No More Learning

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 trans-
formed 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
Ecile, 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
a


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XIV]
His Novels
459
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.
In all the books named above it is evident that Gissing, a born
hedonist, hated the scene he was portraying ; he could not at
any time sink his own standards, nor could he comprehend the
factors—custom, comradeship, the lowered demand upon life and
characteristic forms of courage and humour-by which their lot
is rendered tolerable to the poor. The picture of poverty is seen
in pleasanter lights (and presented in a less substantial medium)
in the later books, The Town Traveller and Will Warburton.
Certain of the novels, New Grub Street, Born in Exile and
The Odd Women portray a rather higher stratum of society,
whose origins are in the suburbs or the provinces ; but the
malignant effects of poverty or obscure birth invade this region
also. The theme is frequently the endeavour of one born in an
inferior station to grasp at the advantages of culture or ease for
which, by intellect or temperament, he or she is fitted, but
excluded by lack of money or by defect of social aptitude ; it is
the case with Godwin Peak and with Eve Madeley ; they both
seek their prize by dishonourable means ; both, in some shifty
way, have to disavow an earlier hampering alliance; these de-
teriorations are traced back to poverty. The novels last named
also work out vigorously, and without dogmatism (which Gissing
could not tolerate), problems arising out of distinctly modern
conditions. They exhibit a complete change of temper from the
attacks made on abuses with reforming intent by Dickens and
Reade. In New Grub Street, there is the problem of conscience
in the conditions of modern journalism ; in Born in Exile,
the conflict between religion and science ; in The Odd Women,
the status of women made conscious of their unpreparedness and
superfluousness when the sheltering home collapses. Some of
Gissing's finest work in the more strictly defined business of the


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460
George Gissing
[CH.
novelist is in these three books; the characterisation in New
Grub Street of Alfred Yule-pedantic, unimaginatively sincere,
ageing, beset by minor ailments, the springs of courtesy and
kindliness dried up in him by constant disappointment, swept
aside by the tide of progress, but holding sardonically to his
place-has a grip and tenacity and a freedom from analytical
impediment to which Gissing rarely attained; the characters of
Reardon, suffering from the malady that falls upon outwearied
imagination, and Biffen, author of the unsuccessful novel Mr
Bailey, Grocer (an example of the theory of absolute realism in
the sphere of the ignobly decent') are made the more real by
a vein of reminiscence of Gissing's own apprenticeship to want
and defeat; his temperament gave him, moreover, a clue to
these types, sensitive, self-centred, conceiving themselves the
chosen victims of adversity, and lacking in ‘social nerve. ' In
The Odd Women is illustrated another way in which Gissing
foresaw new directions of technical method and criticism of life in
the novel form ; it is found in the relentless study, unmoved by
any considerations of sentiment or plot, of the beginning, course
and ending of Virginia Madden's indulgence in secret drinking.
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 Whirl-
pool, 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 the irresolute artist Mallard
in The Emancipated, as a ‘Janus with anxiety on both faces,' or
of Mrs Bradshaw, who 'interested herself greatly in Vesuvius, re-
garding it as a serio-comic phenomenon which could only exist 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


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XIV]
His Women
461
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 per-
sonality. 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 momen-
tary 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 back-
ground 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 Salammbó. Gissing's
romance, in contrast, fails in intensity of imagination.
A third of these imaginative liberations Gissing found in his
lifelong admiration of Dickens. His monograph established a
claim for Dickens as a representative of 'national life and senti-
ment'; it disposed finally of the heresy that Dickens's characters


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462
George Gissing
[CH.
1
were merely types or caricatures devoid of basis in observation; it
brought into relief his skill in the presentation of various types of
women ; and it accorded due praise to his style, discriminating
in it the salutary element which is drawn from the eighteenth
century. The book is more than a criticism of Dickens; it is a
manual of the art of fiction, which brings to bear upon a mass of
problems raised by his work a ripe judgment formed by practice,
reading and reflection. One further imaginative solace Gissing
found in the solitary retreat outlined in The Private Papers of
Henry Ryecroft; a retreat freed from the menace of poverty,
from the exactions of acquaintanceship, filled with the atmosphere
of books and of quiet comfort; even in prosperity, Gissing pre-
ferred the role of social outlaw. In form, The Private Papers of
Henry Ryecroft lies somewhere between the journal intime and
the diary, reflection and observation being expanded to the length
of brief essays, and “tuned to the mood of the sky and the pro-
cession of the year’; memories of the bitter past, or of vanishing
phases of English custom and scenery; thoughts stirred by some
phrase of famous authorship, or by the anticipations of mortality,
or by things which he resented, such as industrialism, compulsion
of the individual, talk of war : all are mingled and unified by the
style and tone which echo 'the old melodious weeping of the
poets. ' The book is not autobiographical, though it seems to be
the expression of a personality almost as intimately realised as the
autobiographical form presupposes. Gissing wrote of it that it
was 'much more an aspiration than a memory. '
In structure, Gissing looks back to the age of the three-volume
novel; he uses at times, but impatiently and not well, the old
contrived plot, with melodramatic contretemps which results from
hidden wills, renounced legacies, forced coincidence and the
like; his more characteristic work takes the form of studies,
rather than tales, of the fates of two or three groups, related
by marriage, cousinship or occupation. Each section is dealt with
in turn methodically and exhaustively; but, partly through the
consequent breaks in the narration and partly through the
occasional analytic stagnation, there is some loss of organic con-
tinuity; the form is impressed from without, and too little shaped
by forces within, the narrative; the characters are hedged about
by this absolute exclusion of vagrancy; poles apart from this
method stands such a book as Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov,
where the tale affects us like a continuous swirling stream. Gissing's
dialogue is apt to be bookish, and, though admirably representative


