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.
§ 18. The classical world; By the Ionian
Sea; Veranilda.
Gissing
wrote novels of another type in which the purpose is the analysis of states
of mind. The
two kinds
of novel cannot be strictly divided; but there is a recognisable boundary
between the
sociological
studies and such stories as Isabel Clarendon, A Life’s Morning, The
Emancipated,
Eve’s Ransom, The Whirlpool, The Crown of Life and Our Friend the
Charlatan.
Here, Meredith was his master, and the direct influence of The Ordeal of
Richard
Feverel
may be traced in A Life’s Morning an idyll shadowed, for a while, by tragedy;
to
Meredith,
also, may be due the more frequent occurrence in these novels of concise
satirical
strokes
such as the characterisation of their resolute artist Mallard in The Emancipated,
as a
“Janus
with anxiety on both faces,” or of Mrs. Bradshaw, who “interested herself
greatly in
Vesuvius,
regarding it as a serio-comic phenomenon which could exist only in a country
inhabited
by childish triflers.” We miss, however, Meredith’s heroic keynote, poetic
conception
and penumbra of comedy. Gissing’s analysis probes deeply, especially in
his
tracing
of the disintegration of ill-starred marriage unions which have no sanction
in community
of standards,
tastes or class-clanship; and in the dissection of modern temperamental
types,
such as
Dyce Lashmar, “who excelled in intellectual plausibility,” and Alma Fotheringham,
whose
artistic enthusiasms spring out of too shallow a soil. In these instances,
he exhibits the
plenitude
of interacting motive with practised skill; but, too often, he lacks the
magical spell
which
combines the scattered traits into a breathing personality. One of his
analytic studies
begins
“Look at this girl and try to know her”; the phrase is indicative of his
most serious
limitation
as a novelist.
Gissing was not without avenues of escape from the dismal world in which
for a great part of
his career
he dwelt and studied; one was his native instinct to idealise womanhood;
upon
almost
all his feminine characters he confers some graceful sensuous charm, and
he gives his
imagination
free rein in bodying forth such visions as Thyrza, Cecily Doran and Sidwell
Warricombe.
He won a sense of mental liberty, again, in classic poetry and amid the
scenes
which
it calls to mind. The gratification of a long-fostered desire to see Italy
gives a momentary
richness
of colour to the drab expanse of New Grub Street; Magna Graecia is the
main scene
and inspiration
of two later books, By the Ionian Sea and Veranilda. In the former, Gissing
proves
himself a master of the descriptive essay, as might have been anticipated
from many
passages
in the novels in which the elusive charm of English scenery is sensitively
caught and
rendered.
Impressions of the memorials of antiquity, of the bright or delicate colouring
of land-
and sea-scape,
of languorous perfume, of the discomforts of travel, of the sharp, deleterious
climate
at certain seasons, of strongly marked Italian rustic types, are blended
in the exquisite
prose
narrative, which reveals surpassing beauty in the chapter “The Mount of
Refuge.” A
historical
novel dealing with the period of Totila—the suggestion dated from his early
absorption
in Gibbon—had long been a preoccupation with Gissing. He put into Veranilda
years
of patient labour, and wrote with matured power upon a theme which pleased
his
imagination.
The background is skilfully planned, informed by exact knowledge (in great
part
drawn
from Cassiodorus, of whom Gissing wrote charmingly in By the Ionian Sea)
of habit,
custom,
religion, law and the daily round of sixth century life. The historical
novel of the
classical
world is a recurrent form in English fiction; but the closest parallel
is to be found in
Salammbô
Gissing’s romance, in contrast, fails in intensity of imagination.
The Private Papers of
Henry Ryecroft
URL : http://www.bartleby.net/223/1418.html