stances. She told him, too, of Pennyloaf's humble security.

"You have kept well all the year?' he asked. "And you, too, I hope?'

"Then they bade each other good-bye... "In each life little for congratulation. He with the ambitions of his youth frustrated; neither an artist nor a leader of men in the battle of justice. She, no saviour of society by the force of a superb example; no daughter of the people, holding wealth in trust for the people's needs. Yet to both was their work given. Unmarked, unencouraged save by their love of uprightness and mercy, they stood by the side of those more hapless, brought some comfort to hearts less courageous than their own. Where they abode it was not all dark. Sorrow certainly awaited them, perchance defeat in even the humble aims that they had set themselves; but at least their lives would remain a protest against those brute forces of society which fill with wreck the abysses of the nether world."

"Where they abode it was not all dark"; this is the one ray of everlasting light which pierces the abyss. Mr. Gissing has been called the "Spokesman of Despair." It is a mistake. He is rather, when at his best, a great master of tragedy, the essence of which consists in picturing a soul contending against floods of hostile circumstance and retaining its essential integrity.

Here, and in his deep feeling for the misery of submerged life, is to be found the religious significance of Gissing and some of the lesser authors of

his type. His explicit references to religion are rare; though in "The Nether World" there is a madman who loves to sing the praises of the Lord in squalid alleys as though to point life's irony. Mad Jack has just a trifle too much method in his madness to be convincing as a lunatic; but as a literary device he does his author's bidding perfectly; and the reader is not likely to forget the scene where the counterfeiter and would-be murderer, Bob, under arrest and dying, is borne on a stretcher from his miserable lodging, while Mad Jack chants by the wayside, "All ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; praise Him and magnify Him forever!"

Mr. Bernard Shaw has said that we must make a religion of socialism.' This may be, although Mr. Shaw himself seems somewhat unfitted by nature for the rôle of a self-forgetful apostle. Yet whether it be or not, there is no question that certain religious elements appear in Gissing's treatment of society and the problems which oppress it. Once at least he expressed regret that he could not give larger place to religious aspiration and motive in his work. "If I could write a book that recognized the spiritual side of man, where I now appeal to one reader, I should then speak to thousands," he confessed to a friend. There is, however, an ethical and even spiritual note in his most significant

1 Atlantic Monthly, February, 1909, p. 234.

2 "Some Recollections of George Gissing," Gentleman's Magazine, February, 1906, p. 14.

work, which might have reassured him. At least one critic of "The Whirlpool" (Mr. H. G. Wells) has felt the change in Rolfe's way of thinking to be emblematic of a like wholesome change for society.

"It is the discovery of the insufficiency of the cultivated life and its necessary insincerities; it is a return to the essential, to honourable struggle as the epic factor in life, to children as the matter of morality, and the sanction of the securities of civilization."

1 "The Novels of Mr. George Gissing," Contemporary Review, August, 1897.

CHAPTER XVI

THE NEWER FICTION. II

ONE class remains. It includes those novels or other works of the imagination which deal ostensibly perhaps with adventure or manners, but really with Life, and after a fashion so touched by faith or doubt as to leave a definite religious and ethical impression. The great names here are those of George Meredith' and Mr. Thomas Hardy; and their bare mention seems like the proffer of good wine at the feast's end. With Meredith I should group Robert Louis Stevenson and Mr. Rudyard Kipling; while Mr. Eden Phillpotts seconds Mr. Hardy.

Much that has been said of George Meredith's poetry might be repeated concerning his prose. It is characterized by the same courage, insight, sanity, and vigour; it is marred by similar mannerisms, self-assertions, and wilful obscurities; the reader of prose as well as poetry being sure of more or less contemptuous treatment at his author's hand. It is

1 Measured by the calendar Mr. Meredith belongs, of course, with the mid-Victorians; but his popular recognition came so late, and the sources of his youth seem so perennial, that there is no anachronism in placing him here.

hurt too by an excess of subtlety which seems like the exercise of ingenuity for its own sake,' and by an almost intolerable tendency to indulge in aphorism. There has been in English just one writer who could afford to make a business of coining aphorisms -and that man was Tupper. Tupper was an honest son of toil who made proverbs as other men dig potatoes or mend roads. If at times he mounted the tripod and invited a sort of mantic fury, or assumed the bearing of a seventh son of a seventh son, nobody thought the less of him; to open his mouth in parables and to utter dark sayings of old was a part of the day's work; and even when the dark saying proved-as it generally did-to be a platitude, this too was borne with as belonging to the lot of proverbmakers. Jewels are one of nature's by-products; the best of them are found, not made; the process of fabrication is a suspicious one; and even professional search for them is a precarious occupation. It requires the whole of Emerson's moral and spiritual power to make even his artificial multiplication of aphorisms tolerable. With George Meredith it frankly ceased to be tolerable at all, his frequent recourse to the "Pilgrim's Scrip" in "Richard Feverel" heavily penalizing the reader of that admirable book. This is not to say that his aphorisms are

1 Cf. the criticism of Prof. J. M. Manly in his English Poetry, 1170-1892: "But the gods gave him also the fatal gift of excessive intellectual ingenuity and a delight in the exercise of it; while the sole gift they denied him was self-restraint."