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His Style
XIV]
463
of character, it often fails to create illusion; there is an exception
in his natural unforced pathos. In style, though he is rather
consciously literary, he is one of the few novelists who add to
the worth of words by the care with which they are used, and
his best writing has a rare rhythmical grace and variety. He
was an eager student of the rhythm of classical verse as well
as of the prose of Landor and the poetry of Tennyson ; in the
later novels, his prose, always pure and finely chosen, breaks
into arresting and felicitous phrase, more often of pungent than
of imaginative quality.


## p. 464 (#480) ############################################

BIBLIOGRAPHIES
CHAPTER I
CARLYLE
I. BIBLIOGRAPHIES
Shepherd, R. H. The Bibliography of Carlyle. A bibliographical list
arranged in chronological order of the published writings in prose and
verse of Thomas Carlyle (from 1820 to 1881). 1881.
Notes and Queries. Series vi, vol. iv, pp. 145, 201 ff. 1881.
Anderson, J. P. Carlyle Bibliography. Appendix to Garnett, R. , Life of
Thomas Carlyle. 1887.
II. COLLECTED EDITIONS AND SELECTIONS
Collected Works. 16 vols. 1856-8.
Collected Works. (Library edn. ) 34 vols. 1869-71.
Collected Works. (People's edn. ) 37 vols. 1871-4.
Works. (Ashburton edn. ) 17 vols. 1885-7.
Works. Ed. with Introductions by Traill, H. D. (Century edn. ) 31 vols.
1897-1901.
Ausgewählte Schriften. Hrsg. von Kretschmar, A. 6 vols. Leipzig, 1855-6.
Sozialpolitische Schriften. Übersetzt von Pfannkuche, A. Göttingen, 1895.
Passages selected from the Writings of Thomas Carlyle. With a bio-
graphical Memoir by Ballantyne, T. 1855.
The Carlyle Anthology. Selected and arranged by Barrett, E. New edn.
New York, 1876.
An Outline of the Doctrine of Thomas Carlyle, being selected and arranged
passages from his works. 1896.
Pages choisies de Carlyle. Traduction et introduction par Masson, E. Paris,
1905.
Arbeiten und nicht verzweifeln. Auszüge aus Carlyles Werken. Düsseldorf,
1912.
III. SEPARATE WORKS
Elements of Geometry and Trigonometry; with notes. Translated from the
French of A. M. Legendre by Thomas Carlyle. (The introductory
chapter on Proportion is by the translator. ) Edinburgh, 1824.
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. A novel from the German of Goethe.
Translated by Thomas Carlyle. 3 vols. Edinburgh, 1824. Other
edns, 1839, 1842. Together with Wilhelm Meister's Travels. 1874.
With introduction by Dowden, E. and notes by Shorter, C. 1890.


