ABSTRACT
I am afraid that, profiting by my license, I drag forward Mr George Gissing from an antiquity ofseveral weeks. I blow the dust ofoblivion from M. Pierre Loti and indeed from all the company-they have been p'ublished for days and days. I foresee, however, that I must neglect the company for the sake of the two members I have named, writers-I speak for myself-always in order, though not, I admit, on quite the same line. Mr Gissing would have been particularly in order had he only kept for the present period the work preceding his latest; all the more that In the Year ojJubilee has to my perception some points of superiority to The Whirlpool. For this author in general, at any rate, I profess, and have professed ever since reading New Grub Street, a persistent taste-a taste that triumphs even over the fact that he almost as persistently disappoints me. I fail as yet to make out why exactly it is that going so far he so sturdily refuses to go further. The whole business of distribution and composition he strikes me as having cast to the winds; but just this fact of a question about him is a part of the wonder-I use the word in the sense of enjoyment-that he excites. It is not every day in the year that we meet a novelist about whom there is a question. The circumstance alone is almost sufficient to beguile or to enthrall; and I seem to myself to have said almost everything in speaking of something that Mr Gissing 'goes far' enough to
do. To go far enough to do anything is, in the conditions we live in, a lively achievement.
