E-text prepared by Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders
1906
'Les gens tout à fait heureux, forts et bien portants, sont-ils préparés comme il faut pour comprendre, pénétrer, exprimer la vie, notre vie si tourmentée et si courte?'
In England during the sixties and seventies of last century the world ofbooks was dominated by one Gargantuan type of fiction. The terms book andnovel became almost synonymous in houses which were not Puritan, yet wherebooks and reading, in the era of few and unfree libraries, were strictlycircumscribed. George Gissing was no exception to this rule. The Englishnovel was at the summit of its reputation during his boyish days. As a ladof eight or nine he remembered the parts of Our Mutual Friend coming tothe house, and could recall the smile of welcome with which they wereinfallibly received. In the dining-room at home was a handsomely framedpicture which he regarded with an almost idolatrous veneration. It was anengraved portrait of Charles Dickens. Some of the best work of GeorgeEliot, Reade, and Trollope was yet to make its appearance; Meredith andHardy were still the treasured possession of the few; the reigning modelsduring the period of Gissing's adolescence were probably Dickens andTrollope, and the numerous satellites of these great stars, prominent amongthem Wilkie Collins, William Black, and Besant and Rice.
Of the cluster of novelists who emerged from this school of ideas, the twowho will attract most attention in the future were clouded and obscured forthe greater period of their working lives. Unobserved, they received, andmade their own preparations for utilising, the legacy of the mid-Victoriannovel—moral thesis, plot, underplot, set characters, descriptivemachinery, landscape colouring, copious phraseology, Herculean proportions,and the rest of the cumbrous and grandiose paraphernalia of Chuzzlewit,Pendennis, and Middlemarch. But they received the legacy in a totallydifferent spirit. Mark Rutherford, after a very brief experiment, put allthese elaborate properties and conventions reverently aside. Cleverer andmore docile, George Gissing for the most part accepted them; he put hisslender frame into the ponderous collar of the author of the Mill on theFloss, and nearly collapsed in wind and limb in the heart-breaking attemptto adjust himself to such an heroic type of harness.
The distinctive quali