No More Learning



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XIV]
The Comic Spirit
445
invent either the character or the story. The fine adjustment
of the claims of blood, brain and spirit is the ideal illustrated in
his grander figures ; Mazzini, 'an orbed mind supplying its own
philosophy,' Carinthia, and Vittoria, whose nature, compounded of
the elements of woman, patriot and artist, was 'subdued by her
own force. ' Finally, the conception of retribution in the poems
and novels shakes off the scriptural and puritan accretions which
cumbered George Eliot; other orders of human error and punish-
ment come to light, as in the instances of Sir Austin Feverel,
Victor Radnor and lord Ormont. On the largest scale, in Odes
in Contribution to the Song of French History, Meredith's ethic
reveals Sedan as the expiation of the errors of seventy years
before, when, rejecting her spiritual lover, liberty, France yielded
to the glamour of Napoleon.
Meredith summoned the novelist to define not only his
philosophy but, also, the temper and intention with which he
proposed to depict society. He symbolised the ideal attitude
in his creation of the comic spirit, an emanation of earth,' and,
therefore, endowed with sanity, clear vision, inborn purity and
sympathy with the final purpose of 'earth. ' Politely but relent-
lessly, it fulfils its office as guardian spirit of a civilisation of
which the members are but quasi-civilised. 'Accord' is its social
aim; it seeks out, therefore, not the obvious sinners, with whom
the moralist can deal simply and well, but the Patternes, Poles,
Daciers and Fleetwoods, in whom lurking savage instincts are
concealed by surface veneer and rectitude. The weapon of the
comic spirit is the silvery laughter of the mind'; its strokes take
the form of satire, humour, wit or irony. It is clear that the
comic spirit is a new form of the ideal observer, already known in
the Greek chorus, in the spirit of Aristophanes and of Molière
and of others reviewed in Meredith's Essay on Comedy, in
Addison's Mr Spectator, in Goldsmith's Chinaman ; the comic
spirit ranges over a wider field in the novel, exercises a more
incessant vigilance in its efforts to reconcile the diverse aims of
society.
There are two main kinds of structure in Meredith : one, a highly
individual form in which an outstanding character appears con-
stantly in the centre of the stage in a succession of loosely connected
scenes, for which the focus and angle of vision are determined by
the comic spirit. The method is exemplified in miniature in The
Case of General Ople and Lady Camper, and, at full length, in
The Egoist ; the model is evidently that of comedy; The Egoist
6


## p. 446 (#462) ############################################

446
[CH,
George Meredith
is called a 'comedy in narrative’; if Le Misanthrope could be
magnified to the proportions of the novel, we should have an
exact counterpart. The alternative kind of structure is, however,
more common in Meredith. In it is outlined a prolonged situation
depending upon delicate adjustments of honour, passion and
aspiration in many characters ; very often, some kind of problem
lies behind the story-educational in The Ordeal of Richard
Feverel, political in Beauchamp's Career, social in One of Our
Conquerors. The play of influences from nature is, also, un-
remitting. Action and the older sort of plot can almost be
dispensed with ; they are exchanged for large organic conception,
knowledge of the subterranean processes by which idea and will
gather force and externalise themselves, intuition as to the time
and places at which the tension and the disturbing vibrations
will work towards dramatic conjunctions—such, for instance, as
Beauchamp's final encounter with Renée de Croisnel, where we
witness the long-impending collision between incompatible French
and English customs; or the deep-founded misunderstanding
which precedes the apology of lord Romfrey to doctor Shrapnel.
The former kind of novel, the comedy in narrative, presents
figures, such as Sir Willoughby, who are both individual and
typical, after the fashion of Molière's Tartufe or Harpagon ; the
latter kind, the novel of highly charged situation, presents its
characters in more relations and with a more vivid sense of
complex personality. In both kinds, we draw our conception
of character chiefly from two sources : the first, speech and
dialogue, which are idealised and extended so that they offer
the largest sensitive surface whereon character may leave its
impress; the second, the analysis, sure, delicate and exhaustive,
of motive and feeling. In this analysis, Meredith is a realist
(though there are occasional failures, such as the central incident
of Diana of the Crossways), and his figures are distinguished
from the pleasing shadows of romance. At times, we feel, as in
George Eliot's works, that the novelist is helping us by lucid
and dispassionate reasoning to understand a figure viewed as
through a glass window; but, in the more notable characters,
especially those of women, we feel ourselves continually in the
presence of personalities quick with nervous and spiritual vitality
and having the power on their own account to engage our concern
and memory. Lucy, Rose, Kiomi, Vittoria, Renée, Clara Middleton,
Nesta, Carinthia, are as vivid in gesture, speech and movement,
in varied mood and in the quality they impart to our own humour,


