Gissing's Reviewers

232 REVIEWS 1. Gissing's Reviewers Gissing: The Critical Heritage, ed by Pierre Coustillas and Colin Partridge (Lond & Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972). Contemporary artists can now avail themselves of opportunities to shape their own images in several ways that were not possible during the Age of Transition, 1880 to 1920. George Gissing apparently made little effort to enhance his literary reputation by seeking to ingratiate himself with his public or with the press, and journalists who wrote book reviews were not among his favorite people. We can conjecture about how his reputation would have prospered if Eduard Bertz had been in a better position to aid him, or if Gissing had cultivated more literary friends - consciously or otherwise - though certainly not with the aggressiveness of a Jasper Milvain. Privately, he denounced his reviewers and critics, e.g., "Stead is an ass," or, even more devastatingly, Roberts is "essentially a popular man." If he rarely expressed his own artistic creed publicly, we can find it easily enough in New Grub Street, in his essay on "The Place of Realism in Fiction," or still later in his writings on Dickens. He had the principles and could articulate them. His reviewers were always fumbling and contradicting themselves, but never sufficiently excited to persuade a vast public to buy Gissing's novels so as to decide for themselves. Gissing: The Critical Heritage is a collection of nearly two hundred articles recording the reception of his books between 1880 and 1912. The editors of the volume advance Gissing's reputation with this very collection, a book that forms part of a Routledge and Kegan Paul series that includes Hardy, Hawthorne, Ibsen, James, Johnson, Joyce and Kipling. Gissing could hardly carp about membership in this company, and he undoubtedly has Profs. Coustillas and Partridge to thank for their salutary efforts in his behalf. It is one more substantial document in Prof. Coustillas's plumping for Gissing: promoting reprints of his novels; assembling details of his biography; collecting a bibliography of his writings, publications, and reprints; and selecting and editing critical articles about Gissing. No author could desire a more conscientious, earnest, and sensitive advocate . Reprinted in this collection are all the significant reviews and surveys of Gissing's books as well as several pieces that are manifestly inferior. This balance enables us to see why Gissing was justified in raging at being misrepresented: "I am getting a very solid bad reputation for gloominess and misanthropy ," he complained to Bertz in I892. As the editors properly point out in their introduction, Gissing also received serious and perceptive treatment by reviewers who praised him for the 233 right reasons and thereby helped him gather an elite of appreciative readers. This collection enables us to gain an overview of what they stressed: his pessimism, his boldness of subject matter, his need for humor, his representation of social and moral issues. Reviewers heartily disagreed with his methods or with his attitudes, but most of them praised his sincerity. Virginia Woolf, hardly one we would expect to share Gissing's methods, characters, or social attitudes, summarized Gissing's powers perhaps better than any other critic. Which is true, she asks, the magnificence of Eva Harrington or the misery of Gissing 's novels? They are both true ; everything is true that can make us believe it to be true. Beauty beyond all other beauty, horror beyond all other horror still lie hidden about us, waiting for some one to see them. The thing that really matters, that makes a writer a true writer and his work permanent, is that he should really see. . . . When a. book has this quality it seems to us to possess both these essential qualities - life and completeness and for these reasons we cannot imagine that they will perish. There will always be one or two people to exclaim , "This man understood." While this judgment has the tone and flavor of Conrad or Forster, it also has the generosity of a gracious lady poised in habitual kindness. She wrote this in 1912. Earlier, Gissing endured the vagaries characteristic of reviewers; some wrote in ignorance, scribbling opinions - a puff of unfounded flattery or a slash of no less absurd...