The desolating thing is that if only he could get back to his clerkship and his bachelorhood, he would be all right. The hard-boiled journalist who finally marries Reardon’s widow sums him up accurately by saying that he is the kind of man who, if left to himself, would write a fairly good book every two years. But, of course, he is not left to himself. He cannot revert to his old profession, and he cannot simply settle down to live on his wife’s money: public opinion, operating through his wife, harries him into impotence and finally into the grave. Most of the other literary characters in the book are not much more fortunate, and the troubles that beset them are still very much the same today. But at least it is unlikely that the book’s central disaster would now happen in quite that way or for quite those reasons.
The chances are that Reardon’s wife would be less of a fool, and that he would have fewer scruples about walking out on her if she made life intolerable for him. A woman of rather similar type turns up in The Whirlpool in the person of Alina Frothingham. By contrast there are the three Miss Frenches in The Year of Jubilee, who represent the emerging lower-middleclass — a class which, according to Gissing, was getting hold of money and power which it was not fitted to use — and who are quite surprisingly coarse, rowdy, shrewish and immoral.
At first sight Gissing’s ‘ladylike’ and ‘unladylike’ women seem to be different and even opposite kinds of animal, and this seems to invalidate his implied condemnation of the female sex in general. The connecting link between them, however, is that all of them are miserably limited in outlook.
Even the clever and spirited ones, like Rhoda in The Odd Women (an interesting early specimen of the New Woman), cannot think in terms of generalities, and cannot get away from ready-made standards. In his heart Gissing seems to feel that women are natural inferiors. He wants them to be better educated, but on the other hand he does not want them to have freedom, which they are certain to misuse. On the whole the best women in his books are the self-effacing, home-keeping ones.
There are several of Gissing’s books that I have never read, because I have never been able to get hold of them, and these unfortunately include Born in Exile, which is said by some people to be his best book. But merely on the strength of New Grub Street, Demos and The Odd Women I am ready to maintain that England has produced very few better novelists.
This perhaps sounds like a rash statement until one stops to consider what is meant by a novel. The word ‘novel’ is commonly used to cover almost any kind of story — The Golden Ass, Anna Karenina, Don Quixote, The Improvisatore, Madame Bovary, King Solomon’s Mines or anything else you like — but it also has a narrower sense in which it means something hardly existing before the nineteenth century and flourishing chiefly in Russia and France.
A novel, in this sense, is a story which attempts to describe credible human beings, and — without necessarily using the technique of naturalism — to show them acting on everyday motives and not merely undergoing strings of improbable adventures. A true novel, sticking to this definition, will also contain at least two characters, probably more, who are described from the inside and on the same level of probability — which, in effect, rules out the novels written in the first person.
If one accepts this definition, it becomes apparent that the novel is not an art-form in which England has excelled. The writers commonly paraded as ‘great English novelists’ have a way of turning out either not to be true novelists, or not to be Englishmen. Gissing was not a writer of picaresque tales, or burlesques, or comedies, or political tracts: he was interested in individual human beings, and the fact that he can deal sympathetically with several different sets of motives, and makes a credible story out of the collision between them, makes him exceptional among English writers.
Certainly there is not much of what is usually called beauty, not much lyricism, in the situations and characters that he chooses to imagine, and still less in the texture of his writing. His prose, indeed, is often disgusting. Here are a couple of samples:
Not with impunity could her thought accustom itself to stray in regions forbidden, how firm soever her resolve to hold bodily aloof. (The Whirlpool)
The ineptitude of uneducated Englishwomen in all that relates to their attire is a fact that it boots not to enlarge upon. (In the Year of the Jubilee)
However, he does not commit the faults that really matter. It is always clear what he means, he never ‘writes for effect’, he knows how to keep the balance between recit and dialogue and how to make dialogue sound probable while not contrasting too sharply with the prose that surrounds it. A much more serious fault than his inelegant manner of writing is the smallness of his range of experience. He is only acquainted with a few strata of society, and, in spite of his vivid understanding of the pressure of circumstance on character, does not seem to have much grasp of political or economic forces.
In a mild way his outlook is reactionary, from lack of foresight rather than from ill-will. Having been obliged to live among them, he regarded the working class as savages, and in saying so he was merely being intellectually honest; he did not see that they were capable of becoming civilised if given slightly better opportunities. But, after all, what one demands from a novelist is not prophecy, and part of the charm of Gissing is that he belongs so unmistakably to his own time, although his time treated him badly.
The English writer nearest to Gissing always seems to be his contemporary, or near-contemporary, Mark Rutherford. If one simply tabulates their outstanding qualities, the two men appear to be very different. Mark Rutherford was a less prolific writer than Gissing, he was less definitely a novelist, he wrote much better prose, his books belong less recognisably to any particular time, and he was in outlook a social reformer and, above all, a puritan.
Yet there is a sort of haunting resemblance, probably explained by the fact that both men lack that curse of English writers, a ‘sense of humour’. A certain low-spiritedness, and air of loneliness, is common to both of them.
There are, of course, funny passages in Gissing’s books, but he is not chiefly concerned with getting a laugh — above all, he has no impulse towards burlesque. He treats all his major characters more or less seriously, and with at least an attempt at sympathy. Any novel will inevitably contain minor characters who are mere grotesques or who are observed in a purely hostile spirit, but there is such a thing as impartiality, and Gissing is more capable of it than the great majority of English writers.
It is a point in his favour that he had no very strong moral purpose. He had, of course, a deep loathing of the ugliness, emptiness and cruelty of the society he lived in, but he was concerned to describe it rather than to change it. There is usually no one in his books who can be pointed to as the villain, and even when there is a villain he is not punished. In his treatment of sexual matters Gissing is surprisingly frank, considering the time at which he was writing.
It is not that he writes pornography or expresses approval of sexual promiscuity, but simply that he is willing to face the facts. The unwritten law of English fiction, the law that the hero as well as the heroine of a novel should be virgin when married, is disregarded in his books, almost for the first time since Fielding.
Like most English writers subsequent to the mid-nineteenth century, Gissing could not imagine any desirable destiny other than being a writer or a gentleman of leisure. The dichotomy between the intellectual and the lowbrow already existed, and a person capable of writing a serious novel could no longer picture himself as fully satisfied with the life of a businessman, or a soldier, or a politician, or what not. Gissing did not, at least consciously, even want to be the kind of writer that he was.
His ideal, a rather melancholy one, was to have a moderate private income and live in a small comfortable house in the country, preferably unmarried, where he could wallow in books, especially the Greek and Latin classics. He might perhaps have realised this ideal if he had not managed to get himself into prison immediately after winning an Oxford scholarship: as it was he spent his life in what appeared to him to be hack work, and when he had at last reached the point where he could stop writing against the clock, he died almost immediately, aged only about forty-five. His death, described by H.G. Wells in his Experiment in Autobiography, was of a piece with his life.
The twenty novels, or thereabouts, that he produced between 1880 and 1900 were, so to speak, sweated out
