in the play. Such carelessness is apt to beget a lack of confidence in his deductions. It has just been shown that the line "Though this be madness", etc., is wrongly assigned to Hamlet, and here again we find in the next paragraph: "The dullards were given a broad hint in the seemingly casual mention that a play might be 'an abstract and brief chronicle' of the time, an idea repeated in Hamlet's exclamation, 'The play's the thing Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.' King or Queen mattered little to Shakespeare. The principle and the point were identical in either case. Hamlet explains to the court assembled to hear the play: "You shall see anon how the murderer gets the love of Gonzago's wife.""

In the first place, it is not a play, but the players, who are spoken of by Hamlet as "the abstract and brief chronicles of the time"; and secondly, Hamlet's exclamation has no relation whatever to his former remark in regard to the players. Thirdly: Hamlet does not explain the play to the court at any time; he interprets certain lines to Ophelia, and comments on others to the King and Queen. The line which Mr. Thompson quotes is the climax of the whole scene, and is hurled almost in the King's face as he rises in terror. How or in what way this particular line could be twisted into a reference to the murder of Amy Robsart, Professor Thompson does not explain beyond coupling it with the four line stanza, uttered by Hamlet:

For thou dost know, O Damon dear,

This realm dismantled was

Of Jove himself, and now reigns here,
A very, very-pajock.

And here the Professor's hobby has led him into a quagmire indeed. As is seen, Hamlet omits the word rhyming with “was”. To this Horatio remarks, "You might have rhymed"—that is, the word which fits it, by implication, is ass. Mr. Thompson asks: "What word most naturally occurs to the mind which will rhyme with 'was'?" And then proceeds to answer his question with the extraordinary suggestion that the missing word is "coz", the familiar abbreviation of the word "cousin" and here used to indicate Leicester, who may have been so addressed by Elizabeth. The two words in present day usage have a certain resemblance in

sound sufficient for rhyming purposes, but in Shakespeare's day was invariably rhymed with such words as glass, pass, etc. For example, in a preceding scene Hamlet says: "Why, 'As by lot, God wot,' and then, you know, 'It came to pass, as most like it was'" (II, II, 434). Again, in Lucrece:

Without the bed her other fair hand was,

On the green coverlet; whose perfect white
Show'd like an April daisy on the grass.

As regards the word "coz", as it was a contraction of the word "cousin" it retained the pronunciation of the first syllable of that word, which in Shakespeare's time was like that of the French word Coozin. By no possibility, therefore, would the words cooz and wass rhyme. Is it worth while to discuss the applicability of the stanza to Leicester after showing how the word suggested is quite inadmissible on the score of rhyme?

These are fair samples of Professor Thompson's use of certain lines in the play and his deductions. The two or three others seem to me quite as wide of any hidden meaning.

Many readers will doubtless read with interest Professor Thompson's entertaining article. That he will likewise gain a corresponding number of adherents to his view of the matter is quite another question.

HORACE HOWARD FURNESS, JR.

GEORGE GISSING, HUMANIST

BY STANLEY ALDEN

THE casual reader of critical reviews must have been struck by the recurrence of the name of George Gissing, a novelist who, in the normal course of things, ought to have been long ago forgotten. That the name of a writer whose career began forty years ago should persist in the columns of the reviewers is enough to establish the assumption that its owner must have in his work something either unique or uniquely said; must have either intrinsic or historical value. In the case of Gissing, one can but infer from the constant use of his name in a single connection that present-day reviewers and critics regard him as the father of what may be vaguely termed “English naturalism", as opposed to that older type of realism of which in their respective times Fielding and George Eliot are exemplars. It is significant that Gissing's name almost invariably appears linked with the names of three or four Continental novelists of his own or a slightly earlier day; with Dostoievsky, Zola, Balzac, and, less often, with Daudet. Seldom is he accounted brother to Howells or George Moore. And, in common with his more widely-known European contemporaries just mentioned, he is invariably-or all but invariablydubbed "naturalist", with the implication of praise. From such linkings it seems safe to infer that he is regarded as the same sort of naturalist, or realist (for the terms are loosely used), as his Continental confrères, while differing not only from his British contemporaries, but from the older English and American realists as well. What does such a distinction imply? Obviously that as it is habitually used "realism" means writing that deals with a certain type of matter; a type that may be roughly defined as that dealt with by Zola, or by Hardy in such a novel as Jude the Obscure. In other words, our younger critics have been using the words "realist" and "naturalist” almost interchangeably, and chiefly to characterize writers preoccupied with a particular

milieu, rather than to identify a method of treatment, or an underlying purpose.