## p. 465 (#481) ############################################

CH. 1]
Carlyle
465
The Life of Schiller, comprehending an examination of his Works. 1825.
2nd edn. 1845. (Originally published as Schiller's Life and Writings in
The London Magazine, 1823-4; see, post, sect. iv. )
Leben Schillers, aus dem Englischen (with an introduction by
Goethe). Frankfort o. M. , 1830.
Cf. Küchler, F. , Carlyle und Schiller, Anglia, vol. xxvi, Halle, 1903
(pp. 1 ff. and 393 ff. ).
German Romance. Specimens of its chief Authors; with biographical and
critical notices. Translated by Thomas Carlyle. 4 vols. Edinburgh,
1827. (Vol. 1, Musaeus and Fouqué; 11, Tieck and Hoffmann; 111, Richter;
iv, Goethe. ) Tales by Musaeus, Tieck, Richter. 2 vols. 1874.
Wotton Reinfried. Fragment of a novel. 1827. See, post, Last Words of
Thomas Carlyle.
James Carlyle. 1832. Published in Reminiscences, see post.
Sartor Resartus; the Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh. In three
books. With Preface by Emerson, R. W. Boston, 1836. First English
edn. 1838. (Sartor Resartus originally appeared in Fraser's Magazine,
1833-4; see, post, sect. iv. ) 2nd edn. n. d. 3rd edn. 1849. With an
Introduction by Dowden, E. 1896. With Introduction and Notes by
Mac Mechan, A. Boston, 1896. By Barrett, J. A. S. 1901, 1905. Ed. Wood,
J. 1902.
Published by the Doves Press. 1907. Ed. Parr, P. C. 1913.
Sartor Resartus. Traduit par Barthélemy, E. Paris, 1899, 1904.
Übersetzt und zum ersten Male mit Anmerkungen und einer
ausführlichen Biographie Carlyles versehen von Fischer, Th. A.
2 vols. Leipzig, 1882. Übersetzt von Schmidt, K. Halle, 1900.
Spanish translation by Blanco, E. González. 2 vols. Barcelona,
1905.
Cf. Wells, J. T. , Thomas Carlyle: his religious experience as reflected
in Sartor Resartus, 1899; Lincke, O. , Über die Wortzusammensetzung in
Carlyles Sartor Resartus, 1904.
The French Revolution. A History. 3 vols. 1837. 2nd edn. 1839. 3rd edn.
1848. Also 1857 and 1871. New edn, with Introduction and Notes by
Fletcher, C. R. L. 1902. With Introduction, Notes, etc. by Rose, J. H.
3 vols. 1902. 2nd edn. 2 vols. 1909.
Histoire de la Révolution française. Traduite par Regnault, E. ,
Barot, 0. et Roche, J. 3 vols. Paris, 1865–7. Les Hommes de
la Révolution française. Traduction nouvelle par Fauvel, H. , avec
étude sur la vie et l'âuvre de Carlyle. Paris, 1888. Die französische
Revolution. Deutsch von Feddersen, P. 3 vols. Leipzig, 1844.
6th edn. Leipzig, 1911. Also Die grosse Revolution. Bearbeitet
von Luntowski, A. Berlin, 1911.
Cf. review by Mill, J. S. in The Westminster Review, and by Mazzini, J. ,
Life and Writings, 1864–70, vol. iv, pp. 110-144.
Lectures on German Literature. 1837.
Lectures on the History of Literature. 1838. Ed. Green, J. R. 1892.
Ed. with Notes, etc. by Karkaria, R. P. Bombay, 1892. Cf. Dowden, E. ,
Carlyle's Lectures on the Periods of European Culture, Nineteenth
Century, May 1881; rptd in Transcripts and Studies, 1888.
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays; collected and republished. 4 vols. 1839.
2nd edn. 5 vols. 1840. 3rd edn. 4 vols. 1847. Also 1857. Occasional and
Miscellaneous Essays. New York, 1839. (The individual essays of the
collection will be found enumerated in sect. iv. ) Biographical Essays
(Johnson; Burns). 1853. Essays by Thomas Carlyle, with introduc-
tion by Harris, F. n. d. Selected Essays. Ed. Pringle-Pattison, A. S.
Edinburgh, 1909.
E. L. XIII.
30


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466
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Bibliography
Essais choisis de critique et de morale. Traduits avec une introduction
par Barthélemy, E. Paris, 1907. Nouveaux Essais choisis de
critique et de morale. Traduits par Barthélemy, E. Paris, 1909.
Vermischte Aufsätze von Thomas Carlyle. Deutsch von Bredt, P.
1910. Zerstreute historische Aufsätze. Deutsch von Fischer,
Th. A. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1907.
Lectures on European Revolutions. 1839.
Chartism. 1839. 2nd edn. 1842.
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the heroic in history. Six Lectures reported
with emendations and additions. 1841. 2nd edn. 1842. 3rd edn. 1846.
Ed. MacMechan, A. Boston, 1901, 1902. Ed. Parr, P. C. 1910.
Les Héros, le culte des Héros, et l'Héroïque dans l'Histoire. Traduc-
tion et introduction par Izoulet-Loubatières, J. Paris, 1887. Gli
Eroi. Trad. di Pascolato, M. P. Florence, 1897. Los Héroes.
Trad. por Orbón. , J. G. Madrid, 1893. Über Heroen, Heroen-
cultus und das Heroische in der Geschichte. Deutsch von
Nenberg, J. Berlin, 1853. Übersetzt von Wicklein, E. Jena,
1913.
Preface to R. W. Emerson's Essays. 1841, 1844, 1853.
Historical Sketches, written between 1842 and 1843. Ed. Carlyle, A.
1898.
Past and Present. 1843. 2nd edn. 1845. Also 1872. Ed. Smeaton, 0.
(Temple Classics. ) 1902.
Cathédrales d'Autrefois et Usines d'Aujourd'hui. Traduit par Bos, C.
Paris, 1901.
Cf. R. B. E. , Thoughts on Thomas Carlyle; or a commentary on the
'Past and Present, 1843.
Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches. With Elucidations. 2 vols. 1845.
Also, New York, 1845. 2nd edn. , enlarged.