GISSINGS' PESSIMISM.

Is the English speaking race really becoming more cheerily and healthfully optimistic, as a recent contributor to our columns seemed to think? The question ranges over so wide a hold that it is not wise to attempt an answer offhand. The common life of to-day has so many sides to it, and so many complexities, that such a thing as a positive answer without limitations is impossible. Much depends on definitions, and at the very beginning of the subject we have to admit that optimism may mean one thing to the mere social observer and something else to the Christian moralist. A third section, again, may quite reasonably contend that these are both reducible to the same thing. Still, if we take the movement of the popular mind as it is easiest followed and best known to us it is by no means impossible to make out a good case for our contributor's argument. The tendencies of popular fiction register that movement at least as well as any other thought-barometer with which we are familiar, and the observer can obtain illuminative sidelights from a study of the development of some of our best read authors. A writer in one of the Reviews, himself a popular story teller, has been applying this process of dissection to the work of Gissing, whose fiction mainly concerns itself with the study of the common life as it is lived around him. The reader who is familiar with Gissing will not require to be reminded of his singular power of entering into and depicting manners and habits of thought ; but his peculiar strength as an author of fiction has lain in the force and directness with which he has analysed the motif of common life and defined its aimlessness and disappointment. Perhaps we hardly require to have that moral emphasised for us. Few people are so fortunate as to have attained middle age without realising something of the sort for themselves, and the truism of the thing is so trite and in itself so uninteresting that even the youngest reader may close the book with the summary verdict "Connu !" Mr. Gissing's critic discovers that the author of " New Grub-street " has now arrived at another conclusion,—that life is not a meaningless riddle after all, and that the blankly pessimistic note in fiction is a wrong one. The critic thinks that the conversion has been made in all good faith and as part of the process of unconscious development, and perhaps it would be pessimism after the novelist's own early manner to suggest that the change has resulted from a desire not to weary the patience of his readers.

But the pessimism of literature was always an unreal and a theatrical affair at the best. The thing itself is as old as bile or sin, which materialistic philosophers have defined as convertible terms. In English literature it is popularly said to have begun with Byron, and everyone remembers Macaulay's fancy picture of the intellectual young man of the period who cultivated the popular hero's views of men and more particularly of women, and patiently trained himself before a mirror to smile in a sardonic, Byronic manner at life and its empty problems. It was not in flowers to touch his soul, like Wordsworth's, with thoughts too deep for tears, and his heart did not leap up at sight of the rainbow in the sky. The scientific people came later, indeed, and taught him how the flower acquired its colouring, and how delusive a thing was the rainbow, with many other things which it was useful for him to know. Among other things he learnt somewhat too well the jargon about the survival of the fittest, and "Nature red in tooth and claw," so that it became the business of writers who catered further for his instruction and amusement to apply these discoveries to common life by encouraging him to perceive how empty and selfish a thing it was. Not to strike this note somehow or other in literature was to leave the writer self-confessed behind his time, and your story teller was no more of a psychologist than your mere Dickens if he failed to leave a bad taste of the emptiness of life and cheap cynicism on the palates of his readers. The poet went a stage or two further, and frankly reduced life and love and the world to nothingness, thanking whatever gods he knew that existence began in mystery and ended nowhere. With a comfortless creed like this for a starting point it was easy for the merest tyro at fiction- making to describe the life about him as it is lived by those unleisured and uncultured folk who have to work to live, unrelieved by the graces and luxuries or the intellectual compensations of life, until it loses itself in gutters or graves. The same methods can be made to apply even where the conditions of existence are more favourable, as Gissing has demonstrated to his readers in "The Whirlpool" and really, if the premisses be once conceded it is difficult to think of them as failing to apply anywhere within the orbit of modern life and manners.

But it seems that we are promised a change. Even this apostle of the hopeless in fiction, according to his friendly critic, has seen the error of his ways and is on the point of recantation. His latest work, we are told, shows signs of a return to a more healthy frame of mind, with recognition of honourable struggle as a factor in life, and of children as the safeguard of morality and the sanction of the securities of civilisation. Are we to accept this as one of the indications of a change in the popular taste in fiction, suggested by a saner and more whole some view of life and its responsibilities ? Whether we accept the change in the novelist as a sign, or the standard of judgment set up by his critic, the result comes to much the same thing. The tone of criticism is influenced by the popular mood of the time, and in its turn it reacts on those who write the stories and describe under the masque of fable the daily lives of their contemporaries. It would be too much to expect, of course, that poets and novelists would suddenly cease to be enamoured of that bloom of decay which they have taught to flower with so fatal a fascination. One of the most pathetic notes ever struck in literature is the expression of that unrealisable hope, the pursuit of the phantom of that "inviolable shade," which Arnold's gipsy-student knew. It has been repeated many times before and since, from the time when literature first began to reflect the philosophy of life. But it has long since been a play-thing of the poets and a commonplace of the novelists, and the sane taste of the normal mind must sooner or later cease to be obsessed by it. The practical concerns of life make their own demands, and life is too short for these trite philosophisings. There is, of course, always a choice of alternatives. We may accept Grant Allen's "crowned caprice" as god of the world, and agree with him if we choose that the end of life ends everything, and that blank pessimism is the only thing possible for all save fools. On the other hand, if it is not given to everyone to cherish the hope that turns aside the sting of death and extinguishes the victory of the grave, there is the alternative of believing with Shakespeare that this existence of ours with all its contradictions is "a sleep and a forgetting;" or with a misunderstood poet of a very different reputation, from whom Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar" seems to have borrowed a suggestion, that another period of consciousness begins when life leaves eagerly its long anchorage and leaps swiftly seaward from the shore.

 The Sydney Morning Herald 9 October 1897,