Into such a category it is possible to fit Gissing with no close familiarity with his works. For casual readers he is merely the author of such reprinted novels as The New Grub Street, The Whirlpool, or possibly The House of Cobwebs, a volume of shortstories which have had some vogue. If other titles are known, some of them suggest matter in the province of the naturalist. The Unclassed, for instance, or The Nether World, and Human Odds and Ends might carry such a suggestion. It will, therefore, be seen to be significant that he has not been mentioned along with Fielding and Eliot on the one hand, nor with George Moore or Howells on the other, for, with the exception of Mr. Moore, these writers have been distinguished as realists not so much by their subjects as by their literary methods and their philosophy. It is worth while to seek a reason why George Gissing has not long since been forgotten. Is it that as an innovator George Gissing has importance historically, or has he something to say which teases the interest of novel-readers, and may even trouble the complacency of critics who dispose of him so cavalierly with a word?

Mr. Frank Swinnerton in his critical study of Gissing makes it clear that he does not consider him a realist, but dismisses the matter summarily with the remark, "He was too personal," evidently disagreeing with Gissing himself when he says: "But there can be drawn only a misleading, futile distinction between novels realistic and idealistic. It is merely a question of degree and of the author's temperament." Thus Gissing plainly understood the word as applied to manner. Now an opinion on such a matter as realism from so distinguished a realist as Mr. Swinnerton is not to be lightly dismissed, but one regrets that he has not buttressed it with additional reasons, or taken occasion to "place" Gissing with reference to his literary type. It may be valuable to consult with reference to the matter, others of his fellow-craftsmen.

Discussing "Mr. George Gissing" in his volume Fame and Fiction, Mr. Arnold Bennett says: "To take the common gray things which people know and despise and, without tampering, to dis

close their epic significance, their grandeur-that is realism, as distinguished from idealism or romanticism." (This comment about Gissing is best understood when one recalls that Mr. Bennett regards The Nether World as his "most characteristic novel".) Here we see that realism includes both matter and manner, with equal emphasis on each.

Mr. H. G. Wells, writing in The Monthly Review, remarks that "he whose whole life was one unhappiness because he would not face realities, was declared the master and leader of the English realistic school". If, then, Gissing's novels are what Leslie Stephen believes novels should be, "transfigured experiencebased upon direct observation and the genuine emotions which it has inspired", one could hardly expect them to be realistic, for Mr. Wells is right in asserting that he was afraid of facing, in his own life, the stern realities. His ineptitude in moneymatters, a defect which he bestows so liberally upon his leading characters, is a case in point. Surely an anomaly this, a realist who shuns reality.

Gissing's own ideas on realism are illuminating. In his invaluable study Charles Dickens, for instance:

In what degree, and in what direction, does he [Dickens] feel himself at liberty to disguise facts, to modify circumstances for the sake of giving pleas ure or avoiding offense?

Our "realist" will hear of no such paltering with truth. Heedless of Pilate's question, he takes for granted that the truth can be got at, and that it is his plain duty to set it down without compromise; or, if less crude in his perceptions, he holds that truth, for the artist, is the impression produced on him, and that to convey this impression with entire sincerity is his sole reason for existing. To Dickens such a view of the artist never presented itself. Art, for him, was art precisely because it was not nature. Even our realists may recognize this, and may grant that it is the business of art to select, to disposeunder penalties if the result be falsification.

Here we see something of what realism meant to Gissing, as we do also when he refers to Balzac, Victor Hugo, Dostoievsky, and Daudet as "Realists men with an uncompromising method, and utterly heedless as to whether they give pleasure or pain."

With distinguished insight he blames Dickens for fearing to write of disagreeable facts, so that he commits a capital artistic