An Idealistic Realist

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

IN the vocabulary of criticism the word “ realism ” has been soiled with all ignoble use, and one would hate to apply it unconditionally to the work of a writer whom one admired. George Gissing, whose death is a loss to English literature none the less actual because he never won a wide circle of readers, would no doubt be called a realist by those who fancy that when once they have attached a label to a man there is nothing more to be said about him ; but such a characterization cannot be accepted if it is meant to put him in the same category with Émile Zola, Flaubert, Mr. George Moore, and Mr. Howells, who are all realists in their different ways. With them it is the fact, and the fact only, which seems to count. But it is the fact transfigured by the imagination that one seeks in a work of art; and the finest realism is not found in the record, but in the interpretation of the record. Gissing was a realist controlled by an ideal. He might seem to insist upon the sordid side of life, but he had a passionate love of beauty. Consequently, in his analysis of the ugly there was always an implied contrast with the beautiful. This idealizing tendency grew upon him as he wrote. The Crown of Life, one of his last books, is far richer in spiritual nourishment than The Unclassed, one of his first.

Yet even in The Unclassed, and in Demos, and Workers in the Dawn, the difference between his method and that of others who have dealt with the under side of human existence was sufficiently marked. It was no doubt a fault in his art that he emphasized things evil unduly ; but he did not fail to see the soul of goodness in them. He was not morbid and he was not indecent. He did not spare the dark touches necessary to complete the picture, but he did not put them there simply because they were dark. One feels that Zola gloated over his repulsive details, that Flaubert depicted vice with cold contempt, that Mr. Moore attempts to discover in a spirit of bravado how much the public will stand, that Mr. Howells more genially expounds the significance of the unessential. But George Gissing was obviously moved by the “ daily spectacles of mortality ” he contemplated. His was not the detached attitude of the scientist; it was the keen sympathy of the artist. He did not let his sensibilities run away with him ; he was never morbid or mawkish ; he disdained the devices of a melodramatic sentimentalism; he was incapable of “ working up ” pathos. He could put the situation before us as vividly as any realist of them all. But the deep and poignant emotion was there, even if the superficial reader did not discover it. No cold observation could have accomplished this. No novelist by a little intellectual slumming can really tell us how the other half lives.

In the second period of his career that saeva indignatio in him turned more to grim satire. He dealt, not with those whom all classes had cast out, but with a class least likely to have comprehensive sympathies, the class which one must still call, despite the objections of many persons to the term, the “ lower middle.” Perhaps In the Year of Jubilee is his most remarkable achievement in this respect. The dull monotony of the daily round, the sordid aims, the laxity of moral fibre, the incapacity to comprehend, much less to experience, the nobler emotions, — these things are portrayed with a distinctness which one may fairly call appalling. Eve’s Ransom is a study of human selfishness. The man sacrifices himself for the girl, and she receives the sacrifice gayly, and goes her way, leaving him to cherish his hurt in silence. Yet even here Gissing’s idealism has the last word. The man realizes that his pain has been worth living through. “ Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren,” — that is the law of life. The lesson is taught with bitterer emphasis to the hero of New Grub Street, for whom “ la lutte pour la vie ” proves too much, and whose genius cannot survive the hardest blows of fate. In the struggle of Reardon to be true to his art against the most adverse conditions there is possibly some flavor of autobiography, — though for that matter every novel that is worth anything must have a glimpse of the writer’s own soul. But Gissing was not the man to exploit his personality ; he was not up to the tricks of the trade as practiced by the commercial novelist; and it does not require for the appreciation of his art any impertinent intrusion into his life. New Grub Street is a book to be read. Those who choose to do so may take it as an argument against the marriage of men of genius to commonplace and selfish women. Indeed, the unequal bond of wedlock was often a theme with Gissing. But if so many marriages are unhappy, if a union brought about by anything less than perfect love and trust is certain to be unhappy, what place in the world shall the women who do not marry take ? Such a question is hardly answered by The Odd Women, another novel far superior to most contemporary fiction. The heroine of that tale does not have, after all, the courage of her convictions. But then so few of us do !

The Odd Women manifested conspicuously Gissing’s growing interest in wider and higher themes; it also marked a further growth of his idealistic temper ; and therefore his later books may appeal to readers whom his earlier did not interest. The Crown of Life is, on the whole, the most remarkable of these ; it reveals the passionate tenderness which is the root of all the author’s convictions. Love is the crown of life, and the right woman is worth any man’s while to wait for. And there are large public questions involved in the story, — imperialism, for example. Our Friend the Charlatan is a still closer study of political conditions, though what gives it its value is the unsparing analysis of the man who deludes himself no less than he deludes others. It is upon his skill in the delineation of character that the fame of the novelist is most likely to rest; plots are easily forgotten, but the Becky Sharps and Colonel Newcomes remain more real than the figures of authentic history. One cannot help feeling that Gissing would have done, had he lived, better work in the future than in the past. But he did enough to make his fame secure.