## p. 447 (#463) ############################################

XIV]
His Style
447
as any figures in nineteenth-century fiction. Meredith's boys are
creations of profound insight; his men, even those cast in the
mould of Vernon Whitford, do not, in general, lodge so securely
in the memory. A rare gift of characterisation, which Meredith
possesses in the highest degree, is that of calling into being figures
belonging to other nationalities ; his Welsh and French and Italian
creations are marked both by completeness and by subtlety ; this
is the basis of the historical power which gives abiding value to
the picture of the rising under Mazzini in Vittoria, and to that of
Napoleon in Odes in Contribution to the Song of French History.
It is worth notice that, in the main, the analytical method is only
practised upon the complex, sophisticated people of the leisured
world; the simpler classes are delineated in other ways ; for in-
stance, Mrs Berry, who is alive, and Jack Raikes, who is moribund,
are in Dickens's manner of humorous exaggeration. Meredith's
rustics are apt to savour chiefly of beef and beer. The exception to
the avoidance of psychology in the case of humbler folk is in the
part of Rhoda Fleming which deals with the yeoman's family;
the age-long moulding influence of the Kentish soil, the inveigling
of the weaker sister, Dahlia, and the savage virginal pride of
Rhoda Fleming are set forth in the way of analysis.
The general effect of oracular allusiveness in Meredith's style
appears, on examination, to arise mainly from incidental comment,
in which the figurative and aphoristic elements, due, in some degree,
to the influence of Carlyle and, therefore, indirectly of Jean Paul
Richter, abound to such a degree that we often seem to be
looking at similes and metaphors instead of at the thing which
was to have been said. On the other hand, the narrative prose,
and that directly expressive of character, has, in general, a fine
precision, an almost ostentatious felicity of phrase and diction.
The writings of La Bruyère, Saint-Simon and Stendhal are parallels
and, sometimes, models, for the clear exposition of intricate
psychological and moral situations, and for the predilection for
wit and epigram, which overflow into receptacles such as “The
Pilgrim's Scrip' and 'Maxims for Men. ' The pervasive irony,
exultancy and poetic distinction of Meredith's writing are native
to his own mind. In his middle years, he seems to have retorted
upon public indifference by a wilful disregard for the convenience
of his readers ; he avoids simplicity and indulges in fantastic
circumlocution ; he sacrifices more and more of the narrative
quality, of which, on occasion, as in the duel in the Stelvio pass,
he is a master, in favour of effects derived from witty and ironical


