[In the following essay, Swinnerton offers a mixed assessment of Gissing's short fiction, but praises his adept characterization, particularly his female characters.]

The art of the short story, it has been sufficiently explained by critics who specialise in short stories, is very different from that of the novel. Mr. Max Beerbohm, in a reckless mood, once said that as the brick was to the house, so was the short story to the long one (and it is true that the novel makes in every way greater demands upon the imagination, the invention, and the staying powers of the author); but it is well known that Mr. Beerbohm is a law unto himself in these matters, and others, taking his words in a very literal sense, have thought differently. Gissing might have agreed with Mr. Beerbohm upon the most literal interpretation, for he wrote two little books which were either very long short stories or very short novels; and of his legitimate short stories (by “legitimate,” I mean those which do not exceed eight or ten thousand words), quite a number are very small novels, while others again are the merest sketches. Some of these last, perhaps, do not quite justify themselves. They start, and they end; but otherwise have no positive qualities. Others, again, have a pleasant and enjoyable flavour, and justify themselves completely, since they have character and kindliness, and show the author's literary sense.

There are two volumes of Gissing's short stories—Human Odds and Ends, and that posthumous collection edited by Mr. Seccombe, The House of Cobwebs. The former contains twenty-nine “stories and sketches,” the latter fifteen stories, mostly in the author's later key of gentleness and tolerance. Several of them cover ground already used by Gissing—or perhaps one should say that they are a second crop from the same ground—and they all have a quaint air of familiarity, very welcome to any reader acquainted with the author's longer works. They are by no means as good as some other short stories of their day; and their interest as a collection is a personal rather than a pressing one. But they are not negligible. In Human Odds and Ends, it seems to me that some of the sketches have no value—such a one as “In No Man's Land,” for example, is almost entirely without merit. It is about a man who knows of a string of houses without a landlord, in which people for years have lived rent-free. This man tries to take possession by peremptorily assuming control. He goes to the length of having the houses painted; but in the end he is forced to acknowledge defeat. Such an idea might possibly be made richly comic by a richly comic writer; but in Gissing's hands it produces but the ghost of a smile, as any damp joke might do in retelling. It becomes, in fact, pointless, since it is without character. Such another story as “In Honour Bound” is likewise difficult to explain. A philologist, finding himself ruined, confesses to his landlady that he has very little money; and she, on the point of buying a business, asks for some of it to assist in the purchase, and keeps him alive for months until he is again self-supporting. The philologist, intending “in honour bound” to ask if she cares to marry him, is then told of her marriage to another, and is warned by the woman's servant that the new husband would not like him about the house. The only real interest the story has is that it slightly foreshadows the idea of Will Warburton, where the hero, being ruined, hears from his landlady of a grocer's business which is for sale, and buys it. But “In Honour Bound,” even if it were true to an actual case, is not artistically probable; and Gissing's method does not give it verisimilitude. On the whole, therefore, it is not quite worthy of serious consideration.

Other stories in the same volume have far more value, even if it is slight. Such a story as “An Inspiration,” rather Dickensian and fairly sentimental, is interesting on two counts. First of all it imparts a faint warmth of pleasure to the reader, who is gratified at the spectacle of happiness for the downcast; secondly it relates to “Harvey Munden,” an interlocutor several times employed by Gissing in both volumes of short stories. At first I supposed Harvey Munden to be intended for Gissing himself, but one of the stories in The House of Cobwebs is told in the first person, with Munden for a second figure, and in no case does he attain to any character at all. So his existence, or at least the recurrence of his name, is mysterious, and beyond explanation. “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” “The Day of Silence,” “The Tout of Yarmouth Bridge”—all have qualities of some description. “The Justice and the Vagabond” is another episode of interest, relating how a wife-ridden J.P. meets, in the course of his judicial work, a vagabond schoolfellow of his own. They take advantage of the absence of the J.P.'s wife to plan a dash to the far regions of the world; but the J.P. is overtaken by death before he can start. This is well told and good. For the rest, Human Odds and Ends, although modestly entitled, does not belie its name. It would have suggested poverty of invention had we not the far richer collection of The House of Cobwebs to restore our confidence.

