ABSTRACT
It is some years now since Mr George Gissing began to write novels in which the vigour of individual thought attracted as much as the tone of bitter and defiant pessimism repelled. Perhaps the repulsion outmeasured the attraction; for Mr Gissing's books, though they have a reputation, are scarcely popular. They probably never will be as long as the common taste is for the sweet and smooth. It has been laid down as an axiom that the man who says he likes dry champagne will say anything. It is a true saying of many men, and perhaps of all women. The tonics Mr Gissing administered to the social world, which he saw so plainly to be sick, were bitter enough to wry the palate. He fOlU:1d things wrong, and he used the rough side ofhis tongue to say so. Time has apparently softened the asperity-which, indeed, never was cynical. A Life's Morning has a great deal of the melancholy of Mr Gissing's former books, but it has a wider sense ofbeauty and a broader feeling of human possibilities. The style is tense; and, though Mr Gissing is an entirely original thinker and writer, one notices here and there the influence, for good, of Mr George Meredith, and the example, for ill, of George Eliot. Some of the sentences in this novel might be quotations from Theophrastus Such. The value of the story, however, lies in the noble conceptions of character given in the two women who play unequal parts in their influence on Wilfrid Athel, who is intended to represent modern youth in its most intellectual aspect. Emily Hood is drawn with all the care and power ofwhich the author is capable, and this is saying very much, to represent the ideal of pure womanhood. Her name is 'written in starlight.' Beatrice Redwing is a striking contrast to her-rich in beauty, youth, and wealth, genius, and social rank; and when the crisis comes, most readers will think