## p. 448 (#464) ############################################

448
[CH.
George Meredith
analogy; there is a wasteful fusillade of phrases which do not
carry us forward ; imagery, at all times too prodigal, becomes
bewildering in its protean transformations. It is unfortunate that
these excesses culminate in the early part of One of Our Con-
querors, and thus bar the way to Meredith's most delicate and
poetic study of awakening womanhood, the character of Nesta
Victoria Radnor. His poetic style has other features, due, in part,
to a revulsion from the manner of Idylls of the King, in part to
the concentration which was his declared method of craftsmanship.
Unessentials are shorn away until words are left to stand side by
side, each preserving, sphinx-like, the secret which connects it
with other words; it is certain that not all the satisfaction which
comes with comprehension arises from poetic sources. At the same
time, as in all poets of insubordinate intellect—Donne, Chapman,
Browning and others—there are supreme imaginative passages,
pellucid in diction, and of radiant beauty and entrancing music.
Meredith is a great metrical experimenter. He devises new
forms of stanza in Modern Love, Hymn to Colour, A Ballad
of Fair Ladies in Revolt (where the rhythm sustains admirably the
sense of keen spontaneous debate), Love in a Valley (which plays
exquisite variations upon a nursery measure), Earth and Man and
The Thrush in February (two variants of the gnomic quatrain).
His tragic ballads invite comparison with similar forms in Rossetti,
Morris and Swinburne; his sonnets are very various in theme,
temper and structure; one of them, Lucifer in Starlight, is among
the most remarkable technical achievements of Meredith ; it
evokes the full epic strain of Milton from the restricted keyboard
of the brief sonnet form. The travail of creation tortures the
form of much of Meredith's poetry; the Lucifer sonnet has the
repose of perfect achievement. Individual effects are attained,
also, in his continuous measures; in the iambic movement of the
consummate lyric outburst The Lark Ascending; in the anapaestic
trimeters of The Day of the Daughter of Hades and A Faith on
Trial, the freedom of equivalence and substitution (and, in the
former case, of rime) preserves the emphasis of meaning from
the too great insistence of the metrical beat—the pitfall of this
metre. The Woods of Westermain and The Nuptials of Attila
are in the trochaic tetrameter catalectic; in the latter poem, the
impression of primitive violence in the theme is reinforced by the
persistence of four strong stresses within a short line of seven
syllables, and by the entire avoidance of weak syllables either at
the beginning or the end of the line. Phaéthôn, a splendid, if


## p. 449 (#465) ############################################

XIV]
Samuel Butler
449
rather free, attempt, in galliambic measure, for which Meredith
names the Attis of Catullus as his model, and Phoebus with
Admetus, with its three successive strong stresses at the end of
the even lines, and the use of pauses to complete the length of
the line, are other instances of the research and the testing
of metrical possibilities by the inner ear which impart a fresh and
unfamiliar music to his verse. There is evidence that, by its
imaginative, intellectual and metrical daring, and by its opening
of new springs of poetical inspiration, Meredith’s verse has
more immediate bearing upon the practice of following writers
than his novels; for, though it is admitted that he has set a high
standard to which the novel must attain, if it would be ranked as
literature, nevertheless, fiction has quite notably discarded his
philosophic way, and is committed to the path entered upon,
not with his approval, by the realists.
Samuel Butler was born on 4 December 1835 at Langar
rectory, Nottingham; he was the son of Thomas Butler and
grandson of Samuel Butler, headmaster of Shrewsbury school
and bishop of Lichfield. Samuel Butler was bracketed twelfth
in the first class of the classical tripos at Cambridge in 1858. In
the following year, abandoning his intention of taking orders, he
went to New Zealand and successfully managed a sheep-run.
Some of his leisure was spent in writing for The Press, Christchurch,
New Zealand, the articles Darwin on the Origin of Species (1862)
and Darwin among the Machines (1863) which were afterwards
expanded into Erewhon and Life and Habit. A volume published
in 1863, A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, is composed of
his letters from the colony. Returning to England in 1864, he
settled for the remainder of his life in Clifford's inn. He studied
painting and exhibited at the Royal Academy between the years
1868 and 1876. Erewhon was published in 1872; The Fair
Haven (1873) provides an ironical setting for the matter of his
pamphlet The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ,
written in 1865. Meantime, he had begun, about 1872, The Way
of all Flesh; it was laid aside in 1885, and not published till 1903.
A Psalm of Montreal was written in Canada in 1875. His books
of scientific controversy include Life and Habit (1877), Evolution
Old and New and God the Known and God the Unknown
in 1879, Unconscious Memory (1880), Luck or Cunning (1887),
and the essays The Deadlock in Darwinism (1890). His Italian
journeys led to the publication, in 1881, of Alps and Sanctuaries
29
E. L. XIII.
CH. XIV.


