Datos generales de la provincia de Tungurahua

23 'One volume is becoming commonest of all. It is the new school, due to continental influence. Thackeray and Dickens wrote at enormous length, and with profusion of detail; their plan is to tell everything, and leave nothing to be divined. Far more artistic, I think, is the later method, of merely suggesting; of dealing with episodes, instead of writing biographies. The old novelist is omniscient; I think it is better to tell a story precisely as one does in real life, hinting, surmising, telling in detail what can so be told and no more. In fact, it approximates to the dramatic mode of presentment'. Letters, p. 166. Letter to Algernon, August, 1885.

that many of Gissing's remarks on the art of fiction are

exactly contemporary with James's essay of that name and

that the terminology of Gissing's statements - 'selection',

typicality' 'dramatic mode of presentment' - strongly

recalls Jamesian principles, we are reminded of just how

sensitive and susceptible Gissing always was to currents

of artistic theory, and at no time more so than in this

early stage of conscious artistic self-development.

At the same time, this compulsive concern with

artistic method and condensed dramatic form is not simply

a matter of Gissing's being attuned to a contemporary

shift in fictional theory and taste. The emergence of an

aesthetics of fiction which Gissing treats as such a

liberating force, actually posed a serious challenge to

a writer, who - save arguably in a late novella such as

Eve's Ransom - never achieved the kind of fictional ideal

he so enthusiastically aspired to in the mid-1880s. The

lament of the memoirist in the quasi-autobiographical

Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft is surely Gissing's own:

'Oh, why has it not been granted me in all my long years of 24

pen-labour to write something small and perfect.'

Of course, in a simple sense, the reason why it

was not granted to Gissing to write something small and

perfect has to do with its being against the grain of his

temperament and abilities to do so. Viewed more positively, 24

24 George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (London, 1961) , p"I 81.

170

however, Gissing's failure to compose 'artistic' novels

can be seen as due to his having so strong a sense of the

intractably determined complexity of social and individual

experience that he could not achieve an art, which by its

selective processes, brings about a transvaluative change

from the actual to the fictional, (as I have argued James

does in The Princess Casamassima). The extended form of

Gissing's work is, in one sense, a kind of fictional

correlative to the complex and dispersed ramifications

of the English social structure, to a complexity that is

both horizontal (capable of varied patterns of inter­

relationship within a given group or class), and vertical

(capable of complex and problematical relationships between classes).

One of the principle reasons, therefore, why Gissing

thought Turgenev 'glorious' must surely be that he had

succeeded in writing concentrated narratives which, in

dramatising individual relationships, simultaneously

dramatise socially and ideologically determined relations.

As Irving Howe has observed of the two sides of Turgenev's

fiction, 'the romantic - idyllic side of his work may

profitably be seen as an analogue ... of his political

side.' Turgenev could do what Gissing could not - write

highly condensed novels in which the socio-historical

implications of the personal life are manifest - not

simply because of a difference in degree of artistic

the Russian social structure. Focus, as Turgenev did, upon

'that rapidly changing face of Russians of the educated class'

and you focus upon a single point at which the full extent

of the country's moral and ideological predicament was felt

and articulated. Turgenev enjoyed the advantage of a kind

of unity - of milieu and setting - as a given condition of

his fiction, which Gissing, writing in the more highly

developed, highly differentiated circumstances of late

Victorian, urban and commercial England, did not have.

This essential difference in cultural and political

context is brought home by comparing Gissing's thoughts,

in the middle 1880s, on the need to write more concisely

and more dramatically with Turgenev's concern with the form

and scale of fiction at a similar early stage of his career.

Whereas Gissing wrote long novels and would have liked to

write shorter ones, Turgenev, by 1852, had written only

stories and, for several years, anxiously (and in vain)

essayed the long novel form. The attempts to write a long

novel lasted several years, ending when the composition of

Rudin began in the summer of 1855. Yet Turgenev had

already given voice to doubts about the applicability of

the long novel form to the subject of Russian society.

Reviewing a long novel by the woman writer, Yevgeniya Tur,

in The Contemporary, in 1852, Turgenev wrote:

A novel - a novel in four parts! You know don't you, that apart from a woman no one in Russia in our time is capable of facing up to such a difficult and, in any circumstances, lengthy undertaking? Indeed what can one fill four volumes with? The historical, the Walter- Scott type of novel - that expansive, solid

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in the soil of the nation, with its extensive introductions in the form of porticoes, with its reception rooms and dark corridors for ease of communication - this type of novel is practically impossible in our time; it has outlived its

generation, it is not contemporary ... There remain two other types of novel which are closer to each other than may seem the case at first glance - novels which to avoid different inter­ pretations which are not everywhere applicable, we shall call after the names of their chief representatives; the George Sand and the

Dickensian. Such novels are possible among us and will, it seems, be adopted; but it is

pertinent to ask now whether the basic elements of our social life have revealed themselves to the extent of demanding quadripartite dimensions in the novel that is to reproduce them? The success in recent times of various types of essay and sketch seems to prove the opposite.

This passage, originally excised by the imperial

censor, is both a thinly veiled critique of the repressive

Nicolayevan regime and a literary judgement which Turgenev's

four studies of the Russian intelligentsia, written over the

following decade, vindicated. As far as the synoptic

study of social relations was concerned - as opposed to

the extended psychological studies of Tolstoy and

Dostoyevsky - Turgenev's question remained a pertinent one

until as late as the 1870s. By that decade reform,

emancipation, organised radicalism and incipient industrial­

ism had started to loosen the rigid structure of Imperial

Russia. Turgenev, in Virgin Soil, was obliged to write a

longer novel than his previous works and to depict scenes

from a wider range of social settings - the country estate,

the dingy urban lodgings, and, most significant, the factory.

In stressing the question of how far the developed 25

25 Review of Plemyanitsa by Yevgeniya Tur.