ABSTRACT
Mr Gissing's persistent pessimism is but the more annoying by reason ofits obvious sincerity, and doubly dangerous because it is so convincing. In The Whirlpool his art almost convinces us that it does not much matter what you do, since everything is certain to tum out badly. If you marry your life will be wrecked, and if you do not marry that abstention will probably wreck your life as completely as the most reckless love-match of them all. That your life is going to be wrecked is a foregone conclusion, and not worth bothering about; it is the question of how the wreck is to be accomplished that lends to life its interest. This Mr Gissing implies, and this you, reading his book, accept as truth, and the more unwilling your acceptance the greater the victory of his art. It is not till you have laid aside his novel, and have again moved for awhile in the real world which his imagined world so closely resembles, that you realise how, after all, the mirror he holds up has in it so slight a flaw, perceiving that it does not reflect, exactly, things as they are, and that after all the world is not so crooked as he would have you to believe. There are indeed enough unhappy days in life; but there are good moments too, and these the bent ofMr Gissing's genius leads him to ignore. It is always a grey sky that he would choose to paint. When the sun shines Mr Gissing shuts his eyes.