## p. 450 (#466) ############################################

450
[CH.
Samuel Butler
of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino. His close interest in the
art of the Sacro Monte at Varallo-Sesia, especially in that of the
artist Tabachetti, is reflected in Ex Voto (1888). A number
of essays appeared in The Universal Review, between the years
1888 and 1890 ; in 1896 was published The Life and Letters of
Dr Samuel Butler. Butler's admiration for Handel's music, an
admiration dating from his boyhood and constantly increasing, led
to his attempt to compose in the Handelian manner, collaborating
with Henry Festing Jones. One of the subjects chosen as libretto
for an oratorio was Ulysses, and, hence, arose an independent study
of the Homeric poems, from which resulted Butler's theories of
the feminine authorship and Trapanese origin of the Odyssey.
The substance of many pamphlets and lectures on the subject is
contained in The Authoress of the Odyssey, published in 1897.
He also made prose translations, in a vigorous homely idiom which
he called Tottenham Court road English, of the Iliad (in 1898)
and of the Odyssey (in 1900). In 1899 appeared Shakespeare's
Sonnets, reconsidered and in part re-arranged, in which he
combated the view that the poems were academic exercises, and
contended that Mr W. H. was a plebeian of low character.
These literary controversies illustrate Butler's antipathy to pro-
fessional critics, and his view that the function of criticism is
to disengage the personality of an artist from his medium of
expression. Erewhon Revisited was published in 1901. Butler
died on 18 June 1902. A selection from his manuscript note-books
appeared in 1912, under the title The Note-Books of Samuel
Butler.
Only the briefest reference is possible to Butler's scientific
discussions. His interest in them was lifelong, and he imparted
to them, at times, an angry temper born of his belief that he was
flouted by an oligarchy of men of science, who regarded him as an
amateur because he was not a professional collector and experi-
menter. He accepted all their facts; but he challenged their
interpretations on the ground of what he deemed was their
loose reasoning. His contentions turn chiefly upon two points :
first, the restoration of the idea of design to the philosophy of
evolution—not the old teleological design of Buffon, Lamarck and .
Erasmus Darwin, but a cunning and will inherent in each separate
cell to shape the chances of its environment to ends of comfort
and stability. Secondly, he put forward a conception of heredity
based on the continuity of each generation with all its predecessors,
and the transmission of serviceable habits stored up by unconscious
a


## p. 451 (#467) ############################################

XIV]
Erewhon
451
memory. These conclusions are now, in a provisional way, accepted;
but the debate has passed away from this region and is concen-
trated for the present upon the internal economy of the reproductive
cell.
Butler's place in literature, however, must be finally determined
by his genius as satirist and essayist, as illustrated in Erewhon,
Erewhon Revisited, A Psalm of Montreal, The Way of all
Flesh, Alps and Sanctuaries and The Note-Books. Erewhon was
published in 1872 ; Butler's was not a solitary voice; Carlyle had
thundered ; Ruskin and Morris had entered the plea for beauty;
Matthew Arnold, in Friendship’s Garland (1871), and Meredith
had given warning of the shadow looming from the continent upon
complacent prosperity in England. But the appeal, in these
cases, is to the nation collectively; some practical reform is in
view. Butler's attitude is different; he does not vaticinate; he
has little to say of industry or of democracy. But he is struck by
evidences on all sides of the stagnation of thought. In religion,
thought, emptied of its propulsive energy, has sunk into the
moribund system of the musical banks; in education, the
universities are busied in suppressing originality and cultivating
evasion ; youthful mental vigour is dulled by grinding for many
years at the hypothetical language; professors are afflicted with the
'fear-of-giving-themselves-away-disease. ' In science, there has
been a promising upheaval in the coming of Darwinism ; but the
English aversion from mental effort is in process of making
Darwinism into a pontifical system for comfortable acceptance.
Butler carried on a ceaseless crusade to save science from the fate
of the musical banks. In the family, schools and churches, tyrannies
have been set up which have vested interests in mental stupor
and convention, and which permeate the atmosphere with cant
and hypocrisy convenient to themselves. These things are the
customary targets for the satirist of the Victorian compromise ;
and, when that phase has passed away as completely as the
commonwealth phase, Erewhon will need a commentary as Hudi-
bras does. But there is a profounder criticism in Erewhon ; it is
embodied in the paradoxical interchange of moral misdemeanour
with physical ailment. This is the basis of a classic piece of
ironical prose, descriptive of the trial of a youth, who, after being
convicted of aggravated bronchitis, is, a year later, condemned on
a charge of pulmonary consumption. An obvious interpretation
is that the passage is a plea against the puritanic morality which
isolates and condemns the individual without consideration of
29-2


