The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
                                Volume XIII. The Victorian Age, Part One.

              XIV. George Meredith, Samuel Butler, George Gissing.

                                  § 15. A comparison with Zola.
 

           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 Germany was given up to the reading of philosophers, chief among
           them Comte and Schopenhauer. The latter’s influence appears constantly in the novels;
           Gissing, in his first book, adopted from Schopenhauer his conception of social sympathy,
           though he quickly rejected it to become a social agnostic; Schopenhauer’s outlook of despair
           colours some of Gissing’s most powerful writing; it was on this social side that the novelist was
           influenced most; Schopenhauer’s view of women, applied with ruthless Latin logic by de
           Maupassant, does not affect Gissing; on the contrary, the delineation of finer feminine
           characters sets free all the latent idealism of Gissing’s nature.
 
             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 England, poverty was a desolate, mirthless
           waste on the borders of the evil kingdom of commerce. He does not, as Mrs. Gaskell and
           Charles Reade do, much concern himself with the workshop or conflicts of capital and labour;
           but, with a profounder knowledge than Ruskin, Carlyle or Morris had when they revolted
           against its ugliness, he pictured the world of poverty, its streets and purlieus and dens, the
           whole atmosphere of it, squalid and without a vestige of beauty. Envy, jealousy and revenge
           are the reigning motives there; the brutal and cunning, such as Clem Peckover, in The Nether
           World, trample upon the impotent and degenerate Pennyloaf Candy and Bob Hewitt, and prey
           upon those whose instincts are humane, such as Jane Snowden and Sidney Kirkwood. The
           anatomy of poverty is carried out most fully in the novels Demos, Thyrza, The Nether World,
           New Grub Street, Born in Exile, The Odd Women, In the Year of Jubilee, Eve’s Ransom,
           and in the short sketches contained in Human Odds and Ends and The House of Cobwebs.
           In some of these books is described the outcome of attempts at amelioration; Besant’s All
           Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882) treats Gissing’s material in a mood of resolute
           optimism; Gissing is frankly pessimistic. In Demos, the suggested remedy of socialism leads to
           a mob-murder; and wealth, which comes unexpectedly to the lower middle class family, the
           Mutimers, only leads to demoralisation. In Thyrza, along with the presentation of the lovely
           though idealised figure of Thyrza and her more human sister Lydia, there is a study of the
           results of bringing education to the artisan; the sole outcome is the bitter tragedy which
           indirectly befalls the exceptionally endowed workman Gilbert Grail. The finer characters of the
           lower world are those untouched by education; the wild. frank Totty Nancarrow, and old Mrs.
           Mutimer, Richard Mutimer’s mother; the dumb, instinctive honesty of her protest against his
           despicable manoeuvre is one of the most masterly, and one of the few heroic, things in Gissing.
           In general, his dramatic episodes are not those depicting resistance.
 

                                                                                     The delineation of poverty; Realism and pessimism
 

           Note 3. The Monthly Review, 1904; “George Gissing,” by H. G. Wells. [ back ]
           Note 4. In the privately printed Letters from George Gissing to Edward Clodd, the first letter
           mentions a note-book kept by Gissing containing a long list of barbarisms and superstitions among
           the lower classes of women in London; a letter printed in Edmund Gosse’s Questions at Issue
           (1893) gives Gissing’s observations on the reading of the poorer classes. [ back ]

URL : http://www.bartleby.net/223/1415.html