XIV. George
Meredith, Samuel Butler, George Gissing.
§
The titles of
some of Gissing’s books give warrant to a suggestion advanced by one critic 3 that
Gissing early burdened himself with a grandiose ambition of emulating Balzac’s
survey of the whole province of society; but, in method of representation,
there is little that is common to the art of the Frenchman, voracious of
reality and teeming with products of his creative genius, and to the
fastidious, resentful observation and record of the Englishman. There are
points of resemblance, rather than of contact, with the circle of Soirées de
Médan; Gissing surveyed his world closely, but he
is not “documented” like the brothers de Goncourt; 4 he does
not attain the controlled objectivity of his contemporary de Maupassant, though
it is evident that, by Gissing’s time, the question of the intervention of the
artist in his work has become, what it was not to Dickens and Thackeray, an
artistic problem. Gissing is like Zola in his portrayal of the submerged part
of the population of towns and of the squalidness of poverty; the crowds which gather
in districts such as Hoxton, Lambeth and Clerkenwell
are more like those of Zola than those of Barnaby Rudge.
In Gissing’s reading of men and women, amorousness, sometimes furtive,
sometimes brutal, plays a large part. He is one of the earliest in English
fiction to probe deeply into the psychology of sex; though a certain reserve
withholds him from the description of such fervid eroticism as leads to the
study of remorse in Thérèse Raquin. Gissing was preoccupied with the environment of
poverty, and has little concern with heredity or with the procrustean bed of
theory into which the history of the Rougon-Macquart
family is forced. He does not deliberately practise the roman expérimental; nevertheless, his treatment of poverty is
not altogether unlike the Zolaesque studies of some
aspect of commerce or creed or confirmed social habit. A distinction which Zola
drew in the manifesto to Thérèse Raquin is developed in Isabel Clarendon, that
between character and temperament. Bernard Kingcote,
in that book, is a victim of nervous sensitiveness and exhaustion; there are no
such characterisations in Scott or Thackeray or Dickens. Both Zola and Gissing
are apt to evade by some romantic device the full implication of the realistic
method. A traceable link with all these writers is found in the thought of
Schopenhauer, which leavened the whole mass of realistic fiction. Gissing’s
sojourn in
In
truth, the term realist implies a homogeneity in his
work which does not exist; his most realistic novel has prefixed to it a
sentence from Renan which cuts at the root of realism: La peinture d’un fumier peut être justifiée pourvu qu’il y pousse une belle fleur; sans cela le fumier n’est que repoussant. And, however
much he may have derived from the practice of the continent, he is, at the same
time, in direct continuance from English traditions. He admired and imitated
Hogarth—a moralist; Dickens and Meredith left deep impressions on the two main
sections of his work. The London of Dickens cast an enduring spell over his
youthful imagination; the milieu which he best describes is that of
Dickens, the lower middle and the lowest classes. The differences in attitude
between Dickens and his disciple are profound; poverty to Dickens was a soil
rich in picturesque or sentimental idiosyncrasy; its vulgarity he transformed
to magical humour; its evils, he thought, could be remedied by large-hearted
humanity. To Gissing, who was bred in the north of
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