## p. 452 (#468) ############################################

452
Samuel Butler
[CH.
environment, heredity or other uncontrollable factors. This would
be the position of a modern humanitarian, who would acknowledge
a deep intellectual debt to Butler. Behind this interpretation,
however, lies a conception which gives a clue to a large portion of
Butler's writing. Good-breeding' is the corner-stone of his
system, and, in implication, he identifies morality with health ;
he draws a contrast between puritanism and paganism, if the
word may be applied to the ideal of grace, strength and courtesy
which gives Erewhon its resemblance to Utopia. The same idea
comes out in his comment on The Pilgrim's Progress, which, he
says, 'consists mainly of a series of infamous libels upon men and
things. ' The same opposition, fundamentally that between ảyatin
and yvãous, between spirit and letter, is set forth in sardonic form
in his masterpiece A Psalm of Montreal; the Discobolus, the
emblem of pagan grace, is thrust aside in deference to a person
who boasts of his second-hand morality and thrives by a craft
which simulates life.
The most illuminating parallel to Erewhon is the obvious one,
Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Both authors adopt the ironical method
according to which a commonplace person carries with him his own
ingrained prepossessions when he comes upon a race with bodily
and mental habits, equally deep-rooted, but long ago given a
different direction. Both authors preserve an episcopal gravity
while they prolong and enrich the fantasy with witty inventions
and oddities of synthesis. Both are wanting in poetic endowment,
but rich in the humorous, pictorial gift which has the enduring
quality of poetry. Both wield a style keen, serried, precise in an
unstudied way, and, at the same time, flexible, calling to mind the
image of a Toledo blade. Swift, an eighteenth century politician,
has the sharper eye for the hot antagonisms of sects and parties;
Butler, for hypocritical mental jugglery; Swift's Laputans enshrine
the prejudice of Scriblerus against science; Butler's hostility is for
any kind of academicism. Swift, with his acuity of vision for
human injustice, portrays it with the passionate self-torturing
anger which flames in the later parts of Gulliver. Butler sees a
perverse indifference to commonsense and, for the most part,
paints it with a cool amused irony—the good form of his
Ydgrunites—which has become a common trait in later fiction
and essay writing.
Erewhon Revisited, published in 1901, is an ironist's way of
using the conclusions to which Essays and Reviews (1860), and
Seeley's Natural Religion (1882), had been tending years before.


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XIV]
The Way of all Flesh
453
The book is as much a sequel to The Fair Haven as it is to
Erewhon. In his accustomed way, Butler plants a 'seedling idea,'
in this case, the supposed miraculous ascent of Higgs from Erewhon
twenty years before. In ironical analogy, he traces from it the
origin of religious myth, of sacrosanct scriptures, of legend and
sophistry crystallising round public credulity and of the exploiting
of the new religion by unscrupulous professional magnates such as
Hanky and Panky. Erewhon Revisited has less of the free
imaginative play of its predecessor; it is apt to seem, in that
respect, sterilised and rigid, like the later satires of Swift; but,
in sharp brilliance of wit and criticism, in intellectual unity and
coherence, it surpasses Erewhon. All the skill which Butler had
acquired by his controversies in marshalling evidence and in
reviewing a whole system of thought in all its bearings is put
to the happiest use, especially in the effects of climax made
possible by the structural perfection of the work; the furious
outburst of Higgs against Hanky, for instance, in the cathedral;
and, again, the ecclesiastical round table conference, debating
whether Sunchildism shall be supported as a supernatural religion
or not—a perfect piece of high intellectual comedy.
There is, apparently, a Voltairean subversiveness about all this
which may obscure Butler's real view and intention. Voltaire is
the supreme rationalist; Butler puts no excessive faith in reason;
he found it, both in its extremes and in its mean, illogical. In
God the Known and God the Unknown, he offers, seriously, though
it is not usual with him to do so, conjectures which transcend
reason. He had, moreover, the utmost respect for certain simple
religious tenets, which he defined in the concluding chapter of his
Life of Dr Butler, and in the advice given by Higgs at the
ecclesiastical conference, and which he saw, in a measure, ex-
emplified in the religion of the Italian peasantry. He asserted,
not in jest, his membership ‘of the more advanced wing of the
English Broad Church. '
Butler thought contemptuously of the fiction of his day,
especially in comparison with that of the eighteenth century.
The Way of all Flesh owes practically nothing to any tradition ;
though its prodigality of idea and suggestion and wit has enabled
later authors to quarry from it books, novels and essays ever since
its publication. Butler claimed for it that it contains records
of the things I saw happening rather than imaginary incidents’;
it contained, also, things which he had undergone in his own
experience. It is like a book of the reign of queen Anne, inspired
3
>