II

Even in The House of Cobwebs, we become aware that Gissing had his own conception of the short story. Most of the stories in The House of Cobwebs are little narratives, depending hardly at all upon surprise or concentration, and consisting of a series of slight events which may be rounded off into a tale. They are, in short, undramatic. If, without pledging ourselves to any particular definition of what a short story should be, we notice the lack of drama in Gissing's two collections, we perceive a particular fact. That fact is, that the dramatic quality is implicit in most effective short stories—either in the sense of surprise, or unexpectedness, or conflict, or incident. When we find the incidents in Gissing's short stories humdrum, or mild, we recognise that we had expected to be stirred in some way, or to be given some precisely poignant moment, whether of suspense or sympathy. The lack of this emotional heightening in the whole of Gissing's work is notable; in his short stories it becomes, according to the dramatic test, a positive defect. It is a defect in the sense that the stories are not, regarded technically, short stories at all, but merely short as contrasted with long. There is, in essentials, no difference between “A Song of Sixpence” (in Human Odds and Ends), which is about a woman whose evil habits have been checked by disaster, or “Humplebee” (in The House of Cobwebs), and such a novel as Eve's Ransom, or Denzil Quarrier. The superficial difference is entirely one of area.

So it is with the volumes contributed to the “Autonym Library” and to Cassell's “Pocket Library”—Sleeping Fires and The Paying Guest. These stories are perhaps 30,000 words long, whereas many of Gissing's full-length novels contain 150,000 words; yet, except for the fact that they are written as separate tales, they might almost, as they stand, form contributory portions of longer books. This, strictly speaking, is not the art of the short story as it is generally understood. It is the art of the episode, an art which has hardly received acknowledgment as an art at all. So far, indeed, is that from being the case, that a book like The Nether World may be rightfully condemned as episodic, which means that it does not progress unerringly from chapter to chapter, but is made up of segments or sections which show their joins and let the reader's interest lapse.

Yet if we take these short tales for what they are, we shall see how well they illustrate one aspect of Gissing's art—that of characterisation. He had a very keen sense of those slight personal eccentricities which, duly emphasised, may be made to suggest character in a book. His imagining of character, I should say, was not a strong point, because he never had the jolly visualising faculty of a Dickens, nor the detachment of a modern novelist. His bookish heroes were all inclined to run to one sensitive, retiring pattern, since his sympathy with other types of male was small. His women characters are very much stronger and better, possibly because a slight acquaintance with women, a good deal of intuition, and much self-communing may produce portraits of highly subtilised women transcending the acquaintance of ordinary men. That is to say, where portraits of men demand actual experience of men's ways, the woman of fiction is much more highly conventionalised, besides, of course, being much more interesting, experimentally, to a male novelist.

When Gissing drew character, he did it in firm outline; but he was not always equal to its expansion. His characters—particularly the men—gradually slide into sensitives, or they run between straight lines. Now the art Gissing possessed, of being able to shake up a character in a few words, was particularly useful to him in short stories of the kind we are now considering. A reader does not need to remember the characters in a short story: he wishes simply to retain an impression of the whole thing. So characterisation in short stories is required to be, for effect, sharp and typical; and Gissing's method, which, on a different plane, was the method of Dickens, was adapted to the short story. He would describe somebody as “a middle-aged man, bald, meagre, unimpressive, but wholly respectable in bearing and apparel”; or “A young woman of about eight-and-twenty, in tailor-made costume, with unadorned hat of brown felt, and irreproachable umbrella; a young woman who walked faster than any one in Wattleborough, yet never looked hurried … who held up her head … and frequently smiled at her own thoughts.” The persons, once seen, are recognised sufficiently for the purposes of Gissing's short narrative. The reader has seen, or can delude himself into the belief that he has seen, just such people; and the short story has no room for subtleties of characterisation. Just so does Gissing hit off the people in his less notable novels: “A younger girl, this, of much slighter build; with a frisky gait a jaunty pose of the head; pretty, but thin-featured, and shallow-eyed; a long neck, no chin to speak of, a low forehead with the hair of washed-out flaxen fluffed all over it. Her dress was showy, and in a taste that set the teeth on edge. Fanny French, her name.” In a long novel, such a method of characterising people loses its effect, because while it is desirable that the majority of the dramatis personæ should be easily referable to type by the reader, they should present themselves primarily as individuals. In the Gissing short story, on the other hand, the method is used with dexterity, and the stories, being easily read and admirably handled, are in every way enjoyable. They make no great demand upon the reader's emotion, but are intelligible and sufficiently absorbing. And they contain frequent portraits of Gissing's inveterate foes—landladies.

