ABSTRACT
If the thoughts and emotions of Mr Gissing's characters are not thoroughly understood, it will be from no lack of explanation and description. He is not content to allow his reader to interpret their speech and action: he is a perpetual chorus, telling what is meant by the developments ofthe story, and pointing out the special significance of each one. Even when we suppose ourselves entirely familiar with the few creatures who make their entrances and exits upon his stage; even when we have advanced to the third act ofthe tragi-comedy, we are carried back now and then to the beginnings of things, and made to review in detail the early history of some of the moving figures. Nothing is told by suggestion, everything is overladen with detail. The labor this necessitates weighs heavily upon the mind ofthe reader, and it would require infmite leisure and patience to read the book from cover to cover. Yet the judicious, who know what to omit, will be rewarded for taking it up. The conversations are capital as a rulesimple, natural, often clever without apparent effort, and sometimes impassioned, with a thoroughly modern reserve. Mr Gissing is observant, earnest and astute, but he is not yet an artist. Like many ofthe contemporary novelists he cares but little for plot, combining with that indifference a strange blindness to the immense value of construction. In itself: plot is, indeed, a matter of comparatively little consequence-a slight thing, which may become typical or elemental in the handling. Yet the plot of this novel is sufficiently well selected. It is the fact that it rambles on without definite plan that operates so seriously to its disadvantage. It is not only condensation that the book needs, but design and system and the effective accentuation of progress. In the drawing of his characters Mr Gissing is much more successful, though he holds them somewhat too securely in bondage, and will not allow one quite to forget that they are puppets.