## p. 454 (#470) ############################################

454
[CH.
Samuel Butler
6
by a controlled passion of hatred, which surges up with embittered
unassuaged memories of youth. As always, Butler breaks down
common classifications; he had already obliterated the distinctions
between machinery and humanity, and between life and death ; in
his novel, he tells the story, not so much of a character as of a
family organism, insinuating its nature in the name Pontifex (a
more successful effort of nomenclature than the mere inversions of
Erewhon). The Pontifex cell is transmitted with modifications
until it establishes itself in the English country rectory. Theodore
Pontifex, at first a victim, and, afterwards, an inquisitor, is the
unifying character; the study of the formalised relationship of
parents and children is the central theme. Theodore and Christina
take up throughout the pontifical attitude of parents ; this
premises, in the father, infallibility, and, in the mother, a recurring
state of self-laudatory hallucination,' which finds consummate
expression in Christina's letter, a brilliant piece of imaginative
divination. The native iniquity of the child Ernest is to be trained
until it evolves the 'virtues convenient to parents. ' Ernest's boy-
hood, schooling and ordination proceed under this superimposed
morality, which, like the system in Richard Feverel, bears the
strain until adolescence bursts disastrously through it to get
at the fresh air of reality. Ernest's misdemeanour and trial
are the counterparts of those of the tuberculous youth in
Erewhon. We learn without surprise that Ernest finally leaves
his children in the charge of parents not their own. In these
characterisations, there is an incisiveness of satirical effect which
leaves a sting upon the memory and feeling ; for the sense of
cynical disillusionment with which the first part of Theodore's
honeymoon is drawn, we must seek a parallel in de Maupassant.
There are more genial elements in the portraits of Alethea
(Butler's friend Eliza Mary Ann Savage) and of Mrs Jupps, a
pagan of the lower world, free from any shadow of scruple, and
mistress of 'the oldë daunce. ' Nevertheless, after a time, in spite
of its range and fearlessness and truth, the book strikes us as
one-sided; we feel as we do sometimes with Meredith's comic
spirit that the pursuit is too relentless, the victim is in a
hopeless case and the element of sport has gone out of the
hunt.
A juster conception of Butler's nature is to be derived from
Alps and Sanctuaries, in which sensitiveness to the genius of the
place and people, humour, enthusiasm and love of beauty blend
with the sharp flavour of his 'wit and clear sense, to produce a