Gissing, whenever he writes about landladies, does so from first-hand knowledge. He writes of them always with feeling—in Born in Exile, in Will Warburton, in Eve's Ransom, in The Nether World—it would be possible to marshal such a collection of landladies as to reveal the species in hideous array. So in the short stories, particularly in “The Prize Lodger” (Human Odds and Ends) and in “Miss Rodney's Leisure” (The House of Cobwebs). Well does Gissing cry from his heart, in In the Year of Jubilee: “To occupy furnished lodgings, is to live in a house owned and ruled by servants; the least tolerable status known to civilisation.” Mrs. Turpin, the minor heroine of “Miss Rodney's Leisure,” is seen with humour: presumably Miss Rodney treats her as Gissing would have wished all landladies to be treated by their tenants—in a spirit of chastening reproof.

“A Daughter of the Lodge” is a little pointless, as is “A Poor Gentleman”; and “A Charming Family” is, although clever, unpleasantly cynical. Otherwise, the contents of The House of Cobwebs, in addition to being cheerful, are well written and entertaining. To say that they do not challenge comparison with the best English short stories is in no sense to deny their merits. The lack of drama, the lack of any especial poignancy of motif, leaves them smooth and gracefully written tales.

III

The Paying Guest is a bright little story of the suburbs, rather similar in vein to The Town Traveller. A young couple, desirous of adding to their income, agree to receive as guest a girl who finds her own home unbearable. It seems that her mother has married a second time, and that her stepfather also has a daughter by his first marriage. The rival daughters quarrel particularly over a lover, who transfers his affections from one to the other. Accordingly, this rather flamboyant girl comes to stay with the suburbans, sets their circle in turmoil, and unexpectedly marries an old and determined suitor. This, however, does not happen until the house has been set on fire by reason of the suitor's ardour. The story is not very merry, and its humour runs to violent and grotesque action; but it is sustained, and does not fail to amuse.

In quite a different key is Sleeping Fires, which opens in Greece and deals with the meeting between a man and his illegitimate son (both ignorant of the relation), and their instant attachment. The son, however, dies before his identity is fully disclosed; and interest is then demanded for the father's resuscitated love-story. Sleeping Fires is slight; but it is characteristic Gissing, and has passages of good quality, which show how lightly Gissing could design and execute when he had a subject fit to his hand.

These two stories afford the author an opportunity for easy and pleasant writing, quite distinct from the labour which obviously belonged to the writing of their immediate chronological neighbours, In the Year of Jubilee and The Whirlpool. The year 1895, indeed, which saw the publication of Eve's Ransom, The Paying Guest, and Sleeping Fires, is one of happy tasks lightly performed; and while neither of the present stories is the equal or even the immediate inferior of Eve's Ransom, it may perhaps be inferred from the author's success in such shorter works that he would have been more comfortable as well as more successful if the Victorian novel had died decently before he began to write. It is obvious from Reardon's painful struggles with the three-volume book that Gissing found irksome and laborious the excessive length required by the public. His own case is very little improved nowadays, when many commercial publishers stipulate beforehand that the stories they purchase shall consist of not fewer than 75,000 words; but it is clear that much of what went to the bulking of Gissing's long novels was strained and conscientious page-filling. How much better if the English reader did not count the number of words in the books he busy! If Gissing had written other simple narratives of the same kind as Eve's Ransom and these two short novels, his best work, by being purged and simplified, would have stood clear of the wreckage of the Victorian tradition by which it is now encumbered.