ABSTRACT
The story turns upon money, and upon money in main connexion with marriage and its problems. Harvey Rolfe and his wife Alma, Hugh Carnaby and his wife Sibyl, with all the minor characters, their relatives and acquaintances, illustrate the action of the 'whirlpool,' in which society, the middle classes, the rank and file of the professions and arts, the people of comparative leisure, the men of business, are engulfed. There is defmite, straightforward tragedy in the book; suicide and homicide are among its important incidents. But the dominant tragic note is not struck in scenes of passionate action; it is heard in the obscurer colloquies and debates of the will, in the timorous hesitations ofdecision and choice, in the sense of life as a thing tangled, involved, perplexed. It seems dangerous to take any step in any direction; there is nowhere any simplicity: it is as though a rational human existence were no longer possible. Or, if possible it be, it is away from the whirl and clash of city life and interests: in some peaceful, ancient town, the home ofyour forefathers, where you have lived from childhood, where you pursue a life ofdecent business, keep your mind open and alert, and have wife and children as rational as yoursel£ That was the happy lot of Basil Morton, com dealer and old-fashioned scholar; and, grimly enough, he and his are the only successful and contented folk in Mr Gissing's book. It had been more satisfactory had he planted them in Bloomsbury or West Kensington, and shown that, to alter a word of Arnold's sonnet, 'even in London life may be led well.' We cannot all, in Turgeneff's favourite phrase, 'simplify' ourselves by electing to live and prosper in Arcadia. But Mr Gissing has no relenting mercies: his other folk, with scarce an exception, succumb to the
miasmatic influences ofLondon and its ideals: most of them are wellmeaning, but the fatality is heavy upon them all, and they drift or drive into unhappiness or dishonour. And the worst ofit is, that Mr Gissing's method is terribly and disastrously strong unto conviction: subtly, quietly, imperceptibly he persuades us that these ghastly, marred, soiled broken lives are nothing uncommon. We have met so many of them: the futile weaklings, the just tolerable cads, the maddening toadies and artistic pretenders, the riff-raff of gentility and culture, the people of sinister success, and the people of pitiable failure, with the crowds of the entirely uninteresting, who do not enjoy the lives they lead, yet persist in living them. No one is to blame, nothing can be done: 'the whirlpool' or, in Aristophanes' phrase, 'whirligig is king.' Harvey Rolfe and Hugh Camaby, each after his kind, were excellent fellows; but they and theirs are caught in the bewilderments of modem life, as it were by some pathetic necessity, some inevitable taint and infection in the air. One may seek peace and simpleness in Welsh valleys, the other chase adventure and prosperity at the Antipodes; but fatality, plus their wives, bring them back to malarious London, its rottenness and stifling ways. We are left with the consolation, of doubtful efficacy, that perhaps the robustious and shouting genius of Mr Kipling heralds an age ofblood and iron, with the British Empire on the warpath-or the raid. The soliloquist of Maud spoke in that spirit; and he was mad.
