forgotten. Perhaps the most moving expression of it occurs in a letter of 30 August 1888 to his younger sister written after her visit to Anne Bronts grave, to which the local sexton had guided her. The mans readiness to indicate it, he wrote with some emotion, would seem to prove that it is occasionally asked for. Strange to think of Charlotte Bront having stood on the spot, at the time of course regarded by those with whom she had dealings as an insignificant stranger. At this point one cannot help feeling that his emotion on imagining himself and Charlotte Bront, his favourite Victorian novelist, in a place so easily animated by his reminiscences of their contribution to English literature, was at its height. These revenges of time, he went on, using words which had been invested with pathos by Shakespeare and Browning before him, are very palatable to me. I think of such cases with a sort of exultation a rebellious triumph over the worlds brute forces. Be it permitted to the present writer to add that these feelings were shared by him with deep sadness on 28 December 2003 when, together with some fellow admirers of Gissing, he placed a commemorative plaque on his grave at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a hundred years after his pathetic death away from his native country.8

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