ABSTRACT
Here is Mr Gissing at his best, dealing with the middle-class material he knows so intimately, and in a form neither too brieffor the development of character nor too lengthy for the subtle expression of his subtle insight to grow tedious. The paying guest is a young person, 'not quite the lady,' who has quarrelled with her stepfather and halfsister at home; and the genteel entertainers are the MumfordsofSutton. They are thoroughly nice people are the Mumfords, and they know the Kirby Simpsons of West Kensington and Mrs Hollings of Highgate; and, indeed, quite a lot ofgood people. Then there are the Fentimans-'nice people; a trifle sober, perhaps, and not in conspicuously flourishing circumstances; but perfectly presentable.' The MuInfords live at Sutton, 'the remoteness of their friends favoured economy; they could easily decline invitations, and need not often issue them. They had a valid excuse for avoiding public entertainments-an expense so often imposed by mere fashion.' What a delightful analysis of the entire genteel spirit that last phrase implies! And they kept three servants to minister to their dignity, although entertainments were beyond their means. In the remote future, when Mr Gissing's apotheosis is accomplished, learned commentators will shake their heads over the text, well nigh incapable, in those more rational times, of understanding how these people with their one child could have been so extravagantly impecunious. Yet we, in this less happy age, know how true it is. In and about London there must be tens ofthousands of Mumfords, living their stiff: little, isolated, pretentious, and exceedingly costly lives, without any more social relations with the people about them than if they were cave-dwellers, jealous, secluded, incapable of understanding the slightest departure from their own ritual, in all essentials savages still-save for a certain freedom from material
brutality. Mrs Mumford's great dread was that this paying guest ofhers would presently drop an aspirate; but that horror at least was spared her. But the story of the addition of the human Miss Derrick to the establishment, her reception, her troubles, and her ignominious departure, must be read to be believed. The grotesque incapacity ofeveryone concerned to realise for a moment her mental and moral superiority to the Mumfords is, perhaps, the finest thing in an exceedingly entertaining little volume. Why, one may ask, is it so much more entertaining than the larger novels of Mr Gissing? Mr Gissing has hitherto been the ablest, as Mr George Moore is perhaps the most prominent, exponent of what we may perhaps term the 'colourless' theory of fiction. Let your characters tell their own story, make no comment, write a novel as you would write a play. So we are robbed of the personality of the author, in order that we may get an enhanced impression of reality, and a novel merely extends the preview of the policecourt reporter to the details ofeveryday life. The analogous theory in painting would, of course, rank a passable cyclorama above one of Raphael's cartoons. Yet so widely is this view accepted that the mere fact of a digression condemns a novel to many a respectable young critic. It is an antiquated device, say these stripling moderns, worthy only of the rude untutored minds of Sterne or Thackeray. By way of contrast and reaction, we have the new heresy ofMrLe Gallienne, who we conceive demands personality, a strutting obtrusive personality, as the sole test of literary value. Certainly the peculiar delight of this delightful little book is not in the truth of the portraiture-does not every advertising photographer exhibit your Mrs Mumford and her guest with equal fidelity at every railway station?-nor in the plausible quick sequences of events, but in the numerOU$ faint flashes of ironical comment in the phrasing that Mr Gissing has allowed himsel£ We congratulate Mr Gissing unreservedly on this breaking with an entirely misleading, because entirely one-sided, view of the methods of fiction. Thus liberated, his possibilities widen. Mr Gissing has an enviable part as a novelist; a steady conquest ofreviewers is to his credit. He has shown beyond all denial an amazing gift ofrestraint, a studious avoidance of perceptible wit, humour, or pathos that appealed irresistibly to their sympathies. Now ifhe will let himself go, which he may do with impunity, and laugh and talk and point with his fmger and cough to hide a tear, and generally assert his humanity, he may even at last conquer the reading public.
