[In the following review, Aiken discusses Gissing's later works.]

To this collection of short stories by George Gissing, “never before issued in book form,” Mr Alfred Gissing contributes a preface, which is largely a discussion of “realism” in fiction; and in this preface Mr Gissing moves, a little naïvely, to the conclusion that the author of the Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft was something more, or better, than a mere realist, because his stories contained a “moral,” or here and there pointed to a “higher truth.” At this date, it seems a little odd to encounter a critic who is still worrying about the defence of the “ugly” in art, and who finds it necessary to discover a moral or social—if not aesthetic!—justification for such a portrait as that of Mrs Gamp. And it is odder still that Mr Alfred Gissing can proceed, as he does, with his pointing of Gissing's “moral,” after quoting a passage from a letter in which Gissing wrote: “Human life has little interest for me, on the whole, save as material for artistic presentation. I can get savage over social iniquities, but, even then, my rage at once takes the direction of planning revenge in artistic work.” This could hardly be clearer. If, in his early work (Demos, for example) Gissing was occasionally tendentious, in his maturity he was first and last an artist. His purpose, in his descriptions of lower middle-class life, was not moral at all, but aesthetic: his problem was a problem of presentation. His novels and stories were his reports of life as he knew it; he was, in his narrower field, as honest an observer as Trollope; and if he was of far smaller stature as an artist than Chekhov, less poetically gifted, he shared with that great man a tendency to minimize “plot” and to make of his stories mere evocations of life.

In this regard, Gissing was very much ahead of his time. When one reflects that it is now almost a quarter of a century since he died, one reads this posthumous collection of his short stories with astonishment: for with only one or two exceptions these stories are strikingly, in tone and manner, like the sort of thing which, in the hands of such a writer as Katherine Mansfield, critics hailed as revolutionary. In most of these tales the “story” amounts to little or nothing. If one compares them with the contemporary work of Hardy or Meredith or Henry James, one finds a difference as deep as that which severed Chekhov from Turgenev. Here is little or nothing of Hardy's habitual use of tragic or poetic background, his intermittent reference to the backdrop of the Infinite; here is none of Meredith's brilliant, and brilliantly conscious, counterpoint of comment, with its inevitable heightening of distance between the reader and the story; none of the exquisite preparation and elaboration of James. Much more than he admitted, or realized, Gissing was interested in “human life”; it is above all for his uncompromising fidelity to his vision that we can still read him with pleasure and profit. He seldom shapes or heads his narrative as these others did, attached less importance than they to dramatic climax. He is content with a bare presentation of a scene or situation.

To say that Gissing would have been liked by Chekhov is to say that he is a “modern”—he is decidedly more modern than Hardy or James. James, of course, would have disapproved of him, as he disapproved of Mr Arnold Bennett, on the ground that he offered his reader a mere slice of life, the donnée without the working out. Whatever we may feel about that, and however much this sort of modernity may ultimately make Gissing appear old-fashioned, we must unquestionably accept him as an artist of the Chekhov generation, and a good one. He is not great—he lacks force, depth, range, subtlety; he has almost nothing of Chekhov's poetic profundity, only a tithe of his exquisite sensibility; by comparison with him, Gissing seems prosy, bread-and-butterish. But he is good. He can almost always be counted upon to tell his story with a clear eye and a fine gravity of spirit. There is no rhetorical nonsense about him, he is capable of no literary pyrotechnics, his style is level and undistinguished; but within his limits he is an honest and just creator of people and pictures, exaggerating nothing, never forcing a mood, and often using understatement with the most delicate skill. What could be better than the ending of his charming story, “The Fate of Humphrey Snell”? Humphrey was a queer stick—lazy, dreaming, impractical, not very strong; he had a passion for countryside; and eventually found a happy solution of his difficulties by becoming an itinerant herb-collector. He tramped the country, slept where he found himself, enjoyed this simple existence hugely. And then one day he fell in love with a girl who was no better than she should be; applied for a job as steward to a Workman's Club; and asked the girl to marry him. And this is how Gissing ends his story: “Annie, whose handwriting was decipherable only by a lover's eyes, answered his news by return of post: ‘Send me money to come i shall want all i have for my things i cant tell you how delited I feal but its that sudin it taks my breth away with heepes of love and—’. … There followed a row of crosses, which Humphrey found it easy to interpret. A cross is frequently set upon a grave; but he did not think of that.”

That is all—and it is all we need. And Gissing is just as good in his story of the two Cockney families who go to Brighton for their Bank Holidays, or in the story of the matrimonial failures of Miss Jewell. These tales are, in their kind, perfect. The Budges, the Rippingvilles, Miss Jewell, and the two splendid Cockney girls, Lou and Liz, are done from the life—they are as trenchantly recognizable as Mrs Laura Knight's etchings of Cockney folk on Hampstead Heath. And if the interior of an English middle-class boarding-house, with all its heavy smells and dreary sounds, its aspidistra plant and its scrubbed white step, has ever been better done, one doesn't know where to find it.