## p. 455 (#471) ############################################

XIV]
George Gissing
455
travel-book inimitable in its engaging idiosyncrasy. The same
genial mind is at play in his brief essays, especially in one entitled
Quis Desiderio. . . ? in which he laments with airy and irreverent
wit the disappearance from the shelves of the British Museum of
Frost's Lives of Eminent Christians, a book which had served
him for many years in the office of a desk.
Butler strove incessantly to irritate thought out of its inertness
and convention and credulity, to challenge stifling authority and
to undermine hypocrisy. For these purposes, he prepared and
stored in his note-books 'little poisonous microbes of thought
which the cells of the world would not know what to do with. '
He applied them to society in book after book; but, as it seemed
to him, in vain; in his own words, he was allowed to call his
countrymen life-long self-deceivers to their faces, and they said it
was quite true, but that it did not matter. ' He has not the highest
gifts of poetry or emotion, but he is very far from being a mere
undiscriminating wit; he has, in the end, a constructive intention,
not mockery, but the liberation of the spirit.
George Robert Gissing was born at Wakefield on 22 November
1857; at school, and at Owens college, Manchester, he worked
with a furious energy, and seemed destined for a notable career
in the academic world. His course was, however, cut short
through an ill-starred marriage in 1875; he fled first to London,
where he experienced the poverty and wretchedness described
in many of his novels; and, afterwards, in 1876, to America,
making use of that adventure in the narrative of Whelpdale in
New Grub Street. After a brief stay in Germany, he returned
to London, publishing his first novel Workers in the Dawn, at
his own expense, in 1880. He made a precarious livelihood by
private tuition, going without sufficient food, but steadfastly
declining to take up journalism, which offered possible openings.
The evidence is a little contradictory; but it seems that by the
year 1882 Gissing had emerged from the bitterest of the miseries
due to poverty. In 1884 appeared The Unclassed, in 1886 Isabel
Clarendon and Demos, and, from that year until 1895, he
published one or more books annually; in 1887 Thyrza; in
1888 A Life's Morning ; in 1889 The Nether World ; in 1890,
in which year he entered upon a second unfortunate matrimonial
venture, The Emancipated; in 1891 New Grub Street; in 1892
Born in Exile and the short Denzil Quarrier ; in 1893 The
Odd Women ; in 1894 In the Year of Jubilee ; and, in 1895, four


## p. 456 (#472) ############################################

456
[CH.
George Gissing
books, Eve's Ransom, Sleeping Fires, The Paying Guest and
The Whirlpool. Human Odds and Ends, a collection of short
sketches, came out in 1898 and in the same year Charles Dickens:
A Critical Study. Later writings connected with Dickens were
the introductions to the incomplete) Rochester edition beginning
in 1900; Dickens in Memory (1902); the abridgment of Forster's
Life of Dickens in the same year; and a chapter in Homes
and Haunts of Famous Authors, published in 1906 after his
death. Meanwhile, he had written The Town Traveller in 1898,
The Crown of Life in 1899 and Our Friend the Charlatan in
1901. The two books that followed were of the essay kind,
By the Ionian Sea (1901) and The Private Papers of Henry
Ryecroft in 1903. After his death were published the unfinished
Veranilda in 1904, Will Warburton in 1905 and a second
volume of short stories, The House of Cobwebs, in 1906. Gissing
died at the age of forty-six at St Jean de Luz on 28 December
1903.
The novels of Gissing bear all the marks of a period of
transition ; they retain features of the passing Victorian type-
sentimental, capacious, benevolently admonitory, plot-ridden; at
the same time, they adumbrate accepted modern forms, which
picture a familiar ‘slice of life' in a representation saturated
with material detail, precise and complete in analysis of the inner
world of thought and feeling. The transition was effected at an
earlier time, and more consciously, in France, where its principles
were formulated by apologists such as Taine, and theorists who were
also practitioners, such as the disciples of Flaubert. Gissing was
widely read in the fiction of the continent and uses his reading to
finely critical purpose in the monograph on Dickens; it is natural,
therefore, to look in him for affinities with these continental
writers.
The titles of some of Gissing's books give warrant to a suggestion
advanced by one critic' 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
1 The Monthly Review, August 1904: "George Gissing,' by H. G Wells,


## p. 457 (#473) ############################################

xiv]
Gissing and Zola
457
de Goncourt? ; 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 pre-
occupied 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
1
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 ;
1 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.
.


## p. 458 (#474) ############################################

458
[CH.
George 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 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


## p. 459 (#475) ############################################

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


## p. 460 (#476) ############################################

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


## p. 461 (#477) ############################################

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


## p. 462 (#478) ############################################

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


## p. 463 (#479) ############################################

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.